April 2nd, 2019

Throwback: April 27, 2009: “Baseball” in Japanese and baseball in Japan

The Japanese word for “baseball” is yakyū, combining the characters for field and ball. My current guesstimate on pronunciation is “YAK-yoo”…anybody know?

Baseball is a big deal in Japan, and a genuine part of the culture, for close to 150 years. The games sell out, players become celebrities, and, I like to imagine, nobody leaves in the 7th inning the way lame and silly people do at Jays games (not that I don’t love Jays games with all my heart. It’s for that reason, actually, that my heart breaks a little when people abandon their team before the game ends in order to “beat traffic”! Ahhh! You could really triumph over traffic by never leaving home, people!!)

It is, I am discovering, extremely complicated to order tickets to Japanese ballgames. But I shall persevere, somehow, to eat lovely snacks in the Big Egg and join in the happy cheering! I’m going to figure this out…somewise. [Note from the future: I did get to go to a game in Tokyo, though someone else had to buy the tickets for me in the end, and it was fantastic! As I recall, I did not get any snacks, but still, fantastic.] But just to be safe, I’ll also be ordering Jays tickets sometime soon, because really, they aren’t exotic, sometimes the fans are lame, and the snack food is terrible at the Stadium Whose Name We Don’t Say, but otherwise, they are the best team in the world. [Note from the future: now that Jays tickets are much more expensive and two of the people I used to go to games with have moved away, I rarely go–no games at all last season. this is a sad future note.]

I don’t mean to care about material things
RR