4.13.02 HANSHIN TIGERS vs YOKOHAMA BAYSTARS
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Things had not been going well for the Hanshin Tigers. For four consecutive
years they had finished at the bottom of the six-team Japanese Central League.
Then, this past off-season, the organization was tinged with scandal when
it was revealed that manager Katsuya Nomura’s wife, a prominent television
personality no less, had concealed five million dollars’ worth of her husband’s
income from the government. She plead guilty to tax evasion, he resigned as
manager, and the good people of Osaka wondered if things could get any worse.
Improbably, while they wouldn’t get worse, they’d get more interesting.
Enter Senichi Hoshino. Hoshino is as famous in Japan for his career-long association
with the Chunichi Dragons as he is for his notoriously short fuse: as manager
of the Dragons he had been known to slap players’ faces coming off the
field and get into wrestling matches with umpires. Think Billy Martin with
the Q rating of Tommy Lasorda. Evidently, though, thirty-odd years with one
team was enough for Hoshino, because he agreed to replace Nomura in 2002 at
the helm of the Hanshin Tigers, bringing with him a new, Churchillian team
motto—Never, Never, Never Surrender!—and, as importantly
to Tigers fans, a well-documented disdain for the Yomiuri Giants, Tokyo’s
answer to the New York Yankees and the Tigers’ oldest and most hated
rival.
More improbably still, after a promising spring training, the Tigers opened
the season not only with their first opening-day victory in twelve years,
but by sweeping the Giants in three games at the Tokyo Dome! They then
rolled off four more road wins to tie the club’s record-best start of
7-0, set in 1938. Senichi Hoshino and the reborn Hanshin Tigers were suddenly
the hottest story in Japan, sports or otherwise.
Of course, I knew none of this.
But I was about to burn up some of the 747-loads of frequent-flyer miles
my wife has been earning on her recent transpacific business trips, and I’d
done some homework at least. Enough to know weeks earlier that of the
baseball options open to us while I would be there, the one that involved
spending hundreds of dollars and the better part of a day taking the Shinkansen,
the Japanese bullet train, back and forth a few hundred miles from Yokohama
to Osaka was precisely the one I was interested in. My wife’s colleagues in
Japan, eager to make the arrangements for us, were dumbfounded. Why not just
take the train twenty minutes into Tokyo? Didn’t we want to see the Giants,
like everyone else? Well, no.
The Giants, see, really are the Japanese Yankees, in just about every respect—they
spend the most and they win the most, and always have, so everybody loves
them—and I have to hate them just on principle. Plus, they play in a
dome. ’Nuff said. Turns out almost all the teams in Japan play in domes,
and of the few that don’t, most of them play on artificial turf. Yech.
One notable exception, I discovered, is the Hanshin Tigers. The Tigers play
in Nishinomiya, about a fifteen-minute train ride from Osaka, in Koshien Stadium.
Koshien Stadium was built in 1924. No roof. Real grass. And instead of the
cute cartoon characters employed by most Japanese teams for their logos, the
Tigers’ logo is just a really scary-looking tiger. Black and yellow,
fangs bared, fierce as all hell.
Well alright then, thought I. Tigers it is.
I flew to Japan. I turned on the TV in the hotel room. The Los Angeles Dodgers
were playing the San Francisco Giants. I flipped the channel. The Yakult Swallows
were playing the Yomiuri Giants. My wife returned from her meeting. Somewhat
indignantly, I was dragged away to dinner. Later, I flipped the channel again.
Interspersed among the highlights of every Ichiro at-bat, every Tsuyoshi Shinjyo
at-bat, and every strikeout and/or hit given up that day by Shigetoshi Hasegawa,
Kazuhiro Sasaki and Hideki Irabu, a man whom I would quickly come to recognize
as Senichi Hoshino talked about his now 9-1 Hanshin Tigers.
The next evening, Kei Igawa would hold the Yokohama BayStars scoreless over
nine innings, running his personal record to 3-0 with a 0.35 ERA, and helping
the Tigers to 10-1 on the season. Every train station newsstand was splashed
with Hoshino’s proud, defiant face, every morning news show peppered with
his gruff, matter-of-fact voice; everywhere one looked there was mounting
evidence of a growing Tigers mania sweeping the nation. It all seemed too
good to be true. Thanks to my perversity, we suddenly found ourselves holding
two of the most coveted tickets on the island. Tomorrow, Saturday, we were
headed for Koshien Stadium.
Of course, the whole prospect was a somewhat dodgy one. We knew this. In
order to actually get to Koshien Stadium, we would be required to navigate
the Japanese train system, no small feat for cultural illiterates making their
first such attempt.
Sure enough, disaster struck early. We’d been told to take the green
line from Sakuragicho, the station nearest our hotel, the three or four stops
to Shin-Yokohama, where we’d catch the Shinkansen. We waited. Red trains
came and went. Blue trains came and went. Long story short, there is no green
train on Saturday. After twenty minutes of gnashing our teeth we got on a
blue train, which we knew didn’t go to Shin-Yokohama, but we had to do
something. It was dead reckoning at this point. Blind faith. Making it up
as we went, we got off at Yokohama Station, scrutinized the all-but-inscrutable-to-us
train system map, took a calculated risk—fourteen minutes and counting
until our Shinkansen left—and hopped on the red line.
One station. Two stations. Three stations. Christ. “Shin-Yokohama
des!” cried the conductor, and we bolted out the door, desperately
scanning for signs with English on them as we dashed up the stairs like contestants
on some survival show. We reached the platform. Empty. We’d missed it
by two minutes.
The next Shinkansen didn’t come along for another forty, and unlike the one
we’d missed, it would stop at every station between Yokohama and Osaka, providing
ample opportunity for me to chew on the disappointment metastasizing down
below.
Some three and a half hours later we arrived in Osaka and were again faced
with the daunting challenge of navigating the shopping mall-like train station
and finding among the myriad lines the train that would take us to Koshien.
Fortunately, once we’d traversed the underground corridor to Umeda Station,
things got a little easier. For no longer were we dealing with JR—Japan
Rail—trains. In Osaka, Hanshin rules the rails, and yes, it’s the
same Hanshin. You knew that teams in Japan took their names from companies,
right? Of course you did. And the Hanshin trains were easy to recognize, given
the windows plastered with “Never Never Never Surrender!” stickers
and Tigers logos and Senichi Hoshino looking at you from every direction like
an omnipresent dictator. Feeling a little better now.
It was the bottom of the fourth when we got to the stadium. So, sadly, I
can tell you nothing of the scene before the game, the throngs of people buying
supplies from the vendors’ row outside, or what must have been a palpable,
nay, overwhelming excitement in the air, or what I can only imagine to have
been thoroughly baffling and surprising and delightful pregame ceremonies
inside. If this is what was lost, though, something more was gained. For entering
Koshien Stadium at full boil is something I will never (never, never) forget.
You could hear it from the platform. Chanting. Rhythmic clapping. From where
we were the stadium itself was largely hidden behind more elevated train tracks,
so that it revealed itself only when we were just upon it, an ancient-seeming
brick edifice covered with ivy that had just begun to green. We hurried inside,
not knowing yet how much we’d missed, and fruitlessly tried to match the symbols
and numbers on our tickets with those on the signs marking the corridors leading
inside, fleeting glimpses down which went far beyond the merely tantalizing;
what we could see through the tunnels was utterly fantastic, hallucinatory,
pure dream. A young vendor who’d tried to help us moments earlier found us
again, still floundering, and graciously motioned for us to follow him into
the stands. The rush of sensation was overpowering.
Personal reference points: Game three of the 1998 NLCS in San Diego. Grainy
footage of the Nuremburg rallies. That Macintosh 1984 commercial. And
I’ve never even seen it, but my god, The Wall.
Fifty thousand people were packed into a stadium smaller than Fenway. A single,
steep, uninterrupted deck encircled the playing field, a great, seamless band
of humanity, each individual holding aloft two plastic yellow and black mallets
and beating them together in time, the crowd magically pausing in unison and
just as astonishingly resuming a heartbeat later, the beat subtly changed
from before. How did they know when to stop? How did they know how to change?
There was no apparent mechanism. Like a giant school of fish that instantaneously
turns on a dime, this was mob psychology taken to an end that can only be
described as sublime.
Chanting accompanied the beat; every four measures the mallets stopped for
a brief vocal interlude before resuming in time. The effect was hypnotic and
mesmerizing and not a little frightening, but gradually, as we followed our
guide through the maze of sections to our seats about halfway up from third
base, the fact that this was, after all, a baseball game began to reassert
itself. Little by little the scene resolved itself into something at least
partially comprehensible. And by the time we’d folded ourselves into our preposterously
tiny seats and the stadium P.A. started pumping Aerosmith in response to a
batter’s base on balls, I felt comfortable that despite appearances, this
was indeed the same planet I’d left days earlier in New York.
It was possible now to look around and note details that had been lost in
the initial rush. The all-dirt infield. The impossibly deep outfield. The
open pressbox set in among the stands, halfway up underneath the roof behind
home. The full brass band in the bleachers in right. The scoreboard in dead
center with the players’ names in Japanese and the count reading S:__ B:__
O:__.
The Tigers were up 2-0, that much I could glean. The BayStars managed a run
in the sixth, though, and another in the top of the seventh, about which time
we noticed that everyone around us was pulling out fistfuls of balloons and
blowing them up. Not just ordinary balloons, either: they were the long, sausage
kind, but with a little plastic ring around the opening, which wheezed loudly,
like a squeeze toy, when the air was let out. And when I say “everyone
around us” started blowing up these balloons, I mean quite literally
everyone. In minutes the entire ballpark was a sea of brilliant pink,
yellow, green, orange, white, purple, light blue, dark blue … you could
no longer see people at all, only balloons. The guy sitting next to me offered
us some.
More than any other thing I could point to, this episode epitomizes my brief
experience of Japan. The equal parts sheer delight and utter incomprehension.
The feeling of being caught up in something both wonderful and completely
inexplicable. Powerless to understand it, you simply surrender to it. We blew
up our balloons and waited, eyes wide, slightly giddy, expectant.
Following the BayStars’ third out in the seventh, the Tigers’ cartoon
mascot appeared on the scoreboard, singing and dancing and blowing up balloons;
it was clear that this was going somewhere, and we readied ourselves. At the
song’s climax, the mascot, the scoreboard, and the entire crowd registered
a gleeful “Lucky 7!” upon which Koshien Stadium erupted with the
combined thrust of 50,000 shrieking, soaring balloons. Awesome. In the purest
sense of the word, absolutely fucking awesome. (And yes, a bunch of
guys did have to run out onto the field to pick them all up.)
By this time I’d figured out that the second half of what the crowd
had been chanting all game long consisted of the batter’s name. Or sometimes
it was just his name, or sometimes his name in combination with something
else. Sometimes, for example, the chant went “clap-clap-clap:
Yano! clap-clap-clap: Yano!” Or sometimes, as for the American
slugger George Arias (career .237 in four seasons with the Angels and Padres
but a big star here), it incorporated English: “clap, clap, clap-clap-clap:
Let’s go Georgie!” But the main chant, what seemed like the default,
was slower, more meditative, consisting of four rounds of “clap, (and-a)
clap, (and-a) clap-clap-clap” alternating with what sounded
at first to my unattuned ear like “yako-tay…” followed by the
player’s name. As the game went on, though, I began to discern additional
syllables: “yako-wisay…” Not like I’d know what it meant
anyway, but it was hard to quell the impulse.
I was wearing my Dodgers hat—there’s little point in trying to
blend in as a westerner in Japan, so, paradoxically, you tend to be less self-conscious
about such things than you might otherwise—and it got the attention of
two teenage students sitting behind us, identifiable as such by their bellhop-like
school uniforms, which they were wearing on Saturday because, well, because
kids in Japan are really into their school uniforms. In one of the most brilliantly
subversive ploys of I’ve ever heard of, in fact, kids in Japan have decided
that their school uniforms are totally cool. But I digress.
One kid said to me, “You Tigersu fan?” I nodded solemnly: Hai!
He pointed to my cap. “You Dojusu fan?” Processing … processing
… right, Dodgers fan! Hai!
“Nomo,” he said, smiling. I nodded again, and added, “Ishii.”
His friend shook his head like he didn’t understand. “Kazu,”
explained the first kid, and they nodded in agreement. Our cultural exchange
was complete.
The BayStars got another run in the top of the ninth when shortstop Takuro
Ishii lifted a fly ball to right field, and, tagging, catcher Ryoji Aikawa
took out his opposing number with a lowered shoulder to the collarbone, beating
a perfect throw and sending Akihiro Yano to the locker room with what we’d
later learn was a dislocated shoulder. Three-two Baystars now.
With so many of the Tigers’ victories this season having come in dramatic,
ninth-inning fashion, the crowd got plenty worked up for the bottom of the
frame, the scoreboard imploring those on hand to “Go! Go! Go!” and
“Fire! Fire! Fire!” and then, ominously, “Be on fire!”
I never learned what exactly the connection is between the Tigers and fire,
but there was no mistaking its versatility as an all-purpose motif. Unfortunately,
the only guy on fire at this point was BayStars closer Takashi Saito, who
got the first two batters he saw to pop up and walked the third before facing
Arias. Georgie responded to the crowd’s cheers by driving a ball to deep
left, lifting our hopes but ultimately just sending Takanori Suzuki to the
wall for the final out. So close.
Add to the list of wonders the experience of being among 50,000 people all trying to get on the same train, by the way. Back at Shin-Osaka station on the way home I bought myself a little Senichi Hoshino charm—a cute plastic figurine about three quarters of an inch high with a big caricatured face that is unmistakably Hoshino’s, it’s exactly like the Hello Kitty, et al. charms that dangle from the cellphones and jacket zippers and briefcases of Japanese of all ages, sexes, and walks of life, from frivolous schoolgirls to buttoned-down salarymen. It now hangs from my scorebook.
FINAL SCORE: BAY STARS 3, TIGERS 2
LIFE DURING WARTIME: War? What war?