Talk:Japan national football team

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[edit] Current players

Why are Mike Havenaar and Robert Cullen "current players" even though they haven't played a single match for the senior side? Also, now that the final squad of 23 has been announced, does it make sense to replace the current list with the World Cup squad? Ytny 14:27, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] China a "principal continental rival"?

I don't see by what standard China could be considered a "principal" rival.

  • As of April 2006, FIFA ranked Japan at 17th in the world and China at 66th. [1]

As flawed as the FIFA rankings may be, they do provide a good measure of roughly where each team stands internationally and it is the only official, quantifiable method of comparing nations. 66th is nowhere close to rivaling 17th.

  • China has not had comparable success in the Asian Cup.

Like Japan, Iran is a three-time champion at the Asian Cup. Korea is a two-time winner. China has not won it once.

  • China has not had any international success.

Iran will be making its third appearance at the World Cup in 2006, Japan its third (once as host) and Korea its seventh (once as host). Each of the three team has at least one victory in the finals, while China has yet to score a goal or record a draw. For this year's World Cup, China failed to advance beyond the preliminary stage of qualifying.

  • Head-to-head records

Since 1990, Japan has a record of 6 wins, 2 draws and 2 losses against China. Against Korea, Japan is 6-4-8 during the same span, and 3-2-3 against Iran. That is to say, Japan has matched up fairly evenly with Korea and Iran, while clearly having the upper hand against China.

I don't mean for this to be a take down of China's football program. I just want the above to be considered before calling China a "principal" rival of Japan. If there is a reason for doing so, it would have to be a pretty compelling one. "Principal continental rival" is a subjective designation, but I hope you can see why Korea and Iran belong, and China doesn't. Ytny 14:17, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Friendly results

I would agree that in 5 years time a friendly result may not matter but a 2-2 result against Germany is worth mentioning at the moment I think...Andycjp June 2006

I have to disagree, and I don't know of any other national team article that mentions latest friendly results. I understand the result was a surprise to many fans but this isn't that noteworthy considering Japan actually has a decent record in Europe in recent years.
Surprising results happen all the time and this match, at least on its own, doesn't really change anything for the team. Maybe if you put in proper context, say, Japan's recent struggles in friendly matches or its record against higher ranked nations, it could make more sense.
Still, thanks for contributing and for discussing the issue. Ytny 06:16, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
I agree with Ytny. Friendlies are not mentioned and Japan has had better results with higher-ranked teams such as Brazil. In other words, this draw (though exciting for some) is not noteworthy in the article.--Sir Edgar 07:22, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

I agree that given Japan`s recent form the result against Germany wasn`t totally a surprise. But I still feel it would be useful for casual readers of Wikipedia to know of recent results, (for example Japan 1 Malta 0) without having to leave Wikipedia. The editors of the England team page seem to agree with me... Andycjp June 2006.

Like I said above, I think mentioning recent results or form might make sense in proper context, but not on its own, or even a few recent results. And I think the England article serves my point, in that the results and fixtures sections are fairly comprehensive.
But I also see that the article as a whole is more comprehensive than this one. So you end up with an article where you either have the results without context or a result section that takes up most of the article, and I'm not sure if either is that helpful. That said, I think we can make this article more complete, though it's much harder to find English-language source material for the Japanese team. Ytny 03:36, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
There is usually some good pre- and post-match info at http://www.crisscross.com/jp/ , although, I would tend to agree that for friendlies and even qualifiers, anything beyond scoring summaries is not all that important. For the World Cup games, I would like to see each game description be moved to 2006 FIFA World Cup - Group F, where it can be NPOV'd by fans of both teams. The same would hold true for other tournaments like the Asia Cup. In the GroupF page, the match report for each game is already there, so that seems to be the logical place to put the summary, too. But, this would probably need to be taken up on the main Football project page.
If there is a desire, I can search for past results from the last few years, and put them in the article, in the brief form as in England's page. Even the Japanese language page for the team just lists the scores for the World Cup, with no commentary. No Asia Cup or other games are listed. Neier 09:46, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Colours of the uniform

Why is the uniform of the japanese football team blue? 213.66.229.162 11:40, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

I asked a Japanese person about this and they said it might have been explained in the newspaper many months ago but they don't really recall if any reasons were specifically mentioned. The person did offer that Japanese like the color blue because it has for them many positive associations (as opposed to "Blue Monday" or "feeling so blue" in other cultures) such as the blue of the vast ocean, the blue of the sky, both of these signifying a desire for the freedom of wide-open spaces. 218.218.61.59 20:18, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Not sure about "desire for the freedom of wide-open spaces", but Japanese culture has always valued connection with, and worship of nature. But it's true that "blue" is generally consiered a positive because of its association with the seas and the sky. Also, recent uniform designs are meant to reflect Mount Fuji. Ytny 03:02, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Two Japanese people I asked about this told me today that blue was the color of the uniforms of the University of Tokyo's soccer team, and since that team was for a long time (or may still even be) undefeated and also since it was the very first university soccer team in Japan (and being the very first to do things in Japan seems to matter a lot and give you higher status) that this had a lot to do with why blue was chosen as the color for the national team as well. They seemed to have seen in on the news or in the newspaper. I am assuming you do not live in Japan perhaps or may not have seen the same newspapers or TV programs where this was discussed. I find it strange myself, not being Japanese, that a university team should influence decisions regarding the national team. This I feel would not happen in other countries. But in Japan non-professional sports are looked at in a different way somehow. Besides soccer there are the highschool baseball tournaments which don't get any attention in the U.S. but are always in the news in Japan when they are played. 218.218.61.59 13:11, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Ytny wrote: "Also, recent uniform designs are meant to reflect Mount Fuji."

I ran this notion by several Japanese people on a number of different occasions. Some of them knew a lot about soccer. All of them reacted with expressions of disbelief. I'd be interested where your Mt. Fuji idea came from and if you could be more specific, even if just a personal comment, as to what part of the uniform or specifically in what way you thought the uniforms "reflect Mount Fuji."
As for other aspects of the uniform, you can see some abstract blade-like forms at the sides of the jersey.[2][3] Quite a number of Japanese people told me these were supposed to represent katana which are related to the team's theme of Samarai Blue. I think if this is so that the katana forms might have been broadened somewhat on purpose by the desingner as international viewers might not regcoanize them to be swords otherwise.


Looking back at what I wrote, I realize "recent uniform designs are meant to reflect Mount Fuji" was misleading, since I was talking mostly about the 2002-03 design.
The best I can do is pull up this link from Google cache in Japanese, but adidas points to Mount Fuji as a primary inspiration for the uniform designs, the primary uniform with the red piping at the sleeves and the alternate with the gray body and white sleeves.
But since I've found that link, I can give (roughly translated version of) the official explanation for the colors:
Blue: the seas and the sky that symbolize the Japanese homeland, speed;
White: the spirit of fair play, sense of trust required for teamwork;
Red: the Japanese flag, passion;
And you're right about the katana motif - there are supposedly 11 blades on the white uniform, hough I haven't counted them myself.
Ytny 17:47, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Match vs. Australia

The World Cup section should be about Japan's play during the World Cup Germany, but it focuses on the Australia match and totally reads like it was written from the Australian perspective.--Sir Edgar 02:21, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I tried to redress some of what you say by adding the parts about Kawaguchi's saves, plus connections with what has been said within Japan about how they need to improve in certain areas ("shooting the ball").
The problem is that most that it is more likely for native English speakers (i.e., Australians) to visit this site and make contributions like this item, than for Japanese supporters to do so. I think the author who initiated this part also just cut and pasted his report in more than one article. That is he might have originally intended it for an Australian article and just figured he would kill two birds with one stone and copy it here.
The focus on the first match is probably due to the let-down after giving away that match so badly in the last moments, that is Japanese probably wanting to forget things, and Australians excited about their big win. And a lack of time, now that the World Cup is well underway and people have so many matches to focus on. In time, this may change. Especially, if Japan pulls of a miracle against Brazil's substitutes and gets into the next round. I'd like to work on what you said but am not sure I can find the time for a while. I just might add something about Kawaguchi's stop in that early PKO, just to get things going. At the World Cup Yahoo! site it made Moment of the Day. And there was another diving stop of a Nakata shot from midfiled by the Crotian goalkeeper that deserves mention.218.218.61.59 20:04, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I am a Japanese supporter and I've made my share of edits to this article, but I haven't edited any of the match report, partly since I haven't had the time and partly because I'm not sure about the value of these reports in the national team articles.

If I can add a critique though, while I realize the standard for objectivity is lower for sports articles, I don't think descriptors like "great" and "stunning" belong in Wikipedia entries. Ytny 03:08, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, those are just quotes from the articles I cited. I don't think the idea of what an "article" really is can be said to be "fixed". I know some people are thinking that it is like a book "article", but that is only because they don't yet have a frame of reference for a medium (wikipedia) that can be more extensive than offline articles. Those are offline media are limited due to physical things like paper and space. Obviously the person who started this thread came here with the idea of finding out more about the matches. Since they seem to be having trouble with funding the idea of limiting articles might have to do with memory capacity though which does impose a kind of limitation. For sports I am not even sure how certain standards should apply. If you saw the matches there is a lot that the available "sources" don't report about that you saw and know happened and that other people would like to know about probably and be interested in reading. It seems strange that you can't include what you saw in an article and have to search around for some newspaper article that confirms what you saw. A lot of times those articles are very limited and also they don't give you an overview of things relating things from one match to another, in most cases. A lot of who read Wikipedia just come to find answers to things and I don't think they are so worried as to whether it meets certain criteria of book-like qualities. I read elsewhere in Wikipedia the founder himself started out saying his goal was to publish a hardcopy of Wikipedia someday. I think that was naive. He himself did not realize how big the project would get and how impractical the idea was, and also how useless many articles are once you take them offline and cut them off from their many hyperlinks. But I understand he might at first have wanted to compete against books using book-like standards, and, of course, the need to start somewhere (with a book model). Like with a model based on books or offline models. That's only a starting point. It doesn't necessarily mean we have to be locked into only that model int he future.218.218.61.59 13:00, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

While I'm not quite sure exactly what to make of your response, I concede that match reports themselves are useful as long as the World Cup remains a current event. But my critique about subjective descriptors still stands. My problem with "great" and "stunning" isn't so much that they're subjective per se, but because they're subjective and not that helpful in explaining what happened. At the risk of channeling my old journalism professors, nouns and verbs are better friends than adjectives and adverbs - value judgements like "great" and "controversial" should either go without saying or be treated as matters of opinion.

And if they're direct quotes as you say, why are they presented as facts. I realize you linked to the cited articles, but they should still be framed as opinions, not objective observations. Your point about Wikipedia's mission notwithstanding, the article still has to meet some degree of journalistic standard.

As an aside, I can easily make a joke here that neither the series of acrobatic saves nor the blunder on the first Australia goal are particularly surprising to anyone who has watched Yoshi Kawaguchi play. Ytny 15:13, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

On value of match reports.
The same can be said for reports on many kinds of current event: They're useful for people who may have missed the televised match or seen it in a language they do not understand which happens a lot with international events like the World Cup. They're also useful for people wanting to reflect on the current state of things and relate them to past reports and draw connections between different times. When such events have summaries that include supporting hyperlinks this is actually quite useful to such users. You used the subjective adjective "useful" in a subjective time frame. But there are other users unlike yourself who use wikipedia not only to get current information (on a soccer match), but for these uses as well, who would not agree with your definition of "usefulness" in this context.
I would caution you on attempting to impose your limited personal and subjective opinions of whay you consider "useful" on others. Obviously the people who initiate the reports and contribute to them and come to them to read (such as the reader who commented on their incompleteness) may have different ideas about usefulness than you do. Writers and editors while forming their own personal standards, which is quite a normal thing to do, also need to consider the needs of their audience and the motivations of that audience for coming to read what they have written.
That said, I have to consider from the other side, what would I do if it were decided that this team page were just for the essentials. I understand this kind of thinking comes from the limitations of writing on paper which involve cost and space. Ease of reading is sometimes given, but a dubious reason as the links in the content box allow you to focus on what interests you. You are not forced to read about the match reports if you do not wish to. However, if some members were to insist that the page require this kind of minimalism I'd simply suggest moving match reports to an entry about match reports that can be accessed via a link from the team page like "for match reports see etc...) . I myself find the conciseness of the upper sections of the team page good thing, yet not necessarily something that means that having match reports "somewhere" is a bad thing, or that one thing has to be sacrificed for the other.
There are entries for TV programs which summarized every episode over periods of over 10 years. That way people coming to show later can catch up on past events. Also, and this cannot be known in advance, but if the series is issued on DVD later, it serves as a handy reference if you cannot afford to buy the whole series but would just like to choose the disks you find most interesting according to their summaries. In some ways, sporting events may be different than this, but the point I am making is that a "current" event (or series broadcast) can often have a usefulness that goes beyond its original intent (to bring you news of the day, or the latest weekly episode).
Simply because you personally seem to use the Internet in a more limited way (to treat a current event as one that won't matter to anyone again later after it is no longer current), doesn't mean that everyone does.
On the use of adjectives.
You wrote:
My problem with "great" and "stunning" isn't so much that they're subjective per se, but because they're subjective and not that helpful in explaining what happened. At the risk of channeling my old journalism professors, nouns and verbs are better friends than adjectives and adverbs - value judgements like "great" and "controversial" should either go without saying or be treated as matters of opinion.
I question whether what we are doing ought to be confined to offline notions about "journalism" (that exclusive either/or choices always need to be made between what happens and qualitatively how it happened at the expense of the latter) in the sense that many offline notions come in large part from restrictions on space (on a page made of paper which involves cost and weight) and time (the productivity of staff writers, the time readers have in a given day before they discard that day's edition, the limited attention span of a reader during a given average session of reading). If your old professor is now dead, then all the more reason, due to age, why those of his generation carrying with them all the legacy notions of offline writing, would have left you ill-prepared to deal with a different media (wikipedia) where time and space are not similarly restricted to same degree.
You wrote:
And if they're direct quotes as you say, why are they presented as facts. I realize you linked to the cited articles, but they should still be framed as opinions, not objective observations. Your point about Wikipedia's mission notwithstanding, the article still has to meet some degree of journalistic standard.
Framing those parts by more explicitly adding several more words (adding who said what or frames such as "what was described by one reporter as") would have made those sections, too cumbersome. They were meant to be presented, not as personal observation, but as wording quoted from the cited articles, in quotation marks. However, my main purpose, rather than to absolutely include those specific adjectives, was simply to add some balance to the article and offer links to sources that presented the match in a different light from was originally on the team page. I think I accomplished this even in the current version so I am satisfied.
I don't think it prudent to make the assumption that everyone who visits the team page is a jaded soccer supporter who already knows all the players thoroughly. (In fact, you would think that those jaded fans would stay away having less of a need to consult the page, unless it is for some kind of narcissistic reason such as showing off what they know.) Wikipedia sometimes seems to attract, as contributors, people who have a higher than average involvement with a topic but who seem unable to imagine that many in the audience that comes to Wikipedia are not like them. It should not be assumed that a lot of that audience has ever seen certain players play very much. For all we know, they might be seeing those players for the very first time. This kind of audience is natural to see for any of the major sporting events. They come because they have may have less experience than many of the contributors but would like to learn more from them. 218.218.61.59 14:29, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

I'm going to apologize ahead of time for not reading your response completely and I'll probably come back to it later. But I should clarify a couple of points:

1. I feared you would interpret "my old journalism professor" the way you did. I didn't mean that Wikipedia should strictly follow journalistic conventions. But there are goals that good journalistic writing achieves - readability, informative and descriptive writing without excess - tht also make for good Wikipedia entries. They're good guidelines for any sort of informative writing.
2. You wrote:
"I don't think it prudent to make the assumption that everyone who visits the team page is a jaded soccer supporter who already knows all the players thoroughly."
Yeah. I think you'll notice that I wrote, "As an aside..." and "I could easily make the joke. As in, the last paragraph was besides the point and not to be taken seriously.

Ytny 18:00, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Takayuki Suzuki

Why was Suzuki not playing for Japan in the 2006 world cup? --Science Lord 06:50, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Why do you think he should be (in relation to his most recent results at the time in his club play or in any of the games for the national squad leading up to the World Cup)? Was it because he was on the last World Cup that you thought so? My impression was that there was not much in his results of late and so he was not chosen. And then you might ask, "but then, well why were a number of other players who had made good contributions, but maybe not for a number of years, included on the team?" For the answer to that question, you might want to take a look at this article from the Daily Yomiuri and see if you think it is a fair judgement about the way Zico selected some or most of his team.
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