It’s not easy being a member of the Samurai Bears. The Golden Baseball League team, which consists solely of Japanese players and has no home field, is in the midst of a 90-game, 96-day road trip around the American southwest. “I can’t believe we’re actually doing it,” pitcher Takaaki Igarashi said through an interpreter during a postgame interview with Ben Bolch of the Los Angeles Times. “It’s not that it’s really hard. I just get sick of eating hamburgers all the time.” Bolch caught up with the Bears during a recent stop in Southern California, and he chronicles a journey “fraught with comical misadventures and lost-in-translation moments.”

Food is a major issue. Bolch writes:

“Almost every player totes along a rice cooker to make simple Japanese dishes, occasionally concocting something more elaborate with meat or curry and inviting his teammates over.”

In Southern California, however, the team has found a small following.  “Here and in Long Beach, there are many Japanese people,” first baseman Yuji Nerei told Bolch before a recent game in Fullerton. “They cheer the Japanese way, with the trumpet. That makes us very comfortable and feel at home. It feels like Japan.”