A few weeks ago I went to a baseball game in Japan. It's quite a different experience from one in Canada or the US, but the beer is still watered down and overpriced!
I went to Seibu Dome, just west of my workplace in Tokorozawa. Seibu Dome is not a huge stadium like the SkyDome. It only has one tier of seating. The bleachers are an area of sloping astroturf behind the outfield fence. The game had started at about 6pm, and we arrived in the middle of the 3rd inning to find the home team, the Seibu Lions, leading 1-0 against the #1 team in their league, the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks. Japanese baseball teams don't represent cities, they represent department stores - so Seibu and other department stores owned by the same company are plastered with posters of the players.
I must admit that I haven't paid much attention to Japanese baseball, so I don't know which teams are in which league. All I knew about the Lions was the name of their 18-year-old pitching sensation, Daisuke Matsusaka. Many kids there wore his number - #18. Luckily he was pitching that night, so I can impress my students and other Japanese people with that bit of trivia.
It took me a while to understand the scoreboard. (Those of you who don't understand/care about baseball can ignore this paragraph.) I wondered why they didn't show the count (strikes, balls, and outs) but I eventually figured out how they do it. They have rows of lights beside the letters S, B, and O. 2 red lights for the strikes, 3 green light for the balls, and 2 yellow lights for the outs. (I may be mixing up the red & yellow lights there.)
There isn't much of the cheesy organ music or fancy Jumbotron graphics to get the crowd going. Nonetheless it was louder than the SkyDome - but Toronto fans aren't known for being noisy! The cheering is led by a group of people in red-white-&-blue happi coats. (A happi coat is a short cotton jacket generally worn by men at festivals.) Some of them sweep huge flags on long poles back and forth. Others bang enormous drums, and the crowd in the area shouts and cheers and makes lots of noise. There are 2 groups of flag-&-drum people, and they wander around the stadium getting the crowd to cheer for the home team.
The beer is served by men and women who carry beer kegs on their backs in vinyl bags, kind of like a cooler bag. They must be very heavy when they start! The beer is, naturally, foamy when it comes out of the tap. So the girl serving us encouraged us to sip some off the top while she waited to top up our cups!
I ate Japanese food there. I didn't look for any hotdogs or other traditional North American baseball food, but I did eat 2 servings of yakisoba (fried noodles). They were delicious and very salty (and also pretty cheap, at 400 yen), leading me to need more beer.
Despite the great Matsuzaka, the Lions lost - the Hawks scored 2 runs in the 8th inning and that was it. The station is conveniently located right outside the doors of the stadium, and we all piled into the trains as if it were rush hour in Tokyo - we were home by 10pm!
Copyright Ailsa Wylie 1999