Baseball

Holy crap. Yesterday we had the pleasure of going to see a baseball game. The Hanshin Tigers, which is a sister city of Detroit(Which is why they are called the Tigers as well). So basically, the over all mentality of this country is to keep your head down, be quite and keep to your self. But at baseball games, Japans favorite sport(And I now know why), they get to go CRAZY. Basically take any sports games back home, add a English soccer game, multiply by 10, and you get a Japanese baseball game.

For started, all around the stadium, they have "cheerleaders" standing up on rails. Their job is to get chants started, get the crowd riled up, and just, well be cheerleaders. A couple rows above them are trumpet players and flag wavers. So through out the entire game, these people were just standing up and shouting different chants, over and over and over again. There was NO break from the chanting.On top of the non stop chanting, almost every single person in the stadium had these like thunder bats, hollow plastic bats that they used instead of clapping.

The last amazing thing about this game was during the 7th inning stretch. Back home, we obviously stand up and stretch and sing take me out to the ball game. Well here in Japan, everyone buys balloons outside, blows them up, and sends them all off at the same time. It's like personal fireworks. I don't know the meaning behind it or where it came from, but WOW, what an amazing photo moment.