Bayern Munich liked what they saw. Their scouts had identified a 17-year-old who had played only five times for Sagan Tosu in the Japanese J-League. They invited the boy, Taichi Fukui, over to Munich to train for three weeks over summer 2022 and became convinced.
By September, Fukui, by now 18, had signed a contract to join in January. For now, he will train with Martin Demichelis’s Bayern II squad. The road to the first team will be long, but the pathway is there. Fukui is one of the new age. Japan’s latest Under-20 squad includes teenagers based at Real Madrid, Barcelona and Bayern Munich.
When Japan arrived in South Africa for the 2010 World Cup, they brought with them an unhealthy chunk of insularity as their baggage. Japan, joint-hosts in 2002, had never before won a World Cup match outside their own country. Their coach, Takeshi Okada, had never managed outside Japanese football. Only four of the 23-man squad played football outside Japan, at Catania, Grenoble, CSKA Moscow and Wolfsburg. This time, finally, they tasted victory on foreign soil. Their one star in European football, Keisuke Honda, scored half of their goals in South Africa.
Kyogo Furuhashi scored both goals in Celtic’s Scottish League Cup final win over Rangers last month. Further south, Kaoru Mitoma is one of the most watchable attacking players in England. In Germany’s Bundesliga last weekend, Japan boasted nine different starters, more than Brazil and Spain combined.
The national team is now a diaspora: only four of the 26 in the original 2022 World Cup squad played their football in Japan and three of those were only back in the J-League after a career abroad. In little over a decade since 2010, a Japanese export revolution has taken place.
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The aim was always for vast expansion. By encouraging the creation of clubs in each of Japan’s 47 prefectures – and thus aiming to reduce the dependency on company ownership, a la baseball – the number of fully professional clubs has grown to 60 across three tiers – that’s more than in France, for example. Neither is this football as purely strategic endeavour; communities are being bound to clubs to create a nascent cultural heritage.
Japan’s export revolution is – principally and unsurprisingly – founded upon rapid investment. The Japanese Football Association made public their intention to win the World Cup by 2050 (when the J-League was formed in 1992, this was originally a 100-year goal), and to make that even vaguely realistic the quality of the domestic league needed to a) improve quickly, and b) become extremely effective at developing talent as well as attracting it.
The FA and the J1 League brought prefectures, associations, clubs, coaches, universities and schools together to work for a common good. There is a Japanese concept – “ikigai” – which describes the sourcing of meaning or fulfilment from a purpose. The national team was the ikigai.
“I think we are now the top league in Asia – a club from our league has won the AFC Champions League for consecutive years,” said J-League general manager Takeyuki Oya in 2019 – he was probably right then and he is probably right now, depending on your means of assessment. The difference with the leagues in, say, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, China and Saudi Arabia, is that Japan is aiming to be a nursery for talent, not just a nursing home.
That aim is governed by regulation. It is now mandatory for every club to run their own academy with at least Under-15 and Under-18 teams. There are limits on the number of foreigners on each squad. The first team starting XI must contain at least two homegrown players and one Under-21 player.
In Japanese society, there is a hardwired respect of seniority which often meant younger players had their pathway blocked; that has changed. Clubs are also rewarded for developing and playing academy graduates. The earlier the player moves, the more development they get in a different footballing culture and the more space it allows for another young player to replace them.
Just as important as the number of players produced is their style and personality. Japanese (and Asian players in general) were stereotyped as simply being hardworking and industrious, team players who perhaps lacked flair and physicality. Those who were exceptional tended not to always fit in with the plans of the national team.
But in 2016, the Japanese FA created “Project DNA”, an initiative that aimed to adjust and amend existing training methods to produce more rounded footballers. They sent coaches to European clubs, including those in the Premier League. They studied and they cherry-picked and they vowed that insularity should never rule because Japan would never have enough alone.
The baby has not been thrown out with the bathwater. Coaches and scouts still insist that there is a mentality that tends to stretch across most Japanese players: they want to improve, dedicating themselves to improving technique, and they are very appreciative of instruction. But in terms of playing style, there has been a notable shift. Japan’s most successful recent exports (Mitoma at Brighton, Daichi Kamada at Eintracht Frankfurt, Takefusa Kubo at Real Sociedad) are fun, unpredictable, exciting attacking players.
“There has been a greater emphasis on flair of late,” says John Duerden, Asian football correspondent for The Guardian, Associated Press and World Soccer. “This is partly organic as the globalisation of football means that, compared to 20-30 years ago, Japanese kids can watch the best and most exciting players in the world every day and coaches were aware that Japan had a surplus of technically excellent midfielders and dynamic full-backs and needed something a little different. The success of Mitoma etc, will drive that even further as it shows that you can be exciting and shine at the highest levels.”
Duerden’s point hints at perhaps the most interesting aspect of this strategy: the point at which it becomes self-fulfilling. The rate of change has been so rapid that current coach Hajime Moriyasu could pick a national team squad composed entirely of those based abroad and aged below 30. More and more major clubs are focusing their scouting on Japan.
You see the point: a greater focus on development leads to more rounded players; more rounded players leads to more exports; more successful exports leads to more interest (Japanese players still come comparatively cheap); more interest leads to more scouting; more scouting leads to more incentive to develop; more incentive to develop leads to a greater focus on development and we’re back at the start of the circle. All the while, the national team inevitably improves.
Japan’s victories over Spain and Germany in Qatar may have been shocks, but even upsets are built upon foundations. The third largest economy in the world already had a competent football team and a competent football league. Its desire to be the best may fall some way short; these impossibly large dreams often do. But Japanese football is thriving – look at Europe’s biggest clubs in the biggest leagues and the best competitions for proof of that. They believe that they’re just getting started.
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