A Ball Crossed the Sea — The Game Arrives and the JFA Is Born

These days Japanese football competes on the world stage as a matter of course. The national team is a fixture at the World Cup, Japanese players line the rosters of Europe’s great clubs, and the women’s side once stood at the very summit of the world. And yet there was a time, beyond any doubt, when the sport of football did not exist in this country at all. The story begins the moment a single ball crossed the sea and came ashore as an unfamiliar “game played with the feet.”

A foot-played game, carried across the sea

The Meiji era was a time when Japan absorbed the products of Western civilization at a furious pace. Railways, the postal system, schooling, the military — alongside these institutions of a modern state, something else arrived from across the ocean: sport. Football, in particular, slipped quietly into the country through its newly opened port towns.

The stage was set in the settlements where foreigners lived. Many Europeans and Americans had taken up residence in Yokohama and Kobe for the sake of trade. For the British especially, football was the very landscape of home. They formed clubs among themselves and chased a ball about whenever a holiday came. At first it was no more than a private amusement for foreigners. To the Japanese, it must have been a strange sight: oddly dressed outsiders dashing across the grass.

Schools and the military were also important routes of transmission. In 1873, an advisory mission led by Major Douglas of the British Navy is said to have arrived in Japan and to have instructed the young men of the Naval Academy in British-style physical education and sport. A way of using the body that Japan had never known — controlling a ball with the feet alone, without the hands — was thus passed on, little by little.

From the settlements into Japanese hands

If the imported pastime had stayed the property of foreigners alone, there would have been no story to tell. What proved decisive was that it passed into the hands of the Japanese themselves, becoming their own sport.

A symbolic event was the match said to have been held in Kobe in 1888 (Meiji 21). This contest between the foreign clubs of Kobe and Yokohama survives in the records as one of the oldest formal football matches played on Japanese soil. The leading players were still resident foreigners, but the young Japanese who watched such matches up close would in time begin to kick a ball themselves.

The key to its spread lay in the schools. Through physical education at normal schools and middle schools, football reached young men across the country. It mattered greatly that the normal schools — which trained the students who would become teachers — took up the game. Young men who learned to play there went on, after graduation, to teach at schools in every region, passing it on to children. From person to person, from region to region, football put down roots throughout the length and breadth of Japan by way of the channel of education.

Even so, the Japanese football of this era was still scattered. People played eagerly in many places, but there was no center to bind these efforts together, to set them competing under common rules, to draw them into a single direction. For the sport to take root in the country as a culture, an organization to serve as the unifying body was indispensable.

A single silver cup gave birth to the association

The core around which that unifying force gathered was a single cup that arrived from across the sea.

In 1919, the Football Association of England — the homeland of the game — presented a silver cup to Japan. It was a gift laden with an expectation: that Japan would organize its football on an international footing. Yet Japan itself, the recipient, still had no nationwide body to take in the cup and put it to use. There was a splendid trophy, but no tournament to award it at, and no association to bind things together. This awkward contradiction in fact spurred those involved into action.

And so, in 1921, the Greater Japan Football Association was at last founded. This was the birth of the body that would govern the country’s football — the forerunner of today’s Japan Football Association (JFA). It was the fruit of strenuous effort by men such as the Sinologist Daira Uchino, who labored to establish a modern sporting organization in the Taisho era. Japan’s once-scattered football had finally gained a single backbone.

In that same year of 1921, the association’s founding coincided with the first national tournament, held to mark the occasion. This was the beginning of what would later be called the Emperor’s Cup, the oldest national tournament in Japanese football. The silver cup presented by England became the emblem of honor awarded to the champions of this national tournament. A ball that had crossed the sea and a cup that had crossed the sea: the two were joined on Japanese soil and bore fruit in a single tournament.

A long, long run-up toward the world

An association had been formed and a national tournament had begun, yet by the standards of the world the Japanese football of the day was still a newborn infant. In Europe and South America, professional players were already starring, and international matches staked on national prestige were stirring fervor. Around that very time, on the far side of the globe in South America, plans for the first World Cup were already taking shape. Beside all this, Japan had only just reached the starting line.

Even so, the seed sown in 1921 was no small thing. A body to bind the nation’s sport together had come into being, and a stage had been built where the country’s strongest sides gathered to contest the title. Here was the first sure step on Japanese football’s “century’s road to the world.”

The organization existed. The tournament had begun. What Japan craved next was a true contest against the world. How far would their own ability hold up against the powers across the sea? At the time, there was no stage on which to find out other than the greatest sporting festival in the world — the Olympic Games.

The wall of the world rose far too high, towering above them. And yet, at the very threshold of that high wall, Japanese football was about to work, just once, a “miracle” that would astonish the world. The stage was a Europe where the footsteps of a dark age were drawing near. The story moves on to Berlin in 1936——