Live from Japan!

So yesterday Danielle, Bonnie, Sam, (who were our first visitors from the states) and I met up with a ton of other jets to go to a Chunichi Doragonsu (dragons) Game. What a blast. The game was not a particularly good one, what was great, was the crowd.

The United States has a thing or two to learn about cheering from the japanese I think. Even in what was not a particularly interesting game. The crowd was constantly cheering, CONSTANTLY. There were really two primary cheering sections.

One for the visiting team. It was nice probably around 200 people cheering for their Yakult Swallows (Suwarrowzu). They were quite enthusiastic, they had giant flags, a brass band, and hundreds of plastic bats that they would smack together.

The other cheering section consisted of the rest of the stadium. The stadium seats about 38,000 people, when the dragons were up to bat it seemed like about 39,000 of them were cheering. Even us foreigners, you couldn’t help it, there was nothing else you could do. Their organization was incredible.

Of course some cheered less enthusiastically then others, and some more (more on this to come). Nearly 1/3 of the people in the stadium were wearing some kind of Chunichi Dragons apparel and about half had the plastic bats or noisemakers the whack together in lieu of clapping. There was, in fact, a cheering section for the Dragons, that was about the same size as the one for the Swallows. But really, they served little more purpose than to choose which of the cheering songs they would use next. More uniformly entusiastic perhaps, with only the season ticket holders, but no more enthusiastic then many of the fans outside of the section. In some cases quite a bit less enthusiastic.

Behind us were the true Super Fans. They were extremely enthusiastic the entire game. Insanely enthusiastic, they screamed out their cheers at the top of their lungs every inning for all nine innings. One of them had the myriad of songs printed out onto paper for reference, just in case he needed one of the less used ones. They were clearly a handful of fathers who had taken their sons out the the game, and one of the sons, seated between two of the older fans, was so whipped up, he managed to hit danielle in the head with his plastic bats on a couple of occasions.

This picture somewhat sums up their attitude. Bouncing on his seat, belting out his cheering song, and whacking together his little plastic bats.

The picture is appropriately blurred with the furious motion of his arms. What this photo doesn’t show is that the one of the bats was broken and had been repaired with blue tape. I can only assume that he would never replace the bats that had served him so well in his cheering up till now.

We had the greatest time, largely thanks to the group behind us whose enthusiasm you could not help but absorb.