Oooh Yeah! Cheerleaders! Bring it on! I hooked up with Brad for lunch and he was kind of enough to invite me to a football game at the Tokyo Dome tonight. Although there is no professional football league in Japan, there is a shakaijin league where teams owned and run by various companies play against each other. The players are also employees of the company. Strange but true. Tonight’s game was the IBM BigBlue vs Kajima Deers (Kajima is a construction company) Brad’s friend is one of the cheerleaders for the Deers so we sat on the Kajima side. I don’t have to tell you that I (we) spent most of our time watching the action on the sidelines and could not concentrate on the game much. I did catch a few replays on the big TV screen. Unfortunately, my canon camera sucks and I wished I had my SLR. I did my best with photoshop but the results are still less than acceptable. I’m sorry fellas. I will make up for it at the Tokyo Motor Show next week.
See below for more pom-pom pics.
(1) We arrived just before kick-off and the stands were totally empty. By half-time though, our side was packed with salarymen and office ladies. Mostly employees of Kajima no doubt. I overheard many of them talking about the players by name as if they knew them. The IBM side had fewer people and their cheerleaders were not as sexy. Actually, I didn’t go to check but I’m just guessing (2) Here the players are entering the fields. Lots of cheering and high-kicks from the girls (3) Just to prove that I did watch the game a bit, this is a photo of the game in action (4) That’s me in the middle with the goofy expression holding the “cheer stick”. They gave everyone two of them to blow up and bang together. I found it surprisingly fun to whack those things around, must be the inner-child.
These photos need no explanations.
Neither do these
These are the only good ones from the half time show. Unlike NFL cheerleaders, these girls have day jobs and only do this on the side. All their free time must be taken up by practice because they were very very good. In particular, there was one extremely sexy cheerleader who I wanted to take a picture of, but she kept eyeing me with a “Come Hither” all night and so I was too embarrassed to take her photo for fear that she might mistaken me for a freak. ;P
Kajima beat IBM 32 to 9 and afterwards the players gave speeches to the audience.
It was an unexpected and fun evening. Thanks Brad!
TOUCH! GO! OFFENSE! Ha Ha! Nice one! Yeah, like I commented a little while back, we did a capoeira demo at the Mitaka Sports Festival. The ICU Angels cheerleaders were there also! Man, they were impressive! Lots of high kicks, throwing each other into the air, and standing on each other’s shoulders! They’re not quite as hot as the Dallas Cowboys’ cheerleaders, but they were pretty tight with their routines. PS. Sorry, no photos allowed.
Marcello, next time you have a capoeira event let me know. I’d like to come and watch if I can. It’s kind of like breakdancing and martial arts, right?
i work on the nfl tour in the states and the cheerleaders look similar ; ) do the deer cheerleaders work for the company too?
Deers vs. Big Blue
I work with a girl who is a cheerleader for the Kajima Deers, an American football in the Japanese X-League, a league of company teams. She had invited me to see a game a few months ago but they were…
Hi Roy, actually, why don’t you just add our RSS feed to your ‘reader’ and you’ll get updated automatically when we plan new events. feed:http://jp.bantus.org/feed/ And, yes, it’s kinda like breakdancing mixed with martial arts. But there’s a lot more to it than just that.
Any time, man, any time.
My friend wanted me to point out that NFL cheerleaders also have day jobs. They are not employed by the teams at all. They only make a very little bit of money…more along the lines of an allowance. The only practices they have are on Saturdays. These girls practice all day Saturday as well as two weeknights after work. So there’s a reason they do such a good job.
And all this time I thought the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders movie was real…boy have I been mislead for all these years.
On the other hand, I saw a documentary about some Japanese cheerleader for the SF 49ers I think it was, and it appeared that it was a full time job for her.