Five years ago, I attended My First Baseball Game in Japan. It was a great time, and I recently returned five years later with my wife to attend two more games.
After seeing the legendary Yomiuri Giants at the equally impressive Tokyo Dome in 2019, we took in a Tokyo Yakult Swallows vs Hanshin Tigers game at Meiji Jingu Stadium in Tokyo and the Chiba Lotte Marines vs Orix Buffaloes at ZOZO Marine Stadium in Chiba. We again used JapanBall to purchase the game tickets, and Michael and Margarita Westbay again did a phenomenal job in getting and delivering our tickets to the hotel, which had detailed directions to both games.
The first game we attended was the Hanshin Tigers vs Tokyo Yakult Swallows at Meiji Jingu Stadium in Tokyo. It is an impressive stadium that was built in 1926 and is the second-oldest stadium in Japan. It holds over 37,000 fans at capacity and was a real treat to attend a game there. The sightlines were great, and you felt really close to the action in the game.
We were also fortunate to see the Hanshin Tigers, who are the defending Japan Series champions. They brought over 15,000 of their fans to the game, making it feel like their home game in Osaka. The Tokyo Yakult Swallows fans were equally enthusiastic and took an early 1-0 lead on an RBI single by Kojiro Yoshimura. The fans reacted in a timeless tradition of singing the team’s fight song while moving umbrellas up and down rhythmically, which I also happily took part in. Swallows fans conducted this lively tradition during the bottom of the seventh inning as well. The Tigers answered back with a combined six runs in the fourth and fifth innings, highlighted by a home run by Shota Morishita. The Swallows would celebrate Tetsuto Yamada’s 1500th career game in the bottom of the fifth inning, which was commemorated with fireworks, and he briefly posed with a sign noting the milestone hit. Tokyo would get two more runs in the eighth inning on a two-RBI single by Munetaka Murakami but would lose the game 6-3.
Two days later, my wife and I ventured 24 miles out of Tokyo to visit my brother and his wife in the prefecture of Chiba. We took in an Orix Buffaloes vs. Chiba Lotte Marines game at ZOZO Marine Stadium. The stadium overlooks Makuhari Beach, which we visited before the game. We noticed several differences from the Swallows game two days earlier. Chiba was celebrating its Summer Week with modern and festive-looking black caps and uniforms. The cheerleaders, called M*SPLASH, were on a stage in front of the stadium spraying water on fans to Pit Bull’s Don’t Stop The Party. ZOZO Marine Stadium, built in 1990, is one of the newest stadiums and resembles the former Three Rivers Stadium and Riverfront Stadium that the Pittsburgh Pirates and Cincinnati Reds used to call home, respectively.
The pregame festivities resembled the Los Angeles Dodgers games that I attended, including an in-house DJ, pregame hosts, and theme song rap music for each home player. Unlike the Tokyo Swallows game, the Japanese national anthem was played before the game. The traditional chants were still sung by the respective teams’ fans. Chiba also had a light show accompanied by fireworks in the seventh inning. The Lotte Marines play in the Pacific League, where the designated hitter is used, as opposed to the Yakult Swallows in the Central League, where the pitchers bat.
The game itself was exciting and enjoyable. Chiba struck first against last season’s Japan Series runner-up, Orix, with a home run by Toshiya Satoh. The Buffaloes answered with a home run of their own by Keita Nakagawa. The Lotte Marines regained the lead in the sixth inning with an RBI single by Shingo Ishikawa and added an insurance run with Akito Takabe’s RBI single to win 3-1. The game ended with postgame fireworks, another light show, and a postgame block party. Both games were fun in different ways, and I was glad to be back in Japan to see them.
