Step into any Japanese top flight stadium as an uninitiated fan and the first thing that hits you is a wall of sound. Noisy support is de rigueur, and those who insist that J. League supporters are simply mimicking their counterparts in Europe and South America have clearly never attended a baseball game in Japan. From the multitude of unofficial fan clubs that crowd the terraces to the carefully choreographed chants that ring out for ninety minutes, J. League fans have arguably borrowed as heavily from their native baseball league as they have from European and South American football culture.

While baseball retains its image as a somewhat staid past-time in what is a relentlessly conservative country, football supporters in Japan broke the mould early, with Kashiwa Reysol fans setting the earliest trends for excessively passionate support. Kashima Antlers’ InFight were arguably the first well-organised fan club to travel the length of the country in support of their team, but these days it is Urawa’s travelling hordes who continue to polarise opinion. The Reds’ story is a well-worn one of a struggling underdog come good, but in a country obsessed with glamour, the extra twenty thousand fans to have recently clambered aboard the Reds roller coaster has sparked claims that much of Urawa’s support is made up of “plastic fans.” Whether that is the cause of the inferiority complex that Urawa’s more hardcore supporters lumber around with them is a mystery, but at any rate the most recent instances of fan violence have almost always involved the Reds.

Urawa fans deserve further scrutiny. At their best Reds fans produce an atmosphere worthy of any match in the Bundesliga – from which the Saitama club borrowed heavily in the mid-1990’s. Opposition teams are greeted by a cacophony of noise, with hopeful away fans forced to up the ante to compete with the vociferous support raining down from the northern end of Saitama Stadium. Yet Urawa’s hardcore support has grown increasingly boorish. From the days of supporting their team with relentless zeal at the dilapidated Komaba Stadium – which included a trip to the Second Division in 2000 – Urawa’s support has not only been diluted by the move to the far larger Saitama Stadium, it has also become increasingly inane. Instead of offering support to their team, many Urawa fans have simply taken to booing the opposition, and a string of more than three opposition passes prompts a predictable chorus of jeers from the Urawa faithful. There were more than a few wry smiles up and down the country, then, when Urawa inexplicably choked away at relegated Yokohama FC on the final day last season, handing the title to bitter rivals Kashima Antlers in the process.

The organised nature of support in Japan is often misunderstood, and stands in glaring contrast to the spontaneous outbursts synonymous with English football. The word fascist pops up from time to time to describe J. League fans – not because of any particular right-wing political leanings, but rather due to the rigidly organised nature of their chants. That has given rise to claims from some Euro-versed analysts that J. League supporters are not in tune with the action on the pitch, however such criticism overlooks the fact that Japan remains a group-oriented society. While J. League stadia offer fans the chance to cast off the shackles of an overbearingly formal social structure, that fans choose to do so in unison with their fellow supporters should come as no surprise in a country where the concept of wa – or group harmony – is one of the central tenants of its culture.

Elaborately choreographed card displays are one aspect of European culture that have made their way onto J. League terraces, while the fact that hardcore fans stand at J. League grounds makes the giant flag display an old favourite. Uniquely Japanese are the team slogans, however, which routinely delight English-speaking fans with their Babelfish-inspired Engrish. Júbilo Iwata’s “Hungrrrrry” invoked mirth from local rivals Shimizu S-Pulse this season, but the joke may be on S-Pulse for their “We Believe” slogan, with the club failing to inform fans to believe that a relegation dogfight was on the cards. Supporter groups also adorn themselves with some inspired translations, with Kyoto Sanga fanclub “Real Naked” making a name for themselves as a group of men who support their team in bare chests – fortunately for them the J. League is a summer-based competition.

Despite some of the more uniform aspects of J. League support, the match-day experience for all eighteen top-flight clubs differs from team to team. The 2002 World Cup may have left a legacy of international-class stadia, but it has proved problematic for some well-established clubs such as Nagoya Grampus, who alternate their fixtures between the ageing Mizuho Athletics Stadium in downtown Nagoya and the ultra-modern Toyota Stadium, situated some thirty-five kilometres out of town. That’s a situation mirrored across the league, with several top flight clubs regularly splitting fixtures between a variety of stadia. Given that clubs rent their grounds from local councils it has also led to some radical scheduling – with Kyoto Sanga “hosting” Yokohama F. Marinos hundreds of kilometres from the former imperial city in Kagoshima’s Kamoike Stadium, while Gamba Osaka played the first leg of their League Cup quarter-final against the Marinos in distant Kanazawa.

For foreign fans, supporting a J. League club can be a hit-and-miss affair. Some clubs welcome foreign supporters with open arms. In the case of FC Tokyo – perhaps the only J. League club to have lifted its influences straight from British football – one highlight is the annual UK Day, where holders of a British passport are entitled to discount tickets and are treated to standard English fare inside Tokyo’s cavernous Ajinomoto Stadium. With match-day line-ups announced in English and a rousing rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” belted out before kick-off, there’s no mistaking who FC Tokyo fans are paying homage to. Other clubs offer a nod to Japan’s sizeable Brazilian community – arguably the largest minority group in what is practically a homogenous society – with the Auriverde always on display when Júbilo Iwata take to the pitch. Still, in a country that remains largely suspicious of foreigners, many J. League clubs simply prefer to ignore the smattering of foreign fans that dot the terraces on a weekly basis, offering little in the way of support for non-Japanese speaking fans.

The days of extra-time and penalty shoot-outs to decide drawn games are long gone, while the two-stage championship has also disappeared from view. The image of the J. League as a mere “retirement home” for ageing European stars is also an enduring, albeit unrealistic point of view, with the league having instead matured into a legitimate, sustainable competition. Nevertheless while the forces of modernity will invariably continue to thrust the J. League into a wider global context, there’s no doubt that it remains a competition blessed with an alluring charm and a unique dose of East Asian exocitism.

All photos by Michael Tuckerman.

A Year In The Life

Throughout 2006 and 2007, then, the majority of Omiya home fixtures were played at Komaba Stadium, a charmless concrete bowl complete with an athletics track. The Squirrel Nation hated the place. It was 25 minutes’ fun-filled walk from the nearest train station, for one thing. And it was located in Urawa. Oh, and it just so happened to be something akin to the Reds’ spiritual home. In contrast to Omiya Park, the small crowds attending Ardija games at Komaba found it almost impossible to generate a proper atmosphere and the hardcore support, instead of being able to reach out and touch the goalnets as they had been used to, were fifty yards from the action.

But an additional factor was serving to isolate fans from the club. While few would have expected it to be easy to compete alongside teams of the stature of Urawa, Yokohama F Marinos or Kashima Antlers, among Omiya supporters there nevertheless existed the feeling that their team had been underperforming and, for many, the root cause of this sense of potential unfulfilled lay in the club’s transfer policy.

Time and again, foreign strikers in particular came to Omiya, failed to make any impact and were quietly let go. On other occasions, the Squirrels got rid of players who immediately went on to achieve terrific success at rival J-League clubs. Holder nominally of the position of Chief Scout, the man responsible for all this was Satoru Sakuma, effectively the General Manager of the club in that he oversaw the relationship with – and indeed continued to be employed by – main sponsor NTT. It was a mess and a constant source of dissatisfaction amongst supporters mistrustful of Sakuma’s power and suspicious of the fact that he was not even employed by the football club.

2007 started, then, with Omiya Ardija in an uncomfortable position both off and on the pitch. Toshiya Miura had departed after three years as coach, having taken the team to promotion but then not been able to move things up to the next level via his particularly cautious brand of football. Rumours abounded of the transfer budget having been blown the previous year, meaning that the incoming coach, inexperienced Dutchman Robert Verbeek, had little or no money to spend – or rather, to have Sakuma spend for him. The squad appeared notably weaker than 2006 and a relegation battle looked to be on the cards.

Defeats in all of the first four matches in March brought home what a tough year lay ahead. The team appeared ill-focused, with even less of a cutting edge than had been the case under Miura – and although the defence did begin to tighten up as new import Leandro settled in alongside Daisuke Tomita in the middle of the back four, the Squirrels were scoring on average only once every two games. Worse was to come at the end of April, when the team put in a particularly feeble performance in a home defeat by Ventforet Kofu, one of the few J1 clubs who are actually a smaller concern than Omiya.

After the final whistle, for the first time fans staged a noisy protest calling for the dismissal not of coach Verbeek, but of Satoru Sakuma. It was plain to see, they argued, whose fault all this was: not so much the lifeless football and the dreadful results but the sheer energy-sapping lack of ambition that seemed to be pervading Omiya Ardija, the apparent belief that simply being in the top division was going to be sufficient for the supporters and really ought to provide satisfaction in itself.

Nothing, of course, changed. In fact, although the simmering resentment against Sakuma remained, this heralded a modest improvement in the team’s fortunes. A hard-fought 1-1 draw in the rain at Saitama Stadium against high-flying Urawa turned out to be the first match of an eight-game unbeaten run.

But it was difficult to move up the standings when no fewer than four of those games were 0-0 draws and, as the season reached its mid-point in late June, there was an air of deep despondency enveloping the club: an unloved temporary home ground, third bottom in the league, lacklustre performances from players seemingly unconvinced by the new coach, very few goals… and overseeing it all, Sakuma. How could things be much worse?

Sakuma Yamero!

A break in the match schedule saw the Squirrels squad on a training camp in order to prepare for the second half of the season. Just prior to the recommencement of the J1 calendar, Omiya staged a friendly against Urawa and while the Reds’ line-up was filled with youngsters and fringe squad members, Robert Verbeek fielded more or less a full-strength side. The intention was that the Ardija players should use that match to put into practice the style of play and tactics that had been worked on during the camp, as a springboard for moving up the table.

The Squirrels had one shot throughout the whole of the ninety minutes and lost 6-0. They were shapeless, clearly uncommitted and ended up being torn apart by the young Urawa side. Verbeek was sacked later that evening.

The fans were split as to the wisdom of dismissing the Dutchman, some feeling that he’d done his best under difficult circumstances, while others took the view that his ultra-defensive approach was only ever going to achieve results by boring the opposition into submission. But there was no such disagreement when the identity of the new coach became clear. To the horror of the Squirrel Nation and with just days to go before the re-start of J1 against a strong Shimizu S-Pulse team, it was quickly announced that Verbeek’s replacement would be none other than Satoru Sakuma.

This was comedy gold for the sports press – who immediately nicknamed the new incumbent the “salaryman coach” – but total humiliation for the fans. As far as they were concerned, Sakuma had proved himself on countless occasions to be an appalling judge of players, he didn’t even have any real coaching experience at all and was, even worse, still to be an employee of NTT rather than coming onto the payroll of Omiya Ardija.

The club talked about how imperative it was to remain in J1 – that they were under additional pressure from sponsors and from the local council, as the financial backers for the new stadium. But how, fans wondered, would it be possible for the team to make desperately-need improvements under a coach who was in reality an office worker, a jobbing member of company staff? The Sakuma appointment seemed instead to represent a one-way ticket back to J2. The redeveloped Omiya Park would surely play host not to top flight football, but to the minnows of the Japanese pro game.

The End…

Luckily for Satoru Sakuma, in his first game in charge, Shimizu S-Pulse were way off form. Omiya scraped a 2-2 draw – only the second time all year that they had scored more than once in a match. The following week, though, Ardija were outclassed at home by Vissel Kobe before then being put to the sword by Kashima Antlers with what was a truly atrocious display. The Squirrel Nation were aghast at how low their team had sunk. The players were uncoordinated and uncommitted – something it would never have been possible to say about Omiya sides of old – and the new coach was nothing but an incompetent with a giant ego.

Protests by the supporters would clearly have no effect, given that Sakuma was now running the show entirely and there was no desire amongst Omiya followers to undermine the confidence of the players yet further by wholesale booing of their increasingly woeful efforts. But the fans’ websites crackled with impotent fury, while those Ardija players who maintained inevitably anodyne blogs as part of their media profile found that, via the comments sections of their sites, they were on the receiving end of a level of anger that surprised even the fans themselves.

On the pitch, matters reached a head one Saturday at the end of August, when Omiya travelled to take on a Nagoya Grampus 8 side on a terrible run of results and further weakened by injury and suspension. If ever there was an opportunity for Sakuma’s team to break out of their slump, this was it.

Omiya were crushed, 5-0. “The Squirrels followers who made the trip to Nagoya received for their effort and commitment nothing but mockery from the players,” read one fansite after the match. The mother of two young supporters commented on the blog of captain Chikara Fujimoto that she didn’t want her sons watching such awful football again, because it had made them cry. “Despair; thanks!” was the ironic posting of another fan on star midfielder Daigo Kobayashi’s web diary.

But amongst all the animated online discussions, a point that came up again and again was perhaps best summed up by one blog writer when he remarked, “I never realised before now how much I love the club. This situation has brought it home just how much it means to me.” The players seemed to be performing if anything even more poorly since the appointment of Sakuma, but for the Squirrel Nation a sea change had occurred in their attitude to and relationship with the club. The mood was paradoxically buoyant. The players might not look as if they care, the thinking seemed to go, but it’s our JOB to care: we’re Omiya Ardija supporters and we can’t change now.

All that was needed was for the team to provide a win. Any win. With ten or a dozen games to go there was still the possibility of avoiding relegation, but something needed to happen to kickstart a Squirrels revival. Incredibly, it came in the Saitama derby at the start of September when, with the score at 0-0 after an hour, league leaders Urawa had their defence sliced open. Forward Hiroshi Morita latched on to a perfectly weighted through ball after a surging run from the back by defender Leandro and clipped it past Reds keeper Ryota Tsuzuki for a hysterically-celebrated goal.

The reigning champions pushed Omiya back to try and grab an equaliser, but found themselves matched up against an opponent who had discovered a resilience not seen all year long. Leandro and Tomita were disciplined in the heart of the defence and goalkeeper Koji Ezumi played with an assurance that seemed to unnerve the Urawa attack. Ardija held on, reasonably comfortably in the end, for a 1-0 win. Was there hope still for the rest of the season?

Check back in a few days for the final part of a Year in the Life of the Squirrel Nation. And read more from furtho at Go! Go! Omiya Ardija and Japanese Non-League football.

The Derby

There’s half an hour to go before kick-off. Away behind one goal, a huddled group of fans dressed in orange strike up a chant, trying to ignore the torrential, sheeting rain and the fact that a good half of the seats around them are empty. Some of the soaked supporters wave home-made banners upon which they’ve painstakingly transcribed the names of their favourite players and, despite the unpromising conditions, they do a decent job of making some noise, creating an atmosphere and a sense of anticipation ahead of this, the first derby game of the 2007 season.

Their goal-shy team might not have much of a chance in the match ahead – recent results are hopelessly poor and the side are already in the relegation zone – but even so, the fans will do their best to encourage the players. This, after all, is why many of them wear orange replica shirts sporting the number twelve: collectively, they play the role of twelfth man and their job is to support the team all the way up to the final whistle. Who knows, maybe today there might be an incredible upset?

The response of the supporters in red behind the other goal – and indeed across most of the rest of the stadium, although they are nominally the away side – seems explicitly designed to crush any such optimism stone dead. It is a shattering, physical volume, coordinated by nominated leaders with military precision, drums and voices united in the absolute certainty that their team of choice are the strongest in the land.

For Urawa Reds were champions of Japan in 2006 and are top of the league again today. They have a fanbase that stretches far beyond their home in Saitama prefecture, from Hokkaido in the north to Kyushu in the south. They have the biggest budget and the best players and it is unthinkable that their diminutive near neighbours Omiya Ardija – the Squirrels, for God’s sake – might today be in with even a sniff of a chance of avoiding an absolute hammering.

The Reds fans have home-made flags, too. One of them shows a large cartoon fist coming down from the sky, like a Monty Python foot, to crush an Ardija logo. Another features a squirrel being tossed into a garbage can, while a third simply bears the legend OMIYA FUCK.

When Omiya’s mascot, a cheery seven-foot tall squirrel named Ardy, goes on a pre-match walkabout, the air is filled with catcalls, whistles and boos. As kick-off time approaches, the regimented noise from the Urawa followers becomes if anything yet more intense. The supporters wearing orange, meanwhile, continue to wave their banners and shake their umbrellas. You can see that they’re still singing as well. You just can’t hear them.

The Squirrel Nation

Let’s get the whole issue of the name out of the way first. Omiya itself is a small city in Saitama prefecture in central Japan and Ardija is a corruption of the Spanish word ‘ardilla’, which means ‘squirrel’, which is in turn a symbol of Omiya city. Expecting to understand Japanese football club names — Consadole Sapporo, say, or non-league outfit Renofa Yamaguchi — to any greater extent than that is like expecting to understand the deepest mysteries of the universe, so it’s best if you can just let it go there.

At least among the small pocket of foreign followers of teams in Japan’s professional league, the J-League, Omiya Ardija supporters have as a consequence of all this picked up the nickname of the Squirrel Nation. The passion which the Squirrel Nation feel for their diminutive club is something that has, as we shall see, grown greater than ever during the course of a tempestuous 2007, but in terms of the relationship with their near neighbours – the cities of Urawa and Omiya are a matter of only five miles apart – being regarded as playing second string is a pretty normal state of affairs for Ardija fans.

The fact of the matter is that Urawa are far and away the most popular club in Japan, never mind on their own patch, and as such provide a straightforward default option for any new supporter getting into the game and hunting round for a team to follow. Manchester United are now and always have been a clear model for the Reds, from the cultural omnipresence to the design of the uniforms; even their proper full name is Mitsubishi Urawa Football Club.

While Urawa can stage matches at the Saitama Stadium enormodome and turn it into a pulsating cauldron of noise populated by at least 40,000 followers chanting in tight unison, when Omiya play there they’re satisfied to pull in a quarter of that number. And while Urawa aspire to being part of world football’s upper echelons — they were thrilled at winning the Asian Champions League 2007, not particularly because it meant that they were better than other clubs in Asia, but more because it gave them an opportunity to match themselves up with top European and South American sides in the Club World Cup — Ardija operate under their noses at a local level, scrapping for every supporter they can get.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this means that the Squirrel Nation are a tightly-knit bunch, vociferous in their expression of the fact that there are most emphatically two teams in Saitama: a point consistently misunderstood by almost everyone who is not connected to the club. The mayor of Saitama City, for instance, making a speech at Omiya’s brand new stadium and clad in an ill-fitting orange shirt, misjudged his audience as only a local politician can when to a distinctly frosty response he referred in glowing terms to the Reds and their recent achievements.

Omiya Park

Like almost all J-League teams, Omiya Ardija have their roots in the corporate football which blossomed across Japan in the 60s and 70s. While Urawa grew out of a Mitsubishi works side, Omiya’s origins lie in a local representative team of the NTT telecommunications giant. NTT Kanto played Regional League football before gaining promotion to the lower ranks of the Japan Soccer League, a nationwide competition populated by company teams like Toshiba and Yamaha.

During the 90s, however, Japanese club football was changed beyond all recognition by the establishment of the J-League and in 1999 NTT rode the wave of sides joining the ranks of the professionals by being among the founder members of the second tier, J2. The team name was changed in accordance with J-League policy that clubs abandon their corporate monikers completely and instead choose something that grounded them in their local community.

In their first few seasons in J2, Omiya Ardija were mainly stuck in mid-table alongside other small teams, such as Montedio Yamagata and Sagan Tosu. The Squirrels nevertheless had one significant asset at their disposal, in that they were able to use as their home stadium Omiya Park, which prior to the World Cup of 2002 was one of the few football-specific stadia in Japan. Built to stage the football tournament of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the ground had a capacity of 12,000 and the lack of a running track gave it the kind of intimacy that meant a 5000 crowd for a night game was enough to create a piping hot atmosphere. Despite the fact that Ardija were really no more than J2 also-rans, their stadium quickly developed a reputation among J-League fans as one of the best places to watch football in the whole country.

Late in 2004, however, a major problem arose from an unexpected source: suddenly, Omiya got good. Squirrels coach Toshiya Miura in the final quarter of the lengthy J2 season somehow managed to coax a series of increasingly impressive performances from his squad and it was Ardija who emerged from the pack to move into second spot behind runaway leaders Kawasaki Frontale. In the end, Omiya notched up a remarkable thirteen-match winning streak to close out the year and thereby claim an incredible promotion.

Appropriately, the move up to J1 was finally confirmed at Omiya Park with a 3-1 defeat of Mito Hollyhock, after which players and fans celebrated together the club’s shock success. Tears streamed down the face of Japanese / American midfielder Jun Marques Davidson as he shook hands with Squirrels supporters: university students and high school girls, middle-aged salarymen, parents and little kids, all in their orange replica shirts. None of them could have dreamed that a tiny club like Ardija – boasting an average gate of barely 6000 – would fight their way to a place among the elite of the Japanese game, alongside even their Saitama rivals the Reds.

But the problem for Ardija lay in the shape of their cosy, familiar old home stadium. Constructed in the leafy surrounds of the city’s main park and with cherry trees shedding their blossom on the flag-waving fans behind the goal in the spring time, however charming it was, the fact remained that the venue was now showing its age. More to the point, it wasn’t actually large enough for the 15,000 minimum capacity restriction placed by the J-League on stadia regularly staging J1 matches.

The Squirrels were subsequently allowed by league authorities to play a limited number of games there in the 2005 J1 season, but after a 1-0 win over Gamba Osaka in November of that year, the demolition men moved in and the stadium was completely knocked down. It was estimated that construction of its replacement on the same site would take two years. Just at the very point that they were trying to establish themselves in the top division, Ardija were homeless.

Check back next week for part two of a Year in the Life of the Squirrel Nation. And read more from furtho at Go! Go! Omiya Ardija and Japanese Non-League football.

(By the way, we’ll be featuring the ultras from Japan throughout the week in photo daily.)