Notes: Tokyo Dome and The Difference Between Japanese and American Baseball

The first weekend here, Lisa’s family gave us their awesome seats to a baseball game between the Yomiuri Giants and the Osaka Tigers, my first Japanese baseball game ever.

The differences I noticed between American baseball and Japanese baseball being that everyone chants a different song for each batter in complete synchronicity, the stadium food includes fried shrimp, when you hit a homerun you get a stuffed animal, and Tiger fans cosplay as Tigers. That’s about it. The dome itself had no conspicuous technology, which confused me. I expect the oldest tech I’d find in such a prominent structure to come from the year 2020, no older. Time for a retrofit, I thought, until Lisa pointed out that everyone was watching highlights and listening to commentary on seg 1 digital tuners on mobile phones. The Dome has a lot of wireless infrastructure so that tons of people can use their phones without bogging down the network. (Basically, more antennas.)

I took the above shots with a Nikon D700, program mode, vivid colour profile, with a 24-120mm lens. I could have used longer glass, but shots were fine. Given the lightning, I did have to tweak exposure a bit when the stadium lights overwhelmed the AI’s ability to weight exposure towards whatever subjects were focused on. The shot at the top of this post is terrible, but I love the composition and the sign message: Do not take your eyes off the ball!

[TokyoMango]