On Unnecessary Stress
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| Nagoya Dome, 2010 |
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Hiroshima Toyo Carp vs. Chunichi Dragons Nagoya Dome
Central League, Nippon Professional Baseball
Nagoya, Japan
14:00
Outside the Game:
I grabbed the breakfast buffet at my hotel in Tokyo, and then I was off to my first other city of the trip. I checked out and dragged my bags onto the subway and got myself to the station to use the first of my inter-city bullet train tickets. It was here that my JapanRail pass was going to start paying for itself.
As with the airport train a couple of days earlier, Tokyo was the first stop for the bullet train, so the pink-jumpsuited cleaning elves attacked the train when it arrived at the station before we were allowed to board. And it was as though they were magical cleaning elves, because they popped out of a tiny door in the side of the track to appear and clean the train. Once allowed to board, the bullet trains seemed like every other train in Japan, which is to say it was clean, quiet, and efficient. And I suppose that was even more of an achievement given how fast we were apparently going. Because the speed was completely undetectable while riding in the train, with the exception of when we passed another bullet train going in the opposite direction, and the noise and blur of it passing gave you an idea of relative speeds that were involved in this endeavor. I spent the majority of the train ride catching up on my scorecard of the night previous and getting some work done on this monster. About two hours after I started, I got off at Nagoya.
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| No, really. Pink jumpsuits. |
And then I immediately started hitting a rough stretch. As I was running out of money, I decided to stop at an ATM before transferring to the Nagoya subway that would get me to my hotel. There was a bank of them in the station, and even though most of them were for Japanese banks, one or two had the American card agencies displayed. And each and every one of them gave me the error message that my card was not valid and I needed to contact my bank. This engendered a certain amount of concern on my part. Scenarios of my card getting compromised somewhere along the way flashed through my head, and what I was going to be able to do even if I could contact my bank took a stroll through the cerebellum as well. I had some emergency traveler's cheques with me, but I didn't know if they would be enough to get me through a country that still largely cash-based. I had enough money to get me to my hotel, so I decided to get there and then sort out my options.
The subway ride was uneventful, if fretful, and the Nagoya system, although different from the Tokyo system, was equally easy to figure out and navigate. Once I got where I was going, however, it was a different matter. One of the big things in Japan is getting out at the right exit of a station, because some of these things are huge concerns, and exiting in the wrong place can put you at a five-minute walk from the exit you really wanted to get to, and navigating in strange cities is already complicated enough as it is. (To be fair, every last exit to every last station in Japan is marked, and if you can find the map to figure out which one to take, as I had learned to do later in the trip, it is less of a chore to figure out.)
At this early stage of the trip, I managed to choose poorly, and I was hopelessly wandering around trying to find a street location to center myself, and given my bank card situation, I was working with a shorter fuse than average. After twenty minutes of floundering, I gave up and sought direction assistance at one of the ubiquitous 7-11s. (Yes, 7-11. The company has made huge headways into Japan, and now they are almost as common as the other major convenience store in the country, Lawsons.) I got directions, and since I was there, I decided to try their ATM. And my card worked perfectly, and I got my spending money for the next day or so. I later found out that even though an ATM in Japan says they are connected to the US network, only three reliably are: the post office, CitiBank, and 7-11. Go figure. Even with that being the case, one could imagine that they might be able to come up with a slightly more user-friendly error message for those occasions than "Your card is invalid. Contact your bank." I could write one for them, if they'd like. My treat, really, guys.
All my immediate problems resolved, I went to my hotel to drop off my bags before the afternoon ballgame and headed back to the subway station to get me to the Nagoya Dome.
After the game, I got back to the hotel for a clean-up and then headed out for some dinner and walking around. One of my goals for this trip was to get the local specialty in each city when I could. Nagoya was apparently known for spicy pork dishes. One of the guidebooks I had suggested a particular place in the city, and having no other agenda, I made my way there. This place was apparently used to catering to tourists, as they had a full English menu and also had an array of mild versions of the spicy pork for the tenderfeet. I took something on the middling end of the scale and tucked in. With my stomach finally stabilized and feeling better, I was hungry enough to down two bowls of the pork noodle soup pretty quickly before I was on my way. Right by the restaurant was also the only Christian church that I managed to see in my entire time in Japan.
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| It seemed really out of place. |
After dinner, I did some minor wandering around, but with another train to catch the next day and feeling pretty beat after the game, I headed back to the hotel to pack up and get some shut-eye.
The Stadium and Fans:
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| Home plate to center field, Nagoya Dome |
The Nagoya Dome had its own subway stop named after it, which made getting their an easy enough thing. It wasn't as far away from the station as Jingu Stadium was, but there was a long walk through the subway station, out into a long elevator ride, and then a smaller walk along a pavilion to get to the stadium proper. The main team store was actually located across the street from the dome, connected to a shopping mall adjacent to everything. The entire dome was surrounded by a paved walkway that had things such as smaller team stores, ticket booths, fan club buildings, and childrens merchandise stores arrayed on the periphery.
Once inside, it was less claustrophobic than the dimensions of Jingu Stadium, and, more importantly, it was the first stadium I went to where I had full access to all areas through a walkway that circled the entirety of the playing field. I was finally able to wander into the rooting areas as the crews were setting up their wares, as I watched Carp fans laying out their flags, tuning their trumpets, and setting up the drums. The organization was once again fairly impressive.
This was also the first stadium I visited in Japan that not only had a legitimate upper deck, but also a club level and luxury area. It was easy enough to get access to the upper deck, but the premium areas were closely guarded by staffers to prevent any hoi polloi from gaining access.
The stadium itself was fairly standard for Japan, although it lacked the on-field seating that the other two parks had, probably due to space constraints placed on the field size due to the dome. There was the huge video screen in center and the smaller screen behind home plate, and the slightly small dimensions of the park itself conformed with what I'd seen from Japan fields so far.
The Sunday afternoon game had the dome about three quarters full, and most of them were home rooters. A small but vocal contingent of Hiroshima fans were located in their traditional place in the left field bleachers, and as always, both sides were vocal and cheering. There was a special ceremony with posters that the team had given away upon entry to the stadium that celebrated one of the Dragon's relievers hitting a saves total. During the seventh inning festivities (accentuated with junior cheerleaders who helped out the senior squad during several points in the game that day), the assembled crowd all held up their posters.
At The Game With Oogie:
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| All the same |
I was actually sitting a little further up the baseline on this game, just into the outfield on the first base side, but still relatively close to the field. I had asked the ticket guys to mix up the views for the games. I was sitting next to an older married couple and their teenage kid. He wandered off early in the game and came back at the end, and I suspect that he was off into the cheering section for most of the game.
Another event helped remind me that I wasn't at home. In one of the middle innings, a woman made her presence known, and I eventually found out that her child had spilled her drink a couple of rows up behind me, and it had made its way down the steep rows of seats. She was excusing herself so that she could clean up spill in my row. Presumably she did this for all the rows behind me, and she continued to do it for all the rows until she got to the landing below me. Of all cross-cultural things that I saw this entire trip, that one in particular perhaps blew my mind the most.
The Game:
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| First pitch, Carp vs. Dragons |
This game was a first in a couple of ways. It was the first game that the home team lost so far on the trip, and it was also the first game where I saw any errors. The number of errors, at least in the games that I saw, were very low, as evidenced by the fact that I went into the third game without seeing any. In general, they seemed to be well below the MLB average for such things.
After trading zeros in the opening frame, the Dragons scored first in the bottom of the second on a single, a double, and some ground outs. That lasted an entire half-inning, as the Carp tied it up on a single that was brought around on advancing on a putout and legging out a follow-up single. (That was another inherent "late-70s NL" aspect of the Japanese game. Runners would advance on most fly-outs, and even some ground outs, as a matter of course, and first-to-third on a single and scoring from second on any single not hit directly at an outfielder were pretty much givens.)
The Carp would tack on a run in the 4th (on one of those rare errors), and then two in the fifth on a two-run homer by one their stable Westerners. Things largely cooled down for both teams until the eighth, where the Carp put across two more on a small-ball bonanza of base hits and sacrifices. The Dragons tried to put together a rally in the bottom of the ninth, peaking with a three-run homer with only one out, but the next two batters meekly struck out and popped to first, and the Dragons lost, 6-4.
The long stream of disappointed fans flooded the concourses back to the subway station, and this was the first game where there was no post-game victory broadcast from the field.
The Scorecard:
Carp vs. Dragons, 06/27/10. Carp win, 6-4.
Once again, I was manning the Scoremaster sheets. It being indoors, and with a couple of games under my belt, it lacked the extreme difficulty of the game previous.
The Accommodations:
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| Hamilton Hotel Black, Nagoya |
I stayed for one night at the Hamilton Hotel Black in Nagoya. After my adventures in getting there, one of the first things that I asked for at the desk was a map of the area. Once I got back after the game, I thought I wandered into a different place. I thought that I might have accidentally booked into a "love hotel," as the entire downstairs area was filled with young Japanese couples. It turns out that I had just wandered into the hotel's free Happy Hour. While most hotels settle to give you a free continental breakfast, the Hamilton went them extra mile and gave free booze as well. Sadly, there was no whiskey to be had.
Keeping with its clientele (except me, obviously), my room was fun-sized, but a little on the hip and stylish side of things. It still had the prerequisite tiny bathroom and bed and desk and TV, but all the fixtures were in black, and the "Command console" was replaced with an actual clock radio, and the stow-away chair looked a lot like a bongo.
2010 Japan I
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