Baseball Maddness

I appologize for the Reader's Digest version of the Soft Bank Hawks Baseball Game. Here's the stadium. Its pretty new, and fancy. Like Chase Park in Phoenix, it has a retractable roof, but it only opens when the Hawks win, which hasn't been very often in the past few weeks. It however, does not have a swimming pool, or multiple levels of seats. Everyone, except the CEOs in their business suites, sits on the same level.

The inside. Nice artificial turf and green seats give the whole thing a very bright look. Then add the beer vendors in their neon orange, pink and yellow outfits...you can't miss them. Beers of a generous size were 700 yen. That's what beers of an unreasonably small size cost in the States. Chalk one up for Japanese Baseball.

The entire outfield section of the seats is filled with very enthusiastic fans that cheer in unison throughout the whole game. I found them very entertaining as long as I didn't care about what was happening on the field. To keep them all on the beat, there is a rotating team of cheering captains that stand infront of the section and keep time. The guy below is now the personal hero of all of the ALTs in the Kita-Chikugo Board of Education for his professionalism and accurate hand motions. After each cheer, he would tip his hat to the crowd and take a bow. Note the white gloves...this guy took his position very seriously.

The Hawks logo. Looks more like a chicken to me. The team has a whole family of "hawks" that run out on the field and pose on their merchandise. Dad and Mom, 3 kids, and a crazy uncle. Not sure if that is really their relationship, but you get the point. Something to appeal to everyone. Speaking of merchandise, we were probably the only people in the whole Yahoo Dome not weilding the hollow plastic mini-bat noisemakers.

Seventh inning: in the States, we stretch and sing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," which is a little silly if you think about it, because if you made it through to the seventh inning, you are clearly already at the game. Maybe the lyrics of the song the Japanese sang were similar, but I got the feeling it was more about rallying for victory. As the song is starting, people begin to blow up these long yellow ballons....

...towards the end of the song, the bleachers aound the staduim are a sea of yellow...

...and then at the end of the song---WHOOSH! Everyone lets go of their balloons, which fly up towards the ceiling and a few seconds later, you get hit by things that feel like banana peels falling from the sky.

As if the whole balloon extravaganza, walking through the mob back to the subway and getting on the train around 10:30 PM wasn't exciting enough for a Wednesday night with work the next morning, our supervisor suggested that we go out for an hour of karaoke. Not wanting to offend, we said yes (conveniently for him, his last day of summer vacation was on Thursday). We went to a place called "Magic World" near one of the train stations in Kurume, and it was truly an experience. For those of you who don't know, karaoke in Japan is a not an exercise in public humiliation. You and your friends get your own private room, and often the price includes snacks and drinks. It turns out that our supervisor can sing in addition to speak near flawless English, and he blew us all away with the Righteous Brothers "You've Lost that Lovin' Feeling," while I screeched out some Kelly Clarkson. Aside from Shintani-sensei's singing, my favorite part was the duet Jamie and performed to Nelly Furtado's "Promiscuous Girl." She was Nelly, I was Timberland. The decor of this place is not to go unmentioned. The below picture shows just a glimpse of the exterior. I guess you'll have to come visit if you want to see the inside...

***This is probably just the first of many adventures with Shintani-sensei. Like most, if not all Japanese, he is all business in the office, but he sufficiently drank Dave under the seats at the baseball game and seemed truly disappointed when our hour of karaoke was up. His birthday is tomorrow, August 21, and we are taking him out on Wednesday....