Forty-six thousand people, beer served from a backpack, and a player on the scoreboard called Trey Cabbage. Japanese baseball is nothing like we expected and completely unmissable.
We'd done Tokyo Racecourse on a previous trip — that had set the bar for how good a Japanese sporting day out could be. Tokyo Dome felt like the logical next step. The Yomiuri Giants are basically the Manchester United of Japanese baseball: enormous fanbase, historic, divisive. We picked the right night.
The dome is in Bunkyo, right next to Korakuen station. From the outside it looks like a slightly deflated spaceship. Inside it holds over 46,000 people and it was close to full. We were up in the upper tier, which in any other stadium would feel remote. Here the view was still good, the atmosphere carried all the way up, and we had an excellent angle on the beer situation below.
The Beer Situation
Japanese baseball has beer vendors. This is not unusual. What is unusual is that they carry the beer in a refrigerated keg strapped to their back — a proper backpack-sized tank with a tap at the front — and they walk the aisles continuously, pouring fresh, cold beer into plastic cups on demand. Sapporo. Asahi. Yebisu. You wave, they come, they pour, you pay. It is the best possible system for watching sport and I don't understand why it doesn't exist everywhere.
We worked through all three brands by the fourth inning. Yebisu won. It usually does.
The Food
Stadium food in Japan operates at a different level. We had a hot dog that came with mustard, ketchup, and a dusting of seaweed powder, which sounds wrong and tasted completely right. Then someone behind us produced a full bucket of fried chicken — the kind you'd normally only see at a KFC — and we spent the next ten minutes quietly envious until we found the stall selling them on the concourse.
The Game Itself
We know nothing about baseball. This was not a problem. The scoreboard does a lot of the work — player names, stats, replays — and the crowd tells you everything else. When something good happened, 46,000 people stood up simultaneously. When something went wrong, there was a very specific collective groan that needed no translation.
The Giants had an American player called Trey Cabbage wearing number 13. His name appeared on the scoreboard in full caps and we have thought about it several times since. Trey Cabbage. Playing baseball in Tokyo. Living the life.
The organised chanting from the Giants end was something else. Supporters groups with drums and coordinated chants for each batter, every at-bat. It runs continuously. You don't need to know the words — you pick them up within two innings — but the energy it creates in an enclosed dome is unlike anything we've experienced at a British football match.
Go to a baseball game in Japan. You don't need to understand the sport. Get a beer backpack poured for you, find the fried chicken, and let the noise do the rest.