Welcome to Japan

(December, 2019)

I grew up in a place called Duluth.

It’s a place in the north of Minnesota built onto the western edge of Lake Superior. It’s everything you might expect from your typical hair-brained American city. It’s got your greasy burger joints, your high school football fields, your wide open places to park a car, and it’s got places where you can catch a movie for just $2.50. The Warriors play baseball in Duluth, at a ballpark that Don-o and I used to call Good Ol’ Doyle Buhl. It’s the home of the North Summer Brewfest, the birthplace of a one-time Baywatch Babe, and the birthplace also of one Robert Zimmerman.

I hear that guy wrote a pretty good song or two at one time.

So, yeah, Duluth is an American place.

Yet, it is also nearly Canadian.

On an afternoon you can hitch a road trip just up highway 61 and yourself in Thunder Bay just a couple hours later. If you sit in a bar in Duluth I guarantee you’ll hear an apology from someone within five minutes, and you might well live there for ten years before you’ll hear a freakin’ horn honked in anger. It’s a city that likes its Molson as well as any other, and a place that appreciates a good curler.

And, of course, it’s a hockey town.

Sure, the Warriors draw a crowd, but it’s college hockey that brings out the rowdies. And the real renegades play a hard-nosed game called Bandy, which is to hockey as rugby is to international football.

All-in-all, Duluth is a strange mix.

But as strangeness goes, it can’t compare to Japan.

So I get off the plane in Tokyo, and the first thing I know I’m lost.

I’m sure the plane’s rot-gut vodka isn’t helping any.

I take a cab, and it turns out the guy speaks the same amount of English as I do Japanese. I point at a picture of my hotel, and the guy nods and “yeah, yeah’s” me, but fifteen minutes later I’m pretty sure he’s not going to the right place.

Tokyo’s a big-assed city, a New York kinda place. A busy place full of movement, full of trains packed full of salarymen, and rivers of people who flow over streets clean enough to make you wonder if you’re in some kind of staged movie. Crossings at street corners are like a mash-up of the running of the bulls and a National Geographic documentary on the spawning runs of salmon–everyone going upstream the entire way, jets vs. sharks vs. moray eels vs. little cars and bicycles and scooters that swoosh by in their electric way.

And it’s a loud place.

Music plays, and ads blare and lights flash from 3D digitals in dizzying rings.

Cabbies use their horns as their base method of communication and my guy is playing lead baritone. I wave the brochure at the driver again, and he waves back. Finally, I get on the phone and call my Japanese agent, a man named Pak Ci. Pak talks to the driver, and ten minutes later I arrive at the hotel.

That’s how I get to the place I’m at right now, a hotel room on the 24th floor looking out over Tokyo as the night time steals over it. I’m dead tired, and sipping complimentary sake from a plastic cup. Behind me the room is dark except for my television that is playing one of those strange sadomasochistic game shows the Japanese seem to die for.

It’ll start for me tomorrow.

After weeks of haggling, I’ve got interviews lines up with every GM and owner in the LRS who is willing to chat with me, and I’ve got tips in place that might get me discussion with some of the guys I think are key players. I’m doing blog tours, and I’m doing some television. And, of course, I’m hoping to find a few others around Japan, dig up perhaps a few folks the authorities might not think of. There’s something about this whole thing that hasn’t felt right from the moment I first heard of it, you know? It’s made me feel unhappy. Used, maybe. I don’t know. But the whole thing can get me angry when I think about it. I want to talk to people about it. I want to understand.
Then there’s the game itself.

Now that I’m here in Japan, I find I have this strange need, almost an itch, to actually see a game.

It’s a weird feeling. One I haven’t had for …

I shrug to myself.

… all these years.

At one point baseball had been everything to me–well, it had been everything to me and Don-o. I wrote about it a ton. I found my girl as a result of baseball. Lost her on account of it, too, I suppose.

Maybe that’s why I quit looking at the game itself a couple seasons back. Maybe that’s why, despite writing about baseball for six years, I couldn’t tell you what Jamie Boyd’s OPS was last season. Can’t say for sure.

All I really know is that as I sit here in this Tokyo hotel room, sipping the last of my sake and crumbling the cup up in my hand, I suddenly feel the full truth of the fact that I’m a long, long way away from my days Duluth, Minnesota, that I’m watching the lights come on across Japan, and it looks like a static blanket of white over a city of movement, and I’m wondering what that whole image might say about who I am and what I’ve become.

And that suddenly I would give pretty much anything I had right then to smell a field of green grass, to hear the crack of wood, and to see a white ball streak across a cloudless blue sky.