I had a lot of work to do this last weekend. I was behind the eight-ball as far as articles and blogs I had to write for, I had a new book to read for a class I’m hoping to teach later this term as well as a teaching outline to write for it. To top it all off, I had to finish an assignment for another class that I ‘m taking on line. Of course it didn’t help that the weather was crappy all weekend.

But there was one bright spot to speak of! Early in the afternoon Saturday, my wife was in the other room channel surfing and every once in a while, I could hear her cursing up a storm and then stomping off into the kitchen. My eyes were beginning to give me double vision from all of the reading so I decided to take a break and see what all the commotion was about.

You might think it funny that I mentioned there being a bright spot and then talking about how my better half was upset and cursing but this is Okinawa and things here move to the beat of a different drum. As I went into the other room my wife was back to channel surfing so I asked her what had her so darn upset. She looked at me rather angrily and then switched the channel to the National Koshien high School Baseball tournament game on the TV and said “see!”

You see while I was so busy paying attention to important stuff, like the things that pay our bills and keep a roof over our head, my wife was watching the ball game and getting mad as a hornet. But what I immediately noticed was that the Okinawan team was trailing 3 -0. What made it even worse was this was the final game.

This year has started off to be a good one for Okinawan baseball. This year tiny Okinawa placed two teams into the national tournament. One team from small Kadena town had won one game but got eliminated during the second round. My wife’s uncle whose family comes from Kadena had taken a charter flight with some of his old school chums to see them play. Somehow I suspected in the back of my mind that instead of going to the big game, they probably just partied their fannies off and maybe even took in the big Sumo tournament that was going on in Osaka around the same time.

The other team, Konan Sho-gakko, is a private school and a perennial sports powerhouse from Naha city to the south. I knew that they had been doing well but, for some reason in the back of my mind, I thought there were still a few more days to go before the final. They had been to the big tournament a couple of times previously but always seemed to get eliminated early on by the really big schools around the mega-metropolises of Tokyo and Osaka. But this year, they quietly scratched and clawed their way all the way to the final game without me even noticing.

My wife was really upset! You see for Okinawa, the one thing they really have a lot of is pride. They take their high school baseball deadly seriously. During the national tournament that is held twice a year, Spring and Summer at Osaka’s famed Koshien Stadium, they stop everything they’re doing when the local team is playing and I mean everything.

I’ve often said to myself if it weren’t for the fact that all of the thieves were too busy watching the game themselves, this would be the perfect time for them to waltz right into a bank, rob it and stroll right on out without a care. In fact, depending on how early it was in the game when they robbed it, they might even have a few hours of lead time for their getaway before anyone even noticed they had been robbed. That is how serious the Okinawan’s take their baseball!

We also noticed how quiet it was outside! We live in a rural area so peace and quiet is usually the norm but a major route goes right past our house. With Okinawa being a popular tourist destination, we have pretty regular traffic through our little village, especially on the weekends. During the entire game I don’t remember hearing a single car, truck or even the regularly scheduled busses pass by! It was almost as if the “rapture of the church” had taken place and we had been left behind. You could even say that the silence was deafening!

I asked my better half why she had been channel surfing while the big game was on and why she hadn’t told me? Her rationale was that she had missed all of the other games and so thought it might be bad luck for her to watch it. To make it worse, every time she checked the score, it seemed that the home team was down another run. With that, I decided it was high time for the man of the house to take charge of the situation. I turned the game back on and kicked her out of the living room. To make sure she wouldn’t try to sneak back in and take a peek, I told her to do the dishes while she was out there.

The very next at bat, the Konan team broke the ice and scored their first run of the game. Now, they were only down by two runs. The next inning came and went and, the Konan team threatened but couldn’t quite push the runs in. The next inning came and again Konan put runners in scoring position but with two out. Things didn’t look too good but then it happened. The bats came alive and Konan scored four to take a five to three lead with just a few innings left to play. We were safe, or so I thought!

In the bottom half of the same inning, the opposing team from Tokyo tied it up. What in the world had gone wrong? Then I looked around and noticed that my lovely wife had left the kitchen to watch the game. This was a serious infraction of the Okinawa Kamisama (Gods) rules for baseball I told her and ordered her back into the kitchen. “What shall I do” She asked? A blind man could see that the table was a mess as well as the floor. If that wouldn’t keep her busy, certainly she could cook something for dinner later that evening, I told her!

Throughout the remainder of the game both teams threatened but neither could quite finish the other off. Into extra innings we went. The tenth and eleventh innings went by harmlessly enough. It seemed that whoever could just get one more run would certainly win the game. My wife was getting anxious because by now the kitchen was spotless and she had cooked enough food for several meals. But then it happened! In the top of the 12th, The Konan team from tiny Okinawa scored five big runs to take a commanding lead. The opposition still had one more chance in the bottom of the inning but the five runs our team scored took all of the wind out of their sails.

After the game as is the tradition in Japanese High School baseball, both teams line up across from each other and bow to each other as a sign of respect and then both teams face the umpires lined up behind home plate for another bow. The losing team gathers up some of the dirt outside their dugout to take with them as a souvenir and as a promise to those that follow that they will return. The winning team proudly stands as the whole stadium sing the school fight song and then the trophies are awarded, speeches are given, interviews of the day’s hero’s go out across the nation on national TV.

And then it happened. We both heard the first car in hours passed by our house. Soon after that came another and another and then a bus, about two hours late. Within an hour we could hear the crack of an aluminum bat as children across the way at the park were playing baseball and dreaming of the day that they too might have the honor of playing baseball and representing the whole prefecture in Osaka at the legendary Koshien stadium.