On Dreaming of Electric Sheep
 |
| Kyocera Dome, 2010 |
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles vs. Orix Buffaloes Kyocera Dome
Pacific League, Nippon Professional Baseball
Osaka, Japan
16:00
Outside the Game:
I had a breakfast at the ryokan with an Australian couple and got to speak English (or some approximation thereof) for a while. Of all the Caucasians I saw in Japan, a majority of them were from Australia, which makes sense since the distance from Australia to Japan is roughly the same as the East Coast of America to Europe, so the tourist densities are about the same. The guy in this couple had been working there all summer, and his girlfriend had been visiting him the last two weeks before they were both heading home.
 |
| Civilized morning |
Given the brutal beating my feet had taken the day before, and the fact that I didn't have to be at the ballgame in Osaka -- just a half hour away -- until 6, I beat the neighboring room into the tub room and soaked my feet for a good hour until check-out time was approaching. Then I packed up, caught my train, and it was time to get off in Osaka by the time I had really even settled into the seat.
Osaka is the second-biggest city in Japan, and it also has the second-biggest subway system. The Shin-Osaka Station that services the bullet trains and other main JR lines is a little north of the city itself, so it took a little bit of a subway ride to get to downtown. My hotel for the next two days was a few blocks from one of the main downtown subway stops. Having a fifty-fifty chance at guessing the right direction, I managed to pick the wrong one and had to backtrack considerably in the mid-day sun before eventually getting to the hotel.
After dropping of my bags and getting settled in, I decided to see a little of Osaka before I had to get to the game. One of the most famous areas of the city was right around the corner from my hotel: the Dotombori. It was apparently some sort of neon dreamscape/nightmare at night, so I walked around a little during the day to see what the transformation really was. I also walked up one of the high-end shopping streets to get to America Mura, which might as well be "Little America" in the way that New York has "Little Italy" and "Little Japan." Seeing America through another cultural prism was frankly a little too honest and insightful a look into the empty consumerism that is the majority of our culture.
 |
| Daytime Dotombori |
Speaking of which, there was an Apple Store nearby, and it was one of the most frightening places on Earth. The new iPhones had just come out, and the store was filled shoulder-to-shoulder with Osakans standing silently along long island counters looking at the new phones. I was going to make a serious attempt to locate the alien pods before it seemed like a better idea just to leave.
I went back to the hotel by way of the Ebisubashi shopping arcade, stopping into one of the many video game halls enclosed within. Some of the more insane things I saw was a floor dedicated to photomanipulation photo booths that were filled with school-age Japanese girls, and a coin-op "Typing of the Dead" machine (complete with keyboard). One of the top floors had an old combo mechanical/arcade baseball game that I played (poorly) for several minutes.
 |
| Ebisubashi |
I stopped back off at the hotel to drop off my accumulated materials from the afternoon and pick up the my bag for the game, and a quick subway ride got me to the stadium and back with no problems.
After the game, I decided to head back out into the properly contexted Dotombori. Now, you hear a lot of people throw around terms like "Blade Runner on Acid" about certain cityscapes, and as an urbanite yourself, especially one that just spent some time in Tokyo, your jaded cosmopolitan response is generally, "Whatever." Then you go and find yourself confronted by something like a five story neon Buddha-looking guy and penguin Ferris wheel. I'll say that again in case you missed it: five-story neon Buddha-looking guy and penguin Ferris wheel. You lose a sanity point just reading that; imagine what it was to gaze upon. Even if the rest of the glittering neon eye-storm that is Dotombori could be ignored, that image will live in your mind a long time.
 |
| Night-time Dotombori |
In my nocturnal wanderings I stopped off in another video arcade. As it was jam-packed, I realized what some of the machines that I had seen in the other arcade earlier were: card games. From what I could gather, it seems that there are actual arcade games that interact with collectible cards sold separately that you can then play against the computer or other human opponents. Oh, you wacky Japanese!
I had done a lot of walking around that day and was actually crashing pretty hard, so I went back to the hotel a little on the early side and promptly zonked out as soon as my head hit the pillow.
The Stadium & Fans:
 |
| Home plate to center field, Kyocera Dome |
The Kyocera Dome is a multi-sport and -event arena relatively close to downtown Osaka, serviced by a JR line as well as a subway line, both of which dump you a short walk to the stadium. Said stadium, at first glance, looks like a slightly rejected mushroom from one of the Mario Nintendo games. In perhaps a little inferiority complex moment, the ownership has seen fit to call the complex "Osaka Dome City," in thinly veiled reference to its bigger brother Tokyo Dome City in Tokyo, even though corporate sponsorship has since changed the formal name to the "Kyocera Dome."
I found the advertising for the team to be particularly bi-polar. On the one hand, there was a poster for the team as samurai, all manly and whatnot, embracing the traditional macho iconography for yakyu. On the other, there was a poster for some kind of Ladies Night event (from what I could gather), that showed the team as slightly effeminate manga boys. It is rare that you see both ends of a spectrum so clearly defined.
 |
| Secure in their masculinity |
For all its oddness, the Kyocera Dome was actually pretty interesting from an architectural standpoint. It has very unique lines and is non-linear in most places. On top of that, the dome itself looks like some species of UFO from the inside. It would of interest to find out what the locals think of it.
 |
| The aliens are already here |
Proving that art is nice but commerce is better, there is an entire mall built into the "basement" of the dome complex that houses the team store, the fan club, and various other stores and restaurants. In the main team store, they had MLB merchandise (the first I had seen in Japan), including a weird Mets mechanical pen (which of course I bought).
 |
| Overseas ball |
Upstairs and outside the dome, there was the more familiar "fan city" area, with more stalls and vendors (the Buffaloes apparently had some sort of sponsorship with Budweiser) and the stage for the mascot show before the game. The Buffaloes have a foam human boy and girl characters, and then there's some green... I'm going to go with pickle... thing and a giant pink gorilla. I don't pretend to understand all of this for a moment.
The interior of the Kyocera Dome was spacious and well-lit, in stark contrast to some of the other places I'd visited so far. To be fair, this seems a much newer facility than the others. It was also much larger, as the stadium had a good three levels, with luxury areas and boxes as you would find at a MLB park, and they also had the on-field seating seen at other parks in Japan. The ultra-luxury area behind home plate even had personal air conditioning vents worked into the seats.
It also had a bit of Oakland Coliseum Disease, in that the uppermost decks were clearly not expected to sell any tickets for the near future, and large swaths of seats were covered over with player pictures and the like to lessen the effect. But you could walk around to any section of the park largely unhindered, and there was a nice navigational element in that the interior walkways had little maps at regular intervals to tell you where you were in relation to home plate. And, in a stunning advancement in Japanese baseball science, the park had auxiliary scoreboards in addition to the main one in center, and the smaller one behind home plate that actually showed player numbers! It was a great victory for all scorer-kind.
 |
| Pre-game mascots |
The crowd was quite sparse for the game, and I'm not sure whether that is a reflection of the fanbase as a whole, how the team was doing at the moment, or if it was just because it was a mid-week game. There were two, somewhat abbreviated, cheering sections in their respective fields who kept up the cheering for all of the game, but the crowd in general was not very loud at all, especially after the scoring stopped in the first inning. Even the balloon festivities in the middle of the seventh were not as spectacular as at other stadiums because of the lack of volume of screaming condom-looking things flying through the air. But, as always, the fans that were there were watching the actual game.
At the Game with Oogie:
 |
| Scoring, the universal language |
I was sitting right behind third base for this game. Seated behind me were a couple from Australia (or possibly New Zealand. After watching Flight of the Conchords, I was afraid to ask). They were also carrying a copy of of the English JapanBall guide, and were following the game closely, though we did talk a little during the course of the game.
Sitting across the isle from me was an older Japanese man. Every now and then throughout the game, he would nod off and then be awakened by cheering, check out the situation, and then eventually go back to sleep. When the Buffaloes sealed the win, he started cheering very loudly, and then watched the post-game player of the game show with great interest.
The Game:
 |
| First pitch, Eagles vs. Buffaloes |
This game got over early. After a 1-2-3 top of the first, the Buffaloes got two straight singles, who were both driven home by the the number three hitter jacking one out to deep center. And that was pretty much the game. Each team squandered some opportunities (the Eagles had a two-out triple go for naught in the second and had bases loaded without getting a run across in the seventh, and the Buffaloes had a man on third with one out in the sixth that didn't come across and a runner thrown out at home to close out the eighth), but the game was over in the first. The Eagles only used two pitchers, and the Buffaloes Kisanuki went the complete game for the 3-0 victory. The post-game hero interview had the home run hitter and the winning pitcher flanked by all the mascots and the cheerleading squad.
The Scorecard:
Eagles vs. Buffaloes, 06/29/10. Buffaloes win, 3-0.
I was back in the Scoremaster book for this game. After the first inning, this was a fairly standard pitcher's duel, and the managers didn't even do the ceremonial "inning of 27 pinch hitters" in the seventh that I had come to expect. Outside of the 7-6-2 put-out at home to end the eighth, there was no scoring of note for the game.
The Accommodations:
 |
| The room wasn't much bigger than this, but it was big for Japan. |
I was staying at the Washington Plaza Hotel in Osaka, which was a slightly more upscale "business hotel" than I had been residing in up until this point. It had its own large entrance-way and its own restaurant, and more hoity-toity services than the other hotels. They actually let me check in early, for one thing.
The room was also noticeably bigger than my previous ones. All the elements of past rooms were there, just larger, but there was even a proper closet at the entrance. There was the slightly larger bathroom from the future, an actual desk not built into the wall, and a slightly larger bed with the control panel command console. (Since the hotel was so close to Dotombori, one of the added features of the console was a control for ambient classical background music to drown out some of the street noise from below. It was a very welcome feature.) The bathroom from the future even had monogrammed towels with the hotel's name on them, so, you know, fancy.
2010 Japan I
No comments:
Post a Comment