How To Get Outscored 28-1 And Still Win A Soccer Tournament

Something crazy like 90% of the population of Japan lives on 20% of the land because of how steep and densely forested the terrain is.  I might even be understating that statistic.  It's always worth remembering that a third of the population of the US lives in an area essentially 1/5 the size of California.

What this means, besides amazing population density in the city centers, is that there are still enormous areas of the country with nothing but mountains and trees.  The leaves are starting to change here, and the forests are lush and full even higher up.  Highways rise off the seaside in minutes and burrow through hills for half-hour stretches in intermittent tunnels and hug the cliffsides of mountains without a building to be seen.  It's nice to know that there's still so much of the country that remains that way, even if it's not by choice.

Posing for a sleeping shot with the Ishikawa Football Club mascot Sashimi.  He was a great cuddler.

42 Ishikawa Prefecture JETs headed up to Nagano, more than half that number being supporters for our team.  No one else brought close to that many people.  The home of the 1998 Winter Olympics is about three and a half hours from Kanazawa, so we divided up the cars and road-tripped up to play against 15 other teams over the two day tournament.

I'm not sure how long this tournament has been going on, but it's been a while.  Our team got together for three practices over the last month, and we were excited to get out and have some fun running around and competing.  What most of us were unaware of was that most of the "JET" teams are stacked with non-JET players, either ex-JETs who've been playing in local leagues for years or worse, Japanese and Brazilian (!) friends of JETs.  One of the Japanese guys I met at the party on Saturday night from the Chiba team plays for the national amateur soccer league.

So yeah...we got spanked.  It seems pretty silly to me to stack your team like that to try to win a for-fun soccer tournament, but the rules be the rules.  We responded by playing our hearts out while our supporters screamed and chanted so loudly they could be heard three fields away.  And when the party came around, we danced longer and laughed louder than anyone else.  I'll lose every recreational sports league game I play for the rest of my life if I can be on a team like that every time.

The scores of the games on Saturday went 8-0, 8-0, 9-1, and our seeding determined that we had to play the second team in single elimination on Sunday.  We played them much harder, and the score only ended up at 3-0.  Smiles all around.

Rainy and cold to start the day on Saturday.

 

I decided to climb ski lift poles on my lunch break.

 

The highest soccer fields in the whole country.

 

 

Sashimi gets a whirl on the dancefloor.

The whole Ishikawa FC, felt letters and pom-poms galore.

We also got some great sightseeing in on Sunday on the way out.  The mountains in Japan can be absolutely stunning the way they erupt out of completely flat valleys into several-thousand foot peaks.  It was hazy and my camera was in the trunk, so no pictures of some of the most dramatic views, but there's another tournament in the spring in the same place, so I'll grab some after we practice all winter and take Nagano by storm.  (So check back in 6 months...?)

Sometime in the next couple days I'll have another post with some more specifics about school and the work I'm doing here.  Along with that, I'll share with you the most amazing cultural revelation I've had yet.