Peroxide-bleached hair, a passion for sake and a career that showed light to the entire continent of Asia. Hidetoshi Nakata made Captain Tsubasa come to life.
You always remember your firsts; they take you to places you hadn’t yet reached, or sometimes even, conceived. Your first date, your first time at a stadium, your first ever car, and the first time you snuck out of the house to go hang out with your cool friends five blocks away.
1996 was one such year of firsts. Japan were announced as co-hosts for the 2002 World Cup along with South Korea. The greatest show on earth had never travelled outside the Americas and Europe, and it was now en route to the far east. It was also the year when Japan beat defending world champions Brazil at the Atlanta Olympics, another first in their short history as a significant football nation.
Japan would get knocked out themselves, but like with any underdog story, it was a victory over the big dog that stuck longest in memory. Their talisman that day was a nimble-footed 19 year-old midfielder Hidetoshi Nakata, or Hide as he was known among friends and family, who carried a copy of Captain Tsubasa, the cult classic of a football-manga comic from 1981, wherever he went. A year on, he’d bag himself the AFC Player of The Year award, and the collective attention of the entire football community, a luxury South-East Asian footballers just hadn’t been afforded before. At the 1998 World Cup too, he’d be the lone shining beacon for Japan, as the rest of the side crumbled under the pressure of their first ever appearance at football’s grand quadrennial. Nakata’s peroxide-bleached hair was relegated to a minor distraction by his audaciously talented feet.