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Saturday -- baseball, sumo, etc, day with Akinori
Wow, do I suck at writing in LJ.
Saturday I spent the entire day with Akinori, one of my friends from Yakult Swallows games. He's a Hosei alum, but was never really interested in the Big 6 baseball scene for whatever reason. So, in the morning, we went to the Hosei-Keio game, and sat in the actual Hosei ouendan area. Mizushima saved us seats in the "good" area, ie, right behind the band, across the aisle from the baseball club. Also bizarrely, despite that when Mizushima came with us to a preseason Carp-Swallows game he basically ended up sitting there by himself not talking to anyone (I had warned him in advance, "I mostly speak English with this Jingu group"), he DID remember Akinori from there, mostly because at the time, and still now, he couldn't understand why a baseball fan and Hosei alum wouldn't be interested in Hosei baseball. I can understand that. :)
The game was pretty fast and low-scoring. Mikami started for Hosei, Daisuke for Keio, and it was 2-1 in the end with the Keio runs mostly coming off a Ren Yamasaki double, and Hosei's only RBI, bizarrely, was from Mikami himself. Sitting in the ouendan was fun -- Akinori had seriously never done it before, so I kept explaining like, when to stand up, when to sit down, when to yell what, which songs were which, showing him which page in the program had which information... and so on and so forth. It was like "You're a Hosei alum, why do I have to tell you how to cheer for your alma mater?" But he said it was really interesting. I kept telling him about all the various players and pointing them out and whatnot. ALSO at one point during the game, Mizushima tagged Junpei Morimoto walking by and tagged me like "Hey, this is that Morimoto kid I told you about" and I'm like "OMG YOU PITCHED FOR CHUKYODAI!" and Morimoto's like "Yeah..." and I'm like "Nice to meet you!"
The most amusing cheer this time was probably because the Keio cleanup batter is 4th-year draft candidate captain Hayata Itoh aka Clutchy McClutchitude, and Hosei's cleanup batter is freshman Ryosuke Itoh, the current high school homerun record holder. So there was basically a cheer something to the effect of "Hey Keio, our cleanup batter Itoh is better than yours."
So after the game I went nuts going for signatures and stuff :) I got captain Masashi Nanba, also got Taki and Mikami and gave them photos from the USA-Japan game (which they seemed surprisingly nonplussed about... though maybe it was just that they lost to Keio so they were grumpy) and got one photo signed from each. I stalked down Keio's Koji Fukutani, too, who was very polite and sweet as always like "whoa! for me? really? thank you so much! yeah I'll sign one for you..." but failed to get Hayata Itoh -- the line for him was way too long and he had to run for the bus. (WTF Keio has a bus now?!?!) In terms of other players, I got photos with Junpei Morimoto and Ryosuke Itoh, got an autograph from Ryosuke, and also got freshman Ishida, the lefty who's pitched and won 2 games this semester, to sign a photo as well (and I gave him a bunch of photos too). Morimoto was funny, I talked to him for a bit and told him how I saw him at Senbatsu last year and so on, and I found out that he's injured right now, he hurt his leg, but he's hoping to play in the Rookie Tournament... which is going to be right about when I leave Japan. Argh.
I wanted to get kantoku Kanemitsu's autograph too. Mizushima flagged down Yokoyama-kun, the 3rd-year club manager, and was like "where's Kanemitsu?" and it turned out he was watching the 2nd game of the day until the 3rd or 4th inning. But I knew Akinori wasn't going to hang out for that long. HOWEVER I did tell Yokoyama how I used to love reading his blog entries on the Hosei blog all the time and he seemed amused but also said he hadn't written in a while.
This is relevant because later that night by random chance I found Yokoyama on Twitter having written (in Japanese) "A foreign girl came up to me today and said I hadn't written on the blog in a while. Now I want to write again." So I replied to him like "That was me, sorry!" and so we ended up following each other. Pretty weird. It'll be funny if I see him at another game though!
So, Akinori and I went to Jimbocho after that, well, Kanda, and we got soba for lunch at a place called Matsuya. It was one of those super-traditional places that generally they look at foreigners like we're some kind of weird thing that blew in off the street. Which I guess we are. But the food was really good. Akinori said he comes there a lot when he's in the Jimbocho area. Apparently the restaurant's been in business for over 100 years.
After that... well, Akinori had been saying all morning that we should go watch sumo wrestling that evening. And I'd never been to the Kokugikan. So, we went there. It was like 4900 yen for a "B" seat, which was in the upper deck. Akinori haggled with the ticket girl about different locations and we ended up in the "mukai" side in a center seat, which was a really good view, actually.
But in general I found the sumo experience kind of boring. We were there for the final 2 hours and thus saw the more popular and highranked players, all the way up to the final match being Baruto vs. Hakuho. Akinori apparently LOVES sumo and so he told me about all the various matchups as they were happening. I guess it was getting even for me telling him all about the Hosei players. But the thing is, so, with a sumo match, basically, the actual matches themselves are like... 30 seconds on average. It's just two big dudes in a ring trying to not be the first one to fall or step out of the ring. The rest of the time is spent congratulating the winner of one match, and then the next two guys spending like 3-4 minutes getting ready for their match -- usually with some sponsors marching around, and the two guys making a big show of stomping and talking to their masters and whoever. I dunno. And then they grapple for 30 seconds and one guy usually either gets pushed out of the ring or thrown off balance and falls.
A few matches were interesting, like one where there was a guy who "only" weighed 98kg, and another where it lasted like 3 minutes and the two guys just refused to budge. And Baruto vs. Hakuho was a lot like that too, they both tried various things that seemed like strategies and moves, and it lasted a few minutes as well. But largely I didn't find the matches that interesting nor the waiting around. Plus it's so weird that like, you wait all day to see a particular player, and 30 seconds later, he's done?
Whatever, I guess it's a good thing I finally did go to a sumo tournament. I found it amusing that there were more foreigners there than I'd seen in ages.
We ran into Akinori's friend Kenji, who also loves sumo and baseball, but he only talked to us for a bit before running off again.
To let the crowds disperse, we spent 2 hours doing karaoke at an Uta-Hiroba by Ryogoku station. It was surprisingly fun, we both mostly sang stuff circa 1997-2000. Akinori's like 3 years younger than me but I think I got into Japanese music around when he was in high school, so it works out.
We decided to go to dinner after that, and ended up at Rakeru in Shinjuku after it came out that I like omurice. That was awesome as I hadn't been there in ages (well, duh). And so we had omurice and the fantastic bread and also desserts. Whee!
So a good day overall. I still don't know Akinori that well but it wasn't nearly as weird as I thought it'd be hanging out with him for a day. Actually, the most interesting part was probably that we spent a while chatting about computer science. He was a CS major at Hosei, but when we actually talked about what stuff they studied vs. what we studied at CMU, it sounds pretty ridiculously easy for a curriculum. But I told him about my project at work, and the database language and all, and working with Haskell and the type systems, and it turns out that Akinori actually has an interest in functional programming languages but that's mostly on his own, not from school. It's a little difficult too because I mean, I think my Japanese is actually better than his English in general, but neither of us knows the right vocabulary in the other language to explain it to each other.
Shrug.
Saturday I spent the entire day with Akinori, one of my friends from Yakult Swallows games. He's a Hosei alum, but was never really interested in the Big 6 baseball scene for whatever reason. So, in the morning, we went to the Hosei-Keio game, and sat in the actual Hosei ouendan area. Mizushima saved us seats in the "good" area, ie, right behind the band, across the aisle from the baseball club. Also bizarrely, despite that when Mizushima came with us to a preseason Carp-Swallows game he basically ended up sitting there by himself not talking to anyone (I had warned him in advance, "I mostly speak English with this Jingu group"), he DID remember Akinori from there, mostly because at the time, and still now, he couldn't understand why a baseball fan and Hosei alum wouldn't be interested in Hosei baseball. I can understand that. :)
The game was pretty fast and low-scoring. Mikami started for Hosei, Daisuke for Keio, and it was 2-1 in the end with the Keio runs mostly coming off a Ren Yamasaki double, and Hosei's only RBI, bizarrely, was from Mikami himself. Sitting in the ouendan was fun -- Akinori had seriously never done it before, so I kept explaining like, when to stand up, when to sit down, when to yell what, which songs were which, showing him which page in the program had which information... and so on and so forth. It was like "You're a Hosei alum, why do I have to tell you how to cheer for your alma mater?" But he said it was really interesting. I kept telling him about all the various players and pointing them out and whatnot. ALSO at one point during the game, Mizushima tagged Junpei Morimoto walking by and tagged me like "Hey, this is that Morimoto kid I told you about" and I'm like "OMG YOU PITCHED FOR CHUKYODAI!" and Morimoto's like "Yeah..." and I'm like "Nice to meet you!"
The most amusing cheer this time was probably because the Keio cleanup batter is 4th-year draft candidate captain Hayata Itoh aka Clutchy McClutchitude, and Hosei's cleanup batter is freshman Ryosuke Itoh, the current high school homerun record holder. So there was basically a cheer something to the effect of "Hey Keio, our cleanup batter Itoh is better than yours."
So after the game I went nuts going for signatures and stuff :) I got captain Masashi Nanba, also got Taki and Mikami and gave them photos from the USA-Japan game (which they seemed surprisingly nonplussed about... though maybe it was just that they lost to Keio so they were grumpy) and got one photo signed from each. I stalked down Keio's Koji Fukutani, too, who was very polite and sweet as always like "whoa! for me? really? thank you so much! yeah I'll sign one for you..." but failed to get Hayata Itoh -- the line for him was way too long and he had to run for the bus. (WTF Keio has a bus now?!?!) In terms of other players, I got photos with Junpei Morimoto and Ryosuke Itoh, got an autograph from Ryosuke, and also got freshman Ishida, the lefty who's pitched and won 2 games this semester, to sign a photo as well (and I gave him a bunch of photos too). Morimoto was funny, I talked to him for a bit and told him how I saw him at Senbatsu last year and so on, and I found out that he's injured right now, he hurt his leg, but he's hoping to play in the Rookie Tournament... which is going to be right about when I leave Japan. Argh.
I wanted to get kantoku Kanemitsu's autograph too. Mizushima flagged down Yokoyama-kun, the 3rd-year club manager, and was like "where's Kanemitsu?" and it turned out he was watching the 2nd game of the day until the 3rd or 4th inning. But I knew Akinori wasn't going to hang out for that long. HOWEVER I did tell Yokoyama how I used to love reading his blog entries on the Hosei blog all the time and he seemed amused but also said he hadn't written in a while.
This is relevant because later that night by random chance I found Yokoyama on Twitter having written (in Japanese) "A foreign girl came up to me today and said I hadn't written on the blog in a while. Now I want to write again." So I replied to him like "That was me, sorry!" and so we ended up following each other. Pretty weird. It'll be funny if I see him at another game though!
So, Akinori and I went to Jimbocho after that, well, Kanda, and we got soba for lunch at a place called Matsuya. It was one of those super-traditional places that generally they look at foreigners like we're some kind of weird thing that blew in off the street. Which I guess we are. But the food was really good. Akinori said he comes there a lot when he's in the Jimbocho area. Apparently the restaurant's been in business for over 100 years.
After that... well, Akinori had been saying all morning that we should go watch sumo wrestling that evening. And I'd never been to the Kokugikan. So, we went there. It was like 4900 yen for a "B" seat, which was in the upper deck. Akinori haggled with the ticket girl about different locations and we ended up in the "mukai" side in a center seat, which was a really good view, actually.
But in general I found the sumo experience kind of boring. We were there for the final 2 hours and thus saw the more popular and highranked players, all the way up to the final match being Baruto vs. Hakuho. Akinori apparently LOVES sumo and so he told me about all the various matchups as they were happening. I guess it was getting even for me telling him all about the Hosei players. But the thing is, so, with a sumo match, basically, the actual matches themselves are like... 30 seconds on average. It's just two big dudes in a ring trying to not be the first one to fall or step out of the ring. The rest of the time is spent congratulating the winner of one match, and then the next two guys spending like 3-4 minutes getting ready for their match -- usually with some sponsors marching around, and the two guys making a big show of stomping and talking to their masters and whoever. I dunno. And then they grapple for 30 seconds and one guy usually either gets pushed out of the ring or thrown off balance and falls.
A few matches were interesting, like one where there was a guy who "only" weighed 98kg, and another where it lasted like 3 minutes and the two guys just refused to budge. And Baruto vs. Hakuho was a lot like that too, they both tried various things that seemed like strategies and moves, and it lasted a few minutes as well. But largely I didn't find the matches that interesting nor the waiting around. Plus it's so weird that like, you wait all day to see a particular player, and 30 seconds later, he's done?
Whatever, I guess it's a good thing I finally did go to a sumo tournament. I found it amusing that there were more foreigners there than I'd seen in ages.
We ran into Akinori's friend Kenji, who also loves sumo and baseball, but he only talked to us for a bit before running off again.
To let the crowds disperse, we spent 2 hours doing karaoke at an Uta-Hiroba by Ryogoku station. It was surprisingly fun, we both mostly sang stuff circa 1997-2000. Akinori's like 3 years younger than me but I think I got into Japanese music around when he was in high school, so it works out.
We decided to go to dinner after that, and ended up at Rakeru in Shinjuku after it came out that I like omurice. That was awesome as I hadn't been there in ages (well, duh). And so we had omurice and the fantastic bread and also desserts. Whee!
So a good day overall. I still don't know Akinori that well but it wasn't nearly as weird as I thought it'd be hanging out with him for a day. Actually, the most interesting part was probably that we spent a while chatting about computer science. He was a CS major at Hosei, but when we actually talked about what stuff they studied vs. what we studied at CMU, it sounds pretty ridiculously easy for a curriculum. But I told him about my project at work, and the database language and all, and working with Haskell and the type systems, and it turns out that Akinori actually has an interest in functional programming languages but that's mostly on his own, not from school. It's a little difficult too because I mean, I think my Japanese is actually better than his English in general, but neither of us knows the right vocabulary in the other language to explain it to each other.
Shrug.