【Culture】Batting Dome, not just for Baseball Players

In Japan Baseball is one of the most popular sports that has attracted hundreds millions of visitors throughout Japan.

This year unfortunately the studiums can’t accommodate spectators up to its full capacity due to COVID.

We Japanese people like Baseball as spectators. But sometimes we want to feel as if we are players.

Japan has several kinds of batting center generally where we can hit a ball from a pitching machine, often eqiupped with game machine center. We can play at 300–400 yen per game. Ordinarilly one game are made up of 20 balls pitches. When a ball slams a board displayed close to roof of the dome, it is treated as a home-run and a gift will be given to the player that hit the ball.

The below is a type of virual pitcher type. A ball can be thrown by a virual pitcher on the screen.

The batting center are so crowded with lots of kind of players. It ranges from real high school baseball players to business persons that on the way of going home.

When we seize at a pitcher to wait for balls coming and we hit the balls, we can concentrate on hitting them. Even if we are in trouble on our business, we can forget all of them.

When I was a primary school student, I was a baseball player. I know some basic skills to hit a ball but so poor and useless for 42 year old man. Imagine, so hard to hit a ball even 80 km per hour.

During 20 pitches we have just to focus our eyes on the ball. Enthusiastically chasing where each ball coming.

It seems like just a batting practice but it is an usefull way of meditation for mental composure to reach ‘’enlightenment’’. It doesn’t matter whether to hit precisely or not but how extent we are absorbed and involved with the world.

Hi, high schoolers waiting for your turn out of the batting cage! Please don’t laugh at a swing-out man that never even scratch the ball. He is not a baseball player but just an old man who is in a meditation in a batting dome instead of Buddhist temple.