The Baseball Guy

June 10

The plane landed hard at Narita Airport, and a lot of the overhead luggage bins popped open. Mine was one of them, and I suddenly had two very heavy carry-ons right hanging right above my face. Maybe the part they had to replace was a landing gear. Well, they did a pretty bad job!

I couldn’t believe it! I was finally in Tokyo! I was ready to get off the plane and start checking things out. The customs desk was extremely smooth (that’s what happens when you’re an “honored guest of the Japanese government”) and before long we all had our bags and were boarding buses bound for downtown Tokyo. Keiko-san, our tour guide, passed out maps of Tokyo, some hotel information, and $280 worth of meal money. They won’t even let us pay for our own food while we’re here. This trip is awesome!

After arriving at the hotel, I changed into my Apopka Elementary School shirt (the one embroidered with Ralph-Sensei, of course) and headed downstairs to the Fulbright Alumni event. This is one of the great things about the JFMF: they are committed to building relationships between Japanese people and American people. This first event put us into groups of four or five and then matched us with a Japanese person who had been part of the Fulbright program sometime in their lives. I was with a gentleman in his 60s named Toshio-san. He had been a Fulbrighter in San Francisco from 1968-1970 while he studied to get his MBA degree, and here he was forty years later, volunteering to take a bunch of wild American teachers out on the town during their first night in Tokyo. As Dr. Satterwhite has said, the Fulbright program had made a huge impression on the lives of so many Japanese, and Toshio-san’s eagerness to volunteer in a great example of his respect and appreciation for the program.

Yuko Naito plays the Koto and Koumei Ashigaki plays the Shakuhachi as we arrive for the Fulbright event.

We stayed in the Akasaka neighborhood around our hotel and found a great little restaurant tucked away along one of the streets. I have no idea what the name of the place was, because the sign and menu were only in Japanese. I do know one thing: the food was awesome! I had the mostly lively and interesting group too: Jen from West Virginia, Tara from Colorado, and Rebecca from Alaska. Toshio-san did all of the ordering for us, and the food just kept coming! He didn’t order any Sushi, though, which was fine with me. I guess he figured we’d have enough Sushi during the trip. There were all kinds of other things, though: roasted corn, skewered beef and pork, steak, fish, beans, sausages, roasted corn, chicken livers (yes I ate it), shrimp, and ice cream. The food was great and the conversation was wonderful.

From left: Toshi-san, Jen from WV, Tara from CO, Ralph-Sensei, Rebecca from AK

During dinner, we Americans had shared our desired to go sing karaoke at some point during the trip, and Toshio-san told us that he’d show us a place to sing near our hotel. After dinner, he walked us down to a seven floor karaoke parlor, and to our surprise he rented a booth and took us upstairs. I was so excited! Karaoke was on my “must do” list while in Tokyo. We got into the booth, which was a tiny room with a karaoke set up and some maracas and tambourines, and we started picking songs. I personally was involved with the singing of “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “Borderline,” “True Colors,” Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” and an amazing group rendition of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It was one of the most fun things I’d ever done, and I knew that if the next three weeks would be anything like this, then it would be a trip of a quality I’ll never be able to match.

June 11

I was awakened by the sun pouring through my window at 4:30 am. I was so surprised by seeing the sun coming up at that time that I started flipping through TV channels to try to figure out if that was really the correct time. It was. At breakfast, a lot of other people were making the same observations that I was about the early sunrise, mainly that they had a tough time believing that it came up so early.

We boarded a bus to go on a tour of Tokyo which began with the Japanese Diet building. This is basically the Capitol Building of Japan, where the two houses of Japan’s parliament meet to make the laws of the country, much in the fashion of our two houses of Congress. The building is made up of materials from all over Japan with the exception of three things: the stained glass windows (made in Britain) and the door locks and mail chute (made in the USA). It was a very interesting visit.

A joker who needs to go on a diet standing in front of the Japanese Diet.

Following that, we drove past the Imperial Palace for about thirty seconds and headed over to Asakusa where we had a tempura lunch planned. On the way there, Keiko-san pointed out a lot of high-fashion clothing stores where she said that we might like to go visit to see the goods, but that we’d be challenged to find “king sized items to fit you Americans.” We all laughed at that, our bellies jiggling like bowls full of jelly. I got what she’s saying though: not only are we much taller than most of the Japanese we encounter, but we carry around much more girth! You seriously need to look hard to find people in Japan with any sort of weight problem, even with the presence of tempura in their diet. Tempura is a style of cooking where the food is lightly breaded and then deep fried. It was really good. We were eating at little tables and sitting on pillows on the floor in the restaurant. I spilled miso soup all over the place, which is to be expected if you know me, but the Japanese lady just about had a heart attack.

After lunch we had the chance to walk around a giant Shinto temple. I got to see Thunder Gate, which was huge. Walking back toward the temple, I found a place where people were trying to cup some incense smoke in their hands and putting it on places on their bodies to cure certain ailments. I put some on my bald spot.

Japanese Rogaine

There was also a really neat place where you could get a fortune by dropping a 100 yen coin in a slot, shaking an octagonal prism filled with chopsticks, and then pulling a fortune out of a drawer. All of the fortunes were numbered within the range of 1 to 100, 1 being the best possible fortune and 100 being that you’ll die a horrific death AFTER every possible horrible thing in the history of mankind happens to you. Here’s the one I got:

Oh no!

Now I had the chance to pick another fortune, but I had to tie the bad fortune to a string to make it go away and pay another 100 yen to buy another fortune. This time I got Fortune #8, “Best Fortune.” Apparently, “happiness will come to me just like cutting rice plants with a cutter,” whatever that means. The good news is that “marriage is very good” and “the person you are waiting for will come.” Well the fortune worked out, because when I got back to the hotel, my package of baseball tickets had finally arrived (but more on that later.)

This afternoon we came back to watch a demonstration of Kyogen, which is traditional Japanese comedy theatre. The performance was put on by Don Kenney, an American who has lived in Japan and studied Kyogen for decades, and is Japan’s only performer and translator of English-language Kyogen. I loved it. The voices and movements were all very deliberate, and followed a story pattern where a servant tells a lie to try to get out of work (sounds like something that would happen in Ralphadelphia) and the master tells an even more elaborate lie to catch the servant in his original lie and put him back on his task (also something that would happen in Ralphadelphia).

After the performance, we went to the official JFMF Welcome Reception. There was a great deal of wonderful food, and we were addressed by Dr. Satterwhite, Kiso Isao (director of international affairs for Japan’s Ministry of Education), Ronald Post (Minister of Public Affairs for the US embassy in Japan), and Ginko Sato (President of Japan Association for the Advancement of Working Women.)





After the reception was over, I headed back up to the room, called my sweet wife, and then spent about an hour or so putting the baseball tickets and change into envelopes with people’s names on them. Let me explain that last one:

Ever since running into a group of JFMF teachers at the baggage carousel in San Fran, my other name has been “The Baseball Guy.” People look at my nametag when we introduce ourselves and then invariably they say, “Hey! You’re the baseball guy!” which is then followed either by a firm handshake and the words “thanks so much for organizing this, it’s one of the things I’m most looking forward to on this trip” OR “I’m not going, but that’s great that you put that together.” Let me explain how this all happened. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, then you’ve read about my desire to go to a ball game while in Japan, and you probably remember seeing my comments about the JFMF group listserv. Probably about the second or third day of the listserv, I commented in a message that one of the things I’d most like to do in Japan was to go see a baseball game, and that the Seibu Lions would be playing on one of the nights. About 12 people commented back and said they’d also like to go.

I began looking for ways to buy group tickets online because I figured it would be more fun to sit with about a dozen teachers than for us to show up at the ball park on the day of the game and end up sitting all over the place. I found JapanBall, who sold individual tickets to people planning a tour in Japan, and I asked them about their group rate, giving them a figure of 20 since I knew a few other people would be jumping on the bandwagon. When they got back to me with a price of $40 per ticket, I informed the group. I guess that must have looked like a request to sign up or something because suddenly I was getting a bunch of emails from people asking to be included in the order. Eventually I had about 45 people, so I started keeping a list on the listserv so people would know if I had seen their email and had counted them in the order. I gave JapanBall the number 45 as a “preliminary final number” and they said it was no problem.

I opened up an ordering window through this blog so that people could send me the money and I could send to total amount to JapanBall, who would send it on to their ticket buyer in Japan, who would send it to the Seibu Lions and hopefully there would be enough seats to accommodate our group. Can you see the potential for disaster there? I hate dealing with other people’s money, and collecting a lot of money from people I don’t know and sending it on to someone else I don’t know made me very nervous, but I’d offered to buy group tickets so I knew people were counting on me to get this done. When he ordering window closed four days later, I looked on my PayPal account and saw that 68 people had put in a PAID order for a ticket.

68.

My jaw hit the floor, but JapanBall handled it in stride and I got the money to them via bank wire (after a few glitches), they got the tickets (somehow all together in one group) and the tickets got to me exactly when they said they would (thank goodness!) If something had failed, I would have been the goat of the group and my dream trip to Japan would have turned into an absolute nightmare. But all came out well, and tomorrow I will be passing tickets out to 68 crazy American teachers. Whew!

Being known amongst the group for setting this up has been a nice icebreaker in many situations, but honestly, I’m glad the job is done!

And you get to read about the Seibu Lions baseball game on another day! Good night!