Cheering BE-SU-BO-RU style!

Yesterday I had a great experience with my school. We travelled by bus from Senmaya to Morioka - ok that was not so great on the winding roads, but we all travelled up to Morioka to watch our school take on the SIchinoseki Gakuien (or a school that sounds like that) in a baseball game. Now I mentioned once before that it's pretty serious, the high school baseball here, so with the news that we had won the first game, the entire school bar office staff and one of the vice principals was bussed two and a half hours away to support the team! Quite a feat. Interesting choice too as the schools are only 35 minutes apart to play all the games in Morioka. The team actually had stayed in Morioka since the knockout tournament began. Perhaps this is the power the prefecture capitals have here in Japan.

The ground was wide and open, and left me wondering why baseball is played on dirt with a grass outfield. Nicer to play on grass all the way, surely?? Anyways, we waited outside the ground for 20 minutes and were finally let in. The cheering is all very organised, and every student knows all the chants and dare I say it? - dance moves!When your school is batting it's your turn to cheer. Our school was very very good at cheering, with lots of songs, many apparently anime songs, and the strange custom of dunking three buckets of water on the three cheer leaders at the start of each batting innings. The leaders, by the way, are all boys and were in full school uniform!
Thankfully it was sunny, around 24 degrees - perfect. The rain, as mentioned, has delayed this tournament big time!

Preparing the playing area.

The game went on, and I was encouraged to dance and cheer and I joined in. I don't want to dob on the other teachers, but they weren't quite so enthusiastic. The brass band and the cheer leaders led everyone, and we had a blast. Half-way through the seventh innings, the game was called off because it wasn't close. we were losing 9-0 at the time! The opposition looked much bigger than our students I must admit, and I was told they ran 10 km a day! That's what I mean by taking it seriously. I was also told our players didn't run so far.
And we piled back into the buses and headed back, another 2.5 hours, to school. At times the cheering overshadowed the game. Actually, it did most of the time. The result didn't matter, a good time was had by all, and in a country where there is so much pressure on students to do well in tests and the like, where they are worked incredibly hard, that's a very good thing!

The Rainy Season

Last year I was warned - 'oh the rainy season is coming' around June. It never really did. There was a day here and a day there of rain, yet I thought 'rainy season' was a bit of an exaggeration. This year, however, It's the reverse, a day here and a day there of sun, but generally rain is the default setting. We've had one day without rain this week, that was Tuesday.
Today I was supposed to be joining the entire high school in going to Morioka by bus to cheer our baseball team on. It didn't happen because the weather gods were not with us. In fact the entire high school tournament - many games of which are televised here in Japan, is four days behind schedule because of the rain!
Still, although it rained all day and last night too, it's not raining right now. The temperature is down too so I should be thankful for that small mercy. As a break approaches, I hopefully will update more for you.

Today I'd like to share some photos around the Morioka castle site. Well, it's more of an old fortress and now a garden with impressive (restored) walls and a very pleasant place to spend some time. I was there three or four weeks ago and the weather was perfect for that day! And then it rained the next!

Sorry muchly for the lack of blog posts for the last month and a bit. Life can get on top of you sometimes and before you know it SNAP! You haven't blogged for ages.
I've been having some severe issues with Kindle - but I finally received a payment (of around 10 bucks!) last week. It was all a matter of matching names correctly for my bank account and my kindle account, but I kept getting bad information. It was rather frustrating.

 At least I was finally able to see something for my work - and if you're interested in my travel writings, don't forget to check out my Amazon Kindle Author page -
Andrew Boland's Kindle Author Page

It's always been a tiny trickle of money, but I use that to validate my whole existence on this Earth.
I hope to blog again soon, maybe Monday or Tuesday! Hopefully the baseball will be on tomorrow, and Sunday there should be more cricket in Morioka! Until then, take care!