The importance of manga in Japanese football

The Japan Football Federation and adidas have shown the home & away jerseys with which the Japanese national team will take the field during the upcoming World Cup in Qatar 2022. Two highly anticipated kits that the German brand had decided to teaser in a rather unusual yet successful way, namely by drawing them on the covers of two football-themed manga that are highly followed in their homeland: Blue Lock and Giant Killing. A choice that closes a circle, and gives the sports manga, spokon, the fundamental role in the birth and evolution of football on the Japanese island. 

When a young cartoonist named Yoichi Takahashi began creating a new manga after being thunderstruck by Argentina's victory at the 1978 World Cup home game, football in Japan was virtually unknown. In fact, despite having been introduced by the British in the late 1800s, sakka had not yet broken through in the Rising Sun, in a country where Sumo, Baseball dominated and volleyball was beginning to establish itself. But in 1981 with the release of Captain Tsubasa, from us Holly&Benji, the sports landscape in Japan changed dramatically. 

Until then spokon had been an overwhelming success thanks to the works of Asaki Takamori, but the sports covered had been baseball in Kyojin no Hoshi, boxing in Ashita no Joe, and wrestling in The Tiger Man. In them, sports were always seen as a metaphor for life, through which the protagonist learned the fundamental lessons to his own personal growth of discipline, training, and sacrifice. In Captain Tsubasa, on the other hand, sport becomes an endless playground where one can have fun with teammates and challenge opponents, with a levity that fully described the economic and social boom experienced by Japan during the 1980s.

It became a global phenomenon, importing to Italy as well those distortions and exaggerations that still make it a pop icon today: from pitches that run down hills to hellish catapults that generate fiery balls and matches that last several weeks. But above all, Captain Tsubasa in Japan pushed a generation to embrace soccer for the first time, thus starting a movement - an estimated 250,000-plus Japanese boys enrolled in a football school from 1981 to 1987 - that led within a decade to the creation of the J-League in 1992 and to the winning of the Asian Cup in the same year. 

Thirty years and countless cult jerseys later, the influence of manga in Japanese soccer culture certainly shows no signs of waning; indeed, every opportunity is right to celebrate it. As Hidetoshi Nakata was fond of recounting, it was flipping through Captain Tsubasa that made him choose football over baseball, turning him into the brightest star in the Far East. But the impact of manga certainly did not stop at the island borders of Japan; rather, it affected countless numbers of football players around the world. And the choice to anticipate national team jerseys on the covers of the most widely read spokon confirms how close the audiences, even generations apart, still remain.