Chiba

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

My second flight to Japan

Wednesday, June 22, 2011
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.

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.

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

Shinjuku by night

Thursday, July 23, 2011

Tokyo, Japan


Outside 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.

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:

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

QVC Marine Field, 2011

Friday, June 24, 2011

Orix Buffaloes vs. Chiba Lotte Marines
QVC 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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

Click here to see all the photos from this trip.

2011 Japan II

Osaka

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.

Click here to see all the photos from this trip.

2010 Japan I

Tokorozawa

On 2/3rds of a Day on a Plane, Finally

My first plane to Japan

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

International Airspace


Outside the Game:
I'm... not what you call a good flier under the best of situations. When you start up the day awaking with symptoms of a semi-recurrent throat infection a few hours before needing to get on a 14-hour plane ride, the situation is not significantly improved.

My plane was leaving at 11, my doctor's office didn't open until 9, and I was a less than happy camper. There is a new "immediate care" place that opened around the corner from me a few months ago, so I went there when it opened at 8. He said it may just be a sore throat, but in case it was the infection coming back, he gave me the necessary prescriptions to fight it, told me use them just in case, and sent me next door to the pharmacy to get them. All this was fine, it was only 8:30, and everything was going to be peachy. Just peachy.

Except that every single route to Newark airport was stopped cold. My father, who had the unfortunate privilege of driving me to the airport this day, said it was the worst traffic he had ever seen. I took this news rather well, and when I ran out of energy screaming, I called the airport to tell them I was running late and evaluate my options should I miss this flight. The options were not what one would call "good."

But eventually, everyone in front of us discovered there was a pedal next to the brake, and I managed to get to the airport twenty minutes before my plane boarded. Did I mention I had to check in at the airport? I got there at the same time as another gentleman in a similar situation. A member of the Continental staff scolded us quite sternly for being late, and then did the most astounding thing. They were helpful, expedited us through the line, and got us to security in under five minutes. You could have knocked me over with a feather. Security was also similarly painless, and I got to the gate in time to buy a book for the flight.

Ah, yes -- the flight. The longest I'd ever been on a plane previously was the eight hours it takes to get to Heathrow from the East Coast. By the end of that flight, I was ready to chew my arm off, and perhaps the arm of the person next to me. This was nearly twice that duration. Did I mention I twinged a back muscle running around in the airport with my rather heavy bag?

It wasn't all dire news. Because I booked the flight in January, I had managed to get my seat in the first row of Coach, which has extra leg room. I shared my row with a father and daughter going to visit relatives already in Japan. After some initial chit-chat before take-off, I did not speak to them for the entire trip.

As I was contemplating what I was going to do for the next 14 hours on the plane I found the entertainment system. Each chair now has individual on-demand entertainment channels for the entire trip, including movies, music, TV, and video games. (The system is Red Hat, by the way. I found this out when they had to reboot it about a quarter of the way through the flight to fix a hardware glitch with some of the consoles.) While this was reassuring, I realized that I could watch 8 regular Hollywood movies back-to-back, and I still wouldn't be in Japan yet. There was an unavoidable twinge at that realization.

Speaking of twinges, outside of a few small naps, my back was in such a state as to prevent any real sleep. I have actually forgotten all the movies I watched (although I started with How To Train Your Dragon, and ended with The Book of Eli [which I started to watch to see how bad it was, and then couldn't stop for the same reason]), and the endless TV shows. I even tried playing the video games, which were either universally crappy or unplayable.

We had a good deal of turbulence until we got to the North Pole, so food service was delayed. Because of the excitement to start the day, I didn't have breakfast, so by the time the first meal came through, I ate it in under a minute. There were two or three more little meals as the ride went on.

At the time I reached my absolute boredom limit, we were ten hours into the flight and not yet into Siberia, with about six hours left to go. I may or may not have gone crazy at some point. I don't remember a lot from this period clearly, but I did end up doing jumping jacks in the bathroom until I couldn't take it any more, and then went back to my seat to watch more Penn & Teller.

At some point, I had my moment of clarity. I either found the extra energy or gave up the last of my resistance and completely punched out for the remainder of the flight. It was like a runner's high for bored people. We actually got to the airport in Tokyo early, but just to twist the knife, we had to circle for a while until we got a landing slot.

However, the plane ride did, in fact, have an endpoint.

On Getting Where You're Going

First stop, Narita Airport

Tokyo, Japan
Thursday, June 24, 2010


Outside the Game:
This is when things just get a little... let's call it fuzzy, shall we? I'm going to label the start of this day as when I got off the plane in Japan. The fact that any impartial measure of time duration or date lines would indicate this is contra-factual, impartial measure can go jump in a lake.

So my day started as I got off the plane in Momma Nippon. I was at Narita Airport, which is not Tokyo proper. I had only my carry-on, so I didn't have to wait for my bags and went right to the security line. Those of you who remember my commentaries on the Midwest may remember the Midlands folk's predilection for lines. If Midwest America loves lines, the Japanese adore them in a way that's a little sexually inappropriate. The customs line was my first exposure to such things. It was a beautiful line by any estimation thereof, and well-managed. Not just the start and end were staffed, but seemingly random internal intervals also were managed by helpful staff. Cheery signs indicated your approximate wait time from the point of the sign, which gave it an idiosyncratic theme-park feel. At some point, I wondered if the roller coaster was going to be cool enough to justify the wait. But even though it was a rather lengthy, the wait wasn't oppressive buy any stretch of the imagination, and I was through in good enough time.

Once I was in the airport proper, I had to get to the Japan Rail office in order to activate my train pass. It was at this point, I learned the value of pointing. My faulting and mispronounced attempts at Japanese were appreciated, but the actual imparting of information went much smoother when I just pointed at my objective -- such as my Japan Rail voucher ("AH! Hai! Down two stairs. On right.") -- then my stumbling attempts to describe what I wanted in the native lingo.

I got to the office, read the signs, filled out the card they told me to fill out, and waited in another perfectly manicured line. It was here that I first ran into the "American flinch."  It was what many Japanese do when they looked up and saw an American approaching -- a reflexive twinge that was hard to spot if you weren't looking for it. It wasn't mean-spirited by my estimation, but just a Pavlovian reaction to what they imagined was going to be a long transaction. Which is why I found if you make the mildest of efforts not to be a rampaging jerk, they really did seem to appreciate it. My attendant got me my pass, and when I asked if I could get my actual tickets for the trip now, he asked if I could wait for a half hour until it quieted down, clearly expecting an answer other than "yes." I  confused him by agreeing and asking where the ATM was. When I got back a half hour later, the gentleman finished with the customer he was with, whisked me out of the short line, and got me all my tickets for the remainder of my trip.

My first hurdle was getting into Tokyo. Armed with the first of my tickets, I managed to completely fail to enter the train station without assistance. Upon entering, I found the track my train was on, and waited. When the train arrived ten minutes or so before departure, it was immediately swarmed by cleaning crews who went inside, put up little barriers so you wouldn't accidentally get on the train until it was suitably clean, and then scrubbed the train stem to stern in five minutes. The now-clean train was opened and boarded in another five minutes, and left promptly on time.

The first of my many on-time trains in Japan

If you haven't already guessed, this train experience was the complete opposite of anything you'll find in America. It was clean, efficient, quick, and quiet. All the stations and announcements are in Japanese, and then English. Once you get the hang of it, it is an extremely easy system to master. In under an hour, I was at my stop at Shinjuku, where I would be staying for the first three days.

Arriving at the station is one thing. Getting around anywhere, in a foreign county where you don't speak the language, and you're jetlagged as a jetlagged dog might be jetlagged, is quite another. I went to the JR Office in the station and helpfully pointed to the Google Map to my hotel that was completely in kanji and therefore useless to me. The attendant had to look up the address on her computer (which I didn't find particularly encouraging), had her "a-ha" moment, and gave me a helpful pantomime of the directions.

Hey, look, kids: it's Japan.

Filled with false confidence, I bounded out into Tokyo. The entirety of the route involved going in one direction and then turning once, so once I got the hang of how to cross the bloody street, I felt fairly certain I wouldn't die before I got there. This confidence was slowly chipped away as I couldn't seem to locate the giganto-huge sign for the hotel forty feet above my head. I checked in around 6 PM local time (WHATTHEHELLTIMEISITANDWHEREAMI PM in Oogie time), and then decided to wander off into the city, because, hey, why not?

I tried to keep it in straight lines and parallels so it would be easy to find my way back to the hotel, but I was so out of it that I didn't even think to ask for a map at the hotel, so my clever plan of easy backtracking didn't last very long. One thing I found was that even if you could completely see and comprehend some of the signs in Tokyo, it did not guarantee an actual understanding of the meaning. There was a sign that nearly all policemen had on their vests that, if forced to guess, I would have interpreted as "Do not turn invisible while tracking dirt everywhere while carrying a fancy light bulb on the edge of a platter." (Upon finding an English translation later, it turned out that it was an anti-smoking ad. So, I was close.)

Seriously, what would your first guess have been?

Shinjuku was a microcosm of huge buildings that can block out the heavens, with thousands of idiosyncrasies tucked inside them. Not more than a minute from my hotel, I found a large Shinto shrine complex and a meticulously manicured garden walk cut through a stockade of high-rises. Every easily-missed alleyway holds dozens of restaurants and stores that you wouldn't be able to find with a map and a guide, with even more of the same dug underneath street level as a counterpoint to the floors and floors of stores that rise to the sky around them.

A shrine right in the middle of the city

A lot of the first night was a blur of wandering around in a sleep-deprived state, in a place that was 1/3rds DisneyLand and 2/3rds Times Square. There are individual luminous moments of semi-dazed wanderings around a neon wonderland. I played pachinko for a good half hour. Under threat of law and a gun to my head, I could not tell you what exactly I did, if I scored well or not, or what was even going on at all, except that turning the handle shot balls up, and then there was lights and video. There was the giant crane machine in an arcade where the prize was a giant pot noodle. There were bunches of women dressed up like goth PowerPuff girls. It all blended together after a while in a harsh wash of nighttime neon and time-dilation.

At some point in my wanderings, I got found after being lost, and stumbled back, confused and unenlightened, to my hotel.


The Accommodations:

Hotel Sunlite Shinjuku living up to its name

For my first sojourn in Tokyo, I was staying at the Hotel Sunlite Shinjuku. As with many things in Tokyo, it is tucked off in an alley that you could pass fifty times without noticing (which may explain why the JR attendant didn't know it right away). The hotel was split in half across the alley, with a main office and an "annex" across the way that had the restaurant and more rooms. After confidently pointing to my reservation print-out, I was cheerily checked-in and given a wad of rules and regulations, ranging from not leaving the hotel with my room key, to what to do if there's an earthquake, or Godzilla attacks and there's an earthquake, or other such occurrences, most of which involving earthquakes.

I was also delivered the most important package of my trip. Waiting for me was an envelope from the good people at JapanBall, whom I had contracted to purchase all my baseball tickets for me. In retrospect, it was one of the smarter decisions on the trip, as I can't possibly imagine what the transactional exchange would have been like between myself and whatever unfortunate soul was working the ticket booth at the game that day. Actually, I probably could have eventually pointed and nodded my way through the ticket process, but it was one less thing to worry about as I trudged through just getting to the stadiums in question.

My room can only be described as "fun sized." On the right upon entering was a raised door that I found to led to my "fun sized" bathroom, consisting of a combo toilet-bidet (don't get those functions confused, kids!), and a combo sink/shower/tub that shared a single water supply. (It's really kind of hard to explain.) Further into the room was a small cabinet (with slipper holder), a desk built into the wall, a bed built into the other wall, a clock/radio/light control built into where the desk and bed met, and a TV stand built into the wall at the other end of the bed, just in front of a tiny refrigerator. The control panels would be a common feature in my hotels in Japan, and most featured very satisfying analog buttons that were fun to push. It was quite an efficient design, really. Laying on the bed for me was my complimentary cotton robe, and it was all I could do to wait until getting back from wandering around and getting cleaned up before putting on my robe and slippers and watching some TV.

The TV was a little hard to figure out, but if I had found the English translations for the remote quicker, I think the learning curve may have been less steep. Instead of the channel and volume being the up and down arrows right next to each other, it was the channel up/down for the regular TV right next to the channel up/down for the pay (read "porn") channels right next to each other, and the volume controls being below them. (Interesting side note: the machine to purchase cards for the pay channels for my floor was right outside my room, and there was no other reason to buy the cards except to use for adult movies, so there's no real "family-safe" reason to be at the machine. It made for a lot of awkward meetings as I left my room. "Oh, hello there. Would you look at that? I seem to be buying a porn card. And how are you today?") In addition to the regular and pay channels, there were some "wifi" channels that I never quite figured out. I pretty much left the TV on what I imagined was the sports channel, because it constantly showed yakyu and American baseball, as well as the World Cup games going on at the time.

The bed only had one pillow, but it was some odd bead-filled contraption from the near-future that managed to do the work of two. I'm still not entirely sure how that worked. I didn't sleep all that well the first night, and surprisingly enough, watching Japanese sports TV you can't actually understand at 4 in the morning is largely the same as watching it at 10 at night.

Smoking is sort of at a crossroads in Japan. There is a concerted effort to begin to phase it out, but it is still very much in the late 80s timeframe in America, with cigarette machines on every street corner and smoking sections available in nearly all restaurants (though I found that most ballparks had heavily ventilated "smoking rooms" or smoking areas that were the only places it was permissible to smoke), though they do take the precaution of putting up polite signs asking you not to smoke in bed.

An odd quirk of Japanese hostelry is that they generally ask you to turn in your guest key at the front desk if you are going out. I presume it is for some manner of security, but given the incredibly low crime rate and the fact that I felt safe walking around with my passport/ticket cozy hanging outside of my shirt, I don't know how much untoward stuff happens to tourists with their room keys with them. But then again, Americans are always creative.

On Watching Something that Both Was and Was Not Baseball

Seibu Dome, 2010

Friday, June 25, 2010
Orix Buffaloes  vs. Saitama Seibu Lions
Seibu Dome
Pacific League, Nippon Professional Baseball
Tokorozawa, Japan
16:00


Outside the Game:
I woke up in the morning not feeling well at all. Headaches, back pain, intestinal distress, hot and cold flashes, you name it. My main problem was that I didn't know how much of it was due to jetlag, not getting any sleep, medication-induced problems, or whether or not it was the plague. Another item adding to the confusion was that it was humid season in Japan. In addition to not feeling well, it was disconcerting to almost immediately break out into a full sweat upon hitting open air. I was initially not aware that this was an atmospheric phenomenon and not an internal one. Eventually, I noticed that most Japanese people carried around a towel. A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. In this case, they also provide a useful sop to the copious and nearly continuous sweat your body would be outputting through a given day. And the great thing about muggy is that it is not sunlight-dependent, so the sun going down didn't necessarily ensure any relief. Although I didn't feel all that well, I took a shot at the hotel breakfast buffet before heading out. I leaned heavily on the starches, ventured on some protein, and hoped for the best.

Undaunted, I decided to get in some sight-seeing before heading out for my first game in the evening. My hotel was located just north of Shinjuku Gyoen Park, established by an emperor as a fusion of Eastern and Western parks stylings. The main axis of the park was centered around a traditional Japanese garden, while other European styles, such as a formal French garden and an English country garden were laid out around it. Walking around it actually made me feel better, and the aesthetics of the thing were pretty extraordinary.

Tranquility

Having some more time to do touristy things before heading out to the game, I decided to navigate my way to the administrative area of the city, which was home to sky-reaching buildings of various size and ambitions, the largest of which being the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, which also housed tourist observation decks. I took a ride up to one of the decks and got the 360 view of the city, made some very serious purchases at a toy store on the tourist deck, and then headed across the street to Shinjuku Central Park. The park was headed by a huge waterfall, and housed its own temple (undergoing renovations), and other more standard park-y features, such as children's play areas and athletic fields and the like.

Tokyo, and a lot of it

While the Japanese are generally fifteen minutes or so into the future, in some way the future is the past. For example, the caretakers at the park didn't use leaf blowers to clear the walkways; they used reed brushes that seemed to do the job very effectively without any power except muscle. Also, instead of sounding like a woodchipper grinding up woodchucks at deafening decibels, it made a relaxing "swooshing" noise when they raked.

The future past

It was election season in Tokyo, from what I was able to gather. There were the somewhat standard election posters all about, but there were other indicators as well. Campaigners on the street were giving out fans emblazoned with the smiling faces of their candidate of choice -- not that bad an idea in the stifling humidity that permeated at this time of year. A charming throwback to electioneering past was had with loudspeaker-equipped cars that drove around touting their candidate, and since this seemed rather popular method of vote-getting, it was not unusual to have cars backing several candidates chasing each other through the Tokyo streets, sometimes even talking to the opposition in the next loudspeaker car over. As with many things in Japan, it was just a quarter-turn away from what I'd define as normal.

I headed back to the hotel to wash up before the game, and turning on the sports channel by chance, I discovered that the Japanese have more baseball on per capita on regular broadcast channels than America can ever dream about. In addition to the Nippon Professional Baseball games that are broadcast in localities every night, every afternoon had broadcasts of MLB games, or at least the highlights from ex-Nippon League players. In the morning, the sports news was usually dominated by baseball (though Japan's run through the World Cup was also getting a great deal of press while I was there), so you can pretty much turn on the TV and watch baseball all day.

All baseball, all the time

Heading out to the stadium, I had a list of stops I knew I had to get to, a free pass to the use the train system, a vague idea of my destination... and that is pretty much it. As it turns out, this stadium was one of the most complicated destinations for my entire trip. This was a recipe for a disaster on an epic scale. For later excursions on this trip, I'd equip myself ahead of time with route maps, step-by-step directions, and even track assignments and train schedules, but for this day, I was armed with my ever-ready and devastating "Excuse me + Pointing" technique.

The problem with getting to the Seibu Dome was that I had to navigate two different train lines, and thanks to the fact that I was going at rush hour, I had also to take into account that certain trains were traveling express and not stopping at the station I needed for the exchange.

And frankly, I would have been still standing there at the station if not for the kindly attention of an engineer. He basically dragged me onto his train, got me to the exchange, dragged me to the other train, and told the new engineer to make sure the idiot gajin got off at the right stop and didn't end up in Okinawa. Here's to you, competent train employee willing to go above and beyond your job responsibilities. May your shining light of decency never extinguish.

Seriously, this guy is my hero.

Getting back after the game was a significantly easier endeavor, as I was playing the directions back in reverse, plus there were express trains set to get the crowd back from Tokorozawa to downtown Tokyo. Outside of the embarrassment of being in the same car with some loud, drunk ex-patriots (trying to communicate, "I'm not with them, and I'm sorry" with a wan grin is not as easy as you'd imagine), I got back to the hotel without incident, and settled in for a good two to three three hours of sleep before waking up with headaches and sundry aches. Lather, rinse, and repeat until morning.


The Stadium & Fans:

Home plate to center field at the Seibu Dome

The Seibu Dome was the first stadium I was seeing in Japan, and even then, I wasn't quite prepared for it. Once out of the train station proper, it empties out into a large, open "complex" for the team, most of it familiar to American fans. There were kids play areas, ticket booths, merch shops and the like. There were also kiosks for the fan club, which as far as I could tell were handled more like consumer loyalty programs than fan clubs proper in the US. You had a membership card, and could get "points" for being at the game and other such events, which presumably you could use for perks and the like. At many points, people were lining up to get something put on their fan club card. It is actually not a bad idea to engender some extra fan loyalty and might be worth exploring in America.

Then there were the merch shops for the opposing team, and that threw me for a loop. Stadiums in Japan have special shops set up for the visiting team, or all the other teams in the league, which would frankly be unheard of in America. But because of the presence of large number of opposing fans at every game, and I assume some manner of profit sharing, it makes sense to have it. In a turn of events that would likely have Marvin Miller spinning in his grave (if he was dead), the teams also use the players to merchandise concession food products as well as player merch. There were bento boxes and other specialty foods named after the players, graced by their smiling faces.

The final bit that would stick out to an American fan is the stage. As with most Japanese teams, one of the fixtures of the pre-game festivities is a show, usually performed by the cheerleaders and the mascots, usually aimed at the children in attendance. (Yes, yes, I know. Cheerleaders have no place in baseball, and my cultural tolerance only goes so far. Frankly, people to lead the cheers actually makes some sense in Japan, where the entire game is cheering by the fans, and having someone to lead said cheers is logical, but they don't actually do that, and the crowd cheers on their own, and the "cheerleaders" just dance around with the mascots.) What was particularly interesting is that the cheerleaders had to help set up the stage here, and I'm pretty sure "junior teamster" wasn't anywhere on their resume.

The stadium itself was also quite unique. A dome it was, but it was literally more of an umbrella over the entire structure than a single, sealed entity. The playing field was built into a depression into the ground, there was an open area between ground level and the dome, and then the dome covered the entire proceedings. It kept the rain out, let fresh air in, and presumably it was constructed just for that purpose, as opposed to say, Minute Maid Park or Chase Field, which were domed in for air conditioning so that patrons would not melt as much during July.

In a pattern to be found in most Japanese stadiums I visited, there was a strictly regimented access to different areas of the park. In most American parks, if you get to the park early enough, you can go to most areas of the facility (usually excluding the luxury boxes and other super-exclusive areas) to watch batting practice or solicit autographs at the home and visiting dugouts. This is mostly not the case in Japan, where your ticket will only gain you access to your immediate seating area, and, in some cases, the cheaper areas around you.

At the Seibu Dome, there was one entrance area in center field, and you could either go down the left field side (traditionally the "visiting team" section) or the right field side (traditionally the "home" section). There was one walkway at the top of the bowl in each areas, and from what I could see, the facilities and concessions were perfectly mirrored on each side. To progress toward home plate, you had to pass through a series of gates where you had to show your tickets: no ticket for an inner tier and you had to stay at whatever ring you were at. And even if, as with me, you had tickets right by home plate, the area directly behind home plate was a super-luxury area closed off from the other side of the ring, allowing you access to only half of the stadium.

Arrayed along the walkway were various concessions selling souvenirs and food (including what I would find to be the omnipresent Colonel of KFC). There were two specialty food areas, one open to everyone on the ring, and a "Lions Cafe" to which only people in the areas by home plate had access.

The seating itself comprised only one, extremely deep row of seating that circled the entire stadium. In the outfield cheering areas were two "picnic" areas without seats. The Seibu Dome also had what I would find to be a common feature at many Japanese stadiums: on-field seating. In the area just beyond the dugouts on either side of the field was a meshed in area off the foul line. The people sitting in this area got access to comfy chairs and batting helmets. (This frankly fit in with the general paranoia of Japanese baseball concerning foul balls.) The bullpens for either team lie on the other side of these on-field areas.

There was the standard jumbotron scoreboard out in center field, and a small ball and strikes board behind home plate. With few exceptions, there were no auxiliary scoreboards as you commonly find in MLB parks, and with few exceptions, the players' numbers weren't even displayed, just their positions. And, of course, everything was in kanji. It made for some interesting scorekeeping, let me tell you.

You may have also heard about the beer girls, and those stories are true. Diminutive Japanese women wander the stands proffering beer to all and sundry. At a command, they kneel down on the stairs by their customer, pour a cold one, and move on. There are other vendors who don't sell things slung on their back, but frankly, what's the point of that?

They're real.

As for the fans, this was my first exposure to a Japanese baseball game, and it was all rather new to me at the time. Once you get past the gender split at most Japanese games is easily an MLB executive drool-inducing 50/50, and that everyone at the game is watching the game, and not off shopping, or talking on their cell phone, or buying food, or whatever it is other people in America do at games, you can concentrate on the real differences. The fans, especially in the cheering sections, sing songs constantly throughout the game. When the home team is up, the home fans are singing. When the visiting team is up, the visiting team will sing. The songs are situational. Sometimes they will be directed to the player at bat, sometimes to the team in general, and it is always loud. Even the fans not singing will add to the noise with the ever-present thunder sticks, or just by clapping along. There can be some interaction between the two groups. If a batter that is being cheered makes an out, the opposing fans will sometimes jump in with a rhubarb (and one of them, I swear, is to the tune of "Shave and a Haircut, 2 bits.").

The cheering sections are the epicenter for this, with the home team in the right field bleacher areas and the visitors in the left field bleachers, usually. At the Seibu Dome, these areas were unseated "picnic" areas, so the cheering section had room to move. These aren't a slapdash group of screamers as you'd find in America, but organized teams, complete with flag bearers, drums, and trumpets. At its basic level, it is an impressive display, but when the organized drills get executed, with blaring trumpets, pounding drums, and flags and fans rising and falling to the rhythm, it is quite astounding. The stadium itself was about 2/3rds full this night, and the home team did have the advantage of numbers, so their cheering was a roar at times.

Their not having an overweight president, there is no seventh-inning stretch as Americans might identify it. In the break before the home half of the seventh, there is an event of sorts. As it was here (and as it was in most parks), the cheerleaders come out with the mascot and do a dance number before there is a singing of the team fight song. Then there may or may not be a t-shirt or ball giveaway (oh yes -- air canons have traversed the Pacific).

Balloon launch

Then there's the screaming condom launch. Stay with me here. At the top of the seventh inning, fans in their seats started to blow up balloons that, for lack of any better analogy, looked like brightly colored reservoir-tipped condoms. I'm willing to go with the flow, so I waited to see what happened. At the culmination of the seventh-inning festivities, there was a countdown, and everyone released those balloons, and they went screaming up into the night (making a whistling noise through a valve on the lip, I would find out), and then they all fell back to the ground. Everyone seemed to find this great fun, and I would discover that this was repeated at nearly every stadium I visited.


At the Game with Oogie:

Ballpark grub

My seat for this, my first, game was a few rows back on the catcher, right next to the super-duper luxury seats right behind home plate. All Japanese stadiums have protective mesh fences that circle the entirety of the infield, not just behind home plate, so you can actually have a better non-mesh view if you are sitting a little more up in the infield. (People not paying attention to foul balls must have been a pretty serious issue at some point, because in addition to the netting, there are signs on the scoreboard about it, people walking around the stadium with signs about it, and a special class of usher in each area whose sole job is to blow a whistle really loudly if a foul ball is coming your way. The more you know...)

My first meal at a Japanese park was teriyaki chicken and french fries at the club section Lions Cafe, which was thankfully air-conditioned. Sitting there with chopsticks in hand, looking over the ballfield, I had a real moment of disconnect wondering what in the hell was going on here.

I was sitting next to a couple of Japanese women with some high-end photography equipment who apparently came to just to get really good pictures of their favorite players. I don't even think they knew I was there.


The Game:

Celebrating a home dinger

I could go into all of the ways that yakyu is different from baseball, but it is a topic of sizable enough scope that I'm probably going to spin it off into it's own article. The short version is that the Japanese ball (that I saw at least) had it's closest approximation in the late 70s/early 80s NL model: ultimate small ball. Speed, defense, and precision pitching, instead of station-to-station, power, and fireballers. It was quite a refreshing change from how stagnant even modern NL ball had gotten. All you really need to know is that in the third inning, the leadoff batter got on for the home team, and the next batter successfully sacrificed him over with a textbook bunt on the first pitch, and the crowd lost its frigging mind cheering. You ain't in Kansas any more, Dorothy. (And this was the more "progressive" Pacific League, which has the designated hitter rule.)

Hell, you didn't even need to get into the game proper to know you weren't at home. For ceremonial first pitches, they generally bring out the entire team, have the mascot as an umpire, and actually have the leadoff hitter for the opposing team stand in for the pitch. If that wasn't different enough, the first pitch this evening was to be delivered by a school-age little boy. My expectations for a shot put that may or may not reach the plate were shattered as the tyke dug in on the rubber and snapped off a breaking ball that looked like it fell off a table ten feet high. Kansas? I'm not sure I'm still on the damn planet.

The two teams and players are announced, and the home team is brought out onto the field through a gauntlet of cheerleaders and mascots. Sometimes they will toss giveaways to the crowd as they come out to the field. The national love for karaoke is indulged with the playing a team fight song, with a sing-along provided by the scoreboard. I can guarantee you that none of the fans needed any prompting for the words.

The game did veer back to familiar territory with the playing of the (completely unfamiliar) national anthem. Even more curious was the fact that all the teams didn't do so. (I think it was just the Pacific League teams that did.) Less a fixture of the Japanese game, I imagine, by why some do some don't remains a mystery to me.

Many of you probably heard how there is a premium in Japanese games for scoring first. It isn't even just scoring first, but getting the first hit. There's a point of pride to it that the cheering sections of each time will go to for the rest of the game. In this case, the visiting Buffaloes got both in the top of the second, bringing two runs across on a leadoff hit batsman and a homerun to right field. But that was about it for the Buffaloes. Outside of a run in the sixth (brought across with a leadoff double, fielder's choice, and sacrifice fly), the Lions' Wakui shut them down completely, going the full nine in the win. The Lions got the lead when the aforementioned sacrificed runner scored on a single, and then back-to-back homers followed in the third. (Japanese players on the home team who hit a home run are generally rewarded by the team mascot with a giant stuffed animal of the mascot upon their return to the dugout. I am sure I do not know why.) The Lions brought additional single runs across in the 4th and 5th respectively, giving the Lions and Wakui all they needed for a 7-3 win.

After the victory, I saw my first instance of a Japanese innovation that is just making it over to American shores: the on-field player-of-the-game ceremony. As soon as the last out is recorded in a home-team victory, teams of workers scurry onto the field and construct a broadcast platform, from which the player of the game is interviewed on the field, and the interview is broadcast on the main scoreboard. Most all of the home fans stay until this broadcast is completed (assuming the home team wins, of course).


The Scorecard:

Buffaloes vs. Lions, 06/25/10. Lions win, 7-3.

I had been told that most Japanese teams don't have scorecards as part of their programs, so it was probably just dumb luck that I picked one that did for my first game of the trip. The scorecard was part of a half-sized magazine-style program that ran about $2.25.

The scorecard proper was divided up into one page of directions and summaries, and one page of the scorecard itself. Nearly all of the instructions and summary information was written in kanji, but I knew enough about scorecards to work out the main event pretty well, even their odd little way of tracking balls and strikes.

Now the scoreboards in Japan don't use romanji most of the time, nor did they display the player numbers (just their position). This made an additional level of effort to keeping score. I had purchased a copy of the English Japan League guide, so I had all the lineups and rosters in kanji and romanji, but it was an extra step to work out what kanji player was on the scoreboard, look him up, and then update the scorecard in English. That, plus not knowing what the hell the PA person was announcing made it all the more difficult to follow along. Fortunately, having such good seats, I was able to see the players close-up and in the on-deck circle, so I could at least keep track of numbers and names that way. Outside of having no kanji translations for the umpires (which weren't provided in the book), and still not knowing what the summation categories are yet, I was able to keep a complete scorecard.


The Accommodations:
I was staying at the Sunlite for the entirety of my first Tokyo trip. After a night of something resembling sleep, I went downstairs and had the breakfast buffet, which was half Western-style (cereal, sausage, eggs, bacon. etc) and half Japanese style (rice, miso, salad, fish). I mixed and matched a little, not knowing if it was going to stay resident in my system for any great lengths of time anyway, and then went back up to my room to get ready to go out.

When I got back to my room after my morning and early afternoon outings, I found a curious thing upon returning to the room. The room service people didn't just clean around my stuff as per the usual (at least in America) procedure. They completely re-arranged my stuff. And here's the thing: they were right. I wasn't using the special shelf or the toiletry bag that they had put there for that purpose, my luggage didn't belong where it was, and a dozen other little adjustments that made the entire arrangement much better. So go figure.

Click here to see all the photos from this trip.

2010: Japan I