As ardent Hanshin fans count down to the roaring Tigers' much-awaited baseball title, environmentalists wary of the revelers' ultimate expression of rapture -- a dive into Osaka's Dotombori River -- warn that the waterway is full of toxic sludge.
The poisons that await them include particles of heavy metals such as lead and zinc, dioxins and E-coli bacteria.
Hiroaki Ishiga, a Shimane University professor who studied the heavy metal content of the sludge, says samples taken from Dotombori showed around 10 times the concentration of heavy metals compared with muddy waterways elsewhere.