2019 Japan Trip - Day 2 - Measure Twice, Cut Once

Day Two

I was reminded of a lesson in preparedness this day: Measure twice and cut once.  That’s what they say, right?  It counts for travel schedules too, I discovered.  

Sendai

First, the buffet at the hotel is very good.  A typical combination of traditional Japanese and Western breakfast items.  I continued my habit of eating a hybrid breakfast.  The basis is a traditional Japanese breakfast: Grilled fish, rice, miso soup.  I add konbu to the rice, a type of fermented seaweed that I like.  I also add a regular green salad.  For some reason the salads the Japanese serve at lunch at dinner are strange to me.  Cabbage instead of lettuce.  Lots of corn added.  At breakfast I can get lots of dark green lettuce, cherry tomatoes, etc.  I also add orange juice and some type of bread.  

I think someone at the hotel's buffet relies on Google Translate too much.

The reason we came to Sendai was for a baseball game.  Before coming to Japan I was three stadiums away from achieving a goal, to see a baseball game in all twelve stadiums in the NPB, the Japanese Professional Baseball league.  We had tickets for the game between the home club, the Rakuten Eagles of Sendai, and the visiting team, the Nippon Ham Fighters of Sapporo.  

For those who don’t know, all but one team in the NPB is owned by a company.  The Nippon Ham company of Sapporo owns the Fighters.  So it’s not the Sapporo Fighters, it’s the Nippon Ham Fighters.  The only exception is the Hiroshima Carp, which is owned by the city of Hiroshima, just like the Packers of Green Bay.  

I had purchased the tickets after the season schedule were set, but before the start times were known.  We started to plan our day around a 6 PM start time, which is when most weekday games in Japan start.  The choices broke down between Old Places, a famous temple and some castle ruins, and New Places, such as something called the “Sendai Mediatheque.”  Wikipedia calls it a library, but it is more like a multimedia information transfer hub in a very cool looking building.  

We didn’t go there, even though we decided to go to New Places during this visit.  That’s because one of the New Places has to offer is the Kirin Beer Brewery.  

Kirin Beer Factory

Getting to the Kirin brewery isn’t easy if you don’t have a car.  You have to take one of two buses, which have wildly varying schedules.  And when you get off the bus and walk the few blocks to the entrance, it looks like you’re not going to any place outsiders are allowed to go.  It looks like a factory for making beer.  We wandered through the open gate toward the guard booth to ask if they offered tours when a guy in a uniform came running up to us from another building.  

“Tour?  Tour?  You want tour?”  

He directed us to the visitor information center where we found a staff of smiling young women, dressed in dress uniforms the color of beer, waiting to show us around.  

Overall the tour was fun.  It was all in Japanese, and our tour guide spoke in very polite, honorific language, “keigo.”  In keigo you sometimes you a different verb than in standard Japanese.  “Goran kudasai,” means “please look,” in keigo, which is different than “mite kudasai,” which means the same thing in standard Japanese.  

Though I’ve studied keigo I don’t use it very much, and found myself struggling to keep up at times.  I probably missed about half of what she was instructing us on about the beer making process, but I did learn some things.  Such as, beer gets its color from the hops used to make it.  Hops are green on the outside, but the kernel in the middle is yellow, which colors the beer.  Also, Kirin’s process is different in that most breweries, from what I got out of the presentation, send their product through a preparation process twice, making something called a “wort.”  They use some combination of the two worts to make their beer.  Kirin uses a one pass process, producing one wort from which they make their beer.  I also found that Kirin inspects the product along the way at each step.  At the bottling step, for instance, they’ll reject one bottle out of a thousand because it might not be sealed correctly or the label got stuck on incorrectly or something.  The contents of the bottle are thrown away.  The bottle itself is recycled, something which they’ve been doing for 80 years.  

And yes, we asked, you can’t take the rejected bottles of beer with you.  

But we didn’t go without.  At the start of the tour they ask you questions like, “Are you prohibited by religious beliefs from drinking beer?” and “How did you come to our factory today?  Did you drive, were you driven, or did you take public transportation.”  Based on the answers you got a different color badge.  Ours were green, which meant at the end of the tour we got to sample three different beers they make.  And they were not stingy in what they gave us.  These were three large glasses of each.  We were then asked which we liked best and why.  They even gave us a coin bank made from a Kirin beer can.

We left the brewery feeling very, very happy we’d decided on taking the tour.  

An Unexpectedly Late Game

While heading back to the hotel to get our tickets for the ball game, we were checking to see if we could still fit the Sendai Mediatheque in.  That’s when I made what looked like a horrible discovery.

The game had already started.  They had scheduled the game for a 1 PM start, not the typical 6 PM start I was used to.  And I hadn’t checked the tickets when I’d received them to verify the time.  

I was feeling terrible.  The basis of this trip was fulfilling a bucket-list goal.  The game was about half over when I made the discovery.  We wondered if we could exchange the tickets for the next day’s game, which was also a 1 PM start.  I then realized that if we did that, we wouldn’t make our check-in time at the Onsen spa we were going to be staying at starting that day.  

We decided to go to the stadium and see what we could of the game. 

When we arrive, the game was in the 6th inning.  The score was 0-0.  Neither side had scored.  I asked someone sitting behind us how it had gone.  Each side had switched pitchers three times already.  They’d been playing cautiously.  Nothing had happened.  Each time had only 3 hits each.  We settled in to watch the game, half-expecting extra innings.  

That’s when the scoring started.  

In the bottom of the 6th, Rakuten got a lead off single.  The next batter smartly moved him over with a nice bunt.  The runner scored on a double after that.  

The hometown crowd woke up in a big way.  

The Fighters came back, though.  They got two runs in the top of the 7th.  The crowd kept chanting encouraging their team.  They weren’t perturbed by the team falling behind, nor from the snowflakes that started falling.  It was probably team pride that kept them going.

Me, I needed a cup of hot wine they were selling in the seats.  

Both sides were getting hits now, but no one was coming across.  Then, in the bottom of the 8th, an American player for the Eagles, Zelous Wheeler, squared up on a breaking pitch and sent it flying into the stands in Left-Center.  There was another runner on at the time.  The Eagles now had a 3-2 lead.  

The Eagles closer did his job in the top of the 9th, getting the first guy to pop-out, striking out the next two.  They put Wheeler on a stage and interviewed him before the crowd about how he was able to get the home run and how he thought the team had played.  They liked his answers, cheering at each one.  

Though we’d arrived late, we decided it had been a good experience nonetheless.  It was as if the game was waiting for us to arrive before it got started.  The people sitting behind us that we’d been talking with asked to take their picture with us.  Everyone left happy.

William and I went to eat gyutan, Sendai beef tongue, at a very good restaurant to end the day. 

And I checked the start times for the next two games I’d bought tickets for when I got back to the hotel.