“I wanted to let them know that we know that they all made their best effort,” said Masako Hoshina, a company employee from Narita, Chiba Prefecture. How did it come to this? Japan, the continental champions were supposed to lead Asia’s charge in Brazil but, perhaps behind only Spain, have been the major disappointment.
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Japan’s team, which bowed out in the group stage of the ongoing World Cup without winning a match, was greeted by about 1,000 well-wishers after arriving at Narita airport on Friday.
Cheers rang out from the crowd as Japan coach Alberto Zaccheroni and his players, all of them dressed in suits, appeared looking stone-faced from the terminal gate. One of the signs held up by child read, “Thank you for the dreams!”
Japan were expected, and expecting, to be in the last 16, at least. A quarter-final target had been talked about but then the Japan Football Association has a long-term plan that includes winning the World Cup by 2050, a time when if they were still facing Greece, they may just have managed a goal. “If you don’t score then you don’t win,” lamented the Nikkan Sports newspaper on Friday after a goalless draw left the Samurai Blues’ hopes of reaching the second round looking slim.
It is not that simple but Japan should have followed suit from the beginning. Strangely passive in the opening game against Ivory Coast, this was not what people expected. Apart from Keisuke Honda’s delicious opener, there was little intensity and plenty of giving the ball away. The Milan man was in poor form before the tournament but declared he would be all right on the night. He hasn’t really but Shinji Kagawa has been worse. For the expanding number of fans of the team around the world, this version of Japan team looked as Japanese as Michelle Yeoh in Memoirs of a Geisha.
There was not much evidence of that when Japan struggled to break down a Greek team playing with 10 men for most of the game. Fans, both inside the Land of the Rising Sun and out, expected so much of this team. If Japan are to go out at the earliest stage, they should at least show the world the kind of football Asia knows they can play – for their sake and the continent’s.