Baseball is pretty huge over here. At pretty much any time during the day, you can turn on the TV and see a game going on or a recap of the week's most recent games, including Red Sox and Yankees games. They even get a feed of the YES network for the most recent Yankees games with Japanese commentary dubbed in.

I got the chance to go see a Japanese team play today, which was pretty rad. What was radder was that the two teams were the first and second in the league. The local team was the Fukuoka Soft Bank Hawks, and the visiting team was the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters. What's with the weird names? Sponsers (or owners, rather) Soft Bank is a cell phone carrier, and Nippon Ham makes ham.

I learned a new trick on my camera!

The stadium was called the Yahoo! Dome. It wasn't really all that big and couldn't hold a huge amount of people, but it was still super loud in there, mainly because when it comes to cheering, the Japanese are redonk. The entire section opposite home base was filled with fans dressed in jerseys, holding signs and these weird noisemaker/bullhorn contraptions. Everyone in this section was standing for pretty much the entire first seven innings, and cheering almost constantly. I guess each team has a cheer section or something, because both the home team and the away team had people with drums, trumpets and tons of other stuff that were used in their fight songs.

See that Asahi Beer ad?

If someone hits a home run into it, they get free beer for ten years

TEN

Also, they don't have a seventh inning stretch in Japan. As far as I know, the just do this:

Thousands of balloons! (also one guy that sucks)

And then after the game is over, they have fireworks. Indoors. And confetti.

Pretty much the jist of this is that Japan wins.