The dutiful game

Half-time at Japan’s World Cup warm-up game against Costa Rica, and it was time for a new chant.

Ten years ago, such raucous celebration at a Japanese football match would have been unthinkable. Japan football internationals were of interest to a tiny minority of Japanese - and these mostly watched in silence. But, after ignoring it for over a century, the Japanese suddenly decided they needed football. They weren’t just tired of watching baseball, which was the country’s main spectator sport; they wanted a piece of the beautiful game because it was a ticket to what they call "the world" - the world outside Japan. This, more than the strictly American import that went before it, would make them internationally minded, creative and expressive - everything they were not, but felt they needed to be.

Professional football came to Japan only in 1993 with the start of the J.League. By then, the Japanese version of baseball had grown into a reflection of the corporate way of life that had dominated Japan since the war. The players wore grim, at-work expressions and short black hair - much like the office workers who went to see them play.

Everything about football was new and tinged with an international flavour. The players often had shaggy, brown-tinted hair and developed silly dances to celebrate goals. Japanese coaches studied in Germany, while teenagers went to Brazil to live in club dormitories in the hope of putting some samba in their feet. Wise minds came to Japan to pass on knowledge from football’s Old World. For the fans, the game was a ticket to other worlds where people sang, lit fireworks and danced for joy. They knew all this because, in order to behave properly at the game, they studied European and South American crowds in satellite broadcasts to learn how it was done. "As soon as they get into the stadium they become John Bull, they become Germanic, they become Argentine and Brazilian," wrote one fan of the gang he hung out with. "In other words, they are Japanese living in their own country, who have abandoned a little of their Japaneseness."

Despite the late start, the germ of Japanese professional football dated back to 1960, when student Saburo Kawabuchi was training with the rest of the Japan football team in Duisburg, West Germany. The 1964 Olympics were scheduled for Tokyo, and although Japan would qualify automatically as hosts, national pride demanded they not be humiliated. So a young Japanese football team travelled round Europe to test themselves against better opposition.

More than the quality of European football, however, Kawabuchi was impressed by the training camp - a Sportschule, a kind of giant sports centre. Teams ranging from young boys to the middle-aged played on nine grass football pitches. Parents exercised with their children in three gymnasiums, or rowed boats on a pond. They could watch a film in the cinema and stay overnight in a guestroom.

Japan had sports teams, but they represented universities and companies: Furukawa Electric was the strongest in football, followed by Dunlop Japan. And even these teams had hardly anywhere to play. Japan’s native grass grew in the hot, wet summers, but turned brown and all but disappeared in winter. Football teams played on gravel or earth pitches, with potholes that made it almost impossible to pass the ball accurately. As a result,players mainly hoofed the ball from one end of the pitch to the other.

Dettmar Cramer, a German coach who visited Japan, told players at one point: "I had heard that they played football in Japan, but what I saw was ping pong. Just look at the faces of the people in the stands. They look right, and then they look left, then they look right again and so on."

By the late 1980s, not much had changed. But things had moved on elsewhere. First, South Korea had formed a professional league in 1983, and their national side consistently beat the Japanese - and took one of Asia’s berths in the World Cup. Second, the game had become popular with schoolchildren, and the number playing football was greater that that playing baseball. Most importantly, decades of economic growth had made Japan rich and fun-loving - perfect ingredients to prop up a new professional sports league.

In October 1989, Kawabuchi, by then an official in the Japan Football Association (JFA), announced a plan for a professional league intended to revolutionise Japanese football. The old Japan Soccer League (JSL) had attracted tiny crowds; the new teams would all have 15,000-seat stadiums with floodlights and grass pitches instead of earth or artificial turf. Teams in the JSL represented companies; for the new league, they would all have to change their names to the towns they played in, and run a network of youth teams designed to encourage young locals to participate. Kawabuchi thought these might provide a springboard to sports clubs like the one he’d seen in Germany. He thought Japanese life was too dominated by business, and people deserved sports teams representing their home towns rather than corporations. "The J.League is a social revolution," Kawabuchi said later. "It’s different from just making Japan good at football."

By the time the J.League kicked off in May 1993, the metamorphosis of Japanese football was complete. Publicity for the new league meant plenty of Japanese were curious to go along and find out what it was like. But that was not the same as creating thousands of loyal supporters who would watch their team every week, losing streaks included. How do you create a fan base out of nothing?

The Japanese tend to believe there is a correct way to do everything. They go to classes to learn how to arrange flowers, and read manuals explaining the right way to answer a telephone. In earlier times, soldiering developed into the Way of the Samurai, while making tea became a ceremony. So when football first came to Japan, most of those involved were determined to do it the correct way.

However, there were competing ideas of what counted as correct. One was represented by Kawasaki (now Tokyo) Verdy. They had several Brazilian players, and the club asked a Latin soul musician to form a new samba group to support the team. The group was called Camisa Doze - Twelfth Shirt - after the So Paulo Corinthians supporters group which thought its support was equivalent to having a 12th player on the field. Verdy imported over 2,000 samba tambourines and 100 drums from Brazil, and for several years their games were played against a background of Japanese samba.

Not everyone agreed with this, and a rival European school of football support grew up too. The masters of this were the Urawa Reds, based in the town of that name near Tokyo.

The club’s general secretary, Hiroshi Sato, was a football fanatic who had toured Europe as a student and been particularly impressed by Manchester United. Because of its car-maker owner, the club’s full name was Mitsubishi Urawa Football Club - MUFC, just like Manchester United Football Club. Sato decided to give Urawa Reds the same colours: red shirts, white shorts and black socks. He had "Play to the limit" written on the shirts, a favourite phrase of Manchester United legend Sir Matt Busby. To increase the British flavour of the club, he even got an English teacher living in the town to help pen a club song to the tune of Rod Stewart’s Sailing:

We are Diamonds, we are Diamonds,

Yes we love you, boys in red.

We stand beside you, forever always,

Yes Red Diamonds, you’re the best.

"All the time I thought about how to create an atmosphere like I’d seen in Europe," Sato explained. "I didn’t want anyone to be disappointed in football."

The fans were unlikely to be disappointed by the dazzling array of foreign stars who were lured to Japan. Zico, "the white Pele" who played for Brazil at three World Cups, signed for Kashima Antlers. Gary Lineker went to Nagoya Grampus Eight. Pierre Littbarski, who won the 1990 World Cup with West Germany, joined JEF United Ichihara.

The star imports didn’t stop there. More than 60 foreign managers coached Japanese clubs in the first decade of the J.League, and they were brought to Japan to pass on their knowledge to young Japanese players. But they sometimes found their biggest task was dealing with the mental aspect of the game.

Arsne Wenger arrived at Nagoya Grampus in 1995 after they had just finished bottom of the J.League. The French maestro was brought to the club because of his previous success at AS Monaco - but initially he flopped. The players seemed aimless and unmotivated, and lost eight of their first ten games with him in charge. They were bottom of the league again, and in one dressing-room tirade, the normally calm Wenger yelled in disgust: "What are you afraid of? Can you call yourselves professionals, playing like this?"

Wenger eventually realised that the problem was not skill or tactics, but something deeper. "There was a wall between me and the Grampus players," he wrote in a book published in Japan. "The know-how I had developed in Europe was of no use with this wall." Specifically, when players got the ball during training, they would often hesitate, waiting for the foreign master-coach to prompt their next move. "They wanted specific instructions from me. But football is not American football, where the coach can give instructions for each play over headphones. The player with the ball should be in charge of the game. I had to teach them to think for themselves."

So whenever a player had the ball in training and looked to him for guidance, Wenger just shouted: "Decide for yourself!" They had to learn too that, despite what they might have heard, football was not just a game. When Yugoslav star Dragan Stojkovic arrived at Grampus the year before, he had been amazed by the attitude of his team-mates. "Why do they laugh when they lose?" complained the player who took the game so seriously he couldn’t sleep the night after a defeat.

After a few months under Wenger, though, the European approach began to work; Grampus finished the stage in fourth place, by far their highest position yet. They did even better in the second stage, coming in second. And in the post-season they won the Emperor’s Cup, their first ever trophy.

These and other foreign influences rubbed off on a new generation of Japanese players. National team goalkeeper Yoshikatsu Kawaguchi (now of Portsmouth) grew up in provincial Japan, but was exposed to world football from the age of about 15. His school invited Brazilian coaches to teach, and when Kawaguchi showed his talent, it was arranged for him to spend a month at Internacional in Brazil. "From this age," he said, "we were always thinking about foreign soccer and the outside world."

Ten years after this grand project to establish a whole football culture and industry in Japan, the game is unrecognisable from its predecessor. In 1998, Japan finally qualified for the World Cup. Although they lost all three matches in France, one Japanese player, Hidetoshi Nakata, made enough of an impression to receive offers from several clubs in Europe. He moved to Italian side Perugia, the start of several years in Italy’s Serie A that took him to Roma and then to Parma, where he still plays. Most Japanese players who followed him to Europe have flopped so far, struggling to meet the physical and competitive demands. One exception is Shinji Ono, who has become a regular starter for Dutch club Feyenoord.

And as Japan prepares to co-host the 2002 World Cup, there has been no let-up in the foreign influences. The current national manager is Philippe Troussier, a Frenchman. When he arrived in Japan, Troussier decided: "The younger Japanese players are maybe better than Europeans in technical areas. My challenge is to prepare them to play against aggressive foreign sides." To do this, he put them through training sessions that often looked more like rugby, as he pushed and shoved his young charges round the field. Explaining his confrontational style, Troussier once said: "You need human talent on a football field - to communicate and make decisions under pressure. Japanese players need to walk around London or eat pizza in Italy, because this will break down the social borders and give them new ways to express themselves."

They’ll be at home in this World Cup, and able to eat sushi and noodles rather than pizza. But the game they play and the support they get will have more than a little foreign flavour.

Sebastian Moffet’s book, Japanese Rules, is published by Yellow Jersey Press.

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