V.Premier League

I found out via a couple of teachers at my old school that there are professional volleyball leagues in Japan. I checked the schedule and found that a couple of the women's matches were in or near Himeji, as two of the women's teams are based in our prefecture. Since we enjoy volleyball, we went to check them out. It was pretty fun, and some high-quality volleyball. Most of the league is made up of Japanese players, including most of the players from their world championship bronze medal team. Most of the teams had one foreign player, though. There were several Brazilians, including one (Elisangela Oliveira) who served rockets. One team featured two-time Pac-10 player of the year Foluke Akinradewo. She is a Canadian, American and Nigerian tri-citizen who played for the U.S. team in Beijing.
Despite the good play, the best part of the league might be the team names. Our first match was the Hisamitsu Springs vs. the Okayama Seagulls. These are relatively normal names: Hisamitsu is the name of the sponsoring company, while the Seagulls are the only team in the league without a title sponsor, which may be related to why they were the only team we saw without a foreign player. Our second game was the NEC Red Rockets vs. the Denso Airybees. If you're looking for an explanation of what an Airybee is, well, we're stumped.
Our second day got even better, though, when we got to see the Toyota Auto Body Queenseis (nothing like combining two different foreign languages into one nonsensical word) and JT Marvelous. We were even tempted to buy some JT Marvelous gear, though we were happy to have passed it up when we found out that JT is Japan Tobacco, the country's largest cigarette manufacturer.
-Jason