A Saitama encounter

The author, Iwaki-san, Matuskawa-san

Matsukawa-san said, Why don’t you come and sit next to me?  The people who own these seats never come, he claimed.  We took him up on his offer, Iwaki in the center, Matsukawa and I on either side.  Good thing, too, because Matsukawa had a rough way of speaking that was not easy to understand and Iwaki could help explain if required.

During the game itself (a win for the Lions against the last-place Marines) I didn’t interact much Matsukawa, but we spent a good 40 minutes in conversation on the train back to Ikebukuro.  A man of odd jobs who worked 23 years as a truck driver, he claimed to have no family, which is I suppose why he had the means for season tickets, regular transport from Gunma prefecture, and hotels in Ikebukuro during every home stand, 73 games a season.  He claims to have been a Lion’s fans from a young age, back when they belonged to Nishitetsu, the Kyushu rail company.

How did a kid in Kanto grow up being a fan of a team so far away in an age when there was only newspaper and a few channels each on television and radio?  It seems he was something of the contrarian.  Everyone he knew loved the Giants, and so he wanted to be a fan of some other team.  I’m not sure why he settled on the Lions, but it turned out to be a good choice as they ended up moving to Saitama, far closer to Gunma than Fukuoka.  He remembered the Lions playing at Heiwadai, a stadium that has since been torn down, but whose name remains attached to a park and a track-and-field venue. We spoke a bit about Fukuoka, since I used to live there and know a bit about it, and he warned that the Hawks was becoming the Pacific league version of the Giants, a team fronted by a huge corporation with the money to buy the best team, year after year, and thereby thwart the aspirations of other teams and communities. Since retiring Matsukawa has travelled to a number of stadiums up and down the peninsula, from Kyushu to Hokkaido, and hopes someday to visit the US to see some live MLB games, and maybe even to Korea and Taiwan for some pro-league Asian games.

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