Kickoff at 4am

At five in the morning the only reliable light on my street is the 7-Eleven two minutes from my apartment. In a couple of days it will have company. Japan open against the Netherlands in Texas, and the kickoff back home is 05:00^[1], which is a strange hour to ask a country to feel anything collectively. Some streets will stay dark. On others you'll hear it — not a crowd, just a single cheer two streets over, muffled by a window, then nothing.

The match will be on NHK, free, in my living room. I could watch it from bed. So why would anybody get up to watch it anywhere else?

Why So Early

The 2026 World Cup is in North America — eleven cities in the United States, three in Mexico, two in Canada^[2].

That's the whole explanation. Japan is thirteen to sixteen hours ahead of the host venues, so the fixtures land in the small hours here. A late-afternoon game in Arlington is a pre-dawn game in Hyogo.

Japan drew the Netherlands, Sweden and Tunisia in Group F^[1]. Two of the three are unsociable. The Netherlands opener is a 05:00 JST kickoff, the Sweden game an 08:00. Tunisia, mercifully, is a one o'clock on a Sunday, the only one of the three you can watch like an adult.

So the brutal hour isn't quite the legend. Not one of Japan's three group games is a literal 4am this time round. But the tournament as a whole runs through that 1am-to-8am band, the knockouts especially, and the country has done this before. It knows the drill.

The Konbini at 5am

The fridge at the back of a konbini is fully stocked at five in the morning, the same as at five in the afternoon, because the stores never close and the law doesn't care what time you buy beer. A 500ml Asahi Super Dry is about ¥300^[3]. Strong Zero, if that's your morning, is closer to ¥160. The prices are the same at FamilyMart and Lawson, within about ten yen, which is the kind of detail you stop noticing until you're standing in front of a fridge at an hour that makes you notice things.

I clock the fridge being lit whenever I pass it, the way it always is, and think about who fills baskets at it before a 5am kickoff. There's something honest about a beer run that ends before sunrise. No pretence that this is a normal Tuesday.

The 8am Sweden game is the trickier one. Can you really start on cans at eight and then go to work? Most people will have to go to work. That's the game that gets watched on a phone, half-muted, on the train.

Going Out to Stay In

Watching at home is free. NHK shows every Samurai Blue match live, terrestrial and on NHK+, no subscription^[4]. So going out is never about access. It's about not being alone for it.

In Tokyo the football bars open early and charge for the privilege. Hobgoblin in Roppongi runs a flat ¥3,000 cover for the big matches, two drink tickets included; Sports Bar Fiori in Shinjuku wanted ¥3,500 to ¥4,000 for Japan's group games^[5]. Footnik in Ebisu is a proper football bar and screens the lot. The Hub, the British pub chain, just extends its hours. I'm in Hyogo, an hour or so west of all of that, watching the listings the way you watch weather in a city you don't live in.

The cinemas do the most Japanese version of it. TOHO and other chains open early for ticketed screenings — a seated, air-conditioned, assigned-seat 5am football match in a multiplex^[5]. There's a quiet absurdity to buying a reserved seat to watch a screen at dawn that I find completely persuasive. If I went out for one of these games, that's where I'd go.

Doha, 4am

The 4am of the imagination is real, but it belongs to 2022. Japan played Spain at 4am JST on a Friday in December, won 2-1, and topped the group^[6]. Before sunrise, Shibuya Scramble Crossing filled up with people chanting "Nippon" into the dark^[7].

What I remember from the footage is the order inside it. Officers on a raised platform with a loudspeaker, the so-called DJ Police, asking the crowd to mind the signals, and the crowd minding them, crossing on green, stepping back on red. Euphoria with a queue. Afterwards people picked up their own litter. A country can lose its mind at 4am and still sort the recycling.

That was a spontaneous celebration, not an organised screening, and I'd be careful projecting it onto any specific corner in 2026. But it's the truest picture of what the hour does here. The hour doesn't dampen it. It concentrates it.

The Morning After

The cost comes due around nine. The 8am kickoff overlaps the start of the commuter rush, so the people who half-watched on their phones spill onto trains already running, then into offices to begin a day on no sleep.

You can usually tell. Not from anything said (nobody mentions it) but from the temperature of the floor. A little slower. More coffee than usual moving past the desks. The particular flatness of a room where a quiet majority is running on 寝不足（ねぶそく） and pretending otherwise. By lunchtime someone will have the highlights open under their desk.

I don't know yet how the 2026 mornings will land. I'm writing this on the eve of the opener, and the muted office is a forecast, not a memory. But the country has rehearsed it. It stays up, it goes in, it gets through the day, and it does the whole thing again the following week for the next one. The match is free at home, so why go out into the dark for it? People do, and that, more than the football, is the part worth being awake for.