Fighters game in Akita, whee

What a crazy day.

So after my trip to Yamagata... I came back to the hotel, showered, and got on a bus to Komachi stadium, which took about 25 mins and 340 yen to get to. Got out of the bus, wanted a photo in front of the stadium, saw a guy looking like he did too... and asked if he'd take a photo of me if I took one of him. So we did that. Then he's like "I came here from Tokyo, didn't you too?" and I said yeah, but... I didn't recognize him at all. He said he'd seen me before at the Tokyo Dome and other games in the area but never said anything. We parted ways and I wandered around a bit more and got some food and whatnot...

...got into the stadium, found Taicho and his friend Shoko, and wouldn't you believe it but the dude from outside was sitting in front of them. So I plopped down my stuff with everyone. Matsuno also showed up a bit later and he was also sitting in that vicinity, in front of the ouendan.

The ouendan, for the record... well, as usual they stared at me as I was walking up like "oh... it's her..." but the female ouendan (with short hair) nodded to me so I said konnichiwa and she replied back. Shrug. One of the guys who I still don't know his name but who's been around a long time and I guess is around my age, he saw me taking a picture of the flag waving in the breeze and was like "don't take a photo! don't take a photo!" and I'm like "it was just of the flag! the wind is strong! i'm so sorry!" and he's like "you were in Sapporo this weekend too, weren't you?" "i was." "i thought so." and then he walked off. I seriously never know what the hell to think of them anymore since of course nobody tells me anything to my face.

During the pregame when they were starting the cheers, a leader guy is like "Who's here from Sapporo? From Kanto? From Sendai? From Osaka?" etc and then like "From Akita? I know none of you locals are actually Fighters fans but just for today please come yell with us. We have lyrics sheets and if nothing else you can just say 'kattobase'. Got that?"

Anyway um. Eventually the game started -- and there was still no rain yet when it did, though there were big clouds in the sky. Unfortunately, the Eagles got up 4-0 in the first inning off a throwing error by Tsuruoka and the Fighters never caught up, it was Keppel vs. Iwakuma which is just a difficult matchup.

What was nuts is that in the 4th inning the rain started lightly, so people start getting out raincoats, umbrellas... no big deal, but in the of the 5th suddenly the skies opened and it was POURING down on us. People started actually getting up and getting out of the outfield area (since it was grass seating) and the grounds crew covered the bases for a rain delay and the ouendan started doing stuff like headsliding in the grass.

Well, I just opened my umbrella and sat there, as did Tokyo Guy. And well, almost as suddenly as it began, the rain just kind of stopped. So everyone came back and then it took another 5-10 minutes to get the tarps off the bases... all in all it was a 20-minute delay.

The game still only went 3 hours WITH that delay though and the Eagles won 4-1. In the top of the 9th the ouendan gathered everyone together so I went with my group too and was up against the fence for that inning, but whatever.

I rode the bus back to the station with Matsuno, we got seats in the back and mostly talked about baseball travel as well as "omg all my stuff is still wet, argh". Infact, I went back to the hotel and did laundry and some of my stuff is STILL drying out here -- I've been falling asleep off and on while the laundry was going, too.

So, tomorrow, Morioka. It actually looks like it's supposed to rain there but STOP by 3pm. Let's hope that happens. Though I have to admit that Akita's stadium was not so bad, the outfield wasn't so slanted and it was quite spacious. I keep expecting worst cases like Omiya's steep mudpit of an outfield; fortunately the rest of the country isn't that dumb.

In Morioka

Taking a breather, by which I mean some glorious time by an AC, before trying to head out to the stadium. Apparently it's not supposed to rain at all here anymore, but I'm still bringing my stuff for rain anyway.

Took the local trains from Akita->Yokote->Kitakami->Morioka today, which took about 5 hours in all -- a perfect span from checking out at 10am, getting on a train at 10:24, getting here at 2:35pm, and checking in to the hotel here at 3pm (the eariest possible). Most of the trip was uneventful except between Yokote and Kitakami -- a tetsudou (train geek) sat down across from me and we chatted train nerd crap for the 45 minutes until we got to his stop, which was an onsen in the middle of nowhere. I was impressed that he was wandering around Tohoku given that he lives in Kyushu, and he was impressed that I was wandering around on a Seishun 18 at ALL given that I'm a gaijin -- but to his credit he never actually tried to speak English to me at all, he was just like "I see you have an 18 pass and a clunky timetable book, where are you going today?" which is actually apparently not a bad way to break the ice with other fellow travelers. We compared train travel stories and he told me about some interesting stations that he's been to (Koboro station in Hokkaido, which CANNOT be reached except by train or by boat, no roads go there as it is between two tunnels) and Kareigawa station in Kyushu, which was built in 1903 and is still the original station building, it hasn't changed in over 100 years so it's supposedly a train history tourist spot, a "Meiji-era station"). We talked about Doai and Yubiso, showed off photos of our trips there, and then he had to leave.

Other than that, not much happened on the train.

It occurs to me that I haven't talked about all the trips myself. Mostly, people haven't tried to talk to me on this trip -- an old man got out a map like "excuse me, what country are you from?" and I snarled at him in Japanese like "That's a rude question, we're in Japan."

What's been striking about this trip more has been looking at the Japanese countryside, a lot of places there's only one track, the trains don't run that often, and yet the trains I'm taking are full of JHS and highschool kids. Often we'd stop at a station, there'd be like 10 kids on the platform, 6 would get on the train and the other 4 would wave goodbye and ostensibly go ride their bikes home. I saw some kids ride for like 2 stops, which is 5 miles... it must suck if they miss the one or two trains they can possibly take home.

There are a LOT of stations that clearly used to get a lot more traffic than they do now. Notably several ones I saw had an opposing platform to wait on... which was overgrown with plants or whatever and no longer used; you could see there used to be two tracks at the station but now there was only one and a wide space where a track used to be. I guess cars really are killing the countryside trains. They say that shinkansen are killing the night trains too. Kind of odd how it works; things become more convenient but you also lose something in the process.

Still, I've seen some beautiful places and I'll post photos soon.

For now, I feel cooled off so I think I'm going to try to figure out how to get to the stadium now...