Hyogo Baseball Tournament, Doctors and More!

Hello!

I seem to have recovered from the ear issues I had last week. After I last wrote, I still was not feeling improvement since seeing the first doctor, so I went to another one that had better online reviews but was slightly inconvenient to get to. He ended up being able to resolve most of my issue very quickly!

This is another thing about being a foreigner in a country with a difficult language - it can sometimes limit the quality of services to which you have access. In my case, I looked for doctors that supported English speakers, but in doing so you may make sacrifices in terms of actual doctor quality.

I am lucky, though, that I live in a major metropolitan area, so there are a plenty of options nearby. Our prefecture (think of prefecture like a US state) has an online doctor directory that you can specify what type of doctor you need and what languages they support.

But, even with that, I still only found the "good" doctor by searching on google outside of the directory.

While I was still experiencing symptoms, I mainly took it easy this week but was able to get to a few high school baseball games on Saturday.

Speaking of baseball, the lead-up games to Koshien have begun. You might remember that Koshien is Japan's national high school baseball tournament.

If you want to get more familiar with Koshien, here a few links that describe the tournament -

Japanball Koshien Article - this is a rather in-depth summary of my experience there.
Hanshin Tigers English News Tournament Summary - gives a quick overview of the tournament - good way to get a taste of what it entails!

The Koshien tournament features around 49 teams that represent each prefecture in Japan. Some prefectures have two entrants, hence why the number does not line up with number of Japanese prefectures (47).

Leading up to Koshien, teams compete in single elimination prefectural tournaments to determine the prefectural champion.

I live in Hyogo prefecture and I think possibly because of the size of Hyogo, the tournament starts earlier here than in other areas.

A set of games occur in nearby Akashi for a few weekends and, eventually, teams will play later round games at Kobe HottoMotto Field. HottoMotto is a professional-style stadium nearby where I live. The Orix Buffaloes from Japan's professional baseball league play several games there each year while spending most of their season in Osaka.

If any of you are interested in watching the games online, you can catch some at https://vk.sportsbull.jp/koshien/ - usually on Saturday or Sundays there are several games during the evening time US time.

There are a lot of pictures from the tournament games in this week's photos. I also posted some videos to youtube that you can view here.

Besides baseball, swimming started at school a few weeks ago. Usually, classrooms will spend two consecutive class periods during the week in the pool. There is a big "pool schedule" posted in the teacher's room, but I have not yet looked at it to figure out how many times a week each class is using the pool. It appears that it is around once a week.

Last time, I shared this link that is a news posting site from our school. If you scroll down a ways past all the pictures of the 5th grade's recent trip to nature school, you will see some pictures of the pool and students using it.

As you can see, both teachers and students cover most of the body while in the pool, usually wearing long sleeve shirts and leggings. Younger grades focus on just getting used to the water whereas older grades learn specific swim strokes.

Our school also sends out text message notifications to parents - from one of them, it seems to suggest that there will be some sort of "life saving" practice happening soon. The message gets translated into English for me automatically, so it might be a bad translation but the note suggested that the students will be wearing normal clothes for this and will practice what to do if they are accidentally submerged in water wearing regular clothes.

And, school will be taking a break soon. Japanese schools typically take a 4-6 week break starting at the end of July. I may have mentioned this a few times already.

Teachers will still come into school during this time except for the August "Obon" holiday week period. For Obon, most workplaces are closed for about a week as Japanese travel back home to spend time with family, or visit other places in Japan. It is a busy travel period.

Even though the school is closed, teachers have to use "paid time off" during this time. For us teachers in the JET Program, we get five extra "summer holiday" days that we are to use for these holidays that are in addition to our normal paid time off.

I will leave it there for now, write more next week!

Until then,