Kickoff 1993 — The Green Frenzy

May 15, 1993, dusk over Tokyo. The stands of the National Stadium had swelled with people long before the gates opened. When the floodlights came on over the pitch, the cheers of more than fifty-nine thousand spectators rose into the night sky. A country that had known only empty stands, now wrapped in a sold-out celebration — that scene was itself a revolution. This was the long-awaited kickoff of the professional football league, the J.League.

The Green Clubs That Cast Off Their Company Names

For the J.League’s opening, ten clubs were granted entry. These were the memorable founding members, later called the Original 10. Kashima Antlers, JEF United Ichihara, Urawa Red Diamonds, Verdy Kawasaki, Yokohama Marinos, Yokohama Flugels, Shimizu S-Pulse, Nagoya Grampus Eight, Gamba Osaka, and Sanfrecce Hiroshima — every one of them was a former corporate team reborn, having shed its company name and donned the name of a town along with a new nickname.

In this single act of ‘removing the company name’ was packed the entire philosophy of the J.League. To stand not as Yomiuri, not as Nissan, but as the club of its town. For companies that had poured vast sums into their teams over the years, having their own name vanish from the front was not an easy thing to swallow. Even so, chairman Saburo Kawabuchi would not yield on this one principle. As long as it remained a corporate advertising medium, football could never belong to the people of the town — that conviction was unshakable.

Clubs hoping to join were held to demanding conditions. Incorporation of the club, establishment of a hometown to serve as its base of activity, a floodlit stadium able to seat at least fifteen thousand, contracts with at least eighteen professional players, and the operation of youth academies to nurture children. These were not mere thresholds; they were ideological gateways, designed to send into the world only genuine clubs that put down roots in their communities.

Community Ties: A New Philosophy

The greatest banner the J.League raised was a single phrase: community ties.

Until then, Japanese professional sport — typified by professional baseball — had taken it for granted that a company owned a team, attached its name to it, and spread its fanbase across the whole nation. But the path the J.League chose was the exact opposite. A club puts down roots in a single town and walks alongside the people of that region. Win or lose, they keep cheering across generations. The reformers had seen that this bond between club and community — so natural in Europe and South America — was precisely what Japan was decisively lacking.

The hometown system was that philosophy translated into a concrete mechanism. Each club designated a particular town as its base, filled the stadium there, taught football to children, and showed its face at local events. The club would not belong to some distant company in Tokyo, but become the shared property of the town right before its eyes. This way of thinking later developed into the J.League Hundred-Year Vision — ‘to nurture community-rooted sports clubs’ — becoming the fundamental principle the league would uphold a hundred years into the future.

The Opening Night Seen by Fifty-Nine Thousand

And so came May 15, 1993. The card for that memorable opening match was Verdy Kawasaki against Yokohama Marinos.

Filling the stands of the National Stadium were fifty-nine thousand six hundred and twenty-six people. Never once before, in all of Japan’s past, had such a crowd surged in for a single football match. After a dazzling opening ceremony, the moment of the historic kickoff arrived at last. Verdy struck first. But in the second half, Yokohama Marinos turned to the counterattack and, on the strength of ace Ramon Diaz and others, came from behind. Yokohama won that memorable first match 2 to 1.

Yet that night, what truly captured people’s hearts was not the result itself. The riot of colored jerseys, the pouring floodlights, the chants the supporters drummed out, and that heat as the whole stand swayed as one. It was a scene from an entirely different world than the empty corporate league of before. Through the television broadcast, that fervor flowed that very night into living rooms all across Japan.

The Unprecedented Boom That Dyed the Nation Green

The heat the opening brought did not stay within the stadium. The J.League swelled, in the blink of an eye, into a social phenomenon.

Club merchandise sold like wildfire, and the players became darlings of the age, transcending the bounds of sport. Above all, Kazuyoshi Miura — called ‘King’ — became a name known even to people who knew nothing of football. Young people who had never had any connection to the game now donned the colors of their favorite club and made their way to the stadium. In provincial towns, having a club of one’s own came to be spoken of as a new source of local pride.

The numbers tell the story of that frenzy. Kawabuchi himself, it is said, had at first reckoned that five thousand per match would be a good result. But once the lid was lifted, the average attendance in the first year sailed well past seventeen thousand. Tickets became hard to come by, and television ratings recorded high figures. It was an unprecedented success that no one had foreseen. The country called Japan was being dyed green, whole and entire.

And so in 1993, Japanese football at last seized the hearts of the masses and put down deep roots within society. A country that had known only empty stands was reborn as a country wrapped in a packed stadium’s roar. The dream the reformers had seen on the eve came true in a form that far surpassed all imagining.

But heat like this does not burn on forever. A flame that flares up too suddenly eventually calls forth the chill of a reaction. Behind a popularity that had swelled like a bubble, the J.League was already beginning to head toward its first great trial. After the frenzy, the trials would come.