Sumo wrestling is the official sport of Japan – but baseball is the most popular! It’s all the students at the School’s I teach at talk about. Before my year is up therefore, I thought I should fit a game in.

Me and a couple of friends went to see the Fukuoka Soft Bank Hawks play at home. The atmosphere was electric – further fuelled by the roving beer boys and girls who tirelessly traipse the stands with a backpack full of Asahi.

Everything reached fever pitch at the start of the seventh inning, the crowd spontaneously inflating tens of thousands of sausage shaped balloons and sending them screaming and whistling through the stands, a writhing mass of yellows and blues squirming and splurging across the night sky. This is a great eccentricity that can be seen at all Japanese Baseball matches! (see a video below, courtesy of Youtube).