Japanese National Football Team: making sense of their success from a cultural perspective

I am not a football expert, my son went through the UK football academy system with a professional football club so I have seen how young footballers are developed in England but am not an expert in football strategy but am a Grimsby fan only because my father is and did watch the World Cup Semi-finals live in Berlin in 2006. However, I do understand the Japanese and how they approach work and only recently said to my partner that Japan would soon beat England at football. As latecomers to the game of football (baseball has been their most popular sport) they have adopted a similar mentality to what was adopted in the Meiji and post WWII eras: study in detail, adapt and improve. Delegations left Japan not long after it opened up from its Sakoku period of being closed off to the world (1633-1853) and travelled around the world (UK included) to learn about railways, banking systems etc and this knowledge was taken back to Japan to mostly improve and adapt it to Japan’s needs. Japanese companies also embarked on this spirit of improvement and refinement of technologies they learned from outside Japan leading up to the economic miracle (1955 to the 1980s.) Technology was refined and improved, kaizen (itself an import into Japan) took hold in Japanese automotive factories and Japan became the second largest economy in the world. Although the inflexibility of Japanese businesses processes and a cautious approach to change meant that many foreign companies have since overtaken the Japanese in some industries, they have never lost that spirit of improvement and refinement.

When I do my presentations about Japan, I talk about ‘kaizen’ in a looser sense than its technical applications-for me the Japanese ‘kaizen’ embraces a sense of observation, a focussed attention to details including the processes involved and then improving until perfect. I use an example about how the Japanese have taken the recipe for pizza, studied it to such an extent down to the minute detail of consistency and ingredient ratios and now allegedly make the best pizza in the world (many Italians will disagree!). I also use an example of Yamaha (I am a freelance bassoonist) who have studied the details of this very intricate instrument including the wall thickness and tone to replicate the sound of the more traditional German models that are played in Europe to produce their new professional models.  A recent delegation I presented to from Innovate UK recently went to visit a Robotics factory in Japan and were astounded by the level of detail and kaizen seen, often retaining prototypes from the 80s to keep testing and improving on.

The risk averse nature of the Japanese means that any new endeavour is carefully studied beforehand with a razor like focus on detail and information gathering, as anyone working with a Japanese company will attest to. It is no surprise that the J League has been sending over delegations to England for years looking at our academy systems, how they are run, studying the processes of coaching and playing football and bringing these learnings back to Japan to improve and adapt. Japanese Youth Football Programmes are said to be extremely well organised and very effective with a big emphasis on holistic aspects such as discipline, respect, teamwork, responsibility and resilience. To become a master of something in Japan means hard work, discipline, repetition when practicing and sometimes, subjugating your own needs to that of the team. This can sometimes change the nature of a hobby or a sport for Western counterparts. When I lived in Japan, I was taken aback at the amount of practice and commitment school children were expected to give to after-school clubs that I thought would be a fun hobby (I failed miserably at Kendo). The expectation of practicing meticulous moves repeatedly until perfect was not really of interest to me at that time. I also played with a Japanese orchestra in Ashikaga, and agree with comments made recently by CBSO conductor Kazuki Yamada that "in Japanese orchestras, everyone is focussing on being correct to the letter of the music."

In summary, Japan has a history of studying things in detail, refining them and taking them back to Japan to inject with Japanese cultural traits sometimes to produce things that are more efficient and resilient . It remains to be seen whether the same will be done with football.

For more cultural insights about Japan, do watch my videos East West Interface | Trans-cultural Business Education | video