My coworker, Alex mentioned that track racing was a thing in Japan, so I went to see a race. I had to travel an hour and a half to get to the track for the only race in the area during our stay – at the Kishiwada Keirin. For some unfathomable reason, no one else wanted to come along.

The stadium was quite epic, on the level of a minor league baseball stadium in the U.S. The ticket takers at the front wore white lace gloves. Tickets cost 50 Yen. It had bleachers all around the cement track except for one section which had a dirt biking course with jumps. The bleachers were notably vacant – only a few old men with newspaper-like sheets sat around smoking and rifling through their papers. A windowed box of about three stories sat completely empty in front of the finish line. There was a jumbo-tron, mostly showing tables of race results. Tumbleweed blew through the stadium seats (slight exaggeration). I wondered if the clerk at the hotel had given me faulty information because there was virtually nobody there.

Music started, and five or six officials on matching mountain bikes rode from an underground tunnel onto the course. Four of them went to posts on the corners of the track and climbed up to pedestals on top. A couple of the others pulled a starting block onto the track. This scene was just like the intro of a sports video game. Brightly colored and numbered racers emerged from the tunnel. One without a number started from farther ahead, and the others got into the starting block. The unnumbered rider set the pace for the warm-up laps, during which everyone drafted off of the pace setter. As the warm-up laps came to an end, the racers broke out of the line and spanned the width of the track. The pace setter veered off to the left and exited the track. A rearranged pace line formed. A few people passed, and after one and a half laps, the formation morphed to horizontal again, and the racers sprinted to the finish line. After a couple of cool-down laps, the whole thing was over in about two minutes, and everyone went back down the tunnel. This was supposed to repeat eleven times throughout the day. There were eight racers, and there were not many more people in the bleachers than that. Most of them didn’t respond to the race at all – I’m not even sure if they noticed it was happening.

I went down behind the box to find some snack food, and then I found everyone. Hundreds of crotchety old men sat in plastic chairs in front of screens that showed the same tables of results that the jumbo-tron displayed. There were lines of ATMs and people in booths selling sheets of paper for betting. I think I saw exactly one woman who wasn’t working there. It reminded me quite a bit of the scene in an American bingo hall, just without any women.

I saw another race or two. As the day went on, a few more people filed in to the stands, and a couple of guys who stood right near the fence around the track even hollered a little bit for the racers.

Between races, I asked a guy in the bleachers to take my picture. He waved his hand “no” I asked another guy who was walking by. He didn’t even acknowledge me. I asked another guy. He said no. I wasn’t about to let this stop me, so I set up my camera on a timer and set it on a cement pillar to take my own lousy photograph in front of the track. On the bright side, nobody around was paying enough attention to anything around them to notice what would ordinarily seem a bit ridiculous. I only wished that I had a second camera that I could have set on a timer to photograph myself taking a picture of myself with a bunch of self-absorbed, crotchety old Japanese men sitting around.

On the one hand, this scene is truly sad, and some say the track racing here is run by the Yakuza. On the other hand, all these crotchety old gamblers are keeping the sport alive in Japan. I am not sure whether that is a net positive.