Hideki Matsui Baseball Museum Photos

I went to the Hideki Matsui Baseball Museum back in January, during a weekend excursion to Kanazawa with some friends. (They went off to seek some ninja shrine, and I went off into the middle of nowhere to seek some baseball shrine, essentially. This is just how things work, you know.)



Anyway, I had resized/selected/cropped a bunch of the pictures I took, and then my hard drive died. Fortunately, I backed them up to a flash drive, but the process of actually describing/thumbing/etc them got thrown to the backburner until I basically wrote a Perl script to manage photo albums for me (it should look the same as my Photothumb albums). Yay!

So, here's my pictures from the Matsui museum. There's over a hundred of them -- essentially a photo tour of the place, minus the stuff that said "no photos". Basically, did you ever wonder: what happens when a guy wins every baseball award in existence, several times over? Does he just throw all of his trophies and plaques and certificates and photos and such in a box in an attic? Does he make a special "I am awesome" trophy room?



Apparently, if he is Hideki Matsui, his family builds a museum and puts all of his awards in there, along with random other things like old gloves and baseballs and bats and photos and uniforms, so that all of his fans can come see the stuff rather than having it just sit in an attic somewhere. It's a rather impressive collection when you think about it, and it took me around an hour and a half to look through and read through and snap pictures of everything there.

The museum itself is technically in Nohmi-city, which is very close to Komatsu and the Ishikawa airport. From Kanazawa, I had to take the Hokuriku train down to Terai station, which cost about 400 yen and 30 minutes. The museum is a little more than 2 miles from the station; if you're lucky you'll catch one of the three buses a day that goes there and costs 100 yen. In my case, I got a taxi, which cost 1350 yen. Entrance fee to the museum is only 300 yen, though. I was lucky to have the right timing to catch the bus back to the station afterwards -- it takes around 25 minutes and goes through the Neagari area where Matsui grew up. If you ever really wanted an excuse to ride a bus around the middle of nowhere in Japan, this is a pretty good one (second only to Fighters Town Kamagaya, of course).

I'm not sure whether I'd recommend this trip for the casual baseball fan -- if you went from Tokyo or Osaka it'd probably take you several hours to get there (infact, you really can't do it as a day trip from Tokyo unless you fly), but if you're going to be anywhere near Ishikawa prefecture and you really like baseball, or really like Hideki Matsui, or really like the Yomiuri Giants, it's definitely worth going to.

I'm off to Meiji Jingu stadium for my first game of open-sen in a bit! Hooray!