We went to see the baseball while we were in Seattle a couple of weeks back and we couldn`t really make head nor tail of it, and last night we had the chance to see if it made more sense in Japanese. Baseball is huge here and the experience was certainly more impressive than in the States. The Hiroshima Toyo Carp were playing the Nagoya Dragons and between the two sets of fans there was a constant din of choreographed shouting and cheering throughout the whole nine innings. It seemed a little strange to see the usually placid locals get so worked up about a bunch of guys in pyjamas. They certainly know how to have fun though - the highlight for us was when the whole crowd blew up big whistling balloons and let them off in unison filling the sky with a frantic cloud of colour and noise for a few seconds. Hiroshima won on the night with a final innings home-run that sent the faithful home happy. We left concluding that the Carp fans wouldn`t get hooked on the Seattle Mariners anytime soon....
We went to see the baseball while we were in Seattle a couple of weeks back and we couldn`t really make head nor tail of it, and last night we had the chance to see if it made more sense in Japanese. Baseball is huge here and the experience was certainly more impressive than in the States. The Hiroshima Toyo Carp were playing the Nagoya Dragons and between the two sets of fans there was a constant din of choreographed shouting and cheering throughout the whole nine innings. It seemed a little strange to see the usually placid locals get so worked up about a bunch of guys in pyjamas. They certainly know how to have fun though - the highlight for us was when the whole crowd blew up big whistling balloons and let them off in unison filling the sky with a frantic cloud of colour and noise for a few seconds. Hiroshima won on the night with a final innings home-run that sent the faithful home happy. We left concluding that the Carp fans wouldn`t get hooked on the Seattle Mariners anytime soon....