In the land of the Yomiuri Giants

Wed, 29 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

The Chicago Cubs and the New York Mets began the 2000 baseball season Wednesday in Tokyo, with the Cubs winning the first of a two-game series, 5-3. For many Americans, the sight of baseball on Japanese Astroturf on the morning highlight shows was an unfamiliar one. But to me, Japanese baseball has always been a pastime, and to see the first regular season games played outside North America was just another twist in an unusual cultural import-export business.

When I was about 7, I became an unlikely consumer of an unlikely Japanese cultural product. Every morning, a public television station in New York would broadcast a two-hour Japanese-language morning show, with news, weather and talk. But I made sure to tune in at 7:25; just in time to catch the sports segment, often consisting only of day-old baseball scores and highlights.

I had been following baseball for a couple of years by this point, and I was a fan of the Mets -- my hometown team, about to become World Series champions. But here I was, entering a baseball culture nearly 7,000 miles away just because I happened to stumble upon it while channel surfing before school.

Salon.com > Sasha Issenberg

In the land of the Yomiuri Giants