![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Fighting Racism, One Old Bleacher Bum At A Time
So today I saw my 100th and 101st baseball games of 2009. Thanks to the Tokyo Game Show, I decided it was a Bad Idea to be anywhere near Chiba, and instead went to Meiji Jingu for the Tokyo Big 6 University league games.
Plus, I figured that the first game would be Hosei's Kagami vs. Keio's Nakabayashi, the second would be Waseda's Saitoh vs. Meiji's Nomura, and both of those would be totally worth it. And I was right about them all. Well, except for the part where Kisho Kagami is no longer the machine he was last year :( Last fall he was a strikeout machine, and today he could barely hit 140 and keep the ball in the strike zone. I still think he basically blew out his shoulder throwing 400 pitches per weekend last fall. It's really sad. But at least I finally got to see him again, and this time from the front row next to the Hosei dugout... as he gave up 4 runs to Keio in 4 innings, including two home runs, and Hosei lost 4-2. Oh, Kagami-kun :( On the bright side, I got to see Kohei Nishi take the mound for Hosei, he's a rarely-used sidearmer with a bizarre delivery. And Hisashi Takeuchi pitched the last inning... there's been a big deal over him this semester because he's big and hoping to get drafted and can throw fast. I hadn't seen him before since he's largely been injured the last year, but he wasn't bad. And for another change, I actually saw Junpei Komuro pitch for Keio. I think 95% of the innings I've seen of Keio games in the last 2 years have been thrown by Nobuaki Nakabayashi, so the fact that he only went 7 innings today was kind of crazy.
Second game was Koshien 2006 vs Koshien 2007, basically. And it was me watching Yusuke Nomura pitch for the second time in a row, from the Meiji front row -- he must think I'm stalking him by now or something. Nomura and Saitoh are both good, but I guess Saitoh is a little better, or Meiji's offense is a little worse, so Waseda won.
And Tatsuya Ohishi pitched the 8th and 9th innings for Waseda! I loooooooooooooooove him, and I was sitting in the front row on the 3rd base side, which was the perfect place to take photos of him, except...
...I ran out of battery power :( And hadn't brought a spare -- it was still sitting in the charger at home!
I still have like 50 photos of him, but his second inning, my camera was dead, so I just watched him pitch, which was also nice enough I guess. He was hitting 151-152 on the gun, but didn't strike anyone out. It wasn't really that big a strikeout day, oddly. I guess that's what happens when Todai isn't playing.
Now here's the non-game part and why the second game was kind of annoying.
Keep in mind, I showed up at around 9:30am for a 10:30am start -- to stake out a seat in the very front row. Which I did. And for the first half of the Hosei game it wasn't crowded, which was nice. But then people filtered in for the OMG YUKI SAITOH!! factor and the entire infield was packed by the time the Waseda game started.
Having not moved from my seat from 9:30am until 1pm when the first game ended, I took that opportunity to run off and do things like, go to the bathroom, put on more sunscreen, grab a Coke, etc.
I get back to my seat and the area I'd been sitting in has been taken over by Meiji alumni. I think I was vaguely aware of that, but it became even more obvious when the second game was on the brink of starting and the Meiji ouendan were kicking into gear.
A guy probably about my age in a red t-shirt yelled out in English as I came back, "EXCUSE ME! WHAT'S YOUR NAME?" amidst laughter from the rest of the group (who were mostly older older Meiji folks).
I looked at him with the best blank stare I could give, and yelled back, "ええ？なんで英語しゃべてますか？" ("Huh? Why are you speaking English?") And his friends laughed some more, possibly at me, possibly at him, who knows.
I mean, even worse, his t-shirt said "Stupid people shouldn't breathe", and under any other circumstance I probably would have thought he was worth talking to, but not for being like that.
Then an older bearded guy wearing a Futures hat in the second row was like, in Japanese, "Wait, haven't I seen you at Kamagaya? You have an Imanami jersey?"
"Yes," I told him in Japanese, "you've seen me at Kamagaya. And no, I have an ImanaRI jersey."
"Imanami?"
"Imanari. RYOTA." I know where this is going, and I don't really want to go there. Takahiro Imanami is a Meiji alumni and the only Meiji guy on the Fighters right now.
Anyway, the older guy sitting to my right starts trying to talk to me in English. I reply in Japanese. Infact, I didn't speak a WORD of English at all the entire time I was sitting at Jingu stadium today. Seriously.
After a bit of him trying to talk to me in English, or in Japanese with English thrown in for no apparent reason, which I was ignoring, I'm like, again, "なんで英語をしゃべてるの？" Why are you speaking English?
He ignored it and asked in English, "How long have you lived in Japan?"
I said, "なんだっけ？" ("What did you say?")
He asked again in English. I asked again in Japanese. ("もう一回？分かんない。") It went back this way for three times until I gave him a blank stare and replied, "朝九時半に来ました。" ("I came here at 9:30 this morning.") As if I seriously had no idea what he was talking about.
An inning or so goes by. He's been trying to "helpfully" tell me who all the players are, and I've been shooting back that I know exactly who they all are. Yes, I saw Shashiki play at Koshien with Osaka Toin. Yes, I saw Yusuke Nomura at Koryo. Yes, Uemoto is Hiroki's little brother. Shohei Habu was Nomura's teammate in HS. Etc. I show him my scorebook back several pages, wherein it shows I was at Meiji's game last week, and that I was at Koshien, and he's saying, still in his broken English, "Oh, you can write Chinese characters! How great!"
Finally I ask again, why he's speaking English to me. He said he likes English. So I'm like, still in Japanese, "Okaaaaay. Do you speak English to your other friends?" motioning to the group around him.
"Of course I don't!" he replies. "Only to gaijin!"
So then I pretty much just bitch him out (in Japanese). "Look, you're being really racist. How do you even know I understand English? All gaijin do not necessarily speak English, and it's really troublesome for you to think that. Have you HEARD me speak English? No, you haven't. So why are you speaking it? Seriously, knock it off."
I think something about hearing the word 差別 maybe jarred something in his head, because finally, he knocked it off and stopped talking to me. Or more like, actually, he fell asleep for an inning.
Oh, so in the 5th inning the aforementioned Shohei Habu hit a foul ball that pretty much went up up up and then came down right behind the netting. It bounced in the second row, off the guy in the Stupid People t-shirt, and... bounced into my lap, onto my scorecard! Ha! So I caught the ball and was looking at it like "Ha! Now THAT was bizarre!" And the people are all like "Oh, you can't keep it," and I'm like "I know." I looked for an usher, who was coming my way, he handed me a Tokyo Big 6 pin and I gave him the ball.
Now the funny part is, I don't actually REALLY want the Tokyo Big 6 pin. It's kind of lame-looking, it's a silver baseball and says "Tokyo Big Six" on it in blue in English. Normally I probably would have just given it to the guy who failed to catch the foul ball in the first place. But since these people were making me feel really uncomfortable and unhappy, saying things like "oh look, the gaijin caught the ball," I decided, screw that, I'll keep it.
It's a weird thing, really. It's not even that I mind talking to people in English so much, but what gets me is this ASSUMPTION that "white person" equals "English practice". I've tried to explain this to my Fighters friends that I don't mind talking to them in English either, provided that they're talking to me because they just want to practice, or have an English question, or whatever. Yeah, English teaching is my job and it's a little annoying to be doing "work" in my free time, which I've mentioned, but overall aside from one or two people it hasn't been that big a problem. I get pissed off only when it's assumed I must be a dumb foreigner who can't speak Japanese just because I have white skin -- and when people make a big deal about it and call attention to the OMG LOOK EVERYONE WE HAVE A GAIJIN HERE WE MUST SPEAK ENGLISH NOW!!!!!! factor. And for crying out loud, if I'm sitting there writing a scorecard in kanji and yelling cheers in Japanese, why the fuck are you assuming I only speak English? It's embarrassing and demeaning.
I realize it's one of those "get over it" kind of things about living here in Japan, but just as I refuse to belong to a stereotype in the US, I refuse to belong to a stereotype here. If people here believe first that women know nothing about baseball and only watch it because the players are cute, and they think foreigners know nothing about Japan and only speak English, then goddammit, I feel that it's my duty to prove them wrong on both counts.
(Something odd, too, was that during the Hosei game I'd been talking to one older lady in Japanese -- about why on earth was Ishikawa playing first base, and where was Kamegai, and what happened to Kagami? etc. She had thought Ueno was coming out to pitch when it was Nishi out there, and I corrected her -- I mean, Ueno is a lefty and Nishi is a righty. Sheesh. But then she started telling me what was up with other players, like that Kamegai got injured, which I didn't know. Anyway, I think she was somehow associated with the annoying older guy, since she'd been sitting in that seat for the first game, and then gave it up to him for the second game and went somewhere else, but kept dropping by to put her camera down or other stuff.)
Anyway, the Futures guy came up to me after the game and said something to the effect of "Please be a Meiji fan and also cheer for Imanami next time you go to Kamagaya." And I kind of nodded a typical "hai, yoroshiku, otsukaresama" kind of reply at him, while thinking, no thank you!
So I went to watch the players leave on their buses afterwards -- there were a bazillion people outside Jingu anyway because the Swallows-Baystars game was going on afterwards, and as I'm standing there I hear a "Deanna??" and it turns out to be my friend Minako. And she's all like "I heard from my mom that you're going to Sapporo next weekend!" Apparently word spreads fast, since I hadn't actually gotten around to telling anyone. Ha! Minako told me she'd been at Yakult Toda that afternoon with Ojisan and Mariko and some others for the Swallows-Fighters minor-league game, and was going to the Swallows ichi-gun game too to cheer for Hashimoto, a former Fighters guy who got traded to Yakult. She was wondering why I was there for the Swallows game, but I explained that I had just watched college ball for 6 hours and was actually going home.
She asked me what college I'm a fan of, and I had to think for a second, before saying "Er... really... none of them in particular. I just like some players. Waseda's Ohishi... Hosei's Kagami... Keio's Urushibata..."
The thing is, I don't really have any reason to support a particular team. I'd joke I'm a Tokyo University fan if anything, just because they suck so much it'd probably be the most shocking answer to give. At least when Pau was here, since he was a grad student at Tokyo, I at least had an actual reason to go to Todai games (and he could get the student ticket discount). I don't really have any friends who attend or attended a Big 6 school and actually care about the baseball teams there now -- I probably know more Keio alums than any of the others, offhand, though.
I kind of wish I could run into that lady I met at the US-Japan college tournament, who was just a general Big 6 college ball dork like me. Those people are a lot easier to deal with than the particular school zealots.
Alternately, I should just go to grad school here! Then I'd at least have a legitimate reason to be interested in college sports! And a really stupid reason to be in school!
Plus, I figured that the first game would be Hosei's Kagami vs. Keio's Nakabayashi, the second would be Waseda's Saitoh vs. Meiji's Nomura, and both of those would be totally worth it. And I was right about them all. Well, except for the part where Kisho Kagami is no longer the machine he was last year :( Last fall he was a strikeout machine, and today he could barely hit 140 and keep the ball in the strike zone. I still think he basically blew out his shoulder throwing 400 pitches per weekend last fall. It's really sad. But at least I finally got to see him again, and this time from the front row next to the Hosei dugout... as he gave up 4 runs to Keio in 4 innings, including two home runs, and Hosei lost 4-2. Oh, Kagami-kun :( On the bright side, I got to see Kohei Nishi take the mound for Hosei, he's a rarely-used sidearmer with a bizarre delivery. And Hisashi Takeuchi pitched the last inning... there's been a big deal over him this semester because he's big and hoping to get drafted and can throw fast. I hadn't seen him before since he's largely been injured the last year, but he wasn't bad. And for another change, I actually saw Junpei Komuro pitch for Keio. I think 95% of the innings I've seen of Keio games in the last 2 years have been thrown by Nobuaki Nakabayashi, so the fact that he only went 7 innings today was kind of crazy.
Second game was Koshien 2006 vs Koshien 2007, basically. And it was me watching Yusuke Nomura pitch for the second time in a row, from the Meiji front row -- he must think I'm stalking him by now or something. Nomura and Saitoh are both good, but I guess Saitoh is a little better, or Meiji's offense is a little worse, so Waseda won.
And Tatsuya Ohishi pitched the 8th and 9th innings for Waseda! I loooooooooooooooove him, and I was sitting in the front row on the 3rd base side, which was the perfect place to take photos of him, except...
...I ran out of battery power :( And hadn't brought a spare -- it was still sitting in the charger at home!
I still have like 50 photos of him, but his second inning, my camera was dead, so I just watched him pitch, which was also nice enough I guess. He was hitting 151-152 on the gun, but didn't strike anyone out. It wasn't really that big a strikeout day, oddly. I guess that's what happens when Todai isn't playing.
Now here's the non-game part and why the second game was kind of annoying.
Keep in mind, I showed up at around 9:30am for a 10:30am start -- to stake out a seat in the very front row. Which I did. And for the first half of the Hosei game it wasn't crowded, which was nice. But then people filtered in for the OMG YUKI SAITOH!! factor and the entire infield was packed by the time the Waseda game started.
Having not moved from my seat from 9:30am until 1pm when the first game ended, I took that opportunity to run off and do things like, go to the bathroom, put on more sunscreen, grab a Coke, etc.
I get back to my seat and the area I'd been sitting in has been taken over by Meiji alumni. I think I was vaguely aware of that, but it became even more obvious when the second game was on the brink of starting and the Meiji ouendan were kicking into gear.
A guy probably about my age in a red t-shirt yelled out in English as I came back, "EXCUSE ME! WHAT'S YOUR NAME?" amidst laughter from the rest of the group (who were mostly older older Meiji folks).
I looked at him with the best blank stare I could give, and yelled back, "ええ？なんで英語しゃべてますか？" ("Huh? Why are you speaking English?") And his friends laughed some more, possibly at me, possibly at him, who knows.
I mean, even worse, his t-shirt said "Stupid people shouldn't breathe", and under any other circumstance I probably would have thought he was worth talking to, but not for being like that.
Then an older bearded guy wearing a Futures hat in the second row was like, in Japanese, "Wait, haven't I seen you at Kamagaya? You have an Imanami jersey?"
"Yes," I told him in Japanese, "you've seen me at Kamagaya. And no, I have an ImanaRI jersey."
"Imanami?"
"Imanari. RYOTA." I know where this is going, and I don't really want to go there. Takahiro Imanami is a Meiji alumni and the only Meiji guy on the Fighters right now.
Anyway, the older guy sitting to my right starts trying to talk to me in English. I reply in Japanese. Infact, I didn't speak a WORD of English at all the entire time I was sitting at Jingu stadium today. Seriously.
After a bit of him trying to talk to me in English, or in Japanese with English thrown in for no apparent reason, which I was ignoring, I'm like, again, "なんで英語をしゃべてるの？" Why are you speaking English?
He ignored it and asked in English, "How long have you lived in Japan?"
I said, "なんだっけ？" ("What did you say?")
He asked again in English. I asked again in Japanese. ("もう一回？分かんない。") It went back this way for three times until I gave him a blank stare and replied, "朝九時半に来ました。" ("I came here at 9:30 this morning.") As if I seriously had no idea what he was talking about.
An inning or so goes by. He's been trying to "helpfully" tell me who all the players are, and I've been shooting back that I know exactly who they all are. Yes, I saw Shashiki play at Koshien with Osaka Toin. Yes, I saw Yusuke Nomura at Koryo. Yes, Uemoto is Hiroki's little brother. Shohei Habu was Nomura's teammate in HS. Etc. I show him my scorebook back several pages, wherein it shows I was at Meiji's game last week, and that I was at Koshien, and he's saying, still in his broken English, "Oh, you can write Chinese characters! How great!"
Finally I ask again, why he's speaking English to me. He said he likes English. So I'm like, still in Japanese, "Okaaaaay. Do you speak English to your other friends?" motioning to the group around him.
"Of course I don't!" he replies. "Only to gaijin!"
So then I pretty much just bitch him out (in Japanese). "Look, you're being really racist. How do you even know I understand English? All gaijin do not necessarily speak English, and it's really troublesome for you to think that. Have you HEARD me speak English? No, you haven't. So why are you speaking it? Seriously, knock it off."
I think something about hearing the word 差別 maybe jarred something in his head, because finally, he knocked it off and stopped talking to me. Or more like, actually, he fell asleep for an inning.
Oh, so in the 5th inning the aforementioned Shohei Habu hit a foul ball that pretty much went up up up and then came down right behind the netting. It bounced in the second row, off the guy in the Stupid People t-shirt, and... bounced into my lap, onto my scorecard! Ha! So I caught the ball and was looking at it like "Ha! Now THAT was bizarre!" And the people are all like "Oh, you can't keep it," and I'm like "I know." I looked for an usher, who was coming my way, he handed me a Tokyo Big 6 pin and I gave him the ball.
Now the funny part is, I don't actually REALLY want the Tokyo Big 6 pin. It's kind of lame-looking, it's a silver baseball and says "Tokyo Big Six" on it in blue in English. Normally I probably would have just given it to the guy who failed to catch the foul ball in the first place. But since these people were making me feel really uncomfortable and unhappy, saying things like "oh look, the gaijin caught the ball," I decided, screw that, I'll keep it.
It's a weird thing, really. It's not even that I mind talking to people in English so much, but what gets me is this ASSUMPTION that "white person" equals "English practice". I've tried to explain this to my Fighters friends that I don't mind talking to them in English either, provided that they're talking to me because they just want to practice, or have an English question, or whatever. Yeah, English teaching is my job and it's a little annoying to be doing "work" in my free time, which I've mentioned, but overall aside from one or two people it hasn't been that big a problem. I get pissed off only when it's assumed I must be a dumb foreigner who can't speak Japanese just because I have white skin -- and when people make a big deal about it and call attention to the OMG LOOK EVERYONE WE HAVE A GAIJIN HERE WE MUST SPEAK ENGLISH NOW!!!!!! factor. And for crying out loud, if I'm sitting there writing a scorecard in kanji and yelling cheers in Japanese, why the fuck are you assuming I only speak English? It's embarrassing and demeaning.
I realize it's one of those "get over it" kind of things about living here in Japan, but just as I refuse to belong to a stereotype in the US, I refuse to belong to a stereotype here. If people here believe first that women know nothing about baseball and only watch it because the players are cute, and they think foreigners know nothing about Japan and only speak English, then goddammit, I feel that it's my duty to prove them wrong on both counts.
(Something odd, too, was that during the Hosei game I'd been talking to one older lady in Japanese -- about why on earth was Ishikawa playing first base, and where was Kamegai, and what happened to Kagami? etc. She had thought Ueno was coming out to pitch when it was Nishi out there, and I corrected her -- I mean, Ueno is a lefty and Nishi is a righty. Sheesh. But then she started telling me what was up with other players, like that Kamegai got injured, which I didn't know. Anyway, I think she was somehow associated with the annoying older guy, since she'd been sitting in that seat for the first game, and then gave it up to him for the second game and went somewhere else, but kept dropping by to put her camera down or other stuff.)
Anyway, the Futures guy came up to me after the game and said something to the effect of "Please be a Meiji fan and also cheer for Imanami next time you go to Kamagaya." And I kind of nodded a typical "hai, yoroshiku, otsukaresama" kind of reply at him, while thinking, no thank you!
So I went to watch the players leave on their buses afterwards -- there were a bazillion people outside Jingu anyway because the Swallows-Baystars game was going on afterwards, and as I'm standing there I hear a "Deanna??" and it turns out to be my friend Minako. And she's all like "I heard from my mom that you're going to Sapporo next weekend!" Apparently word spreads fast, since I hadn't actually gotten around to telling anyone. Ha! Minako told me she'd been at Yakult Toda that afternoon with Ojisan and Mariko and some others for the Swallows-Fighters minor-league game, and was going to the Swallows ichi-gun game too to cheer for Hashimoto, a former Fighters guy who got traded to Yakult. She was wondering why I was there for the Swallows game, but I explained that I had just watched college ball for 6 hours and was actually going home.
She asked me what college I'm a fan of, and I had to think for a second, before saying "Er... really... none of them in particular. I just like some players. Waseda's Ohishi... Hosei's Kagami... Keio's Urushibata..."
The thing is, I don't really have any reason to support a particular team. I'd joke I'm a Tokyo University fan if anything, just because they suck so much it'd probably be the most shocking answer to give. At least when Pau was here, since he was a grad student at Tokyo, I at least had an actual reason to go to Todai games (and he could get the student ticket discount). I don't really have any friends who attend or attended a Big 6 school and actually care about the baseball teams there now -- I probably know more Keio alums than any of the others, offhand, though.
I kind of wish I could run into that lady I met at the US-Japan college tournament, who was just a general Big 6 college ball dork like me. Those people are a lot easier to deal with than the particular school zealots.
Alternately, I should just go to grad school here! Then I'd at least have a legitimate reason to be interested in college sports! And a really stupid reason to be in school!
no subject
I've only been a minority in locales, not nations, so I can't say I know how it feels. Maybe everyone should spend some time in a foreign country so we can all know how it feels to be generalized and conflated with other people because of our appearance.
no subject
The mass media only ever depicts white foreigners as speaking English.
And, to be fair -- unless you're in Hokkaido and are surrounded by Russians -- the vast majority of whities can speak English. Better than the Japanese who continually force it on them, in fact.