If JSerra wins a CIF baseball championship Friday night it won’t be the first time Lou Fujiwara has been on a championship team.

Fujiwara was on a team from Japan that won the 2017 Little League World Series.

He will be JSerra’s left fielder Friday when the Lions (22-10) play Notre Dame of Sherman Oaks (24-7-1) in the CIF Southern Section Division 1 championship game at Cal State Fullerton at 7:30 p.m.

Fujiwara was the second baseman on the Japan team that beat a Texas team 12-2 in the 2017 Little League World Series final.

Japan does not send area all-star teams to the Little League World Series. Fujiwara’s team was Tokyo Kitasuna, a club team. The 2017 championship was Tokyo Kitasuna’s fourth LLWS championship.

The Kitasuna team was a serious team.

“We practiced 12 hours a day on Saturday, Sunday and on holidays,” Fujiwara said. “It was a lot of work and very strict coaching.”

Fujiwara (5-10, 165) started this season at shortstop. He shifted to left field when transfer Jonathan Mendez became athletically eligible after completing the 30-day sit-out period required of transfers who do not make a change of address.

“Maybe the last time I’d played in the outfield was third grade,” Fujiwara said. “My teammates helped me adjust and of course our coaches helped me, too. I didn’t even know I could play outfield.”

Fujiwara is a major reason the Lions are playing in a CIF final. He leads the team in RBIs with 19 and is second in hits with 28. Fujiwara, who bats third in the order, has been hit by pitch seven times, a team high.

“Everything in our offense flows through him,” said JSerra coach Brett Kay. “He’s a tough out. He can do it all – we can drag bunt with him, we can hit-and-run with him.”

Two years ago Fujiwara and his parents decided he would have a better chance at a future in baseball if he moved to the United States.

“I looked all around the country,” Fujiwara said. “I wanted to find a very competitive level of baseball and when I thought of playing college baseball I thought California would be a good place to play baseball for the college recruiting.”

Fujiwara toured several Orange County high school campuses. Kay said he was at a Trinity League meeting at Orange Lutheran when he looked out the window and saw Fujiwara taking a tour of that campus a couple of days after Fujiwara had visited JSerra.

Fujiwara’s real first name is Rysusei. During a previous visit to the United States he got tagged with “Lou” and that resumed when he returned. He doesn’t think his English is good but it is.

His parents remain in Tokyo, so Fujiwara lives in San Juan Capistrano with a host family that has had children attend JSerra, which is in San Juan Capistrano.

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Fujiwara, who has committed to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, has seen his JSerra team rally from a 6-9 start, including 1-6 in the Trinity League, to finish second in the league and advance to the Division 1 championship game.

“We were playing to not make a mistake,” Fujiwara said of the team’s early struggles. “We should have been playing like defending champions.”

Fujiwara knows something about playing on a championship team.