All Together Now: Report from the Frontlines of Japanese Sport

Since arriving in Tokyo three weeks ago I've gone to a J League soccer game and a baseball game, which is well above my usual rate of pro sports attendance. I had been interested in seeing some Japanese sports, mostly because of what I had heard about the intense and intricately coordinated cheering of each team's loyal fans. One of my roommates, An-chan, is seriously into sports, so she's been happy to arrange a few trips and it's been a fun way to spend time together.

We're not from around here

The first game we went to was a J League soccer match between the Urawa Reds and Niigata Albirex, at Saitama Stadium in Urawa. Urawa's fans are apparently well-known for their cheering, and An-chan purposely got tickets in the visiting section. She said that if we sat in the Urawa section we would surely be hassled for our lack of enthusiasm. When we showed up at the stadium (a beautiful facility built for the 2002 World Cup) it was raining quite hard and each side's fans were already sporting their official team ponchos (red for the Reds, orange for Abirex).

Not only did we not have the right ponchos, we had not prepared for rain at all. After getting nearly soaked, we managed to buy some blue ponchos the stadium was offering. They at least kept us from getting wetter, and in addition they identified us as non-combatants.

When the teams took the field, the highly choreographed cheering started. In the Reds section, directly across the stadium from us, a giant banner saying (in English) "HERE WE GO" was unfurled over people's heads, covering probably 2,000 people. They ran through a number of cheers before the banner disappeared and they settled on a single song, repeated incessantly with associated hand motions and occasional coordinated shouts. Watching this spectacle from across the field I was reminded of the computer generated scenes of orc armies in the Lord of the Rings movies. I found it genuinely frightening. I was also glad we weren't over there, since all the waving banners must make it hard to see the field.

Meanwhile, our side (we were sitting with the Albirex fans) tried to put together a response. Our numbers were much smaller but it was a pretty big crowd for a visiting team. I tried to join in the cheering and singing but it was hard to understand the words. Even the simplest cheers-- clapping and yelling "Albirex!" -- turned out to be quite difficult because of the way Japanese pronunciation adds syllables to foreign words. Do you remember that song "Pump Up The Volume," I think from the late-1980s? Okay, clap your hands to the rhythm of the lyric, "Pump up the volume," maybe a little slower than the original. Now try to chant the word "Albirex" to that rhythm. Hard to fit three syllables into five beats, right? Not if you're Japanese, in which case you would say "A-ru-bi-re-kus." Five syllables.

The most surreal moment came when the Albirex fans started singing Elvis's "I Can't Help Falling in Love With You" over and over again. No changes in the lyrics, nothing. I wondered if this was something they picked up from British soccer fans, some ironic hooligan trick or something. My roommate thinks they just liked singing it.

Anyway, our side was nowhere near as frightening as the Reds fans were, I'm sure. This must be why Niigata lost 2-1, after taking a 1-0 lead soon after halftime. Disappointing, but of course the game was fun anyway.

Rise up, Ogasawara!

For my next adventure in Japanese cheerleading, I attended a pro baseball game at the Tokyo Dome, again with my roommate An-chan, as well as a few others. We ended up at this particular game because I had decided, while watching sports highlights on TV, that my team was the Nippon Ham Fighters, based solely on the name.

What, after all, is a "Ham Fighter?" One who fights ham? ("We will not rest until this land has been rid of ham!") Or, just as a sword fighter wields a sword, should you expect a ham fighter to club you with a smoked pork thigh?

The less funny truth is that the team is owned by Nippon Ham, a meat packing company, and the mascot is the Fighters. (Each Japanese baseball team is named after the company that owns it, so you have the Yomiuri Giants (after the newspaper), the Hanshin Tigers (after the Railway Company), etc.) I think the Nippon Ham company realized at some point that the name was sort of absurd to some ears (perhaps because the American ringers they signed seemed to smirk every time the team's name was mentioned) so many of their promotional materials add a hyphen, like so: "Nippon-Ham Fighters." That certainly takes care of any confusion.

Anyway, they play in Hokkaido most of the time, but they used to be based in Tokyo, and this week they were playing a couple of special games in their old home stadium, the Tokyo Dome. So this was a good opportunity to somewhat ironically cheer on the Ham Fighters.

Cheering at baseball games is more organized and more accessible than soccer cheering. They handed out a printout of the crucial cheers: a couple generic team cheers, and a personalized cheer to employ when each player comes up to bat. (You can see the lyric sheet behind the Ham Fighters logo above.)

When your team is fielding, you sit quietly and listen skeptically while the other team's fans salute their batters one after the other. When your team is batting, it's time to stand up and pay attention to the guys who take turns (one per inning) leading the cheers. I guess you could call them cheerleaders, but my sense of that word is so caught up in pom-poms and dance routines that it really just confuses things. These guys (and one girl) wore orange and blue yukata-like robes (as in the picture above). At the beginning of each inning, that inning's designated cheerleader would cup his hands and somewhat elaborately ask for everyone's cooperation before the cheer would begin for the first batter. Then he would tell you which cheer was next, and coordinate everything with whistle commands.

The personalized cheers were pretty cool. For one thing, the lyrics have a certain poetry to them. The cheer for Michihiro Ogasawara, for example, could be translated thus:

When Ogasawara came to bat, the cheerleader led us in a few warm up cheers before starting up this song. Everyone sings one verse, pounding plastic noisemakers in rhythm, and then yells "Kattobase! Ogasawara!" (Wallop it! Ogasawara!). Repeat until at-bat is over. I'm not sure how this helps the batter, but it's fun for the crowd.

It strikes me that the closest American fans ever get to these personalized odes is when crowds gang up on a player on the opposing team. For example, when my high school played the crosstown rivals in basketball, the opposing crowd chanted "Acid, Acid, Acid, . . ." whenever one of our players, who apparently had recently dabbled in hallucinogens, went to the free throw line. Bottom line: Compared to us, Japanese people are way nicer and better organized.

The game itself started out quite bleak for our Ham Fighters, with Softbank getting a grand slam in the second inning. Down 6-0 going into the bottom of the 7th, the good guys staged a comeback and tied the game in the bottom of the ninth before losing in the 10th. The would-be hero, who hit a two-run double to send the game into extra innings, was actually Ogasawara, the Japanese-made cannon.

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