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Another crazy baseball-filled day
Wow, today was kind of unbelievable in some ways. Or maybe just surreal would be the right word.
Went to the Fighters-Marines game at the Tokyo Dome. As always, this involved walking around and seeing a whole ton of random people and saying hi and the whole 今年もよろしくお願いします thing. All the usual suspects were there and sitting in all the usual places. Me, I ended up sitting with Ojisan and his surroundings. As it turned out, Hiromi ditched us to go sit in the infield and take photos of Darvish pitching (she's allowed to be a fangirl since she's been a Darvish fangirl since he was in high school), so the others in our group were this lady Rie and a friend of hers (apparently they went to Taiwan to watch Itsuki Shoda pitch -- that's just NUTS), Johno, Suu, and uhh... I don't know their names, but this one lady and her two daughters who are probly around 7-9 years old. The crazy part is, the little girls are apparently fans of mine. They were super-excited to see all of my signs, one of the girls proudly waved her Inaba sign next to mine, and they even said something about "wanting to see the gaijin oneechan that we saw on TV". That was pretty crazy.
Akki made a big show of taping over the "SWEENEY" on his #42 jersey and scrawling "KIDA" on it.
Ojisan gave me the Imanari poster he had -- but it turned out he has a big one for real, and today he just gave me a smaller version that was an insert for a hair salon. He was like "come down to Kamagaya and we'll get Ryota to sign it for you?"
Anyway, the game itself, basically, it was Darvish vs. Naruse, and it was even until the Fighters beat the tar out of Naruse in the 6th inning for like 6 runs. The Fighters eventually won 8-1. The Marines made 4 errors, but the Fighters' Sho Nakata played a flawless left field and was running. WTF reality is THIS?
I sang and yelled a lot as per usual.
I had gotten an email from my friend Ogura-san (she's... like 50 years old or so, I met her at the college baseball games last fall) saying that she and Yoneyama were going to get tea after the game and I should join them. So I met them outside gate 21 and we went down to the Baseball Cafe. This was at 4pm or so.
As it is, I never ended up actually eating dinner, just sharing lots of small plates of stuff with Ogura and Yoneyama for like the next 6 hours. We were at the Baseball Cafe until around 6:30 when they had last order -- and there, we shared a basket of fried appetizers and a teriyaki pizza, and all had the free-refill-tea-and-soda drinks. A magician came by -- a gaijin dude -- and he made us balloon flowers. I have a photo. I might post it. That was pretty nuts.
Then Ogura had this brilliant idea to go to Abu-san, which is an izakaya in Yotsuya 3-chome, that... to be honest I don't know the exact connection between Shinji Mizushima (the dude who drew all these baseball manga including Dokaben and, of course, Abu-san) and the restaurant, but basically the place is FULL of baseball crap, and mostly of photos of the owner posing with various famous people, mostly baseball players. Ogura and Yoneyama assure me that baseball players come in and eat there all the time, and that it's really a place to go if you just want to be around other baseball freaks.
I was a little... put off when I first came in, because the entire place acted like they had never seen a white face before in their life. Seriously. We were seated between two other tables -- and it turned out the other pairs had ALSO come from the Tokyo Dome. But like, this guy at the one table, the first thing he said was "oh my god, she speaks Japanese" and then the dude across from him asked me "Can you use chopsticks?" and so on. The restaurant staff were all like, to my friends, "uh, who is this person?" and it was... WEIRD. The owner even came up like "It is very nice to meet you" in English, so I replied in Japanese, 英語がお上手ですよね！
Once it became patently obvious that 1) I speak Japanese just fine, 2) I can use chopsticks just fine, and 3) I know as much about baseball as anyone else in the room, they warmed up to me a bit more, though. The guy at the table next to us who had initially been all shocked to see a gaijin was eventually telling me how he used to actually be a Kintetsu ouendan leader, is now a Softbank fan, showed me a glove given to him by Masanori Taguchi, and was babbling about his plans to go to the Sapporo Dome for the opening series. And one of the guys who had been wandering around delivering food to tables and whatnot, who Ogura kept calling "Mako-chan", came by to chat for a while. They were telling me he was a famous actor and were going on about some movie he was in recently. I thought they were entirely joking. (It turns out they weren't, Makoto Ashikawa actually is an actor with Beat Takeshi's talent agency. Holy shit. Why the hell is he working in an izakaya?) Anyway, he was just being the curious-shopkeeper type and kept asking me lots of questions. And the table we were at had jerseys from Nishimura (current Lotte manager) and Junichi Fukura (Fighters head coach) in it. The owner guy, whose name I forget, turns out to have been a classmate of Fukura's at Nabeoka HS, and was all like "Yeah, I grew up playing baseball with him."
Anyway, in all surrealness, they gave me an Abu-san plate when I left. I have no idea why but it's got the custom restaurant drawing done by Mizushima in it. I should bring it back and make them all sign it someday :P
Oh yeah, and at Abu-san the three of us also went through a salad, a bowl of corn, a plate of edamame, some sashimi, and Ogura ate a natto omelet that me and Yoneyama wouldn't touch. I also just realized that Yoneyama snagged the bill at both the Cafe and at Abu-san and I didn't pay for anything today. I wonder if I should feel bad about that. Argh.
(For the record: Ogura and Yoneyama don't know about me and my blogging and my baseball connections, and I didn't even make any reference to it either at Abu-san, pretending to just be this crazy kuwashii gaijin who knows a lot about baseball. I dunno why, but I guess I don't like making a big deal about it -- I don't like people to think "Oh, you just get to do this because you're a gaijin", after all.)
Finally left around 10pm, got home around 11pm after we walked to Shinanomachi station and then took the train and all. I'm exhausted and I still need to make an entry for Marinerds in theory, and then head back to Jingu in the morning. I was thinking to maybe go early and get a good seat and take photos, but now I'm tending more towards sleeping in and catching up with the Shinozawa group in the outfield instead. It's a little sad because this might be one of my last chances to sit really close up to take photos of the Fighters, but on the other hand, whatever. I've taken so many photos in my time here in Japan already... well, we'll see what time I get to sleep and what time I wake up, I guess.
Oh, something else weird: the "Kitchen Million" restaurant that's right down the staircase from where I live? Apparently it burned down last night. Not a joke. When I walked past it this morning there were all these crews of people there, the front of the building was covered in tarps, you could see burnt remains of stuff crumbling out at the bottom, and it smelled TERRIBLE. Funny thing is, I'd never seen a customer go in or out of there. EVER. In the year and a half I've lived here. It's kind of crazy, but also just kinda freaky, since I give that as a landmark for finding my place. Oops.
Went to the Fighters-Marines game at the Tokyo Dome. As always, this involved walking around and seeing a whole ton of random people and saying hi and the whole 今年もよろしくお願いします thing. All the usual suspects were there and sitting in all the usual places. Me, I ended up sitting with Ojisan and his surroundings. As it turned out, Hiromi ditched us to go sit in the infield and take photos of Darvish pitching (she's allowed to be a fangirl since she's been a Darvish fangirl since he was in high school), so the others in our group were this lady Rie and a friend of hers (apparently they went to Taiwan to watch Itsuki Shoda pitch -- that's just NUTS), Johno, Suu, and uhh... I don't know their names, but this one lady and her two daughters who are probly around 7-9 years old. The crazy part is, the little girls are apparently fans of mine. They were super-excited to see all of my signs, one of the girls proudly waved her Inaba sign next to mine, and they even said something about "wanting to see the gaijin oneechan that we saw on TV". That was pretty crazy.
Akki made a big show of taping over the "SWEENEY" on his #42 jersey and scrawling "KIDA" on it.
Ojisan gave me the Imanari poster he had -- but it turned out he has a big one for real, and today he just gave me a smaller version that was an insert for a hair salon. He was like "come down to Kamagaya and we'll get Ryota to sign it for you?"
Anyway, the game itself, basically, it was Darvish vs. Naruse, and it was even until the Fighters beat the tar out of Naruse in the 6th inning for like 6 runs. The Fighters eventually won 8-1. The Marines made 4 errors, but the Fighters' Sho Nakata played a flawless left field and was running. WTF reality is THIS?
I sang and yelled a lot as per usual.
I had gotten an email from my friend Ogura-san (she's... like 50 years old or so, I met her at the college baseball games last fall) saying that she and Yoneyama were going to get tea after the game and I should join them. So I met them outside gate 21 and we went down to the Baseball Cafe. This was at 4pm or so.
As it is, I never ended up actually eating dinner, just sharing lots of small plates of stuff with Ogura and Yoneyama for like the next 6 hours. We were at the Baseball Cafe until around 6:30 when they had last order -- and there, we shared a basket of fried appetizers and a teriyaki pizza, and all had the free-refill-tea-and-soda drinks. A magician came by -- a gaijin dude -- and he made us balloon flowers. I have a photo. I might post it. That was pretty nuts.
Then Ogura had this brilliant idea to go to Abu-san, which is an izakaya in Yotsuya 3-chome, that... to be honest I don't know the exact connection between Shinji Mizushima (the dude who drew all these baseball manga including Dokaben and, of course, Abu-san) and the restaurant, but basically the place is FULL of baseball crap, and mostly of photos of the owner posing with various famous people, mostly baseball players. Ogura and Yoneyama assure me that baseball players come in and eat there all the time, and that it's really a place to go if you just want to be around other baseball freaks.
I was a little... put off when I first came in, because the entire place acted like they had never seen a white face before in their life. Seriously. We were seated between two other tables -- and it turned out the other pairs had ALSO come from the Tokyo Dome. But like, this guy at the one table, the first thing he said was "oh my god, she speaks Japanese" and then the dude across from him asked me "Can you use chopsticks?" and so on. The restaurant staff were all like, to my friends, "uh, who is this person?" and it was... WEIRD. The owner even came up like "It is very nice to meet you" in English, so I replied in Japanese, 英語がお上手ですよね！
Once it became patently obvious that 1) I speak Japanese just fine, 2) I can use chopsticks just fine, and 3) I know as much about baseball as anyone else in the room, they warmed up to me a bit more, though. The guy at the table next to us who had initially been all shocked to see a gaijin was eventually telling me how he used to actually be a Kintetsu ouendan leader, is now a Softbank fan, showed me a glove given to him by Masanori Taguchi, and was babbling about his plans to go to the Sapporo Dome for the opening series. And one of the guys who had been wandering around delivering food to tables and whatnot, who Ogura kept calling "Mako-chan", came by to chat for a while. They were telling me he was a famous actor and were going on about some movie he was in recently. I thought they were entirely joking. (It turns out they weren't, Makoto Ashikawa actually is an actor with Beat Takeshi's talent agency. Holy shit. Why the hell is he working in an izakaya?) Anyway, he was just being the curious-shopkeeper type and kept asking me lots of questions. And the table we were at had jerseys from Nishimura (current Lotte manager) and Junichi Fukura (Fighters head coach) in it. The owner guy, whose name I forget, turns out to have been a classmate of Fukura's at Nabeoka HS, and was all like "Yeah, I grew up playing baseball with him."
Anyway, in all surrealness, they gave me an Abu-san plate when I left. I have no idea why but it's got the custom restaurant drawing done by Mizushima in it. I should bring it back and make them all sign it someday :P
Oh yeah, and at Abu-san the three of us also went through a salad, a bowl of corn, a plate of edamame, some sashimi, and Ogura ate a natto omelet that me and Yoneyama wouldn't touch. I also just realized that Yoneyama snagged the bill at both the Cafe and at Abu-san and I didn't pay for anything today. I wonder if I should feel bad about that. Argh.
(For the record: Ogura and Yoneyama don't know about me and my blogging and my baseball connections, and I didn't even make any reference to it either at Abu-san, pretending to just be this crazy kuwashii gaijin who knows a lot about baseball. I dunno why, but I guess I don't like making a big deal about it -- I don't like people to think "Oh, you just get to do this because you're a gaijin", after all.)
Finally left around 10pm, got home around 11pm after we walked to Shinanomachi station and then took the train and all. I'm exhausted and I still need to make an entry for Marinerds in theory, and then head back to Jingu in the morning. I was thinking to maybe go early and get a good seat and take photos, but now I'm tending more towards sleeping in and catching up with the Shinozawa group in the outfield instead. It's a little sad because this might be one of my last chances to sit really close up to take photos of the Fighters, but on the other hand, whatever. I've taken so many photos in my time here in Japan already... well, we'll see what time I get to sleep and what time I wake up, I guess.
Oh, something else weird: the "Kitchen Million" restaurant that's right down the staircase from where I live? Apparently it burned down last night. Not a joke. When I walked past it this morning there were all these crews of people there, the front of the building was covered in tarps, you could see burnt remains of stuff crumbling out at the bottom, and it smelled TERRIBLE. Funny thing is, I'd never seen a customer go in or out of there. EVER. In the year and a half I've lived here. It's kind of crazy, but also just kinda freaky, since I give that as a landmark for finding my place. Oops.
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