The Other National Sport

The word for football here is サッカー. Sakkā. You say it and it gives itself away — a foreign word in foreign clothes, the English "soccer" pressed into katakana and left there, never quite naturalised into something that sounds like it was always Japanese. Baseball became yakyū, "field ball," its own two characters, at home in the language within a generation of arriving. Football stayed サッカー. Borrowed, and content to look borrowed.

I grew up with the opposite arrangement. In Sacramento, soccer was what children did on Saturday mornings, orange slices at half-time, parents on folding chairs. Baseball was the serious thing, the adult thing, the thing with history. I came back to Japan at twenty-eight and found the order reversed, and then found that football had done something stranger than swap places. It had built itself a home from almost nothing, fast, in a country that already had a national sport and didn't obviously need a second one.

The Latecomer

Baseball had a century's head start. It arrived in the 1870s, and Japan's first professional league was founded in 1936^[1]. By the time anyone tried to make football professional, baseball had been the default for the better part of a hundred years: the Yomiuri Giants, the Hanshin Tigers, teams named after the companies that owned them, the way things had always been done.

The J.League launched its first season on 15 May 1993^[2]. Ten clubs. One match to open it, Verdy Kawasaki against the Yokohama Marinos, nearly sixty thousand people at the old National Stadium. A nation that, in the league's own words, had until that day been one "without professional football."

What it did with that founding moment is the part that still interests me. It could have copied baseball. The clubs came from company teams, factory sides, corporate sports clubs, and the obvious thing would have been to keep the badges, the way the Giants kept Yomiuri's. Instead the league made them drop the corporate names and take the names of places^[2][5]. A town, not an owner. The model was borrowed from Germany. The idea was that a club should belong to where it stood.

I keep coming back to how deliberate that was. How often do you get to watch a country decide how a sport will feel before it has happened? They chose belonging on purpose.

A Team in Your Town

The phrase they used was almost embarrassingly plain. "A J.League team in your town"^[3]. The hometown system, ホームタウン制（せい）, written, like サッカー, half in a borrowed word and half in something native: hōmutaun, the English "hometown," with the Japanese 制 for "system" bolted on the end. Half foreign, half local, which is the whole story in a single piece of vocabulary.

The names that came out of it are the same trick. Sanfrecce Hiroshima: san, the Japanese for three, joined to frecce, Italian for arrows, after the warlord Mori Motonari and his parable about three arrows that snap alone and hold together bound^[4]. Grampus Eight, from the shachihoko on Nagoya Castle and the city's circle-eight crest. Albirex, Latin stitched onto a star, for a club in Niigata. European football's vocabulary grafted onto local myth. Nobody decided this was the aesthetic. It just kept happening, club after club, because the brief was to sound like somewhere specific and also like football, and football's language was imported.

The league started with ten clubs and now runs to around sixty, across three divisions, reaching almost every one of the forty-seven prefectures^[3]. Six still don't have one. The original 1993 ambition has a longer name now, the J.League Hundred Year Vision, which sets a target of a hundred clubs by 2092, a date so far off it can only be a statement of intent. Plant clubs in towns. Wait a century. See what takes root.

I find this easier to admire than to feel. A manufactured civic tradition, designed in a boardroom, slogan-tested. And yet I did setsubun alone in my kitchen last year, a tradition a convenience store chain sold me, and meant it completely. Does where a thing comes from matter less than whether people show up for it? People show up.

Borrowing Neighbours

Kashima is the club I think about most, because it had to solve the belonging problem more literally than anyone.

The team was a steelworks side, Sumitomo Metal, that moved to Kashima in Ibaraki and shed its corporate name in 1992 to become the Antlers^[5]. The trouble was the town. Kashima had about sixty thousand people, too small to fill a top-flight stadium, too small to be a proper hometown for a professional club. So the club did the only thing it could. It adopted the neighbours. Itako, Kamisu, Namegata, Hokota: four more towns formally written into the club's hometown so there would be enough people to belong to it^[5].

A club that had to borrow neighbours to be big enough to belong somewhere. I read that and recognised it, a little. The reaching-around for enough of a place to call yours.

Then there's Zico, who makes the whole thing human. The Brazilian arrived in Kashima in 1991, near the end of a long career, on a contract with the steelworks before there was even a league to play in^[6]. Number ten. He scored a hat-trick in the club's opening J.League fixture and dragged a factory team in a town of sixty thousand to runner-up in that first season. His word for the bond he built with the place was "a rock-solid connection built on trust"^[6]. A foreigner, on loan to a steel company, who became the thing the town was proud of. Borrowed, and then not borrowed at all.

The Overseas Group

The national team is サムライ・ブルー, Samurai Blue, blue since the kit in the 1930s and the nickname official since 2009^[7]. The formal name is plainer: サッカー日本代表（にほんだいひょう）, the football national 代表, daihyō, the word for "representative," the team that represents. It is worth sitting on that word for a second. Who are the eleven on the pitch standing in for, and where do they actually live?

Japan had no World Cup history at all until 1998^[8]. None. Then France in '98, and every tournament since: Korea-Japan, Germany, South Africa, Brazil, Russia, Qatar, eight in a row counting 2026, which they qualified for first of any nation in the world, a 2-0 win over Bahrain at Saitama in March 2025^[9]. From nothing to a fixture in a generation. The compressed arc the J.League's founders were betting on, arriving roughly on schedule.

The high-water mark, so far, was Qatar in 2022. Beating Germany 2-1, two goals off the bench in the last fifteen minutes. Beating Spain 2-1, Doan's left foot from the edge of the box and then Ao Tanaka bundling in a cross that hung on the line for the two longest minutes of VAR I can remember^[10]. Both at the same stadium in Doha. The country I'd come back to, beating the two countries that more or less invented the modern game.

What strikes me about that squad isn't the results. It's the addresses. The team that now represents Japan barely lives in Japan. They're 海外組（かいがいぐみ）, kaigai-gumi, the "overseas group," a generation of players based at clubs across Europe's top leagues^[12] — Endo at Liverpool, Mitoma at Brighton, Kubo in San Sebastián, Tanaka in England. The combined count of Japanese players in the major European leagues passed a hundred in the 2024-25 season^[12]. The pathway opened with Hidetoshi Nakata's move to Perugia in 1998^[11], and the trickle became the spine of the team.

This is the inversion that gets me. In 1993 the league was the whole story — you became a footballer in Japan to play in Japan. Now the national team is built around people who left, who belong to Japan while living somewhere else, who represent a country they fly back to. I know that arrangement. It has a name in my own life and the word is "returnee." There is a particular way you belong to a place by being from it and not living in it, and the kaigai-gumi carry it onto the pitch every time they line up for the 代表.

The Stadium That Gets Tidied

The players aren't the only ones who do their representing abroad. Whenever Japan plays a tournament overseas, the cameras find the same scene after the final whistle: supporters in blue working along the rows with bin bags, clearing their section of the stand before they leave. Russia in 2018, Qatar in 2022, and again this summer — and the reaction abroad never changes, a delighted how civilised, as if tidying up after yourself were a national gift.^[13] The clean-up has become part of the away kit, as recognisable as the shirt.

What's new is that the gesture no longer travels home unchallenged. This time it drew a small, sharp backlash from inside Japan. A spoof poster went round online in the deadpan style of the Tokyo Metro manners campaigns: a man dutifully bagging litter in the stand, and beside him the same man on the sofa in his Samurai Blue shirt while a woman does the dishes. Please do it at home, it read.^[14] There is a hard floor under the joke. By OECD measures Japan has one of the widest gaps in the developed world between the unpaid hours women and men give the house — women putting in several times what men do.^[15] A quieter version of the complaint just wonders how much of the spotless away end is for the cameras at all. I don't think the cleaning is fake, any more than the hometown clubs are. But it is the same trick as the rest of it: a gesture that reads as one country to the world watching and as another to the people living inside it.

What Belongs

The hometown idea is still down there underneath all of it, more literal than you'd expect. Kawasaki Frontale runs a futsal ground called Frontown where locals of any age turn up in the evenings to play. A ticket to watch Osaka's clubs, or Urawa's, runs you a few thousand yen, cheaper than the baseball at the Dome, far cheaper than a seat in England^[3]. The team in your town, decades on, still mostly a thing you can walk to.

I don't know whether football will ever be the national sport rather than the other one. I'm not sure it needs to be, or wants to be. Baseball has its hundred years and its high school tournament and its place in the language. Football has サッカー — still wearing the foreign name, still a little borrowed — and a national team that lives abroad, and sixty clubs named after places that decided to be proud of them.

A country adopted a game. The towns adopted clubs. The clubs sent their best players away and the players came home to represent. Borrowed all the way down, and somehow, by now, entirely Japan's. I keep deciding it shouldn't add up to belonging, and it keeps adding up anyway.