Saturday, November 17, 2007

"Watching" cricket in Japan

Well, this has turned out to be a good weekend. Yesterday we scaled Mt Shosha and visited the Engyō-ji Temple complex--famous for being the location of certain scenes in The Last Samurai--before venturing into an onsen for the first time. We also joined other ALTs in Himeji for a Thanskgiving dinner, and finished the day in a karaoke booth (also for the first time since our arrival in Japan). Unfortunately, further details and pictures are going to have to wait until a future post.

Today Emma is being treated to a guided tour of Kobe's shopping districts courtesy of several female members of her ESS club. I'm supposed to be occupying my time learning Japanese--but instead here I am, procrastinating, as usual. Maybe I would be able to concentrate if I was able to tune into the cricket match currently underway between Australia and Sri Lanka in Hobart, but unfortunately due to rights restrictions the ABC stream of its radio coverage of the game is only available to listeners within Australia. So I am forced to resort to the second-best option: a ball-by-ball text coverage of the match provided by cricinfo.com. For those of you who are interested, Australia currently has Sri Lanka bent over the bonnet of a Holden Commodore sedan, with their pants somewhere around their ankles (again); Australia having declared their first innings at 5 for 542 and having recently dismissed their hapless (and pantsless) opponents for 246. Interestingly, Ponting decided not to enforce the follow-on, and Jaques and Hayden are currently occupying the crease and scoring at about 5 an over.

If only the Japanese followed cricket more ardently than they do. (One good reason for this might be that it is virtually impossible to watch live cricket here, despite Japan having in recent years been elevated from Affiliate to Associate membership of the International Cricket Council.)

Cricket is played in Japan, by the way:

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