Heading home on a week-night after a pleasant day of team-teaching at Sakuyama Junior High School in the south end of Ohtawara (a 20-minute car drive away from the downtown core where I lived), I visited a small grocer to see what pre-cooked meals they offered.
Hey… I’m all about convenience. It probably explains why I only had crushes on the two vastly different women mentioned above. Cryptic? Another blog.
Anyhow, I purchased a 2-litre bottle of Coke (my preferred choice of suicide) and a pre-cooked tonkatsu meal – breaded, deep-fried pork on rice with a nice thick Bulldog sauce—(this LINK has it all) that I only had to heat up in my microwave oven.
Yummers. Geez. Did I actually write that word. Sorry.
While this following statement might sound ridiculously inaccurate to my wife, back then I had a dining room table and I actually sat there while eating my dinner. I did have the television on, though.
It was 6:35PM, and a baseball game had just started between the perennial great Toyko Yomiuri Giants of the Central League and the Kintestsu Buffaloes of the Pacific League – both played in the Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB – akin to MLB in North America).
The Giants were/are owned by the Yomiuri newspaper—a daily Japanese paper that offers some national Japanese news, as well as the foreign stuff. There’s even an English version of it that I received at my doorstep every morning. I know I didn’t sign-up for it. I never ever paid a newspaper boy for it, and until this very moment never questioned who was paying for it on my behalf. Probably the OBOE. Thank-you!
Here’s a baseball lesson.
The Kintetsu team (not the pork tonkatsu team) was owned by the Kinki Nippon Railway Co. (later the Kintetsu Corp.), and was known through the years as the Kintetsu Pearls (1950-1958), Kintetsu Buffalo (1959-1961), Kintetsu Buffaloes (1962-1998) and Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes (1999-2004).
Unbeknownst to me in 1990, in 2004 the team was sold to Orix Group—the owner of the Orix Blue Wave baseball team. The new owner merged the two teams into the Orix Buffaloes.
The Giants? Those guys are the New York Yankees of Japanese baseball. Sadaharu Oh holds the record for most homeruns in a career with 868. The Giants won nine Japanese League titles prior to 1950 when the NPB started and have since won 20 more championships.
These Giants are named after and have uniforms similar to the former New York and now San Francisco Giants—perennial also-rans to the evil empire that is the Yankees.
After finishing my meal, I laid down on my couch and gently rubbed the bruised areas of my body that still hurt a week after being hit by a car or two.
I should note that earlier this week I was hit a second time – this time right in downtown Ohtawara--and when you are hit in the downtown area, it hurts. I flipped over my handle bars and actually landed on the car’s front hood. I was okay – Japanese cars are mostly plastic. He popped his hood opened, pushed up on it from below and snapped it back into shape – none the worse for wear… although it’s possible I did get a concussion—I’m unsure as I did briefly pass-out.
Back to the couch. I curled up with a Japanese comic book purchased last blog while down in Tokyo with Matthew, and only half-glanced at the television while the game went on.
My telephone rang a few times—but since I was getting annoying phone calls from some Japanese woman who couldn’t speak English, I decided to ignore it—even if it was from any of the people mentioned above. Actually, I knew it wasn’t Kristine, as she was long-distance, and the phone rings differently.
By 8:45PM, it was apparent that Japanese comic books are not understandable by someone with zero Japanese language abilities, so I looked closer at the ensuing baseball game.
It was a tight one, with the Giants and Buffaloes tied at 3 in the 8th inning. The Buffaloes had this whiz kid pitcher named Hideo Nomo who had a twisty tornado-style delivery. The kid was a rookie, and was after his 18th win of the season against 8 losses. Instant favourite player as I watched him whiff a couple of Giants while throwing it 153kph (95mph).
With the Buffaloes going 1-2-3 in the top of the ninth, the Giants were up. It was just about to turn 9PM when the television station immediately shifted programming to some inane Japanese western—a samurai drama.
What the fa-?
What happened to the game? Surely it was accidentally switched at the TV station?
I waited a minute… then another… then another. It never came back. The game had gone the way of the samurai (except for this show which was entering its 14 year on tv).
Because the next day was Friday, I went to the OBOE and asked Hanazaki-san what was going on.
He shook his head and said that there is only two-and-a-half hours allotted to the televised baseball games, and if it goes over, too bad for the sports viewer.
I explained how sports in Canada and the U.S. seem to have a precedence over other televised properties, and you could see the tears welling up in Hanazaki-san’s eyes as I described what could only be the promised land for him.
He told me that that is the way things have always been for sports in Japan, and that the Japanese were not likely to change, because change doesn’t necessarily mean change for the better.
I told him it would, in this, be a change for the better. He sharply sucked air between his teeth, and nodded meekly and said that for all things Japanese, change is very difficult.
Ah so-ka (oh, I get it).
I then asked him about Japan inviting all of us foreigner AETs into the country to teach the kids English and internationalization—what about that, then?
He laughed, slapped me on my hurt shoulder (I wish I hadn’t taught them that) and said, “tabun” (maybe).
While I later learned that the Japanese have 47 different ways of saying ‘maybe’ (including sucking air between the teeth) , my ignorance of social custom made me believe I had made them believe that change was possible. Just not likely.
Later that night, the same two teams locked up again and this time made it to extra-innings before the broadcast switched out.
Months later in April of 1991, when Japan came out with its first set of baseball cards, my rookie card of ROY (Rookie-of-the year) Hideo Nomo showed that he had indeed won 18 games. Years later (in 1994) Nomo-san became the first Japanese-born player to play in the MLB for the Dodgers. At least it wasn’t the Yankees.
Somewhere, this swinger had a miss.
Andrew Joseph
