Kaze’s Basketball Game

I was surprised to find out that many of the foreign students here don’t join clubs. Some of us have and, in most cases, are regarded like freshmen, but some groups give pretty equal treatment.

My friend Kaze (as he likes to be called) joined the basketball team in the fall and has been training and playing with them for these past two semesters. I always see him practicing in the gym while I’m on the second floor with Wadaiko, but I’ve never seen him play. Last week, we heard that he had a home game, so the Zelkova group decided to go cheer Kaze – and, you know, those other guys – on to victory! The others used makeup as face paint (it is all the same thing, really) and we started getting pumped about the game. From what we had heard, the ICU Seraphim were playing the ICU high school team.

High school? Really? Yeah, that is what I said, too.

But these kids are apparently the 5^th or 6^th best in the nation and their star player has been picked as one of the best players in Tokyo this year. Pretty cool stuff, but that meant we needed to make a distinction to cheer for ICU University, not ICU high school.

The game went pretty well, and I had a lot of fun screaming and clapping loudly – two things that aren’t looked on well in daily life here. We had only come to see Kaze, but sometime the other teammembers were really impressive. What do you do when you don’t know someone’s name? Give them one of course! One of my favorite pastimes is to give people nicknames based on their most obvious and sometimes worst feature. Ex: Purple Hat Boy or Dirty Shoelace Kid. They kind of sound like superheroes instead of strangers, which helps me feel more for them, but regardless. Besides Kaze, there was the Cap’in (sort for “Capitan”), Tall Guy, Ocho, Number 12, and Fast Kid. We nicknamed the high school's star player "Periwinkle" because that was his shirt color. Everyone had their own skills to contribute to the team. Except for Ocho, he was rather disappointing, but maybe it was just an off day. For some reason, though, they kept switching Ocho and Kaze during the game because Kaze was getting too many fouls too fast and they wanted to make sure they could still use him later in the game. What surprised me: after Kaze got hit in the face with the basketball and chipped his tooth, they wouldn’t sub him out! What gives?!

The cheering section was supreme; I’m just going to say. I learned about backwards spirit fingers, which had a 45% success rate, and we were pretty genki for the whole thing. But I think that Meghan started to lose her voice by the end of it. Oh, did I mention that besides us 4 who went for Kaze, no one else showed up? People would wander through, stop for a while and watch, but we were the only real audience. It was a good match! Why didn’t anyone else know about it?! More for us, I guess. The Daigakusei did give their all, but the Seriphim were behind by 24 points during most of the game. They did manage to catch up, but lost to the high school by 4. Well played, all. Hopefully I can catch a real game during the season.