July 28, 2009
Japan Experience! 2009 - Day 2 - Baseball, Yakyu Style
For Day 2 on Monday, July 27, all the students arrived on time at 8:45am having been brought all the way to school by their respective home stay families who each taught the students how to use the trains or buses. We started with a brief welcome ceremony, which included short speeches from Principal Mr. Kohei Fukuda, the Vice-Principal Mr. Kurahara and from the school director, Mr. Yohei Fukuda. This was followed by a short orientation about the program, a tour of the school and then the students had some time to send emails off to family and friends from the computer lab.
While today’s original plan was to have separate Japanese language lessons for the beginners and intermediate level students, the Principal invited us all to the high school club’s baseball game at Jingu Stadium instead!
http://seiritsu.ac.jp/system/?p=5141
The 91st All-Japan National High School Baseball Tournament is on right now, with the qualifying tournament in Tokyo being broken up in to 2 blocks, an East Tokyo block of 145 school teams, and a West Tokyo block with about the same number. This is due to simply so many teams being in the largest city in the world. The two winning teams go on to Koshien in August, the famous stadium hosting all the winning teams from across the county. Monday’s game was special because it was the semi-finals for the East Tokyo block of which Seiritsu qualified, which is the first time for our team in the club’s history!
Everyone ready to watch the game!
Unfortunately the team lost 7-1, but the boys put up a great fight, with 133km/hr pitches, and about half the school’s 1100 students came out to cheer on the team. This was a great opportunity for the Japanese Experience participants to talk to and be around the Japanese students, even while they braved the warm weather and tried to pick up all the different team songs everyone was singing.
Deanna, Jessica, Sara stocking up on drinks at a ‘Konbini’ to survive the heat.
Sophia and Vincent, meeting up with a few Seiritsu students before the game
Eliza and Chelsea enjoying some 'Yakyu'
After the game, we came back to the school and with only 45 minutes left until our 5pm ‘kaisan’ time (break-up for the day) the students were again able to use the internet via the computer lab’s computers.