Satoshi and I went out Saturday night, we went to a basketball game. The Japanese Basketball League has only been in operation for a few years, but the Oita Heat Devils have so far managed to finish both seasons ranked in the Top 5. Did I mention there were only 6 teams?

As far as I can tell, there are at least 2 and possibly as many as 4 professional basketball leagues operational in this country. None of them seem to be any good, although interest in the sport is building slowly – the 2006 World Basketball Championships were played across Japan this summer.

While doing some background research for this post, which was pretty much fruitless I might as well admit, I came across this hilarious – in hindsight – press release:

Japanese basketball officials announced the formation of a new professional basketball league on Wednesday. The six-team BJ-League will begin its inaugural season in November 2005 and will be composed of teams in Tokyo, Osaka, Saitama, Oita, Sendai and Niigata. The 40-game season will run from November to May and four of the six teams will reach the playoffs. Organizers said Wednesday they hope to expand the league to 12 teams playing 80 games by the 2010 season. Each team will be allowed to carry 15 players on its roster: 13 Japanese players and two foreign players.

I’m not going to go into details as to why that little paragraph made me chuckle, but as I progress with my retelling of the game you should be able to figure it out on your own.

The game began at 7pm, so after fortifying ourselves at the nearby kaitenzushi restaurant we rolled into the Beppu Convention Center about 6:30. As we strode into the arena we were immediately blasted with a wall of noise, the PA system was pumping out American heavy metal and the volume was definitely up to eleven. We wandered around looking for decent seats while our team limbered up in its pregame warmup.

And the opponents for the evening, the Sendai 89ers (no idea) jogged around in what is hands down the most boring uniform ever made – canary yellow with no insignia, logo, design, stripe, polka dot, ANYTHING at all. They looked like they were wearing practice pennies. You call this a professional league? At least give ’em a stripe for showing up, sheesh.

We weren’t expecting much of a crowd. Hell, we weren’t expecting much of anything to be honest, but about 5,000 people filed into the building all-told, and when the cheerleaders appeared we were quite pleased. Those are some wicked boots, sister.

I also was treated to my first ever rendition of the Japanese National Anthem. Fittingly enough, it was performed by some Mick Jagger wannabe with his buddy backing him up with massive, manly riffs on his guitar. Note the Japanese flag overlay on the singer’s face up on the Jumbotron. I didn’t really catch any of the words to the song, what with all the awesome power chords and shrieking rockstar guy wailing on the mic, but I did gather that their anthem is really, really short. Like 20 seconds short. Satoshi confirmed this reality. Dunno what’s up with that, maybe they just realize that no one came to hear Mr. Tightpants sing, they wanna see some ballers!

We knew there were going to be Americans on the roster. We had even seen a few guys around town here and there that certainly could have fit the bill, what we didn’t realize though was the extent to which Americans dominate this league. I took this photo at the tip-off, and added little flag icons to illustrate the point. 10 men on the court, 6 big lugs are Americans, 4 little dudes are Japanese.

I’m going to preface the entire rest of the post with this admission: I have little to no true basketball experience, despite the family legacy. I do watch it from time to time though, and I’m confident that I have a basic grasp of the fundamentals and how the flow of a good game looks. Furthermore, Satoshi has plenty of basketball experience and I ran all these observations and conclusions past him for evaluation and he agreed with every single one. In short, what I’m about to say is right, and if you disagree you’re wrong.

From the tip-off until the end of the first half, you could legitimately summarize the basketball being played before us as: six American dudes playing 3 on 3 and four Japanese guys standing around ready to pass the ball back in to them if it went out of bounds. It was very disappointing. Oh, and the Sendai 89ers’ (still no idea) American dudes were playing 3 on 3 better than our American dudes, and put the Oita Heat Devils in a nice and deep 17 point hole after only one quarter, yikes.

The fans didn’t give up so easily though, they were supportive, loud, and on their feet willing those lousy Devils back into the game…

…and then out came the cheerleaders.

With cheerleaders like these, I don’t know how anyone could ever lose. These girls, amateurs all of them, harkened back to a time before bloated multi-million dollar cheerleader salaries, before cut throat competition, constant backstabbing, and thousands upon thousands spent on plastic surgery. These girls harkened back to a time when a rookie cheerleader didn’t even dream of holding out over a contract dispute and missing training camp, when endorsement deals were unheard of, when girls cheered not for the money, or fame, or money & fame, but for the spirit, the pep, the pure love of cheering.

These girls, in short, were young, hot, and doing it for the love of the game.

Lemme put it another way – you know how you can break any American cheerleading squad down into 3 groups? You’ve got the dudes with ripped upperbodies for tossing and holding up the ladies, you’ve got the regular cheerleaders, and then you’ve got 2 or 3 little pixies per squad – the ones getting hurled 15~20 meters in the air and who are always totally, totally smoking hot?

Well here in Beppu, perhaps owing to the general Japanese physique and diet, those totally, totally smoking hot pixies are the only kind of cheerleader we have…

I’ll just let that thought sink in for a few moments…

The girls twirled, shimmied, hopped, and spun and little by little the Heat Devils clawed their way back into the game. The crowd was wild, and the announcer never missed a beat. You know that standard stadium chant beat? Something to the effect of:

Bum … Bum … BumBumBum … BumBumBumBum … BUMBUM!

Every sports team in history has built their name into it somehow. My high school, the Berkeley Buccaneers, did it thusly:

B-U-C / C-A-N / E-E-R-S / GO BUCS!

You with me now? Ok good. Well, syncing the name Oita Heat Devils with that beat apparently proved somewhat challenging and the end result is one of the most hilariously awful massacres of the English language ever orchestrated in Japan:

The original: Bum … Bum … BumBumBum … BumBumBumBum … BUMBUM!
Our version: Bum … Bum … BumBumBum … De – Bi – Ru – Zu… RET’S GO!

This obviously requires a rather lengthy explanation. First off, the average Japanese person cannot pronounce a “V” – there isn’t an equivalent sound in their language so all v’s are transliterated to b’s. By any normal estimation, the word “devils” consists of two and only two syllables. However, in Japanese you will never find a consonant-consonant pairing. Japanese consists of consonant-vowel pairings exclusively. If you break down “devils,” we have “de” and “vi” (now “bi”), but then we have “l” and “s” – a double consonant pairing! Naturally the only reasonable thing to do is toss some vowels in there so the poor Japanese layman doesn’t have any trouble yelling it. And wouldn’t you know it? Now it fits nicely!

As for the RET’S GO? Well, that’s something that in my experience normal people can generally pronounce fairly well, although they do frequently misspell it. Why this clown kept shouting out RET’S GO over the PA with a very hard and distinct “r” sound I’ll never know, but Satoshi and I enjoyed it immensely.

So with the hottie cheerleaders leading cheers, and the announcer setting back Japanese stereotypes 20 years or so, the American Japanese Oita Heat Devils fought their way back into the game and ultimately managed to tie it with about 30 seconds to go. I won’t string you along though, they muffed the final play with 9 seconds remaining and lost by 2 points, but it was a great and exciting finish.

Some random notes in closing:

• the Japanese soccer league is called J-League, and predates the basketball league by a decade or so, resulting in the basketball league deciding to call itself Basketball Japan League. That’s right folks, this Saturday night, for only $20 per person, you can bring the whole family to the BJ League!

  

• the 3 point line is nowhere near an NBA three. It’s only perhaps a foot off the top of the arc around the free-throw line. Why they chose to do this when the Japanese men’s national team obviously plays with NBA lines is anyone’s guess. The most obvious result though was that the big power forwards on both teams were making an obscene amount of three point shots.
• the style of play itself was very bland. In four 10 minute quarters Satoshi and I counted only one dunk and one fast break. There was one behind-the-back pass but it went out of bounds. There were absolutely zero dribbling displays, not even a quick crossover. It was almost always just passing in to a forward who had his back to the basket, and then looking for a kickout pass to the sissy 3 point line for an easy basket. No driving either, all in all a very boring, conservative style of play.

We had fun though, quite a bit and more than we were expecting. The quality of play was pretty bad, but not nearly as low as what passed for professional in the Philippines, where the amount of public obsession with the game would befit a much higher quality of play that what exists. American rap and hiphop music blared throughout the game, and hearing that alone was almost worth the price of admission. And just to prove we were there…

PS – if you’re still wondering why that press release made me laugh, the part about the two foreigner limit was what did it. There were never less than six Americans on the court Saturday night, and they wholly dominated the game.