High School Baseball
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I once watched an episode of the PBS series Frontline entitled American Game, Japanese Rules. It dealt with interesting aspects of the “Japanization” of certain institutions that are considered American (or Western at least). The two big ones were business and baseball. Though the majority of the business portion focused on anti-foreigner legislation and copyright entanglements, the baseball side demonstrated that baseball is recognizable - but quite changed from its American original. I admit that loads of it was merely exoticizing the Japanese “otherness” - for instance, ties are the best because then nobody loses honor…if Japan wanted to worry that strongly about honor they’d find a Japanese sumo champion to win the sport back…but I digress.
Aspects of the game are really different. I went to a highschool game between Hakata HS (my base school) and Saijo HS (from the mainland, more suburban). We got slaughtered by Saijo. Their team was really looking good. I thought their pitcher was great. For us the game got off on the wrong foot. By that I mean we gave them 2 runs in the first inning and then our pitcher accidentally beaned a dude in the head during the second inning…which needlessly made us feel a bit timid. You don’t throw well if you’re afraid to bean another guy in the head, I guess. Anyway, the cheerleading and crowd participation aspect of the whole thing really intrigued me. I’m used to American style games where you can sit in the shade if you want, make as much or as little noise as you want, eat if you want to, etc. Not so at a high school game.
One thing I noticed was that the brass band and the cheer squad set up in the bleachers alongside us. (Same for the other team.) This meant that there was no separation - they were not performing on the field. They were literally leading us through cheers. They’d hold up a sign, including which cheer and for which player, and we’d belt it out alongside them as they did pre-rehearsed official “cheer” movements. But there was an order to it. First we cheered our school song with the brass band. Then we cheered our opponents. Awesome. They did theirs and cheered us back. We then proceeded to cheer each time a guy came to bat, for each swing, for each pitch if we were on defense, and for each catch - obviously. That is TIRING. Ha ha. I also loved our brass band’s rendition of Popeye the Sailor Man and Cutey Honey. Interesting choices. I’ll try to have a video of a couple of the songs cut into one another up in a “honey flash!” 
Also - I got crazy sunburned, so I will probably return from this weekend’s pirate race resembling a charcoal briquette. Got my uniform this morning. Blue, #5.