"My son's baseball game is tomorrow," I hear Kazu say on the phone. "It's the first game of the season without the sixth graders. He's starting. Can you be there?"
"Of course," I say. "Definitely. What time?"
Kazu tells me the game will begin at 10:30, and that his wife will pick me up at 10am the following morning.
"Great," I tell him. "I'm looking forward to it."
I set my alarm for 9am because one hour is plenty of time to get ready. Add to this, sleep and I do not get along of late so I want to sleep in as late as possible. In my dreams on Saturday morning there's a noise, a buzz, and then a siren. I wake up groggy and realize my phone is ringing.
"Hello?" I say, trying not to mumble. I hear Mika's voice on the other end. Kazu's wife is calling at ... 8:30?? So much for sleep.
"Did I wake you up?"
"No, of course not," I lie.
"I'll be there in 20 minutes."
Huh? Did I hear her right? I rub my eyes as if this will wake me up. That means she'll be here shortly after 9am. What happened to 10am?
"Got it," I say and panic.
"See you soon," she chirps and hangs up.
An hour is plenty of time to get ready but 20 minutes is not. I rush through my shower, throw on something clean and look for the bottle of tea I thought I left sitting on the coffee table the night before. I see Mika's car outside, pulling into the back parking lot. She's early. (Of course.) I grab my bag, hoping everything I need will still be inside and rush out the door.
I follow her in my car through winding mountain roads climbing higher and higher into the hills. I've not been to this part of Ofunato before. It's a good thing I'm not trying to find this place on my own. I'd be lost for hours.
We arrive at the baseball field and join a group of mothers already watching the boys at batting practice. I notice the mothers are all in blue. There must have been a memo. Team colors. I'm in black. Oh well. We exchange our good mornings. There's a lot of buzzing, mothers chit-chatting in twos and threes. I stand over to the side watching the two teams playing. One of the teams has a large cheering section. The mothers all in purple t-shirts (they definitely had a memo) chanting something I don't quite understand. I marvel at their rhythm, that everyone knows the melody, that they seem to know what to sing when. Pop fly caught? There's a chant. Strike out? Something different. Base hit? A combination of cheering and waving and a lyrical sing-song I can't make out. These moms are serious about cheering.
I walk back over to the moms and say, "I have a question." They all look up. I point to the moms in purple and ask, "Do we have chants, too? Are we going to cheer?" Some giggle, others nod, while Mika says smiling, "Sort of. But there aren't enough of us to make a lot of noise. We do what we can though, right?" She turns to ask the moms. More heads nod.
"Amya-san, You can cheer with us," a young mother I've not met before tells me.
"Well," I start, "I would, but," and here I tell stories about cheering American-style. We boo, hiss, toss things onto the field to show our displeasure, make fun of the players on the other team, jeer our own when they make an error. "Remember, I'm a Boston Red Sox fan. We're maybe the worst of the bunch. We take baseball seriously. Our cheering gets nasty. I don't know that you want me cheering. I might yell at the ref or something."
Instantly they begin to talk. I hear "how different" and "yelling at the ref?" and "we can't boo" and I take it all in, smiling. In the end, I join the mothers in the cheering section, vowing not to make a fool out of myself or Kazu (who's coaching today) or the other moms. I'm handed two plastic bottles filled with little plastic marbles. "Use these," I'm told by another mother I don't know. I agree and sit down on the concrete bleacher seat.
I don't know why I agreed to watch Kazu and Mika's boy play. Our team stinks. We'll surely lose today (again) and this will put Kazu in a bad mood for the rest of the weekend. Indeed, by the bottom of the third inning we're down five to one, our pitcher having walked every other player, and then thrown enough wild pitches for them to score. I regret my decision to be at this game and start planning my exit.
Then the winds change direction, the sun shines down on us without burning our skin, and we can almost hear angels singing. There are moments when bad luck turns to good, and I'm about to witness one right here in a baseball field tucked away in the mountains of Tohoku. I see Kazu running out to the third base ref. I take away from Kazu's pointing and several boys running that he's switching pitchers. Not a bad idea, considering at this rate we'll surely lose. Again.
The pitcher on the mound is a boy so small and so short that I immediately question Kazu's decision. There's no way this little thing can throw a ball with speed and accuracy. I look down at the small boy and picture myself picking him up like I used to with my son, at first heavy but then remarkably light once he's in my arms. I watch the boy throw a few practice pitches and am pleased I didn't speak my thoughts about his ability to anyone around me. The boy can throw.
He strikes out the first at bat, and here the magic begins. The ground ball to the short stop is caught, and the pitch thrown to first base is perfect. Another out. We all cheer, standing up in unison, banging our bead-filled bottles together making quite the racket. The next batter hits the ball high to right field. The mothers and I collectively cringe. None of our outfielders can catch a fly ball. We follow the ball with our eyes as it lands into the glove, and jump up again cheering wildly. This change in pitchers kick-started a series of hits, homeruns (including a grand slam by Kazu and Mika's boy), errors by the other team, and at the end of the game we had won 16 to five. Our team rocks.
All throughout the game, the mothers cheered and called out, their timing perfect and their voices in complete unison. That whole "sort of" comment from before was total crap I now realize. One of the dads calls out something into his yellow megaphone and the moms repeat it perfectly each time. We, too, have special cheers for certain acts of bravery from the boys on the field. I don't know these of course, and so I just bang my bottles together and often one time too many, turning heads asking with their eyes "Who's the one that's off beat?" I decide I'll just try to end my bottle-banging a few beats early in the hopes I don't make a bigger fool out of myself.
Later that night I ask Kazu about his decision to switch pitchers. "Why didn't you just use the second pitcher from the beginning? That first pitcher cost us five runs in three innings. You saw how well that small boy pitched. I don't get it."
"Well," Kazu says, taking a long drag on his cigarette, "the first boy is older."
Here we go. Age trumps merit. I'm about to ask, "You'll put a lesser pitcher in because he's older, even if it means you might sacrifice the game?" but don't. The serious adherence to the concept of hierarchy here in Ofunato strikes again (no pun intended). I find myself amazed by the way social rules control behavior, especially as I compare Tohoku's to Tokyo rules. It's as if I have two different lives here in Japan; Ofunato and Tokyo could not be more different. It's not that Tokyo lacks a system of advancement based on hierarchy. Certainly the rise to the top is in some part based on age. There is, however, an understanding in Tokyo that merit matters. Good employees, even younger ones are promoted. In Tokyo the old system of age before ability is on its way out. In Ofunato, there's no attempt to embrace this system of merit over age.
The good news is these pockets of cultural shifts that occur between regions keeps me on my toes. I dare not assume anything in Japan. The bad news is, I always feel two steps behind. Just when I think I've got life in Tohoku figured out, I encounter a new rule or a previously unidentified norm. I tell myself all this uncertainty keeps me young and fresh. Most days I believe that. On Saturday, I focused on how proud I was of those boys, and of Kazu, and of the cheering mothers. I'll work on identifying more previously unheard of Tohoku rules later.
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