Puray Baru!

It was my man Furuta’s turn at bat. The huge television screen played a hip promo for the popular player and I cheered. A handsome forty-two-year-old with a fifteen year career in Japanese pro ball behind him, Furuta wears glasses and, it was explained to me, is not always “healthy.” When he is healthy, the team wins. When he is not healthy...

The crowd began clapping and chanting in unison: “ Fu-ru-ta! A-tsu-ya! Fu-ru-ta! A-tsu-ya! Fu-ru-ta!” After a few seconds, and much to Masakazu’s delight, I picked up the chant. “Furuta’s my man,” I told Masakazu. Which is too bad, because he did nothing at home plate.

The Yakult Swallows were playing the team from Yokohama whose name I don’t remember but who wore pristine white uniforms. We were sitting on the Yakult side, so naturally we cheered for the Yakult Swallows. I cheered for every player, though I was probably the only person in the crowd to actually yell.

Aoki had come up to bat earlier. When the big screen announced him, Masakazu got very excited. “Who’s this?” I asked. Masakazu answered in a rush of Aoki statistics, his name, age, predictions, career goals, history, folklore. You name it, he knew it about Aoki. “Wow!” I said. I chanted even louder for Aoki. “Ai-ohh-Keeee!” I yelled. I turned to Masakazu, “Aoki’s my man,” I said. He laughed. “Yeah, yeah!” he said. “That is good.”

I had ridden the Ginza line metro with Ben to Gaienmai station to meet Masakazu and Seth for drinks before the baseball game. Mayumi was supposed to join us at the bar, but she was late. Having woken up at three (we met at four-thirty), she emailed Masakazu that she’d meet us at six. When she did show up, it was in full makeup, a skirt, and seven centimeter heels. (Later, when Ben pointed out her shoes, I said, “Don’t laugh, mate. She climbed Mt. Fuji in those heels,” and she joked, “I wore the nine centimeter heels.”) Cam came out of the station and spotted Ben. He wasn’t supposed to’ve met us, but the bar was near the station and he came over saying, “Good thing I found you, I don’t know where the stadium is!” and pulled up a chair.

Let me sort out our crew for you: There was Ben, the Aussie, and Masakazu who is Eddoko via Akita, Seth from Chicago, Mayumi who is (I think) from Kawagoe (?), and Jason, from Ottowa. Cam, the guy who joined us (and who shocks Japanese by being about six feet six inches tall and about three hundred pounds) is also a Canadian whose parents were from the Middle East. At the stadium, we joined another couple of Ben’s friends, Gyu (a nickname), who plays guitar with Ben’s band and is from Tokyo, and Andy, who looks Chinese but who speaks English with a charming Scottish accent from having grown up in Scotland (where his father’s from) and not Hong Kong (his mother’s hometown). Andy brought along a friend to whom I wasn’t introduced, but who only spoke Japanese, so I’m guessing he was from Japan. And me.

I'll explain that I'm not a baseball fan (or a sports fan of any kind really). The last time I went to a baseball game was in Albuquerque, tweny years ago, with Robert and his mother and father. Robert and I were your typical disaffected teenagers and we had to be forced to take the little token handout from the ticket taker, the Groucho Marx funny nose and glasses. I don't know how I made it through that game, bored as I had to pretend to be, but I'm sure Robert and I sat and rolled our eyes and made fun of everyone around us. So, no, I am not a baseball fan, but you caught me in a good week because this week I've decided to take every invitation that comes my way. Baseball? You bet! And I'm glad I did.

At the stadium, the beer girls ran up and down the steps, sweating in long pants, long-sleeved shirts and hats. Their barrels of beer strapped to their backs, they took the opportunity to sit whenever someone bought a beer. A man with our group, Andy, ordered a beer and one of the beer girls came over and sat down. Cam asked about the snacks she was selling. “Nani-yo kore? Cheese?” he said. She looked at him quizzically. I fed him the correct way to ask her what they were and he asked her. “Ohhh! Eh-to, cheezu to kamaboko,” she answered. Cam looked at her quizzically. Having corrected the grammar of Cam’s question in Japanese, she perhaps thought I could translate this, so she looked from Cam to me. “It’s cheese and fish sausage,” I told Cam. “They’re good. Do you want to try one?” He shook his head. "Come on, Cam. They're only two hundred!" He shook his head again, so I bought a beer from her for five hundred and she went away with a big, happy smile.

When she had run off, Cam commented, “The people here are so innocent!” I wanted to laugh at him but I didn’t. I just shook my head. He’s been here eleven months and still has this beautiful fantasy unrolling before him about Japan and its innocent people...I told him General MacCarthur’s quote about the Japanese: “They’re a nation of twelve-year-olds.” Cam said, without sarcasm or irony, almost happily, “Yeah, that’s true.”

A batter came up and the crowd began to chant. I listened carefully, but I couldn’t tell the name they were chanting. "Rah-doh-ree-geh-zu?" I looked quizzically at Masakazu. Nani? What? Masakazu smiled back big, and chanted, "Rah-doh-ree-geh-zu!" I nodded and smiled and turned back to the game.

A huge board at one end of the stadium displayed the players’ names in kanji, which are generally just pretty pictures to me, so I didn’t look at the board for any Rah-doh-ree-geh-zu. Instead I looked at the huge TV screen which was broadcasting the player’s promo. The promos are fast bits of video backed with hip-hop music, scratchy and loud. The player stands in his handsome blue and white Yakult Swallows uniform, moodily lit, with his arms crossed. Then there's a tight close up of the player with his hat pulled down over his eyes, serious and tough looking, and the camera pans around, first at him then away from him at a crazy angle. Finally, the player's name is displayed on his left, in romanji, in a splashy modern font. A sexy female voice announces the name and the video fades to black. Then the actual player gets to bat.

I watched the video, waiting for the name. The name on the screen made the chant: “Rah-doh-ree-ge-zu!” make sense: It was, of course, Rodriguez. I looked at the board that displayed the players names and saw that two were in katakana “Rodurigezu,” I read. I sounded out the other name in katakana: “Ree-gu-zu”? Reeguzu turned out to be Riggs, a perfect American baseball name. Maels Rodriguez is from Peru, I think, and Adam Riggs used to play in Anaheim, California before signing up with the Swallows.

Cam wondered aloud, “Why would they come here to play baseball in Japan?” and I rubbed my fingers together in the Western hand sign for money. (The Japanese sign for money is the Western sign for OK, but with the palm turned up.) “What is that?” Mayumi asked. “Okane,” I explained. Okane or curiosity, I guess--which are the same reasons I’m here.

At some point in the proceedings, someone did something and half the crowd--the Yakult Swallows fans, about twelve thousand strong--broke out the green umbrellas. A song was played and a chant was chanted while the umbrellas were bobbed and swayed in some complicated pattern. All of this was in unison, the result of some cue I had completely missed. I excitedly snapped pictures. When it was over, I turned to Masakazu and said, “That was the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in my life.” He laughed. “In your life?!” he repeated.



Our game last night was at Jingu Stadium in Tokyo, home to the Yakult Swallows. (Who lost, by the way, a disappointing 5 to 0.) Jingu Stadium is nothing to write home about, though it does hold 48,000 people. What impressed me was not the stadium itself, but the fact that there isn’t a parking lot of any appreciable size in the vicinity. Think about that. In Albuquerque, there was a plan to build a stadium downtown and the major complaint was that there wouldn’t be enough parking for a decent-sized stadium, so why put in the effort? If we can't drive and park, we're not going.

Another thing that impressed (and maybe frightened me) was the orderliness of the crowd. (Honestly, it's sometimes like that scene from Hitchcock's movie The Birds here. Do you remember the scene where Tippi Hendren's character walks through the flock of birds and they're just standing on the ground not making a sound, and all the time you're watching, tensed, thinking, any minute now, any minute now all hell's going to break loose.) Though it wasn’t a sold out crowd at Jingu last night, there were about thirty thousand people in attendance at the game. They were quiet, polite, sat through the whole game so that they wouldn't block the view for other spectators. There wasn't a single beer hat in view. There were no fights. There was not a single hyper fan running around crazily with his shirt off and his face painted with the team's colors.

Thirty-thousand people got to the stadium and watched politely and left the stadium, not pushing and shoving at one another, not in cars, not honking and flashing their lights and listening to the end of the game on the radio to try to beat the traffic jam. No, it was orderly. Admittedly it was not particularly exciting for an American, but it was orderly. And it worked.

I had a good time.