According to What Japan Thinks, when asked "what is your favorite sport" the results were as follows:
| Baseball | 20.7% |
| Football (soccer) | 11.8% |
| Formula One, rallying, motorbike racing, other motor sports | 4.9% |
| Volleyball | 4.6% |
| Swimming | 4.5% |
And now, welcome to Kyocera Dome Osaka!Back in March I got to see the Hanshin Tigers play the Yokohama Bay Stars.
Baseball came to Japan in 1872, and the first formal team was formed in 1878. Like many foreign things brought to Japan, it has flourished. There are few major differences between American Baseball and Japanese baseball. There are some interesting things, however, such as:- Many teams are named after their corporate sponsors, not the city they are from. For instance, the Hanshin Tigers are named for the Hanshin Railway that owns them. One of the most obvious examples of this would be the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks.
- Like Sumo, there is a cap on how many foreign players are allowed on any one team. Right now, the maximum number is four.
- And the songs... oh the songs. There are songs to sing for most any event in a game. Everyone seems to know them, too! I felt so lost. Luckily, the man next to us taught us a few of them.
And then there are the fans. Like I mentioned in an earlier post (and eluded to with mentioning the songs), Japanese fans are every bit as enthusiastic about their teams as we can be in the US. The above picture is everyone preparing to release a ton of balloons as the Hashin Tigers closed in the game (and won!). They did it, too, at the seventh inning stretch.For me, it seemed as though the cheering was much more organized compared to US games. Each team has a specific cheering section (unfortunately, my photos of the Tiger's section came out really blurry). Also, I was surprised by how much noise people made when their team was up to bat. At least with my experience in the US, you try to be the most jarring to mess up the other team! For example, being the freshly-made Hanshin fans we were, my friends and I quickly boo'd the other team's pitcher (he was pitching fairly horribly, I'm just saying), and the man next to us (who had taught us the songs) told us that you only cheer for your side to do better, never for the other side to do worse. Not that Japanese baseball is without little jabs at the other side. When the other team was about to strike out, the Hanshin band played a little of "Auld Lang Syne."
And just in case you're interested, here's my (horribly shaky!) video of the big screen playing part of the Hanshin Tiger's theme song: enjoy!
2 comments:
Well, You know your prof loves Japanese baseball in general and Hanshin in particular. That being said, what a great post!
But you should note that the home of the Hanshin Tigers is Koshien Stadium and the experience at Koshien is much different than the Kyocera Dome. Many find the dome to be a little lonely. Spectators are further away from the action and the dome is really home of the Orix Buffaloes...
William Kelly's article is a good source about Hanshin: "How to Cheer a Japanese Baseball Team: An Anthropologist in the Bleachers," Japan Quarterly, October-December 1997, pages 66-79.
http://research.yale.edu/wwkelly/pubs-archive/WWK_1997_Japan-Q_44-4.pdf
You might want to invite your readers to check out JapaneseBaseball.com as it is an excellent resource.
http://www.japanesebaseball.com/index.jsp
I'm glad you had such a good experience at the game with the fans sitting next to you. That was my first experience as well. Good baseball, good anthropology...
Just a couple of small corrections to make you an even better Hanshin fan. Auld Lang Syne is performed when the opposing side's pitcher is taken out of the game. And the jetto fusen balloons are released during the "lucky" 7th inning, before the Tigers are up to bat. They also release them after they have won the game (and sometimes a little prematurely as well...). Hanshin was the fist team to use the balloons; now many other teams do as well. Go Tigers!
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