Tokyo baseball protocol

CHIBA, Japan — The bleachers have always been the bastion of the hard-core baseball fan.

And if you want to push the metaphor a bit, bleacher behavior in other baseball nations can highlight differences in culture, too.

For American ball fans, the world beyond the outfield wall is a place of freedom (like the freedom to watch baseball with your bare belly out), of frighteningly free expression, of the free-for-all after the home-run ball.

Then there are the bleachers in Japan.

Here they are a place of order. Of orchestration.

A ticket in the bleachers in Japan comes with responsibilities.

These bleachers are an organized cheering section. When the visiting team bats, hushed fans play with their kids, read programs, order beers or a fruit-flavored shochu (a liquor made from potatoes).

But when the home team is at bat, everybody’s up. The guy with the trumpet and the mike who runs the show down front makes sure of that. Almost everybody’s in uniform. There are set chants for different players and group moves with the arms. And just outside Tokyo in Chiba, where the Lotte Marines play their home games, there’s the famous Bounce whenever the team gets a rally going.

When the game ends (disappointingly for Marines fans on this particular hot August night), they pick up their garbage, leaving the bleachers spotless as they file out.

Orderly, as always.