“Super Bowl Monday”

Watching the Super Bowl in Tokyo always feels a little off.

Super Bowl Monday in Tokyo is a work day. You have to cue up the live stream at the office while you pretend to be hard at work. You listen to the broadcast through headphones. You try to make yourself excited and interested like you would be back home, but adrenaline is hard to conjure when those tinny iPod earbuds are involved.

If you happen to stumble across an actual TV carrying the game, the local stations don’t include the commercials. Instead they cut away to crowd shots. The announcers stop talking. We see groups of fans in crazy war paint, not acting crazy because they know they’re not on TV. Only they are on TV in Tokyo. There is no sound. Just drifting shots from around the stadium. Then the station theme song flairs up and the announcers start shouting with all of their energy again.

Then there is the food situation. There are no family-sized bags of Doritos in the stores. Guacamole doesn’t come pre-blended in a jar. No cans of chili. Cheese doesn’t come in an aerosol can. Cheese in general is just really damn hard to come by. No foods that make you feel guilty if you snack too much on them.

Maybe you can go crazy and get yourself some of those wasabi flavored rice crackers…

There Was No Joy in Tokyo

Sports are poetry.

And the World Cup is a global anthem of storied verses that gets written every four years. Continents and players change, but the smoldering kernel of competition fused with national pride, remains the steady theme. It is but a stage for global theatre.

There are heroes, whose goals will live forever, in highlight reels and in fans’ hearts and late night pub re-enactments. There are villains, whose egregious miscues can overturn a career of good deeds and sportsmanship.

Last night, in Japan, a nation ultimately fell.

But before that, there was a palpable glory in the streets of Tokyo.

Instead of the streets falling deathly silent as usual, the city simmered, and whispered and had a conversation that spanned wards and prefectures. Loud speakers echoed the passion in the build-up to the match.

You could feel that the whole city was indeed watching. The whole country had committed to staying up, and focusing on this match until the wee hours of the morning.

As if on cue, as game time approached, the thunder and lightning overtook the city. People clad in national team jerseys took smoke breaks on balconies in the minutes leading up to kick-off.

Everyone found a screen, and a comfortable perch, and we all had a frozen moment together. Jaws dropping lower as the game clock unwound. Winding tighter and tighter the tension. A whole nation held their breath, as shots hit the post, headers missed by mere feet, and history, this poem awaited its conclusion.

The rains fell and, and the match remained tied. More supporters took more smoke breaks on balconies. Their country was on the verge of immortality. In a matter of seconds, the fortune of a nation could change. The city breathed as one.

The extra time sessions came and went with nary a goal. Bodies hit the turf in South Africa, and thousands of miles away, arms were raised in disgust at undeserved yellow cards and the cheap antics of opponents desperate for any advantage.

It was a grand theater. The connection between continents, and the tightness of the match converged until the city was breathing as one. Punctuated by more loud speaker exclamations at crucial moments.

In the end, the city and country collapsed from exhaustion brought on by intense focus. In a city where everything is flashing and changing and cut into bite sized pieces and served to you like conveyor belt sushi, for once, there was a common thing to focus on. A rallying subject matter that everyone grasped the gravity of. The headlines of the next days paper were being written in real time, and everyone wanted to glimpse the future the moment it happened.

But in the end, the only remaining sound, was the soft washing of a fine rain. The World Cup haze overtook the streets and parks. The mists shut down the loudspeakers and left people scurrying for taxis or another bar.

Alas, in Japan, tomorrow would prove to be just another day.

But there was glory in the fight. Glory in the resistance. And a glory in a city and nation coming together for a single cause.

This is the power of the World Cup in Tokyo.

Such is the magic of sports, when it achieves a human poetry.

Good game Japan. Thank you for contributing a verse.

Goodnight.

Review of Japan’s Play in the 2010 World Cup

It’s party time in Japan. The national team has been playing fantastic and have really stepped it up during this World Cup 2010.

I’ve watched the national team play several games over the past two years, but it was nothing like what we’ve seen in this last couple of games. They are clearly well coached and well versed in the climate of international football.

The first surprise I noticed about their approach to the World Cup is how physical they are. They get a card every now and then for getting into a shoving match, or wrestling an opponent to the turf. Nothing I would call dirty, just playing tough. The scouting report on Japan heading into these matches, was that they would shy from contact and could be intimidated physically. But they have turned that notion on upside down in South Africa. They are led by tough guy, do-it-all defender Tulio, and his fighting spirit seems to be rubbing off on the rest of the squad.

Who knows how long this magic run will last, but they have clearly rebranded themselves as contenders and aggressors.

One thing that hasn’t changed over the past two years is their penchant for flopping. They haven’t turned the corner into being anti-flop artists in the vein of a Messi or a Rooney, but they have become ‘intelligent floppers.’ This puts them a notch above the Mexicos of the world. While they still flop on sometimes light contact and try to milk the officials for free kicks, the timing of their flops has been more strategic in South Africa. They used to take a dive at midfield and cut off the momentum of their own potential runs. Now they seem to only flop in the scoring zones, when it has a higher chance of paying immediate dividends on the scoreboard. As a result Honda and company are being heralded in the international press as ‘Free Kick Masters.’

On offense they are also taking more imaginative shots than they historically have. Last year it seemed they only shot when they had an absolutely perfect opening on goal. They refused to strike against resistance and would often pass back where a more aggressive player would have taken the shot anyway. But during this tournament, they are channeling their inner Ronaldos and pulling the trigger from 30 and 35 yards out. This year they are capturing the essence of Michael Jordan’s classic ‘you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take,’ line.

It’s always nice to see a team proving the world wrong on such a bright stage. Many people, locals included weren’t expecting them to make it this far. And now people are starting to believe. Fun to be in a nation that has such momentum to believe.

I’ll be tuning in tonight to see how team Japan writes the next chapter of their history.

Go Japan!