The national women's soccer team that just won the FIFA World Cup in Germany is called Nadeshiko Japan. "Nadeshiko" is the name of a flower, but it also represents a certain ideal of Japanese femininity that's demure, quiet and accommodating to men; or, at least, it used to be. Japan's victory over the United States exceeded most people's expectations, and demureness had nothing to do with it.

Nadeshiko is also the name of the professional women's soccer league that has seen its fortunes soar since the return of the national team. Last Sunday, in a game in Kobe that featured four of the national team players, including captain Homare Sawa, attendance topped 17,000, almost twice as many people as had been projected and 19 times the average attendance at Nadeshiko games last year.

Many will be surprised to learn that professional women's soccer has a longer history in Japan than in almost any other country. The Japan Women's Soccer League started in 1989, and according to the weekly AERA enjoyed a fair amount of popularity in the early 90s with the runup to the emergence of the J League. Sponsors were eager and teams had enough money to hire players from overseas. In many cases, the teams were owned by companies, which simply made the players employees. The biggest team of this era was Nikko Securities Dream Ladies, which won the championship in 1996, two years after the league changed its name to L League.