Japan

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This week, I’ll lead off by talking about ties, an almost foreign concept in contemporary American sports outside of the MLS.

After 12 innings of play in a regular season game, both teams stop and each gets credit for a draw. The basic reasoning behind it is to stem off unneeded exhaustion and time. The Yomiuri Giants have been involved in nine ties so far this season – their most recent one on Sept. 4th against the Yakult Swallows lasted 5 hours and 27 minutes. Not surprisingly, the two shortest tie games this year have been scoreless matches: May 16th, Carp at Giants, 3 hours and 35 minutes & June 2nd, Marines at Giants, 3 hours and 46 minutes.

Standings update:
Central: Yomiuri on top, Chunichi in 2nd (7.5 GB), Yakult 3rd (17.5 GB), Hanshin 4th (20 GB)
Pacific: Nippon-Ham leads, Softbank in 2nd (3.5 GB), Rakuten 3rd (10.5 GB), Seibu 4th (13.5 GB)

Masato Nakamura got a pinch-hit single with 2 outs in the bottom of the 9th to give the Rakuten Golden Eagles a 4-3 win over Nippon Ham on Sunday. The Fighters centerfielder, Yoshio Itoi, could have caught it but it looks like he overran it and couldn’t nab it with his bare right hand.

Also on Sunday: third baseman Takahiro Akai hit a gyakuten timely (lead-changing; 逆転 タイムリー) double down the line in the 6th to drive home two runs and put Hanshin ahead of Hiroshima 2-1. Carp manager Brown was not pleased and pulled Keisuke Imai, putting in Takeshi Komatsu to finish the inning. (Komatsu allowed another run to score on an RBI single by Ryo Asai.) Final tally in that game was 4-1 Tigers.
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Since the US major leagues are heading in the homestretch in their playoff races, I figured I’d lead off this edition of NPB Monday talking a little about how Japan’s playoff system works.

The top three teams in each league qualify for the Climax Series. The 2nd & 3rd place teams face off in a best-of-three series (Stage 1) and then that winner challenges the regular season league champion in a best-of-six series, with the winner of four games moving on to the Japan Series. Why six? Because the season champion automatically gets a one-win advantage, meaning they only have to win three actual games. The Japan Series is a straightforward best-of-seven, just like the World Series. This year’s postseason schedule can be found on JapanBall.com.

Entering Sept. 1st, the Yomiuri Giants lead the Central League by 4 games ahead of the Chunichi Dragons. The Yakult Swallows currently hold third place at 14 games back but Hanshin (19 GB) and Hiroshima (21 GB) have outside chances of overtaking them and making the playoffs. In the Pacific League, the Nippon-Ham Fighters lead with Softbank Hawks (5.5 GB) and Rakuten Golden Eagles (9.5 GB). The fourth-place Seibu Lions aren’t too far behind Rakuten at 12.5 GB.

Here’s a cheer the Fighters’ ouendan used a few months ago during interleague play when pitching ace Yu Darvish was at the plate. This was filmed during a June 6th game against Yomiuri.

They are cheering (from the video‘s desciption):
雄叫びあげて 唸るその剛腕 
我らのエース 日本のエース

osakebi agete unaru sono gouwan
warera no ACE nihon no ACE

Highlights from Hanshin’s 3-1 win over Yomiuri on Sunday. According to JapanBall, the two singles Giants hitter Alex Ramirez had put him over 150 hits for the eighth consecutive season, a new Japanese record.
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Another late evening edition of NPB Monday includes the final inning of this summer’s Koshien tournament and some non-game related activities at Meiji Jingu Stadium. I’ll try to find more inspired material for next week – I was too tired last night after coming home from a friend’s party to do proper research in time for a morning posting.

On Wednesday, the Chuinichi Dragons got all their runs off a 3-run homer by Atsushi Fuiji and a 6-run 8th to beat the Hiroshima Carp 9-3. (boxscore)

With the bases loaded and one out, Shijiro Hiyama pitch-hits in the bottom of the 9th for Hanshin in their Saturday game vs. Hiroshima. Hiyama is initially called out on a swinging third strike but the umpire quickly changes it to a foul ball (the right call), allowing his at-bat to continue. A single that bounced just a bit in
front of the centerfielder’s glove won it for the Tigers, 2-1.

Ninth inning of Monday’s Koshien championship game – in 3 parts

Chuukyoudai Chuukyou (Aichi) gave up five runs to underdog Nihon Bunri (Niigata) with TWO OUTS in the top of the 9th but still won 10-9. After starter Doubayashi gets shifted to the outfield while Morimoto takes the mound – which also happened for the 6th through 8th innings, but Chuukyou’s lead would continue to erode until third baseman Kawai snags a liner to finally end it. Hats off to Nihon Bunri making it an interesting final! [Goro Shigeno]
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While browsing some Japanese baseball videos last night, I thought I could make a weekly feature out of collecting the ones I would consider tweeting out to many people who may not even care. So here is the first attempt at NPB Mondays. I also included some Koshien clips because the tournament started on more than a week ago on August 8th.

With runners on 1st & 2nd and 1 out in the 7th, Fukuoka Softbank Hawks starter Toshiya Sugimoto preserved a 2-0 lead by striking out Seibu Lions’ G.G. (Takahiko) Sato and Hiroshi Hirao. Softbank went on to win that August 9th game 4-1, giving Sugimoto his 10th win of the season. (Sugimoto’s record now stands at 11-3 after Sunday’s eight-inning 1-run outing in Fukuoka’s 9-1 win over Orix.)
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If you follow a number of anime/manga people on Twitter, you may have already read this piece by Lisa Katayama that will run in Sunday’s NY Times Magazine called “Love in 2-D”. If not, I think it’s worth at least taking a look at because it flows well (I have an admiration for good feature writing) and offers an interesting look at “a subset of otaku culture” in Japan and at the psychologies of those involved in it.

I agree with some of my colleagues that the presence of prepubescent characters as targets of affection was disconcerting, particularly if one tries to consider possible misconceptions this could spawn among those not familiar with the scene. One of the people in the piece, Momo, said he never looks at child porn and that he’s “not doing anything to harm anybody”, that the characters “are works of art”, “cute girls that live in [his] imagination”. He makes a clear distinction between fictional characters and reality, unlike the reasoning behind recent obscenity cases in America involving manga.

However, what concerned me more was the mention of a government survey where 50 percent of men and women said they do not have friends of the opposite sex. (The other part that was included was the finding that more than 25% of men and women ages 30-34 are virgins but I’m more interested by the one I chose to bring up.) To me, this points to a larger societal problem of nervousness and insulation. I don’t claim to understand casual Japanese relationships – I’m using “relationships” in a broader sense to mean people you keep in touch with on a regular basis – so I don’t know if people you know from work would be considered as friends. Are there fewer social activities available or something? According to one of Lisa’s tweets, the survey comes from the government agency that monitors population and social security so there’s a hint for those who want to look for it.

Also: for those interested about how the term moé was mentioned, Lisa describes it in a way that seems a bit too escapist for me but it serves its purpose for those unfamiliar with it:

In Japan the fetishistic love for two-dimensional characters is enough of a phenomenon to have earned its own slang word, moe, homonymous with the Japanese words for “burning” or “budding.” In an ideal moe relationship, a man frees himself from the expectations of an ordinary human relationship and expresses his passion for a chosen character, without fear of being judged or rejected.

I don’t feel like writing a lengthy post about the societal views of love and relationships and frankly I think other writers can elucidate on that subject much better than I can, but I did want to write something about the article to get it off my mind for a while.

UPDATE 7/27: Adamu of Mutantfrog Travelogue has written a well-constructed response to the NYT piece where he debunks the two key statistics cited by Katayama and explains why making Nisan, the balding 30-something man, the focus skewed the piece unfairly (he thinks it would have been more fair to begin with Ken Okayama).

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