Soccer host unlikely to have a ball

By COLIN DONALD

TOKYO - Unaccustomed to mass tourism and temperamentally inclined to fear the worst, a nervous Japanese public is bracing itself for an invasion of soccer fans.

Not since the home islands were threatened with Allied invasion at the end of World War II has fear of the unprecedented taken such lurid forms.

"The World Cup organisers are prepared for everything," says one Western diplomat in Tokyo.

"Earthquakes, terrorist bombs and Ebola attacks, and hooliganism extending to rape and pillage. For me, the big question is 'are they prepared to have some fun'?"

In the co-host nation, South Korea, organisers are laying out the disinfectant mat rather than the red carpet for teams arriving for training. An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease has required the slaughter of 95,000 pigs and cattle.

Seoul is frantically stressing that the infected areas do not impinge on World Cup venues, though it is standing by with plans for a wider cull should more cases break out.

But despite this ill-timed animal health crisis, as the Friday kick-off approaches the Koreans seem to be in more festive form than their co-hosts across the Straits of Tsushima, with whom they enjoy what diplomats call a "spirited rivalry".

Downtown Seoul is bedecked with football bunting, President Kim Dae Jung has pleaded for a suspension of the usual political mud-slinging and strikes, and the nation prepares to bask in the glow of world attention last experienced at the epochal 1988 Olympics.

Never slow to maximise a sales opportunity, South Korea is touting its 5.7 per cent GDP growth figure and proudly showcasing its advanced IT infrastructure, a corporate pitch that may be wasted on most visiting soccer fans.

Korea has a longer tradition as a footballing nation than Japan, and lacks other sports of rival pulling power, so grass-roots support is hardly in doubt.

But in Japan, questions about the fun factor are relevant, as the story of Japan's brief love affair with the game - culminating in its campaign to bring the World Cup tournament to Japan - can be seen as an attempt to crash the world party of modern soccer.

The Japanese set about importing the sport - the skills themselves and the distinctly un-Japanese culture surrounding the game - with the deliberate planning that characterised the country's miraculous rise from feudal backwater to economic world-beater.

At a key historical moment - coinciding with the death of the Showa Emperor and the bursting of the bubble economy - Tokyo started to aspire to the economic and social stimulus of being an Asian soccer powerhouse.

The book Japanese Rules by Sebastian Moffett, published this month, says the Japanese soccer boom acquired critical mass only with the launch of the Japan League in 1989, which was engineered to integrate Japan more into the international sporting arena.

It took time to catch on because Japan's sporting first love is baseball - played with dogged and uniform perseverance and technical accomplishment rather than flair.

In Japan, teams are owned by corporations and department stores.

Team spirit is grimly inculcated by authoritarian coaches and, distinct from Western patterns, supporters display a kind of corporate loyalty rather than local pride.

Although Japan's soccer stars, particularly Hidetoshi Nakata, are household names, fervour for the game at community level has been hard to detect in the low-key build-up to the World Cup.

In marked contrast to South Korea, the run-up period seems to be dominated by scare stories about the potential disruption of the controlled social fabric.

All that may change with a successful tournament in which the joy of football and the infectious delirium of foreign fans have a chance to overcome the Japanese terror of the unfamiliar.



The Japanese - never exactly carefree - have been inclined to err more heavily on the side of caution since the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the sarin attack by Aum Shinrikyo exposed the weaknesses of the nation's crisis-response.

During the G8 Okinawa summit of 2000, police aimlessly thronged the roads of the remote and placid island in a belt-and-braces operation that added billions of yen to the much-criticised cost of the event.



For the past few months, nightly reports show riot police drills in mock combat with rampaging fans, and new technology - including a gun that fires a restraining net at recalcitrant thugs - has been added to the traditional armoury of tear gas and baton charge.

Shops will be boarded up and cars removed from dealer's forecourts.

One local politician in provincial Miyagi prefecture has marked the outer limit of the hysteria by warning not only against fans selling drugs and failing to pay hotel bills but also preparing his constituents for a rash of pregnancies caused by foreign rapists.

Given such extreme readiness, some foreigners resident in Japan joke that they may be forced to instigate some minor trouble themselves, if only to avert anti-climax.

But facetiousness aside, such anxieties reflect the Japanese belief that the host's job is to make guests feel secure and to minimise surprises that could distract from action on the pitch.

And it is on the pitch where Japan needs to vindicate the immense effort and expense that has been invested in incubating a new sporting culture.

Expectations of the national side, coached by Philippe Troussier of France, are not exaggerated (bookmakers set odds of a win at 66-1), and surviving the first round will be taken as a triumph.

But Japan did not get to where it is today without seeing superhuman effort of will and relentless honing of skills as minimum requirements.

A seemingly endless recession has undermined old Japanese certainties including the belief in the group ethic.

But football, with its culture of star strikers, playmakers and dogged defenders, emphasises individual panache at least as much as the group ethic and thus has been seen as a sport appropriate to the new phase of Japanese social and economic organisation.

Who said it was only a game?

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