KOJI SASAHARA / AP

CRESTFALLEN >>>> Japan's goalkeeper Yoshikatsu Kawaguchi, left, and Tsuneyasu Miyamoto, leave the field after the 1-3 defeat against Australia in Kaiserslautern

Web Exclusive | The World Cup | Japan v Australia Japan's Soccer Samurais Are Left Feeling Blue Supremely confident — certainly overconfident — before the finals, a loss to Australia gives the Asian champions a hangdog expression By JIM FREDERICK subscribe to TIME Printable Version email this story Blog: She'll Be Right Mate

Posted Wednesday, June 14, 2006; 9.05BST
Japan's World Cup team is nicknamed the Samurai Blue. That's a fine enough moniker, but it's the sort of appellation that invites all sort of plays on words when the team loses. And after their embarrassing 3-1 drubbing by Australia, these samurai — and all of Japan — very much have the blues.

Japan came into the game supremely confident. The players themselves were reasonably circumspect, but fuelled by a breathtaking media hype campaign, many Japanese fans had worked themselves into a delirium of high expectations. After Japan's thrilling run to the quarterfinals in 2002, when Japan and South Korea co-hosted the Cup, many fans had convinced themselves that they were now a soccer power, that Japanese football had arrived. Hours before the game, a soccer shop in Shibuya, one of Japan's central neighborhoods, was nearly cleaned out of Japan paraphernalia, and fans thronged a central intersection known as Hachiko Crossing ready to watch on jumbo TVs and, fully expecting a win, party well into the morning.

But those in Japan who knew their football were worried. They understood the mystical powers that home field advantage really does convey upon Cup hosts and worried that Japan's 2002 performance was being treated as the norm rather than a beautiful high point. Getting out of the round competition stage, they cautioned, let alone making it to the quarters, was going to be an enormous task.

Then there ware the players themselves. While they are a skilled bunch of kickers, the doubters said, they players didn't seem particularly hungry. All through the qualifying rounds, Japan's much mythologized Bushido way of the warrior‹was nowhere in evidence. The Japanese team seemed like nice guys, out to have fun and play good ball but winning almost seemed beside the point. The Samurai Blue, in short, were not acting very much like samurai.

And then the game proved the doubters right, delivering a crushing blow to the entire nation. After Australia ran Japan ragged towards the end of the second half, an exhausted Japanese side simply gave up and roared back with an amazing three goals in 10 minutes, Japanese fandom was left wasted, demoralized and tearful. That the Japanese are rational, cold, distant and emotionless is one of the most erroneous national clichés out there. Anyone who knows Japan well knows that the Japanese can be amazingly romantic and melodramatic, sentimental and maudlin. So Japan is making the most of this loss, still wallowing in despair. When the final whistle blew, a nationwide ululation rang out that has not yet ended. Unless Japan can work some sort of magic against Croatia or even more improbably, Brazil, they are most likely going home. The Japanese media is approaching Sunday's match against Croatia with far more anxiety than excitement.

KOJI SASAHARA / AP TOP DOG >>>> Japan's team mascot, Rommel Teshima

One of the oddest little letdowns of the contest, however, has been the failed powers of Rommel, a 10 year-old miniature dachshund that had become the Japan's team mascot and a major media celebrity. Owned by the team's chief media officer Hideto Teshima, Rommel first shot to stardom during the 2002 World Cup, when he regularly hung out around the Japanese media center in Shizuokoa. His fame had only grown since it was reported in the run-up to this Cup that Japan had gone undefeated in the previous 18 games Rommel had attended.

Before the game, Japanese TV news segments on Rommel were virtually unending and his arrival at Frankfurt got almost as much play as the players'. Erwin Rommel, the dog's namesake, was, of course, one of Nazi Germany's most formidable generals. Known as the "Desert Fox" for his wily tank campaigns across Africa, he was one of the few top German commanders to win almost universal respect and admiration from his Allied opponents. But, of all the names in the world, it is still a bizarre choice, given all the weight of World War II history that bears down on the former Axis countries, for a Japanese person to choose for his dog. And yet, in all the media frenzy over Rommel, this one curiosity, the dog's name, has gone completely unaddressed.

Michiko Toyama, a reporter in Time's Tokyo bureau, called Teshima in Germany and asked him about the pooch's loaded name. He said his son named the dog a decade ago after watching a movie about the general, but Teshima says he doesn't have any more details about its provenance, saying that couldn't remember, if he ever knew, the title of the film his son found so inspiring. (The best known Hollywood film about Rommel is The Desert Fox, made in 1951, starring James Mason in the title role. It presents Rommel as a tortured yet ultimately heroic soul, as one of the few senior Germans willing to turn against Hitler's madness in the last throes of the war).

And yet, there is new beacon of possibility for the Samurai Blue. The latest Japanese news updates on Rommel have uncovered this shocking, disgraceful, but ultimately hopeful revelation: Rommel was, it seems, asleep for the second half of the disastrous big game. And thus, everyone has agreed on the only prescription possible for Sunday: Forced wakefulness for Rommel!

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