celebration

I Love a Parade!

A good old fashioned victory parade. Yeah, we didn’t see that one coming in September!

I’m a doofus who can’t read a parade map properly, so instead of being in the thick of torrent of paper raining down upon Our Marines as they celebrated their amazing run to the Nippon Series title I got to stand on the main road to Chiba Marine, confetti-free. So it goes. The most important thing is that I was there, man!

It was pretty stinking crowded there, too – I had estimated the crowd to be around 4.7 quadrillion people (a bit more than 700,000 times the entire population of earth, so maybe I was mistaken) but estimates were that the crowd size was a wee bit less. You may be surprised to hear that I actually don’t like crowds all that much, despite spending so much time in them at games, but of course in the case of the Victory Parade I will gladly make an exception.

They had the whole area decked out really nice with Marines signs. I especially liked the uniforms on the light towers – one for each player. Disappointingly they took they only had them for one day – I would have loved to see those up for a while! I took a picture of Naruse’s – see below.

I did manage to squeeze off quite a few pix at the parade itself and the fan festival afterwards, so this is mostly going to be a (belated) picture post. I was also surprised that so much of the usual external stuff at Chiba Marine was open – the food stalls and farmer’s market, the beer vendors, stores, etc. I guess the stores isn’t so surprising given Sunday was the day they decided to release the first wave of championship goodies so the lines were really long, like an hour plus. I waited later in the day to go in and by the time I made it into the store pretty much everything was cleared out. I did manage to get a keitai strap, 2011 calendar and the official 2010 DVD, though. The official DVD is well over 3 hours long, too, and you can get it from Amazon.

It was cool to see most all of the players who contributed to the championship (minus all of the foreign players – no KTK, Murphy, Corey, Penn, Muniz) up close, and it was REALLY cool to see Ogino (Ta-Ka-Shi!) again after so long and Ogino (Tadahiro) after even longer. Despite the crowds I fortuitously ran into many people I knew, too – as I waited in line to get into the shop I had a bunch of people I knew come up to say hi, so I’m sure the people in line with me were wondering who the hell I was. They would have been wondering especially hard after I got interviewed by BS12. That was awkward – I’m happy to talk on TV but I don’t really have the confidence in my Japanese ability to pull it off! Fortunately it was just BS12 which nobody but us Marines freaks watches anyway.

So: pictures, lots of them!

All Stand Together
Rise up o ace of Chiba
All aboard

Champions again
Greeting the fans
Last visit to Chiba Marine
Tacos

Ogino and Hattori working as greeters
Mar-Kun looks happy
Must have been interesting
Hope the hammy is feeling better
チャンピオンフラッグを掴もうぜ!

Is the the line for tacos?
Furuya, Heiuchi and T Ogino

7 thoughts on “I Love a Parade!”

  1. Oh wow, I wish I coulda been there. Looks like it was really fun!!

    Did you hear that the Minnesota Twins are looking into signing Nishioka?? It’d be kinda fun to see him make a name for himself here in the US, but I don’t know if I want to see him off the Marines. Too bad one of the PA teams isn’t after him. XDD

  2. Deanna, I actually had a few more of Kohbe where he was laughing, but I didn’t 100% like how they came out so I didn’t post. I’ll probably post it in my miscellaneous 2010 pix gallery that I will eventually get around to making!

    Hannah – yeah, I’ve been reading about that. I’m not quite sure what to say as I think Minnesota is both a good and bad fit for him. He’ll never be a superstar there as they already have so many big names and it’s freaking Minneapolis, but the team should be successful so it’ll take a lot of pressure off of him. They talk about him moving to 2B but I think he’s got plenty of range as an SS. I think the Twins would be a much better fit than say the Mariners, where the pressure to be a success would be just insane.

    I’d be totally prepared to wish him well – thanks for the two titles – and move on to the future except we have basically nobody who can take over for him. He played every inning this year! I hope we move one of our wonderful outfielders to short, like Ogino. I say this to anybody who will listen on the off chance one of the coaches will hear 🙂

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