Vibe Check #25 (October 2025)

Hello, and welcome to the 25th edition of our Vibe Check, where we talk about everything and anything dealing with Japan, Japanese culture, anime, or everything that happens on the top of our heads for the month. Hope you have a happy reading.

Check #1: Departure of Yuki Kawamura

As another NBA season is underway, the sad news of Yuki Kawamura being waived from the Chicago Bulls understandably pissed a ton of people. The reason is that Kawamura is super talented with great basketball IQ for someone who's physically smaller than the majority of the league. 

However, it does beg the allegations of the NBA as a whole, "How come fan favorite players such as Yuki Kawamura are treated like trash, but players that have no talent or drive like Ben Simmons and Bronny James whatsoever can not only stay in the league, but will be paid generational wealth as well?" 

The thing people loved about Kawamura is his personality and how he's lovable to players and fans from around the league. You know you're doing well in the league if even opponents' fans are loving your craft. 

When I read the reason why he got waived (because of an injury to his lower leg), it's sad but weird because (don't fully quote me on this), there might've been a chance he would recover during the season, so he could swing back and forth from the NBA to the G-League. It's just that whether someone is a fan favorite in the NBA for a good reason, they tend to get the short end of the stick. Just one injury (that might've been not a huge deal) and they have a reason to go "Oh well, on to the next person."

Check #2: Halloween and Battlefield 6

October is mostly the month dealing with the start of basketball and hockey, and tons of spooky times with trick-or-treating and college parties that are filled with Scream masks. 

However, since I don't really celebrate Halloween, I mostly use the time to try a game out that's out of my range on what I usually play. In the past week or so, my gamer friends were begging me to play Battlefield 6 with them and describing how intense the game is.

Now I have experience with shooting games with Call of Duty, but never with Battlefield. So, I thought, why not? and bought the game. I've played about 10 games from midnight to morning, and let me tell you: COD and Battlefield is the definition of going to high school and college—just a super huge difference in gaming.

For people who have never played Battlefield before, it's a lot bigger than even the biggest Call of Duty maps. It's not that fast-paced, and shooting feels a lot more realistic, and you have to aim a lot more precisely than Call of Duty. Rather than dying immediately on COD, you have the chance to recover and not count that as your death (learned that immediately on the first game).

Is the game fun? Of course, but the learning curve was just super crazy compared to when I was in COD. So it'll take a good bit for me to get used to the games (translation: don't be surprised if there are some all-nighters and tons of embarrassing losses).

Check #3: Yamamoto's Smile

Yoshinobu Yamamoto--the name that strikes fear into tons of batters in Japan and in the States. At first, people underestimated him because of his slow start in the Majors, but now... his name alone would make batters second-guess themselves.

The reason I want to talk about him is because there was a viral video of him smiling at the batters before he struck them out. That got me thinking, "You have to be a really terrifying and psychotic pitcher to smile at the batters before you strike them out." The type of smiles that movie killers have before they kill their prey.

I know Yamamoto is one of the best pitchers in the world, but to smile at batters when you face them is just next-level crazy to me. 

At least with Shohei Ohtani, he has a serious facial gesture of intense focus so you can somewhat try to be calm and composed against him; however, if I ever face a pitcher that smiles at me like Yamamoto smiles, I would be terrified to even stand on the batter's box...

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That's it for this month's Vibe Check and Happy Halloween! Tune in next month for the next Vibe Check!