Out to the Ballgame

Well, it finally happened. Something that I've been wishing to do for a long time now, and I finally got the chance to do it. And my God, was it worth it.

I was able to attend a Japanese League Baseball game on Thursday night - the Yakult Swallows vs the Yomiuri Giants, Meiji Jingu Stadium. There's so much to write about and so many interesting contrasts in terms of this game versus the countless American games I've gone to, as well as the differences in just plain old baseball.

To start out, unlike American baseball, most Japanese teams are sponsored. Both the Swallows and the Giants are based in Tokyo, but are not called as such - Yakult is a dairy company, and Yomiuri is an enormous newspaper company, and they fund the teams, so the names reflect as such.

Jerich and I got there a little early and got outfield unreserved tickets for about $12, and as soon as we walked in the first amazing thing occured to us: They had Japanese food for sale! The concession stands' menus consisted of udon and soba noodles, curry rice, yakitori (chicken skewers), sushi (of course), and edamame (!). There were also smatterings of popcorn, etc, but it was the exception and not the rule.

We got dinner and took our seats amongst the salarymen, who were putting their Swallows jerseys on over their work clothes. Not a bad way to end the work day, I'd say.

The stadium:






The stadium itself wasn't much to look at. It's actually on the grounds of the Meiji Shrine, attended the weekend before. Meiji Jingu actually means Meiji Shrine. But in any case, it was kind of an old-style stadium, the outfield wall a simple arc, and the field artificial turf that is all but old-fashioned in American sports. We were seated in the outfield with the Swallows fans, and across the way on the other side of the outfield were the Giants fans. The Giants are kind of the Yankees of the Japanese league, and their fans were loud and proud and very coordinated (explained later).

Cheering:
This turned out to be one of the most interesting parts of the game. The method of cheering is much more like that of a soccer match - there were innumerable chants for the Swallows, and all the fans seemed to know every word. There were even hired cheerleader types who waved behemoth flags around and played trumpet to the tune of the said cheers.

Each player seemed to have his own cheer designated to him, so that when he was up to bat thousands of people serenaded him. Imagine doing your job with 7,000 people singing to you. Not easy. By far the most popular player appeared to be a guy named Aoki - at least half of the jersey-wearing fans were wearing his name and number. He had a particularly rousing song for him.

The funniest song by far was for Aaron Guiel, who is Canadian, the only North American player in the Swallows' lineup (There was a Venezuelan player, who, when he came up, would be greeted by the waving of an ENORMOUS Venezuelan flag right near where we were sitting. It looked so amazingly bizarre. It really made me wonder if he would be this welcome if he didn't play baseball well. But anyway.). When Guiel came up to the plate, the trumpeters in the crowd began to play Oh, Canada. We found this hilariously funny, until the second or third at bat, when we realized that they were actually replacing Canada with "Ga-e-ru," which is the Japanese pronunciation of his last name. Whoever said they weren't creative?

The most bizarre aspect of the cheering was the fact that whenever the Swallows scored a run, nearly every fan brought out identical umbrellas and began gesticulating them up and down. I honestly have no idea what this was all about, and even after doing some post-game research, still don't really know:



I seriously have no idea what this was all about.

Anyway, the other impressive thing was that neither of the teams' fans really jeered the other players. There was never any booing of anybody, just a kind of unconditional love towards the players for doing their best. The word "ganbaru," do your best, is used often in Japan, and I think that's all the fans really want (besides a victory). Even with two out in the ninth and their team down 5-0, the Giants fans were as vocal as they were when the game started.

The other cool thing was the scoreboard:





I know, cool, right? On the right and left, under the team names, are the players, surrounded by (from left to right), their position (1=pitcher, 2=catcher, etc), their average, and the number of home runs they'd hit. In between the two line scores are the Japanese characters for 1-10. On the black screen is the pitch speed, in kilometers.

After the game was over, Jerich and I shuffled with a few hundred other fans to the nearest train station. Needless to say, I'll be back.

Cellular

Well, I could talk about a plethora of things here, including my accidentally requesting to sit in the smoking section of a cafe (this ended badly. I remember when I was a kid going to restaurants that my parents were asked 'smoking or non-smoking,' but not in recent memory. here they still allow smoking indoors. boo), going to the John Lennon museum where the amount of time spent discussing his post-Beatles music and life defied historical standards (what else would you expect of a place approved of by Yoko Ono?), or the start of classes (which I suppose I will get to at some point).

What I really want to talk about, though, is my cell phone. I know, sounds kitchy.

I know we're all aware that Japan is technologically pretty good, but I had to see it to believe it.

I went in to the cell phone place to get a plan, and nearly 3 hours later I walked out not exactly sure what kind of plan I had signed myself up for, but happy that I just had a mode of communication all to myself.

Only later did I discover the power of this phone.

It can...
take pictures and movies. (ho-hum)

edit those pictures, add captions and a border, and place on one's screen (kinda cool)

It has a Japanese-English and English-Japanese dictionary. (really?)

It has an infrared technology that, when paired with another phone with a similar power, allows one to simply put the phones close to on another and transfer each other's phone numbers into the other's phone. (it can do that?)

My phone has its own email address, so I can send emails to regular computer email addresses as well to other phones with similar capabilities. (kinda like text messaging on steroids)

It also has GPS that i haven't figured out how to work yet, a thing to help you keep track of what you pay money for, a journal, something that automatically sends out emails at any certain point you want them sent out, and a thing that is able to read script and translate it for you by using the video camera and dictionary. (yes.)

Oh, and you can call people on it too.

How much did this cutting-edge technology cost me?


1050 yen, or about $9. Long live qualcomm.

The Week's End

The weather finally let up this weekend, so I was able to put my full touristy energies toward the vast cityscape that is Tokyo.

Saturday was a day of solitary travel, which I rather like. What made the situation so much more exotic is that I did feel like I was traveling throughout the city almost in a separate universe to the thousands of people surrounding me. I had very little idea what any of them were saying or where they were going. It's a very isolating and freeing feeling at the same time, and depending on the eyes that met mine as I explored the oceanic masses of people, it teetered to either side.

The day started in Harajuku, which is inside the city. (I live in the outskirts...think spending a week in Queens and going into Manhattan for the first time...sort of.) I went to the Meiji Shrine, which is this enormous complex of temples and gardens in the middle of the city. The foliage was a heavy, pensive green, and I was thankful for the numerous patches of shade that lined the gravel road into the temple:




I wandered into the main section of the temple, an austere square surrounded by wooden buildings. I threw a 10-yen coin into the altar, as you are supposed to do, bowed, clapped twice, centered my mind to the best of my ability (the axis has been thrown off a little bit lately), bowed again, and turned around to find a Shinto wedding procession marching right through the center of the square:



The husband and wife were housed underneath the red umbrella. They marched through the square in this manner no less than four times, and each time a bovine hoard of tourists marched with them, taking pictures unabashedly. I try to keep my distance at photo-op times like these because, well, after all, it's not my wedding.

From the austerity of the temple, it was on to the flamboyance of the main Harajuku throughfare, Takeshita Dori, which is a haven for those individuals who enjoy "cosplay." Cosplay is the Japanese portmanteau of 'costume' and 'play,' and adherents are encouraged to dress up as their favorite manga (Japanese comics), anime, tv show, or anything else characters and hang out in a public space. They look to be alternative, to be rebellious and on the edge, but their laughs reminded me of the innocence required to dress up in semi-sado-masochistic outfits and parade oneself in an extremely busy public place. Sadly I didn't get a picture of any of them, but I'll know next time.

I then walked up to Shinjuku, which is a very crowded place indeed. Shinjuku is home to the busiest train station in the world, which on a Saturday early afternoon really resembled most places' Friday rush hour. Shinjuku is home to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, whose 45th floor I was hurdled towards by an elevator. Also in the elevator was a young boy and his father. The boy saw the floor to which we were headed (45), proclaimed his fear to all within earshot, and proceeded to squat behind his father's legs, holding his calves like prison bars. I wished to commiserate with my young elevator-mate, but we were upstairs quickly. The view was, to say the least, impressive:



It reminded me of both the enormity of the city I temporarily call home and also my dislike of being quite so high above the ground.

I was quite in the mood for an iced coffee, but for some reason I could not find one. (I did happen upon a Starbucks which, after wandering around very intimidatingly crowded streets in search of refreshment, didn't look so bad. My better conscious was then locked in a battle of wills with that oceanic goddess of the Frappuchino on the Starbucks logo, and I came through victorious, though at this rate I wouldn't be surprised to open my door tomorrow morning to find a Starbucks replacing my neighbor's room, in which case I suppose I would have to concede and order a cup.) What I did find was an establishment called Wired Cafe.

Wired cafe was one of those, you know, uber-trendy, hip places that was, well, wired, the type of place where you could feel like you were all around the world at once, that had that edginess about it that draws in that yuppie, globetrotting type crowd. A sign outside described the cafe's ambiance as such:

"Where the sense of place and time is reflected.
The dynamic mindscape of your emotions and your lifestyles.
Where the beauty of the past collides with the excitement of the future."

Their iced coffee cost 6 dollars, so I went home thirsty, occupying myself on the train ride home with guesses as to what my mindscape might look like from 45 floors up.

A Day at the Park

Classes this morning were canceled due to quickly approaching and extremely angry typhoon "Fitow" (I did not realize typhoons had names), but it turned out to be the nicest morning in a few days. I was finally ready to put some of my wanderlust energy that had been stymied by Fitow to work and went to Kichijoji, the funky home of Inokashira Park. I even had lunch at a great little place called Pepecafe Forest (I was sure it was Pepe Forest Cafe, but alas) which was opened up to the park, those damn cicadas rattling my ear drum like new junior high band students as I attempted to enjoy my Thai noodles before setting off to school for the first time as an actual student.

In other news, I know many of you are curious as to my classes, so here it is: I am taking 2 periods of Japanese per day, as well as a 3-period a week class on modern Japanese literature (my wheelhouse, if you will), and a one-night a week class about the function (or lack thereof) and history of the United Nations. Two of the three are in English, and I think that you can guess which one isn't.

Tomorrow I'm going to the Meiji Shrine, one of the grandest in all of Tokyo. Sunday it's up north a little bit to see the John Lennon museum, put together by Yoko Ono, the representation of whose role in the latter years of the Beatles is sure to be both skewed and understated.

Foreigner.

I am a foreigner here. I have been identified as one, and, by law, I am forced to register as one. There's a window at the city office for "Alien Registration." They're not talking about E.T. They are referring to me.

The word 'foreigner' is used much more freely here than in America, where (in America) I think its connotation is not only fairly negative but bordering on insulting. It's used here really without regret or flinching, and the term, however impolitely blunt it may seem, is a fairly accurate description of my status here.

American culture, speaking very broadly, is a kind of open-source culture in that anyone can come on over and attempt to "make it," and in many cases their way of "making it" is by creating their own version of the qualified "it." I feel I may have more in common with a Canadian or a Brit than I do with someone from Ohio or Alaska or Houston. It's very easy to feel like a foreigner in America while simultaneously being...American. In my own country I have seen a community cut up a recently caught whale to distribute, I've seen overly caffeinated businessmen in New York pushing people out of the way to make it onto a train, and I've seen surfers sitting on their boards a few hundred feet out into the Pacific, their silhouettes bobbing up and down in the kaleidoscopic light of the setting sun.

I suppose what I'm getting at is that it's very difficult to identify "foreigners" in America because so much of it is foreign to us anyway. It is most definitely a country of distinct regions and populations whose main ties to each other often are mislabeled as "patriotism" and in reality is more like economic and political coexistence. In a broad way.

This all came to mind as I sat, mentally reviewing some various grammar and vocab before the Japanese placement exam, where we would show the program directors which level of Japanese we should be placed in. (I tested into Japanese 4, in case you were wondering. Not sure if this means I did really well or not.) The scene:
Three Japanese professors standing at the front of the room, explaining in basic Japanese the process of the test to a room full of...foreigners. I'm sorry, there's no other way to put it. Looking around me I saw all kinds of faces, none of which were Japanese.

Most of these people had come to Japan to experience the country, the culture. They came to be "closer" to the Japanese, to make "Japanese" friends. (I really hate this. Many people have said that such-and-such is a great way 'to make Japanese friends.' That one of the reasons someone came here is to 'make Japanese friends.' I think it sounds ridiculous. Why would you want to be friends with someone just because they were Japanese? I know it's a harmless thing but I don't understand why they can't be friends you like for normal friend-liking reasons, but happen to be Japanese. Anyway.)

But none of these people will ever be...Japanese. Speaking at our orientation was an American Professor at ICU who has lived in Japan for 30 years. He said that even after that length of time, he still did not feel like he was truly "a part" of Japanese culture, although he also didn't feel as if he were still on the outside. 30 years! Didn't feel "a part" of the culture!

This may well be so for a number of reasons, but I think the elephant in the sociological room is simply that he is not Japanese. Someone from Mexico, Nigeria, Israel, or China can become at least an accepted member of American society fairly easily, for reasons noted above. But can anyone who is not genetically Japanese be an accepted Japanese? It would certainly seem not to be the case.

Then what in the world were so many "foreign" faces doing in that room taking a test on Japanese language in Japan? Maybe they were just doing something they enjoyed doing, in the place of its birth and prominence - Anime, sushi, nerd culture, electronics, literature (in the case of myself). But why wear a suit to a party whose dress code has nothing to do with clothing?

More pictures, more humor next time.

Orientation

We were asked to be present for the Matriculation ceremony by 9:30, where we were given assigned seats based on status as a student, and then by last name, so that the girl sitting to my left's last name was Good and he to my right was Gonzalez. The matriculation, however, did not start at 9:30. What occurred at 9:30 was a rehearsal for the orientation. What did we need to practice?

Signing a student pledge that was included in packets that were on our seats, and handing them to the center aisle. We then practiced singing the ICU song, praising in awkward, jetlaggged unison a school that we were not yet officially part of. I looked around. The grey-faced school bureaucrats didn't seem to share my sense of irony about the whole thing. I followed the notes on the distributed sheet music but didn't sing.

So that was the rehearsal. We were allowed a 20 minute break and then the actual ceremony happened. Each new student was introduced (about 200 in all), and after each group there was a small round of applause. The department heads were there, and it was an eclectic mix of Japanese, American and British accents speaking in both common languages. They welcomed us, often in the name of Christ (I was not aware that he had anything to do with my arrival. Again, the bureaucrats didn't seem share my cynicism. Their matching concrete-colored suits suited their stoic faces eerily.)

Lunch was served, an uncomfortable melange of sushi and french fries, kung pao shrimp and fried chicken, that pretty accurately portrayed the uneasiness between the Japanese students and the pale American hoards, mostly clumped in teams by college program. (FYI: The Japanese school year technically starts in April, so only a few of the new "September students" were Japanese).

Up at the front of the room the Dean of something-or-rather was giving a long, monotonic speech in fairly incomprehensible English, and although at least two-thirds of the assembled were talking heartily to their neighbors throughout, he persevered and finished to quiet applause.

The second day of orientation was more of the same. I'm actually quite tired now but my goal is to make it past 9:00 pm before collapsing. We'll see, I suppose. More to talk about but it'll have to come tomorrow or later.

To begin with

Well, where to start...

Japan is only partly what I remember it, and that's most likely because when I was here last it was with a group, which moved in a bovine clump so that nobody really had to know exactly where one was going to get to their destination. The train system is entirely bilingual, and luckily for me the second language is English, so even the poor non-Japanese speaker would be able to manage alright. I say poor because, although it's not likely such a person would choose to come here, any non-Japanese speaker would be in serious trouble. Although many of the signs are bilingual, most of the people are not. So if you need help beyond what is written...good luck.

This morning I met my friend Jerich from high school at Musashi-sakai station, the closest train stop to ICU, my school. We ate, and then took the bus to the campus and walked around its eerily silent pathways - almost nothing arises such a mystical, almost metaphysical silence than the emptiness of a location that is designed to be full of people. Such was the mood this afternoon. As Jerich and I stood silently in the school chapel as an unseen organist played baroque, non-believer-scaring pieces on the enormous organ, the sense of religious accomplishment accompanied by angst of being a place long imagined but never viewed overtook me. The process that had brought me here was nearly 10 months in the making.

The cicadas were buzzing madly, and I felt called upon. To what I do not know, but the location was finally revealed. The combination of deep green foliage and concrete on campus evoked a convergence of the man-made and the natural, and as I boarded the bus I felt that I was leaving a place I had already spent many hours before I had actually arrived.