“Like a mallet lightly tapping the edge of the universe,
There’s a slight plunk.
It makes me wonder —
Why in the world do I cheer on a team like this?
This itself is a kind of —
Riddle as huge as the universe.”
“The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection,” — First Person Singular, Haruki Murakami
I don’t remember the moment I fell in love; it’s just always been. Like any good childhood memory, all I can present to you are a few fleeting vignettes.
Grandpa presents an orange towel in one hand and an umbrella in the other, like Neo from The Matrix.
At each stop, the carriage would pick up more jerseys, umbrellas — inexplicably —, and young hands clutching baseball gloves. Watching the copy sway to the beat of the tracks.
The outdoor sky is a pristine blue, the kind you can only find in summer. Watching it slowly fall into the sunset, the way my grandparents’ kimonos flowed from the ceiling in the shop window. Getting sleepier with each inning, slowly blinking to find the bright floodlights turning Meiji Jingu Stadium into a lucid spaceship.
If you’ve ever been to a stadium before, you’ll know this euphoric sensation. That moment your stomach drops, the wall of noise hits you, the ecstatic anticipation builds. It’s a religious experience. The stands, the stadium lights, and the monochrome seats are arranged around this holy, blank, theatrical space. The pop of the crowd after a goal, home run, or game-winning basket — like falling in love. I think I’ve been chasing this high my whole life.
But with the Tokyo Yakult Swallows, it’s different.
Romantic and sexual metaphors are not apt. Maybe it’s because — true to Swallows form — I’ve never actually seen the team win a live game. Maybe it’s because I fell in love at an age when I was still impressed by anthropomorphic cars, trains, and rodent newspaper editors. Whatever the case, the love I feel for the Swallows is a familiar kind of love. I left Japan before I hit puberty, playing soccer adjacent to their stadium, picking at scabs and fishing turf infill out of my socks. I miss it all.
The Tokyo Yakult Swallows are a professional baseball team based in Shinjuku, Tokyo, playing in the Nippon Professional Baseball league. The team was founded in 1950 and is owned by Yakult, the company known for its sweet probiotic drink in those small one-shot bottles. The Swallows have a reputation as the plucky, perennial underdogs, with consistent success being rare throughout their history.
Baseball is a big deal in Japan. It leads soccer by a significant margin as the most popular sport in the country. The ‘Koshien’ high school baseball championships are a national cultural event. Over 40 per cent of Japanese households watched every game of the 2023 World Baseball Classic, despite the games being held early in the morning. Baseball occupies a similar cultural space in Japan that of ice hockey in Canada.
My love for the Swallows is inseparable from their ballpark, Meiji Jingu Stadium. Meiji Jingu is the second-oldest stadium in Japan and one of only four ballparks remaining in the world where Babe Ruth has played. It’s an outdoor field with no towering skyline in sight from home plate, its seats and walls faded by the sun, exuding a certain quaintness you won’t find in North American ballparks. Even our iconic celebration with umbrellas and chanting ‘Tokyo Ondo’ is a little unstylish, but undeniably charming. Unfortunately, there is a frankly absurd redevelopment plan that would see the city demolish Meiji Jingu. While there is significant resistance and the timeline remains unclear, Tokyo could lose an iconic stadium in the near future. It would break my heart.
In many ways, the Swallows’ story is defined by their rivalry with Tokyo’s other baseball team, the Yomiuri Giants. The Giants are ‘the’ baseball team in Japan. With 22 Japan Series titles compared to the Swallows’ six, the Giants are by far the most successful, dominant, and popular team in the country. Their home stadium, Tokyo Dome, is a massive indoor arena with a futuristic design; it looks like the giant hat with a visor my grandma wears when she plays golf. Built in the heart of towering mansions and skyscrapers, the opulent ballpark is connected to a theme park with rollercoasters and a massive ferris wheel.
The nominative determinism of it all isn’t lost on me. I will say that, at least in terms of size, the ‘Swallows’ is a literal infinitesimal upgrade over the team’s previous name, the Yakult Atoms. Our perpetual mediocrity begins to make sense.
The worst part of it all is that, while the Giants are our biggest rivals, their true nemesis is the Osaka Hanshin Tigers. This rivalry reflects an underlying regional dynamic in Japan, where personality, class, cuisine, and humour are divided into broad east versus west archetypes. It’s the biggest rivalry in Japanese sports. Tigers fans are passionate, raucous, and, historically, even violent. They stereotypically despise the cold, reserved, cosmopolitan nature of the snobby city folk.
So, the Swallows find themselves playing second-fiddle in their own greatest rivalry. The little brother dynamic persists. Analogous relationships include baseball’s New York Yankees vs New York Mets, basketball’s Los Angeles Lakers vs Los Angeles Clippers, and soccer’s Paris Saint Germain vs Paris FC. Rumour has it that the team’s owner, Takashige Negishi, is actually a Giants fan.
The Swallows’ star player is infielder Munetaka Murakami: a truly majestic power-hitter. While he has a solid but unexceptional career batting average of .270, when he hits, he hits big. Murakami holds the single-season record for most home runs in a season by a Japanese player and won the Triple Crown in 2022. In 2021, he led the team to a Japan Series title, the one and only in my entire lifetime.
At 25 years old, Murakami is set to make the jump to MLB next year. In my dream of dreams, the Toronto Blue Jays — the Swallows’ avian cousins — sign him for an emotional one-way reunion with my favourite player. But I doubt that will happen. Like fellow countrymen Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki, the Jays will have to compete with the American Goliath, the Los Angeles Dodgers, for his signature.
Ohtani and Sasaki were both heavily rumoured to join the Jays, with Toronto as one of the finalists for both players before they ultimately signed with the Dodgers — a frustrating outcome for Jays fans. Regardless of where Murakami lands, baseball fans, mark my words: he is going to be a star.
Speaking of Murakami, my love letter would not be complete without mentioning the other Murakami in the Swallows-phere — writer Haruki Murakami. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle author is a ‘loyal supporter’ of the team, and he even has a series of poems titled “The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection,” featured in his short-story collection First Person Singular.
In the introduction to his debut novel Hear the Wind Sing, Murakami wrote, “The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium… In that instant, for no reason and based on no grounds whatsoever, it suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.”
The Swallows are quite literally why we have Murakami books in the world. Something about the Swallows inspires Tokyo folks. I get why. I think people see themselves as the underdog, always up against it. Although personally, I’ve never felt an inclination to write a poem called “Outfielders’ Butts” — yes, this is real — but then again, I’m no Murakami.
“And under the Yakult Swallows’ flag I raise my plaintive cheer.
I’ve been away from my hometown for such a long time, and
My heart aches here
On this tiny, solitary island in the ocean current.”
“The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection,” First Person Singular, Haruki Murakami
The Giants are the glitz and glamour, the sparkly billboards and shining glass, the hustle and bustle of metropolis, the modern shopping malls, and game arcades — the Tokyo people imagine and travel to. It’s the shots of the city’s steady glow in Lost in Translation, neon blood, and crowded crosswalks.
The Swallows are the hundreds of suburbs that exist nestled between the tourist attractions and sprawling urban heights. The local market street, the smoky pachinko parlours, and the fading primary colours of playgrounds and school walls. It’s the view of the tracks from the back of my grandparents’ shop.
I will never love a sports team the way that I did when I was eight years old, gazing into the empty sky and wondering when the rain would come.
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