Major League Baseball is one of the national pastimes in U.S., and Professional Baseball is one of the national pastime in Japan as well, you may know.

How about High School Baseball? Maybe in U.S., only people who has strong relation to high school baseball teams - parents of players, alumni of a school who has baseball team or like that - are interested in high school baseball games. But in Japan, High School Baseball is the other national pastime. There are 2 major national championship games (spring and summer) both are held at Koshien stadium - also known as home stadium of Hanshin Tigers professional baseball team.

The adhesion of Japanese people for high school baseball and its uniqueness in play style, player's attitude to the sports, cheering style, etc. are featured in U.S. PBS's TV program "Kokoyakyu"
http://www.pbs.org/pov/kokoyakyu/

The summer National Championship is currently held at Koshien, Nishinomiya, Hyogo, Japan - its very close to Osaka. All games are TV covered (national coverage) by NHK TV - this is true, can you believe any high school sport events are national covered by major TV station in U.S.?

At the summer championship, 49 teams represent their prefecture (There are 47 prefectures in Japan. 45 teams are prefecture's champions and 2 represent East/West Tokyo and 2 represent North/South Hokkaido, so the total number of teams is 49).
One of the reason of Japanese people's obsession for this championship is, all teams represent our locals.

Our representive - Kanagawa prefecture's champion (186 team participated this year's prefecture championship. The Kanagawa prefecture's number of participating teams is the largest.) - for this year is Toukaidai Sagami high school who will play their 1st game of this year's Koshien tournament this evening, 2:30pm Aug. 11, 2010 versus Ibaraki prefecture's representive Suijo high school.

Root your team on NHK TV today!

Tokaidai-Sagami high school (represents Kanagawa prefecture) won 4 games and reached final. Tokaidai-Sagami will meet against Konan (represents Okinawa) tomorrow. Konan is the champion of this spring games.