Open this photo in gallery:
I was wrong about being the lone Jays fan here. A man named Sin, decked out in a Houston Astros jersey and hat, was on hand, supporting George Springer.Adrian Cheung/The Globe and Mail
If you have the chance to see a Japanese baseball game, you have to take it. In the Nippon Professional Baseball League, the high-energy baseball experience is an alt-reality of what MLB could be.
Passionate fans wear face paint and scream individualized songs they know all the words to for each of their home team’s players, complete with horns; and in the style of a European soccer game, they carve out safe spaces in the stadiums for supporters of the opposing team. At the end of each game, the home team comes back out and bows to the fans in each section.
Multiple kinds of mascots perform on-field skits surrounded by cheerleaders, and relief pitchers are driven to the mound in an actual car, with great pomp and circumstance. It’s the same game, but it captures something about the sport that North America’s original version too often forgets: that it should be fun.
But Major League Baseball in Japan offers a deeply strange, surreal experience – as if someone heard about the MLB third-hand, and set to work selling you products about the league itself.
Opinion: Baseball is having its first truly international World Series
Owing to an ill-timed press trip, I – a Jays fan since I was a child, who took in so many games in the lean years and who called in sick to drive to Buffalo and see Vladimir Guerrero Jr. play his first game as a Bison in Triple A – found myself in Japan for the extent of this World Series.
When George Springer, our old war horse on one knee, hit that miraculous home run to effectively win the American League Championship series over the Mariners, I wept – and some of that emotion was because of the realization that I wasn’t going to be in Toronto for the event I’ve been yearning for, aching for, my whole life.
But I’ve found my ways while in Japan. I watched Addison Barger blast his pinch-hit home run on a train in the Japanese countryside, pumping my fist to the confusion of others around me.
I’ve worn my lucky Bisons shirt and Jays hat to travel, risking getting them dirty as both are white. I wore an earbud to listen to the radio broadcast while half-engaging with the beautiful sights on Miyajima, an island off Hiroshima where a Shinto torii gate is perched in the ocean.
I often joke about my wife having to suffer my hijinks like I’m Archie Bunker, but with the Jays on the brink of potentially winning it all, she had to indulge me in yet another thing on Saturday morning: traveling to the suburbs of Fukuoka, Japan’s fifth-most populous city, to watch Game 6 at the MLB Café, the weirdest baseball experience of my life.
Open this photo in gallery:
The MLB Café in Fukuoka. ADRIAN LEE/The Globe and MailThe Globe and Mail
Some of the strangeness can be explained by time-zone dissonance – 13 hours, between here and Toronto – but some of it is inexplicable.
The MLB Café’s menu feels like what you’d get if you asked an early-launch AI, “What do Americans eat at baseball games?”: mini pancakes, fried shrimp, and cheese consommé fries (these were delicious actually).
The food is eaten with silverware off white china, as if we’re at a hotel breakfast buffet, and the café is attired in leather booths and exposed brick and red tablecloths in the style of an Italian restaurant in New Jersey, halfway around the world. And it’s decorated like a staged real-estate listing, celebrating Major League Baseball as an idea and an enterprise, with bland signs arbitrarily representing most teams. (But the Jays.)
In one corner, there is a poorly Photoshopped poster claiming there are “fan rules” for supporters of the Tampa Bay Rays: laugh loudly, tell the truth, smile often. (For new baseball fans: these rules are not real, certainly not for a team who had to play last season in a minor league ballpark after their home field was destroyed in a hurricane.)
Open this photo in gallery:
A gift shop at the MLB Café.The Globe and Mail
The vibe in the café is that we’re at the ballet. The restaurant is about two-thirds full, and while the attendees are clearly all Dodger partisans – the Japanese are ultimately fans of their hometown players, and LA boasts three – they only show it by offering light polite claps after a hit or a strikeout; otherwise, they are completely, surreally silent.
The intermittent claps and yelps and occasional chants that soundtrack North American sports bars with every strike or before so many pitches are absent; there are only occasional whispers. It feels deeply cultural when Miguel Rojas barehands a ball to get Addison Barger out at first, they go “ohh” at the replay, and gently applaud again.
There’s another fan from North America here, a Los Angel named Scott, a Dodgers fan visiting family who live just down the street. He’s wearing a Yamamoto jersey and a cap where the Dodgers logo is in Japanese kanji.
We shake hands and exchange a “let the best team win,” but when I hear him quietly saying “cheater” when Springer comes to the plate, I decide the outfit’s a little too on the nose, if you ask me! And a man wearing an Ohtani jersey and full polarized baseball sunglasses sits down in the third inning and smilingly asks, “Dodgers?” But when we point to my hat and say “Blue Jays,” he grimaces in disappointment and responds as if we told him his cat had died: “Oh my God…”
Open this photo in gallery:
George Springer hits a single against Roki Sasaki of the Los Angeles Dodgers during the eighth inning.Mark Blinch/Getty Images
My wife and I are not totally alone in our Jays support, though. In a front booth, a man named Sin is decked out in an Astros cap and jersey and turns around to show me the nameplate – he’s a Springer fan. He joins me in clapping for each Jay hit, even if it doesn’t come from his man. He tells me he likes him because he plays “good defence.”
The guests may adhere to Japanese etiquette during the game, but the rules are different when Shohei Ohtani comes to the plate. There was a light but distinct rumbling when he was up, audible groans to his outs, and the only cheers were reserved for his successes. The room felt like it’s physically tensing, and hands were clasped in prayer.
The café is in the home park of the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks, who won the Japan Series just a few days ago. I hoped that championship luck would rub off but to no avail; there were loud shouts of joy when Barger was called out at second, though it strangely returned to respectful silence soon after.
But at the very least, something held up between the two solitudes: immediately after the Dodgers got the final out, the man in sunglasses and Ohtani jersey turned to us with a bow and said – unusually for Japan, in English – “sorry.” Scott shook my hand; Sin came by to tell me that he’ll be here tomorrow.
Same game. But it’s fun.
AloJapan.com