After that we had a party, with the Puerto Rican players leading the dancing. We Japanese are supposed to be shy, but we managed to really enjoy ourselves. We exchanged hats, shook hands and promised to meet again. We normally would not have had the opportunity to go on such a tour, since we were not the all-Japan team or anywhere near that level. The fact that we were able to go as representatives of Japan to play on American soil was marvelous.
People really love and enjoy baseball.
The stadium at Freeport looked like a jewel box when we looked down on it from a hillside. Our good performance, the warm welcome and the friendship with the local community were all elicited by baseball. It was a wonderful and rare experience for us to actually find people with different ethnic backgrounds and nationalities, coming together to play the same game under common rules. This may be the case in the Olympics, but not everybody gets to participate, so it was wonderful that we were able to go. We also were able to see that there was a different sort of baseball from that played in Japan.