Though baseball and sumo have long reigned supreme as Japan’s most cherished sports, soccer’s Samurai Blue are the national team that has captured the hearts and minds of the public in a way that no other squad wearing the Hinomaru has come close to equaling.
As Hajime Moriyasu watched Iraqi forward Jaffar Omran score his infamous equalizer for Iraq on Oct. 28, 1993 — the fateful “Agony of Doha” that prevented Japan from reaching the U.S.-hosted 1994 World Cup — so too were 48.1% of households in the Kanto region, at the time a record for domestic soccer broadcasts.
That mark would go on to be shattered by Japan’s World Cup debut at France 1998, with more than 60% of Kanto tuning in for the country’s games against Argentina and Croatia. The high mark came four years later, when Japan earned its first World Cup win against Russia, with 66,108 packing the stands at International Stadium Yokohama and 66.1% of Kanto — to this day the second-largest audience for a sporting event — glued to their TVs.
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