Kamagaya, nighttime hanami, etc.

I'm a dumbass and should be asleep. Sigh. I want to get up at like 8-9am tomorrow and go to a game at Hosei again.

As for today, I went to Kamagaya for the Fighters-Baystars minor-league game. Turns out Kagami made his debut there yesterday and I missed it. I ran into Hiromi on the way in (I got out of a taxi as she was getting out of the ticket line) and went to see Ojisan, who immediately was like "hey, you shoulda been here yesterday when your Kagami was pitching! I told everyone here about how you were nuts about him... since I went to Hosei too and all, I was interested to see him." And I ran into Yoneyama a bit later who also said "Dude, why weren't you here yesterday? Your darling Kagami pitched. But he sucked. Gave up 3 runs in one inning." I explained that I was at Jingu to see OMG YOSUKE SHIMABUKURO and everyone nodded knowingly, at least.

It seems, though, that Kagami didn't actually come back to Kamagaya today at all, or at least, we didn't see him anywhere.

I ran into Tomoko and Akemi before the game -- Akemi drove up from Osaka! WTF. Apparently since Takaguchi got traded her new favorite player is Seiichi Ohhira. So she made a uniform and brought it here to hold up during his at-bats. Shrug. I also saw Mariko eventually and she's apparently cheering for "John" now -- John Clayton Unten, the half-American kid from Okinawa (who doesn't speak English, I talked to him last year.) Mariko used to be devoted to Yohei Kaneko and Kazunori Yamamoto, neither of whom are on the team anymore.

And I also made a point to go chat with my friend Shohei, who works for the Fighters, and speaks English since he went to college in Nebraska. He told me that he's now pretty high up in the Kamagaya administrative chain -- pretty much in charge of the budget for running things there. And still wants to move back to Hokkaido. But he can't really do that for a few years apparently.

I sat with Hiromi for the game. The Fighters lost 2-1 in extra innings. Also, my IXY camera finally decided it has had enough of actually working, and stopped working halfway through the game. The lens basically got stuck and would not unstick -- it said "restart your camera, lens error" but it didn't matter no matter how many times I restarted it. I think that basically, it had this design flaw where it could accidentally get turned on while just sitting in my bag or in my pocket, and so the lens was often getting stuck trying to expand when it was in a place that it couldn't. BUT, that totally sucked, it failing halfway through the game. Worse, it failed before Masaru Saitoh pitched, so I couldn't take any pictures of him :( I was so psyched to see him pitch, too. I think he's my favorite of this year's draft class. Hiromi's favorite is Enoshita, who ended up being the losing pitcher as he gave up a homerun to Toshiki Kurobane in the top of the 10th inning. WTF?

We ended up not stalking any players afterwards. Well, we waited around the Yokohama bus for about 10 minutes (I actually wanted to see Yuki Takamori of all people -- he also had his cheering section out today yelling TA-KA-MO-RI!!!) but then gave up in order to catch an actual bus back to Kamagaya station. It's a shame but... I was all bummed about my camera and wanted to go to Akihabara, and Hiromi had to get home for some reason or another.

Went to Yodobashi. Showed my camera to a few staff who were basically like "...you're basically screwed. This is fixable but it costs more than the camera is worth." I'm thinking to myself, Seems like a theme for this trip... I ended up buying a Powershot A3200IS since it was on sale for 13,000 yen. I'd buy a more expensive point-and-shoot but what's the point? I always seem to drop them and break them anyway, they never last me more than a year, so buying an expensive one is silly. I should probably take bets on how long this one will last me.

Then I met up with my friend Kohei in Yurakucho. We met in a Starbucks, since I went there to plug in my new camera's battery charger to charge it up. We hung out there for a bit and then walked to Hibiya Park -- our goal for the evening was nighttime Hanami, basically. We tried that two years ago, actually, but that time we JUST managed to catch the tail end of sakura season and all the flowers were gone when we went. This year, there were two issues with nighttime hanami,

1) the governor of Tokyo told people "don't do hanami" this year and
2) due to power shortages, they're obviously not going to waste electricity on lighting the sakura trees.

To be fair, even last weekend, while I thought there were a fair number of people out there hanami-ing, it was clearly less than in past years, and mostly young people, not really people older than their mid-30's, really. So today was very similar.

Well, that is, once we found some hanami. We failed at Hibiya Park and so ended up taking the subway a stop over to Kamiyacho and walking to the Tokyo Tower, which ALSO was not lit up (duh, but it makes for a really weird scenery). We did find a whole bunch of people doing nighttime hanami in the park next to the Tokyo Tower though (Shiba-Koen?). Some people had brought lights of their own for their group's tables, and others were just clustered under the normal park lights that were there -- clearly if the sakura spotlights were on it would have been a lot cooler but I mean, Kohei and I sat under one of the trees for a bit, and we were clearly like, hey, there's some cherry blossoms above us, cool. I'd gotten taiyaki from Yurakucho station and he'd gotten a beer at a convenience store, so we just sat there talking for a bit.

Then we went to get dinner -- ended up at a kushikatsu place near Daimon station. It was actually really freaking good. We sat at the bar and watched them bread and fry basically just about anything, and ate a whole bunch of skewered breaded fried stuff. My favorites were probably the eggplant and the butabarashisomaki.

(The funny part is, just like every other time I hang out with Kohei, which is only once or twice a year tops anyway, it always occurs to me that we have absolutely nothing in common, but I dunno, he likes having foreign friends to talk to in English since he went to college in the US, and he always does find interesting places to go to and interesting food to eat. Certainly I would never have wandered around this particular part of town on my own, nor would I have looked for nighttime hanami on my own.)

After coming home I played around with the new camera for a bit. It depresses me. I find it weird that Canon keeps coming out with new models of cameras that seem to do less and less. I guess that's why they're getting cheaper and cheaper on the cheap ends.

At least today was really warm! It got as high as 21 degrees, which is basically 70 deg F. Whee.