World Football Quest

A country with a millenary culture, that you can still see in almost every corner of Japan. They really know how to mix tradition with modernity, clear example is that you can fin a small buddhist temple in the middle of Tokyo, just between 2 skyscrapers. Of course this is not just applied in their architecture, japanese people are very adaptable to any kind of situations, mixing those strange dresses that sometimes you can see, people with pink hair and many other who look like if they have just escaped from a manga book, with monks, geishas and other traditional figures of their culture.

Watching this in a way that, maybe interests more if we talk about football, they have applied little parts of that character and culture to their game, making Japan national team possibly the best team in all Asia confederation (with South Korea and Australia), and maybe one of the most improved teams of the last 10-15 years. Right now, many people know some players of their team, like Keisuke Honda, Shinji Kagawa, Yuto Nagatomo, Shinji Okazaki, Makoto Hasebe, etc. something that was impossible to think just 10 years before, when if you knew who Hidetoshi Nakata was, you had to be a real football guru or a great fan of italian football.

This shirt can be some kind of special, as it is the design they used in the 2002 World Cup, when they hosted it with South Korea. That event can be considered, at least in my opinion, the moment when asian football, an especially the one of the 2 host nations, got a great improvement and people here and there realized about that game and what they can do if they continue doing some work on their base. The shirt is just a replica one, I mean, the one anyone could buy on a shop those days. If you check the one that players wore, you can see it had 2 layers of fabric, one in blue, and one on white under the "visible" shirt. To reply that visual effect on the replica shirt, they made those kind of white "dots" all along the parts that had that undershirt fabric.

As many of the shirts of my collection, this one came from ebay. I wanted a players one, as I'm very curious about that "2 fabric layers system", but I got this one instead for less than 20€, so it wasn't that bad at the end...