Latham's Guide to Japanese Baseball:

Reading Japanese team names

Turn on the TV any summer evening in Japan and you'll probably find a Yomiuri Giants game. During lulls in action, the networks often display a graphic at the bottom of the screen that may look something like this:

If you guessed that these are scores from other games, you would be right. All twelve Japanese teams can be represented by a single kanji or katakana character, an abbreviation of their full name which appears at the top of this graphic. But who's beating who?

The answer of course lies in which character represents which team. Three of the above symbols are katakana: (ya), (o), (ro/lo) and (da) represent the Yakult Swallows, Orix BlueWave, Chiba Lotte Marines and Fukuoka Daiei Hawks respectively. (Notice that most of the symbols represent the first sound in the company name, not their city or nickname).

That generally holds true for most of eight teams represented by the following kanji characters: (chu), (hiro), (ni), (kin), (yoko), (sei), (shin), and (kyo) which identify the Chunichi Dragons, Hiroshima Carp, Nippon Ham Fighters, Kintetsu Buffaloes, Yokohama BayStars, Seibu Lions, Hanshin Tigers, and Yomiuri Giants.

Because they have evolved over the years, the Giants are represented by the symbol for their old name, the Tokyo Kyojin. The Tigers are represented by the second character of their company name because the Hankyu Braves (now BlueWave) used to use the same character for "han." Both teams were therefore listed by their second kanji.

Though all the teams can be identified by a single symbol, those characters are abbreviated versions of their full names, which are listed below.

While these characters are often shown on TV, knowing them can also help you read Japanese sports papers, web sites, and stadium scoreboards.

And now let's take another look at the scoreboard to see who's winning:

Presumably, the Giants and Tigers are playing each other in tonight's game, so on the scoreboard, we can tell that the BlueWave shutout the Marines, 2-0, while Nippon Ham downed Seibu, 5-3. We know that these are final scores because they are followed by (shu ryo, which means, "game over"). Since, (kai) means "inning," the graphic is telling us that the Swallows are leading the Dragons 4-1 in the fifth inning, Hiroshima is trampling Yokohama 7-3 in the eight, and the Hawks and Buffaloes have gone into extra innings with neither team able to score.

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