An Introduction:
When I planned my first Japan trip in 2010, I had no idea if I would survive, let alone go back. After going, I couldn’t imagine not returning. Despite some curveballs thrown by certain natural disasters not worth mentioning (at least, that seemed the case in Japan), I took my yearly summer trip back to the land of the rising sun to see the teams that I had left on the docket.On Coach Being for Suckers & Other Vagaries of Travel
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| My second flight to Japan |
Newark, NJ
Outside of the Game:
The trip to the airport was a completely different experience from last year. I got up early, got picked up early, and drove to the airport without incident. My father, who drove me again, no doubt appreciated the change of pace.
Upon reaching the airport, things were also immediately different. Unlike my last trip, I had upgraded my flight to “Business First,” or whatever the proper euphemism for First Class is these days. For starters, you get to go through a separate security line, which is shorter and staffed by people with better attitudes than the regular line. Also, they don't really use the full body scanners all that much, or to wit, at all. Pay extra, and no cancer – I’m sure there’s a lesson to learn in that.
I then found out I also got access to the “President's Club.” There's a reason everyone in First Class looks so damn relaxed. It is not just because they are rich and/or well-connected. It is because they have been spending their time before the flight in pampered luxury in their elite clubhouse, getting free food and wi-fi and comfy chairs, smug in the knowledge they board first anyway, while the rest of us schlubs are stuck in the bus station-quality plastic chairs with $9.95-an-hour Internet connections, wondering if our carry-on space will be taken by some fat lady with three colicky children who will be sitting next to you for the entire flight.
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| Less stressful by half |
I had no idea the exact extent of my hated for the people in first class until I got on the plane. Instead of the coach cattle call, there is a luxurious procession to seats, literally backed with ambient classical music, and attendants who introduce themselves individually by name. You snuggle into your personal comfort pod and wait pacifically for the takeoff.
Unfortunately, that wait was a lot longer than usual. They upgraded one of the backup navigation computers on the plane before we boarded, and now it wouldn't boot. They swapped it out, we got 95% of the way to take off, and then it failed again. One thing about first class, you are right the hell up by the pilots, so when people are bouncing in and out off the cockpit to do repairs, you see it up close and personal. Just under two hours in boarded on the tarmac, we stopped just short of the dreaded “de-planing,” as the last engineer in there hit something with a wrench successfully, and the backup nav computer got slowly working. Now all that was left was a thirteen hour plane ride.
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| Things have been worse |
Which, incidentally, went pretty fast. I don't know if it was having two long-distance flights under my belt at this point, but at no time did I ever consider suicide as a viable option to completing the trip, although I did manage to crimp my neck pretty badly during one of my first naps so as to make long-term sleep an unlikely opportunity. But I filled my time with catching up on five or six movies (including the live-action Starblazers movie), and the copious food that was generously shoved in my face the entire trip. I don’t think I can point to a much better value for the dollar than my seat upgrade for this trip. With the delay, it worked out to under $50 a pampered hour, and that was money well-spent as far as I was concerned.
On Getting On with It
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| Shinjuku by night |
Thursday, July 23, 2011
Tokyo, JapanOutside of the Game:
I once again arbitrarily place the start of the new day when I got off the plane, even though the reality was someplace around western Alaska. Once I stepped into Narita Airport, a lot of things were eerily the same. I went through the same efficient ingress line. I went through the same efficient customs line. I went to the same CitiBank ATM. And hell, even the same damn attendant was at the JapanRail desk when I went to redeem my rail pass and get my tickets for the rest of the trip. I think he may have remembered me vaguely, but I sure as hell remember him, as he was my first contact with the hyper-efficient customer service I would encounter across the country.
There was one divergence of note from last time, through. At the customs line, the professional and imposing-looking customs guy gave me his polite drilling on what I was doing there. And I told him “yakyu,” and he seemed a little disbelieving until I threw in a “Go Go Swallows,” to which his face immediately lit up, and he said he was a Tigers fan. I swear to god, if it had been culturally or professionally appropriate, there would have been a fist bump right there. It was nearly tangible.
I eventually got on the same clean, silent Narita Express train to Shinjuku and got to starting to write what you see here. Shinjuku Station is a massive JapanRail edifice, as one gets used to seeing in Japan. But this being my first dazed day back in country, I just blundered out the first exit I saw and then spent the next half hour trying to figure where I actually needed to go.
As I was towards the end of the process and knew myself to be within three blocks of my destination hotel, an American local asked me if I needed help. Upon consultation, he declared I indeed was very close, and he offered to show me which way to go. We talked as we walked along, and I notched another “you came here to do what?” reaction for my increasingly tattered belt. He was a visiting professor at one of the area universities, and he gave me his card as he walked away both figuratively and literally shaking his head.
After I dropped off everything at the hotel, I went out wandering. As with last year, I tried to keep it in straight lines or line-of-site with the hotel until I got my bearings. This time around, I was slightly more lucid than my first trip, and I was even able to wander back to the area where my hotel was on that trip and visit the parks and shrines I was able to remember.
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| Skyscrapers by night |
Though more lucid, this night was still mainly aimless wandering with conspicuous memories standing out. One such was the jazz trio I saw while I was sort-of attempting to find something to eat. They were three twenty-somethings playing on a street corner across from a McDonald's, and they were friggin' fantastic. The drummer in particular was in his own universe of hep, though the lead clarinetists and the bassist were excellent as well. They managed to get a good crowd going, and I must have watched them for at least a half hour. It is things such as this that always blow my mind in Tokyo.
I did start to wonder if I have “white guy looking for Asian prostitutes” tattooed somewhere on my person. Even though I was wandering nowhere near the red-light district of town, I was approached by two English-speaking individuals subtly inquiring if I wanted a Japanese friend for the night, though both left me alone when I politely declined.
I managed to get some chicken someplace, and sufficiently tired again, I went back to the hotel to crash.
The Accommodations:
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| Hotel Sunroute Plaza Sinjuku |
For this leg of the trip, I was staying at the Hotel Sunroute Plaza Shinjuku, not to be confused with the Hotel Sunlite Shinjuku where I stayed last visit in Shinjuku. This was a little more upscale than the later, being a “Western-style” hotel, as opposed to a “Japanese business hotel.” This roughly translates into a larger room with a larger bed and a separate full bath tub instead of a tiny combo unit, with little more bells and whistles all around.
The bathroom was particularly striking, as it was mostly all glass walls, and you could watch TV from the tub, if you were so inclined. Also, the mirrors had a fog-resistant area, so even when the bathroom got super-humid, you could still see yourself. Science, yo.
After checking in, I dumped all of my bags in my room and headed out. After returning from my wanderings, I got in a much-needed bath, with CNN World providing English background noise in the other room. After soaking more than a solid half-day of travel out of my back, I figured out how to connect my netbook computer to the Interwebs, sent out a bunch of “finally took off/not dead” messages to friends and family, and then went to sleep.
On a Game a Year in the Making
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| QVC Marine Field, 2011 |
Friday, June 24, 2011
Orix Buffaloes vs. Chiba Lotte MarinesQVC Marine Field
Pacific League, Nippon Professional Baseball
Chiba, Japan
18:00
Outside of the Game:
And so I woke up in Japan again. The first day was not nearly as bad as last year, but it was still shaky in the way that jetlag from a thirteen hour time differential can be. I got my first of many breakfast buffets at the hotel and actually had a decent appetite to put a dent in the thing.
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| Bifurcated breakfast |
The task then became to make something of my day before my late afternoon game that evening. Last year, I spent the first day in one of the larger parks in Tokyo, and it turned out to be a good way to get my land legs back and help get me sort my head out, so I took a similar tack this year and headed to Meiji Jingu Park.
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| The entrance |
The park consisted of the Meiji Jingu shrine itself, as well as the surrounding park and “Inner Garden” that previously was the private domain of the emperors, now open to the public in these more populist times. The impressive shrine itself was the centerpiece of the park, but the Inner Garden proved to be just as interesting – the private pleasure garden of an oriental potentate can’t help but be. Wandering around the empress’ private fishing pond and seemingly endless Isis fields is just what you need to knock fourteen or so hours of sitting in a plane seat out of you. Your mother was right: fresh air and exercise are good for you.
After spending a leisurely early afternoon at the park, I had some more time to myself, so I started to wander over to the area where the Meiji Jingu ballpark was, which took me through another park and corporate complex that included the buildings for one of Japan's major TV networks. While meandering through this area, I came across a Japanese rapper practicing his craft with a portable beat-box and amp. And I found out that the f-bomb is apparently a necessary part of the rapping no matter what the language, because I only understood maybe two or three words of what he was laying down, and they were all derivatives of the same root in different variants. So check mark for Friday for learning something.
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| An average day in Tokyo |
Soon after, I had to go back to the hotel to get my game bag and head out to the game, stopping to shower a day of sweat off of me. At the hotel, I decided to re-check my navigation, as this was the first game of the trip, and this was the team whose game I missed last year because I went to the wrong place and then got screwed up trying to correct my mistake. Well, damned if I wasn't right about to do it again, as I had made exactly the same mistake as last year, and I was going to head down an incorrect train line with nearly the exact same name as the correct station but had the benefit of being nowhere near where I needed to go. The fact that I was about to make an identical error twice at least said something about the repeatability of my thought processes, if not their accuracy.
All that said, I managed to get on all the right trains going to the right stations in plenty of time to get to the stadium before opening. And the reverse process worked as well, in time to get me back to the hotel before I completely dropped from running too long on too little sleep.
The Stadium & Fans:
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| Home plate to center field at QVC Marine Field |
QVC Marine Field is located a bit away from the nearest JR train station. It is definitely with a reasonable walking distance (depending how reasonable you are about your walking), but the club provides a cheap 100-yen bus from the station to the stadium to make the journey easier.
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| Mascot lineup |
I think the buses are also to prevent any paying customers from blowing away during their walk to the stadium. The amount of wind at the park put “blustery” to shame, and sends one running to the thesaurus to find better adjectives. I had never been concerned about being literally blown from my feet while doing a walk-around of a park before that day, but it was clearly a tempestuous day of firsts. The wind was particularly strong at the rear of the park, and making it all the way around the structure took some real effort. The stadium has a pitching and batting cage area in the back that was absolutely abandoned on this particular day, except for the two attendants huddling out of the wind and staring at the strange American making his way around the place trying very hard not to have his camera bag physically ripped from his person.
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| The museum |
Added on to one of the main team stores outside the park is a small Marines Museum. The interior celebrates the team accomplishments over the years, and then there is a large downstairs segment dedicated to all the on-field locations (bullpen, batter’s box, dugout, etc.) that have full-sized replicas in which fans can play around. The upstairs area is the team history and the Hall of Fame, and in there is the demonic smiling visage of former Metropolitans manager Bobby Valentine, who found his only real successes while managing for the Marines in the aughts.
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| The smiling face of death |
The stadium is a two-deck affair, with entrances on both levels. (Some stadium employee had foolishly left their window open on the second deck of the park that day, and the Venetian blinds in the window had been absolutely demolished by the squalling wind that day.) Once you get blown inside the park, it is similarly divided to upper and lower parts, with a walkway going around the perimeter of both, including the outfield cheering sections. There’s even a concession un-ironically named “Windy.”
The fans were enthusiastic and plentiful, and the non-cheering section people got into the cheering as well. The die-hards in the outfield bleachers showed off a particular Marines cheering method where all of the section pogo up and down while singing as if it was CBGBs in 1981.
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| Balloon launch |
In addition to the seventh-inning rocket balloon launch, there is also a small fireworks display included in the in-game festivities.
At the Game with Oogie:
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| Yep, my actual seatmate |
There are times when the world is small, and there are times when the world is really small.
Along with the ticket for his game was a note from the JapanBall rep who had purchased it for me, informing me that this was a “360 Beer Night” game, which meant that essentially it was open seating for everywhere not in the luxury boxes. As it turned out, this was an extremely popular promotion, and tons of fans turned out early to take advantage of great seats for an open admission price.
As the fans poured in when the gates initially opened, they all sat down or claimed seats by placing personal items such as team towels or whatnot on the chairs and leaving to go get food or do other things. Now, before we proceed, let's think about what would happen if such a thing were tried in America...
Excellent, let's move on.
Not thinking too much of it, I didn't reserve a seat of my own immediately and by the time I was done with all of my picture taking and other silliness, nearly all of the good seats in the lower deck had been claimed. Never having sat in the upper deck before at a Japanese game, I wasn't too upset by this turn of events, and it is because of this I ended up sitting just behind home plate in seats just far enough back to give me an unobstructed view over the foul ball fences around the perimeter of the seating area.
In front of me was sitting a late middle-aged man and his wife, and some younger men, who may or may not have been relations. I was never able to discern. What was immediately blatant was the fact that he was wearing a Derek Jeter jersey. But that was just the start of it.
Soon after I sat down, he broke out a digital camera and was showing the guy next to him a picture of himself in front of the home run apple at Not Shea. I was the tiniest bit gob-smacked.
As I rather rudely continued to look over his shoulder, he was showing pictures of himself at both Not Shea and new Yankee Stadium, and I heard snippets of words such as “Metso” and “Yankee” before he eventually put the camera away.
Now, I was a little surprised in Oakland when I ran into a guy who was also going to see all the MLB stadiums, but it wasn't that big of a coincidence, statistically.
However...
Finding myself in the middle of a trip to see baseball stadiums in another country while sitting just in back of someone who had done the exact same thing in reverse (from my perspective) is rolling some pretty low percentile numbers at absolute best. If I had the vocabulary to talk with him about the subject, I would have engaged, but the whole situation was a little spooky.
The Game:
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| First pitch, Buffaloes vs. Marines |
While home teams generally get a boost in my presence, I was not able to impart such mojo to the second-division Marines, who were playing the similarly mediocre Orix Buffaloes.
Both teams traded some early threats, but the game remained scoreless for the first two frames. Things got interesting in the top of the third. After a fly out to right, the Marines Maruse struck out the next Buffaloes batter, but the third strike squirted past the catcher, allowing the batter to get to first on a wild pitch. A quick single followed, but Maruse got another strikeout that the catcher held, and so it seemed he may yet escape. But the next batter drilled a sharp single to center, scoring the strikeout victim from second before the Marines could close the inning with another, at this point ironic, strike out. In the bottom of the inning, the Marines got a runner over to third with two outs, but a fly out to center ended the threat with them still down, 1-0.
The fourth went quickly, with both teams trading a baserunner, and the Buffaloes shortstop ended the bottom of the inning with an acrobatic grab of a smoking line drive. But the bottom fell out for the Marines in the fifth. A leadoff double was sacrificed to third in the way that only Japan can, but a blistering home run to right brought two runs home. The home run was followed by a single and a double, and both new baserunners came home with a single, but the batter was erased trying to extend the hit into a double. The next batter flew out to end the inning, with the Buffaloes leading 5-0. The Marines went down with a single to show for the bottom of the inning, and the top of the sixth was ditto for the Buffaloes, replacing the single with a double.
A new pitcher for the Buffaloes gave the Marines their best shot of the game. A leadoff double was followed by a line-out to second. But then a walk and a single brought the lead runner home, leaving first and third with one out. Another walk was escorted by another single, bringing in a run and loading the bases. The Marines replaced their DH with a pinch-hitter, who singled to center, plating one run. A squib to the pitcher resulted in a forced-out at home, and, for some reason, a pitching change. The new pitcher got a pop to second to leave the bases loaded and end the Mariners rally with the score 5-4, so maybe the Fighters manager knew what he was doing.
Both teams went in order in the seventh, but the top of the eight was greeted with a lead-off home run by the Buffaloes, and after that, both sides just went in order for the rest of the game, leaving the final score 6-4 Buffaloes.
The Scorecard:
Buffaloes vs. Marines, 06/24/11. Buffaloes win, 6-5.
Back in Japan, where scorecards are not a regular thing, I was using my well-worn Scoremaster book again. Outside of braving the outrageous fortunes of the upper-deck winds this night, besides keeping track of the tricky bottom of the sixth, the only item of note was the dropped strikeout that came home to score in the top of the third. That was first time scoring that with the Scoremaster, so I had to work that out. It is always a pain to remember to record the K in the strikeout totals when it is not blazing in red for me to pick out.
The Accommodations:
I was at the Hotel Sunroute again, and after breakfast, I was only there briefly to shower and get my baseball bag and then to sleep at the end of the day.
2011 Japan II
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