2019年1月11日金曜日 - 
Matt - Playing Basketball in Japan
Recently,
I began playing basketball with a Japanese friend of mine. He invited me to
join his basketball circle, which meets about once a
week for games at a junior high school in Osaka. The players are a
mix of men and women, mostly about twenty to thirty years old. I have really
enjoyed playing basketball in a foreign country, because it allows me to notice
some of the differences between playing here and back home in California.
One important difference is the way the
teams and games are organized. Back home,
individual people talk to each other and form a team, and then each team must call out to claim the 'next' game. This way, we
can make teams with our friends, but it causes problems because it is not
well-organized and often leads to
arguments about who actually is next. In Osaka, the process was quite
different, and seems more fair to me. First, we all stand in a circle and count
ourselves to find out how many players are joining tonight's games. If there
are thirty players, then five teams will be created. At this point, we count
around the circle to determine randomly which team each player will join. After
joining together with our new teammates, we play the Japanese version of 'rock, paper, scissors' in order to determine our
position on the team, which we will use for substitutions.
Of course, the substitutions here happen equally in the order of our numbers, while in California, we don't ever have more than
five players on a team and never substitute.
The style of play is quite different as
well. In Japan, players seem to want to pass and run around more compared to
America, where players want to dribble
and shoot. In America, when we pass the ball, we usually pass it very fast,
because the defense is aggressive. In Japan, I noticed that the passes are much
slower, and the defense doesn't seem to try to steal the passes very much. And,
when a fast pass is thrown, it is often dropped by the players here. I need to
remember all the time to throw slow passes that my teammates can catch!
once a week：週に１回
organized：組織化されている
call out：試合を申し込む
leads to：～につながる
'rock, paper, scissors'：ジャンケン
Substitutions：補欠要員
while：一方で
dribble：ドリブル