After the lengthy saga of my two days in Fukuoka, this post will be mercifully short.
I only had two things on my agenda for Wednesday, May 22nd - traveling back to Tokyo and going to a Yomiuri Giants game. The train I had a reserved seat on left Fukuoka at 9:23 but that was not the train I had originally wanted. The one I really wanted left an hour earlier but was sold out when I had tried to get a reservation the previous week. However, I decided to once again try my new trick of grabbing an unreserved seat on the earlier train so I headed over to Hakata Station a little after 8 AM. There were some other folks hoping to do the same thing so there were short lines by where each door on the unreserved cars would be when the train arrived. Luckily there were plenty of available seats so we were all able to get on.
The trains from Fukuoka don’t go all the way to Tokyo - at least not the trains you can use the JR Pass for. They only take you as far as the Shin-Osaka station and then you need to switch to a Tokyo-bound train there. We arrived at Shin-Osaka around 11 AM and the train I hoped to be on for Tokyo was leaving about 20 minutes later. Of course, since I was originally scheduled to arrive in Osaka at noon, I didn’t have a reserved seat for this train which forced me to again go the unreserved route. This time there were hardly any other passengers with the same intent so there ended up only being maybe four other people in the car with me. I kind of expected that we’d pick up more folks in Kyoto but the car remained relatively empty all the way to Tokyo.
We got into Tokyo around 1415, roughly three hours after leaving Osaka and just under six after leaving Fukuoka. I had positioned myself on the train again to see Mount Fuji but the weather was hazy enough that it wasn’t visible (or I wasn’t paying attention when it was).
The hotel I would be staying at the last few days of my trip was the Toyoko Inn Kayabacho Eki. As you can probably guess from the name, it’s located near the Kayabacho subway stop which was just two stops away from Tokyo Station on the Tozai line. It sounds convenient but it’s a little less than you’d think as the Tokyo Station stop in the Tozai line is a bit of a hike from the main part of the station. On the way to the subway, I grabbed a bowl of katsu-don as a late lunch at a small restaurant in the bowels of Tokyo Station.
I made it to my hotel shortly afterwards and got checked in. I had a little bit of time to relax before heading to Tokyo Dome for the Giants game. I had been to the Dome before - I had seen the 2013 World Baseball Classic Pool 2 games there on my first trip to Japan - but I’d never seen the Giants play there. Their opponent that evening was the Chunichi Dragons.
There are several subway stops right by Tokyo Dome but I was a little surprised that Google Maps didn’t route me to any of them. Instead, it sent me to Iidabashi station in the Tozai line which was a few blocks away. There were two advantages to this - the first being I wouldn’t have to switch trains coming or going and the second being that it’d be a little less crowded. The walk from the subway stop took me along the Kanda river and I soon joined into the press of folks getting off at the Suidobashi Station on the Chuo line.
The plaza outside the Dome had a big Giants souvenir store set up and I went through it looking to see if they had any baseball cards. I came up empty. There was a smaller stand for the Dragons which I also went through although I didn’t expect to find any cards there (and I didn’t).
My tickets for the game were in the upper deck and I had to climb the stairs outside the park to get to my gate. There’s two staircases on either side of the home plate entrance to the Dome and they’re named for Shigeo Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh. The two sides reflect the positions the two played with Nagashima being the third base side and Oh being the first base side. There’s a relief of each player next to the staircase and a picture of them printed on the staircase itself. The gate I needed to go to was on the first base side so I needed to go up the Oh stairs.
Once inside the Dome, I did my usual check to see if the player bento boxes had baseball cards - they did not. I picked up a “power steak bowl” meal that came with a Hayato Sakamoto sticker. It was pretty tasty.
I had sat in Tokyo Dome’s upper deck for the Cuba-Netherlands game in the 2013 WBC and thought the view was pretty good so I had opted to sit up there again. The view was still good but as it was a little more crowded for this game, I felt pretty cramped. Not as bad as at Jingu but it was still a little uncomfortable.
I’m still amused by the Shigeo Nagashima ad just above his retired number. It used to be a physical ad but now it’s on the new enormous video board so it’s not there all the time. That photo is probably from the 1990s though.
The pitching matchup for tonight's game was Shinnosuke Ogasawara for the Dragons and Kenshin Hotta for the Giants. I had seen Ogasawara pitch a week earlier in Nagoya where he had thrown eight scoreless innings against the Tigers, only to come away with a no decision in a game Chunichi ultimately lost in extra innings as the Dragons had been unable to score any runs for him. Incredibly the Dragons had gone almost 40 straight innings without scoring any runs for him.
This game didn't start out looking like it was going to be any better for him. Yoshihiro Maru led off the bottom of the first with a home run and, just like that, the Dragons were down 1-0. The Giants tacked on a second run in the bottom of the third in a rally that saw Hayato Sakamoto become just the second player in NPB history to reach 450 doubles. The other player was watching from the Dragons dugout - Chunichi manager Kazuyoshi Tatsunami.
The tide turned in the game in the top of the sixth inning when the Dragons exploded for three runs with the big hit of the rally being a two run double from Orlando Calixte which knockeed Hotta out of the game. The Dragons added another run in the top of the seventh to make the score 4-2. A trio of Dragons relievers kept it that way with Raidel Martinez ending the game by striking out pinch hitter Louis Okoye and notching his 13th save. Here are the game highlights:
I was pretty happy with the outcome of the game for two reasons. The first is that the Dragons are my favorite team and this was the first time in four tries that I had seen them win. The second was that it kept my streak of never seeing the Giants win intact. I've seen Yomiuri four times now (once in 2019 and three times on this trip) and they've lost every game.
I headed out with the rest of the announced crowd of 41,080. I had forgotten one of the annoying things about the Dome - since the roof is held up by air pressure, you have to enter and leave the ballpark via revolving doors so that there’s no drop in air pressure. Coming in isn’t so bad but when everyone is trying to leave at once, it creates a bit of a traffic jam since really only one or two people can go through at a time. Just to say I’d done both sides, I went out through the Nagashima gate:
As I had hoped, catching the train at Iidabashi was much less crowded than it would have been at any of the other stations and I was back at my hotel not long after the game ended. I'd be back on the Shinkansen the following day but for nowhere near as long of a trip.
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