2019 Japan Trip - Day 13 - Officially the Worst Day of the Trip

The thirteenth day of my trip to Japan this year was a travel day.  We were going to head to the airport to catch a flight to Tokyo, then get to our hotel in Kawasaki, across the Tamagawa river from Haneda Airport, for our final couple of days in Japan. 

That was the original plan.  But I had made some alterations to achieve a goal for the trip.

If you’ve been following this blog from the beginning, you’ll remember back on Day 9 I had plans to see a baseball game in Chiba.  Part of my “bucket list” goal to see a game in every professional park in Japan and North America.  That game had been rained out and it looked like the achievement of my goal would be postponed for a couple years at least.  This was because my plan for next year was to return to Japan during the summer Olympics in Tokyo to see Baseball return as one of the included sports.  Baseball had been dropped for the games in London, and stayed dropped for Beijing and Rio as well.  

I had been looking over the schedule online, just to see if anything could be done, when I saw the Lotte Marines, the team that plays in Chiba, had a game scheduled that Sunday, the day we were flying back to the Tokyo area.  It was an afternoon game.  The listing indicated that it was a home game for them, with the Marines listed in the bottom of the box and the Fighters, the teams we’d seen on Friday, listed on top in the Visiting Team slot.  

I did some time calculations and figured that, if we headed straight to the stadium from the airport, leaving our luggage with a storage company there, we could make it to Chiba Lotte Marine Stadium by the top of the 2nd inning.  That was good enough for me, so I decided to buy the tickets and give it a shot.  My dream of completing the Japanese half of my goal looked doable again.  I told myself that I had probably not considered the Sunday game before because of the slight overlap with the flight back.  

The trip to the airport went smoothly.  Japanese public transportation is very efficient, if somewhat stretched to capacity at times.  The train to the airport was filled to capacity.

The express train to New Chitose Airport near Sapporo.  You get used to standing a lot on Japanese trains.

An ad on the train for some sort of contest or raffle.  A lot of cool looking prizes for stays at various places in Hokkaido.

Checking in and getting through security confirmed my previous observation about Japanese domestic flights.  By putting the security check in the hands of the airline flying the passengers, they made it much smoother and a more pleasant experience for the customer.  

I kept checking my watch, updating my calculations on when we could get to the game.  

Touch-down.  Disembarking.  Luggage.  We headed to the luggage storage company.  They were willing to keep our bags for up to 10 days.  We only needed them to hold them until that evening.  We boarded a limousine bus headed to the Chiba area.  Every fifteen minutes I checked my watch.  We were still on track to get to the game in the early innings.  We switched to the shuttle bus from the station to the stadium.  We pulled into the stadium parking lot…

I need to tell you a bit about how I bought the tickets.  

Most tickets for sporting and entertainment events in Japan are sold at convenience stores.  Convenience stores in Japan are one-stop shopping places for almost anything you might want.  To buy the tickets, you use an ATM like machine where you pick the type of event, then scroll and click your way to the specific sport, specific team, specific date, then venue.  This is done in Japanese.  The machines don’t have English menus from what I could see.

I had gone to a 7-11 in Sapporo to buy the tickets.  I got all the way to the date I wanted, then stopped.  I couldn’t find the game at Chiba in the listings.  Something was wrong.  I slowly read through each one again to find it.

I got one of the store clerks to help me.  I told him the date and the venue.  He couldn’t find it either.  He then asked me the name of the opposing team.  There was a way to pick by the teams playing instead of the venue that I hadn’t noticed.  

“Here it is!”  He pointed to one of the listings on the screen.  

“Chiba?”  I looked at what he was posting.  The listing had the the Fighters versus the Marines on the day I wanted.  

“Yes.  Chiba.”  He pointed at the listing again.  I told him I wanted them.  He tapped the screen to print them out.  I took them and went to the case register to pay.  I tucked them away in my jacket to keep them safe.  

As the bus pulled into the parking lot, I got them out, getting them ready to hand to someone at the ticket gate and walk in.  As I stepped off the bus, I looked around thinking that it looked exactly the same as it did a few days ago.  They sky covered with clouds.  The stadium sitting there.  The parking lot…  Empty?  

I became confused.  By my calculations the game should be halfway through the 2nd inning.  So…  Where was everyone?

There was a couple walking around the stadium.  I asked them if there was a game going on inside.  They both shook their heads.  But, I had tickets, I told them.  I showed them to the couple.  

“But…  Isn’t this for Sapporo?”  

“Eh?”  I looked to where he was pointing on the tickets.  There, in katakana, I spotted the Japanese for Sapporo Dome.  The tickets were for this day, but in the city I had come from hundreds of miles to the north.  The reason I couldn’t find the listing for them on the ticket kiosk was because the game I wanted wasn’t being played in Chiba, where I was standing now.  And the clerk at the 7-Eleven in Sapporo must have thought I wanted a game AGAINST Chiba, not IN Chiba.  I checked my phone again.  The listing on the schedule WAS written as if the game was being played in Chiba, with the Fighters on the top line, as if the visiting team, and the Marines on the bottom.  But when I clicked on it to see the box score, the teams switched, with the Marines on top.  They were going into the 3rd inning, with the Marines having scored.  

I cursed.  I felt stupid.  I suddenly felt as if my Japanese, my reading literacy certainly, was woefully inadequate.  Twice I’d come to Chiba to see a game.  Both times I was leaving without doing so.  First, because of the weather.  The second time, because I didn’t read the tickets closely enough.  

After this trip, Chiba Stadium will always seem like a dreary, lonely place in my perception.

We got back on the bus and returned to the station. Another bus ride back to the airport.  We picked up our luggage.  I decided I was tired of buses and trains so we hailed a taxi to get us to our hotel in Kawasaki.  We had dinner at the Captain's Grill & Bar on the hotel's top floor.  It was a bit pricey, but good.  

I had the Meat & Seafood Grill Combination.  I think there was a 1:1 ratio between customers and wait staff.  The moment you emptied your water glass and set it down they refilled it.

It was while I was unpacking that I discovered that I’d lost my diary.  I’d probably left it on the desk in my room at the hotel in Sapporo.  That is when I declared that this day was the worst day of the trip.  There had to be one.  And it was Day 13.