Tokyo Diary — Jingu Stadium

My last night in Tokyo, I wanted to see a baseball game.  Luckily, the Tokyo Yakult Swallows were hosting the Hiroshima Carp at Jingu Stadium.  It was a beautiful night for a ballgame and Jingu Stadium has the feel of an old-time ballpark; the kind where people go to watch the game, instead of each other.  There are no skyboxes or hundred-dollar box seats or any of that kind of horseshit.  It is a real ballpark.

There are a surprising number of Americans on both teams and one wonders how they wound up here.  It is a different game in Japan.  It is the very definition of “small ball;” the emphasis being on playing like a team.  Hit to get on base.  The most valuable players in Japanese baseball are the guys with the highest on-base percentage.  There are also a ton of women fans here; not girlfriends who got dragged to the game, but real baseball enthusiasts who wear the hats and bang the plastic bats together with  a rabid alacrity.

Me and John McNaughton are the children of lifelong White Sox fans.  Both of our fathers dutifully followed the Sox their whole lives without ever seeing them win it all. The closest they came was in 1959 when they lost the World Series to the LA Dodgers. We discussed our fathers in the cab on the way to Jingu Stadium.  It seems like we almost had the same father; both men being hard to please and somewhat suspect  of their sons’ chosen career paths.  One of the reasons I came to Japan is my father’s having fought in the Pacific in WWII.  He invaded Okinawa and witnessed a bestial, awful battle that forever colored the way he thought of  the Japanese.  I wondered, really, what this place was?  Our countries did grievous injury to each other almost 65 years ago.  Who are they now?  And who are we?

Part of the answer came to me tonight.  A man sitting next to us was wearing a Carps hat and, after a bit of conversation, told us the Carps were his hometown team.

Hiroshima.

I’m not used to thinking of Hiroshima as a place where people live. . .a community. . .but rather as the exclamation point of our war with Japan.  Hiroshima was an action, not a place.  Yet here we are, on a warm summer night in Tokyo talking with another baseball fan about our teams.  He asked us about the Cubs.  Of course we said “Fuck NO!” and he laughed.  We explained that we were real baseball fans; White Sox fans. On this night, almost three quarters of a century after our country tried to erase this man’s city from the earth, I met a  guy from the town of Hiroshima.  He’s lived there his whole life and he likes baseball.  He comes here for the same reasons I do; to try and remember what is good about where we live and who we are.