One of the things I was looking forward to when coming to Japan was seeing some Japanese baseball. Baseball is big in Japan and I was able to watch the Spring Koshien on TV whenever I was working from home. The Koshien is a high school baseball tournament that is taken very seriously and is renowned for the stresses it places on young players with accusations of high pitch counts and poor coaching.

Anyhow, the other day I took the opportunity to see the Yomiuri Giants play the Seibu Lions at the Tokyo Dome in a pre-season match. The Tokyo Dome, as the name suggests, is an enclosed stadium. It is also known as The Big Egg although it doesn’t look much like an egg. Then again I guess the Gherkin doesn’t look much like a gherkin and St. Pauls Cathederal looks nothing like St Paul. Buying tickets online wasn’t too difficult although my bank decided to block my card and it took 2 phone calls to unblock it. Not having a mobile phone meant that I needed to use Skype (which allows you to phone free-phone numbers; very useful).

The game was pretty good. The Giants lost 7-3 with several home runs to enjoy. The Japanese fans lived up to reputation (mainly from You’ve Gotta Have Wa. Quite a few have these small flags (about the size of a linesmans flag) which are waved up and down in a specific motion for some of the songs. The outfield bleachers site the hard-core fans of each team who lead the singing with a small brass band.

One curious thing was that everybody had to exit the stadium through a revolving door. A man with a flashing wand made sure more than one person didn’t use the door at a time (to stop people getting stuck) and everybody queued up to get out. Although us British enjoy a good queue I suspect such a revolving door would never be allowed on safety grounds.