Seira Kitagawa
The Duck and the Oregon Ducks Football team at the football field at The American School in Japan for the Tokyo Oregon Football Showcase.
Yes, the Duck, University of Oregon’s football head coach Dan Lanning and seven football players visited Tokyo. The team attended events from June 25-27 that engaged with fans and children playing football.
The event in Tokyo might have been well anticipated by billboards and posters painted in central spaces: one of Dante Moore in Shibuya, near the famous Shibuya Scramble crosswalk, and one in Shinjuku at the Toho cinema, one of Tokyo’s famous movie theaters.
But do people in Japan care about football at all? That’s the key question for this trip.
“Let’s go, Ducks! Let’s go, Ducks! Let’s go, Ducks!” Approximately 300 fans and UO alumni gathered for the event, cheering for the team, some holding handmade signs praising the Ducks.
The Oregonian reported that the reason for this trip is not only to gain experience but also to pursue a further marketing opportunity. The billboards in Tokyo show the scale of this event and the extent of the marketing. The reason for this out-of-country event pointed to the boom of name, image and likeness in college athletics.
“I hope we will be your favorite team in America,” Dan Lanning said during the event. If the Oregon Ducks team became Japan’s favorite American college football team, the revenue from fandom and things that follow would be significant.
During the showcase hour, the players entered the field and performed their dynamic warm-ups and drills, including some long passes. In the middle of the hour, it started raining, but fans stayed and cheered while holding umbrellas.
“Before I came to Eugene for my study abroad, I never watched American football,” Nanami Yamamoto, a former UO exchange student, said. After her time at UO, she is more open now to watching sporting events with her friends.
Unlike most Americans, football is not something many Japanese people grow up with; however, amid it, some are finding their love for it.
Yota Tamura (right) and Kiyotaka Imori (left) stand behind the board filled with the Oregon Ducks Football team’s pictures. (Seira Kitagawa)
High school football players Yota Tamura and Kiyotaka Imori attended the event with their team.
Tamura had played soccer since he was little. “As I go through physical training, I started to think, ‘I want to make more physical contact,’” he said.
In the midst of it, he discovered football on social media, found it interesting and started training for it. Tamura said he hopes to go to college in the United States.
Imori, on the other hand, had never joined a sports team. Again, social media has captured his interest in football. He bought a football and started playing catch, falling in love with the sport. He said he even tried to form a football team at his high school, though it was not possible.
Both Tamura and Imori now play football on a team and strive to play like the Ducks.
So far, very few Japanese players played in American College Football, which may have contributed to the sport’s lack of popularity in Japan.
However, believe it or not, Japan has over 90 years of football history, with the first match in Japan having been in 1934, according to the Japan American Football Association. Today, there are more than 200 football teams across the country with about 20,000 people playing the sport.
In 2024, the U20 Japan team placed second, beating the U.S. team for the International Federation of American Football Junior World Championship.
“I want to play football in an American college,” Tamura said.
AloJapan.com