78th Annual Tokyo City Corporate Baseball Tourney

Friday night we joined several thousand co-workers for a trip to the Tokyo Dome to support the Honda baseball team in the 78th annual Tokyo City baseball Tourney. We travelled about 2.5 hours by bus from Utsunomiya to Central Tokyo, With Tickets, Food and most importantly, "Beverages" provided. It was our first visit inside the Tokyo dome and it is a real first class facility. Many of Japans largest corporations have company teams and their were 16 represented in this tourney. As the Japanese are rabid baseball fans even at the corporate level the games get pretty large and fan support for their teams is amazing. Until you've been to a ballgame in Japan at the professional or even at this minor league level, it's pretty hard to imagine how wild they actually get. I'm not a huge baseball fan but I have to admit going to games here can be a lot of fun with the crowds getting into the game even more so than NCAA or NFL football in the US. It was cheerleaders and chanting through the entire 9 innings of ball. Honda's competition last night was Mitsubishi, and while fan support for Honda was about 4-1 in our favor, Mitsubishi got it done on the field and won the game 6-4. Honda was done for this tourney, but still we had a great time. Below, I put a vid up on youtube of some of the cheering, which was non-stop. Unfortunately the actual cheerleaders were out of camera range, as they were a bit more "photogenic" than the people seated around us, but you get the idea.