YM COLUMN

September 1, 2010

Sports and space projects

Japanese national team of 2010 FIFA World Cup had a very slim possibility, at its start, of advancing to the final round.

It was the first match of preliminary round against Cameroon that suddenly blew away chilly feeling of people to have given the team an incentive of strong willingness. Previous day, in fact, there occurred an “incident” of exciting return of HAYABUSA that might affect, on Japanese Internet, popularity of soccer, but it enjoyed after all very high TV viewing rate of 45.2% which proved sports was something else.

Amid increased attention of many people, what manager Okada took as a strategy was entirely different from the previous ones; it was weighed heavily on defense by drawing the ball contact line backward. His strategy was a real lucky guess to have led the team to 1-0 victory over Cameroon for having gained the game point three.

The next match was against the powerful team of the Netherlands of world-ranking fourth, in which Japan was defeated by a narrow margin of 0-1 not to have added the game points, however, it was a much better competition as compared to 0-3 defeat in September last year probably because of the luck that a forward player Robben did not play; the game excited many Japanese viewers who were not usually so much familiar with soccer.

Then there was Denmark coming up. The national team fully burdened with people’s strong expectation for advancing to the final round did a brilliant performance of winning the game. Japanese audience watching the game on public viewing TV got so much excited to have chain-reacted to many other local areas like festival merrymaking.

And then finally came the game against Paraguay in a final round. Regrettably, Japan lost the game in a penalty shootout after draw of regular match 0-0. Japan could not reach the goal of the best four that manager Okada aimed at, but numberless TV viewers gave applause to the unexpected fine performance of the national team.

So far in the past, soccer popularity reached the peak at Olympics or World Cup but rapidly receded after the finish of the games except fanatic supporters, but this time the situation surrounding football seems to have changed a little bit to me thanks to their achieving high performance at the World Cup; what do you think?

“HAYABUSA” fever that’s going on in whole Japan now and the great progress of the national team of this time took place simultaneously, which gave the impression to people that both has something in common each other from the standpoint of considering how the organization should be like. They are such as below:

• Consistent leadership.
• To challenge the grand plan within limited team strength (budget).
• Whole team members give their thoughts to the entire mission independent-mindedly and exert their brains and body for success (victory).
• To place expectation for limitless possibility on the Japanese youth apt to be socially criticized.

I’m hoping to connect these common factors of space projects and sports to be intentionally involved in “Space Education”, but I have no idea how to do it actually. I’ve been thinking several years in vain; I wonder if I’m not serious enough. If you have any idea at all, I’m glad to have them.

I welcome your opinions on this column to the following E-mail address.
matogawa@planetary.or.jp

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