Maya Yoshida - Unbeatable Mind

When I was struggling to get playing time at Southampton, I often said to journalists in the mixed zone, a designated area at a stadium (often near a team coach pick-up point) for the media to get post-match quotes from players, ‘I understand where I am in the team right now. I just need to keep on working hard, doing what I have to do.’ Looking back now, I think I was able to say that because of this inner strength of mine which developed from an early age as the youngest brother, the strength of mind to face up to reality.

My brothers had shown me so much that ensured this precocious brat of their little brother wouldn’t become a cocky king of the hill. They had also made me try many things that seemed impossible for me to accomplish. Applying for the Nagoya Grampus Eight academy was one of those. At first, it was only to remind me of the danger of becoming a big fish in a small pond.

A small fish in a bigger pond

In my elementary-school days I never felt that I’d be beaten in a game at the local level. In fact, I hardly lost an individual battle on the pitch back in those days. I played in the school team at Sako Elementary School (which later became Nanryo FC), not at Nita Elementary School which I was actually going to, because the latter only allowed pupils in the third year or above to be in the team there. Besides, the two schools were located just a stone’s throw away from each other.

Sako wasn’t a school known for its strong football team so we seldom went into a tournament at the prefecture level, let alone the national level. In addition, I wasn’t especially keen to play in an official school match or tournament, as I had no aspiration to be a professional footballer whatsoever while at elementary school and was just playing for fun at that time. There really was a danger of me becoming living proof that the frog in the well knows nothing of the great ocean, a player who was merely happy to be invincible in a local school football world.

Possibly sensing that danger, my oldest brother, who was living by himself in Fukuoka, a city along the north shore of Kyushu island, sent me an application form for a youth academy trial when I was in my last year at elementary school, thinking I would need a tougher challenge to broaden my horizons.

It just so happened to be the one in Nagoya, a city in the middle of mainland Japan. He’d googled for a youth academy at J.League clubs while looking online for information about a university for which he was going to take an entrance exam, and the only trial calling for applications at that time was the one at the Grampus youth academy.

He never thought I would pass the trial. Everyone around me thought I had no chance, and so did I.

There were 60 or 70 participants on the day of the trial, I think, and four were successful, including myself. Being a boy from a small town in Kyushu, I’d imagined there would be hundreds of kids trialling with a J.League club, so when I saw the actual number that turned up I thought, ‘This is it? Much less than I imagined.’ Maybe that carefree attitude helped me to go through, and this ‘big fish’ from Nagasaki ended up going to the ‘bigger pond’ that was Nagoya.

I was only 12 at that time. I have heard many people saying, ‘It was such a brave decision to leave home at such a young age.’ I still do. People tell me that it was as courageous, if not more so, as the decision I made to move abroad when I was 21. But to be honest, the 12-year-old Maya Yoshida didn’t think he had made such a huge decision. It was more like, ‘I can always come back home after a year or two if it doesn’t work out.’ I was that casual about joining the youth academy in Nagoya.

Given that he was the one who’d sent the life-changing application form to his little brother, my oldest brother may have felt somewhat concerned when I ended up leaving home at the age of 12. But I wasn’t feeling any pressure or responsibility at all, even when it was time to leave Nagasaki.

However, something changed inside me once I arrived in Nagoya. I started feeling the pressure that comes from realising there would be no way for me to go home without achieving anything. I needed to rent a flat to start my life in Nagoya. We also had to buy some basic furniture. In Japan, a flat to let generally means unfurnished. Even a 12-year-old could understand it was costing the Yoshida household good money. The fact that my parents had to spend money because I was joining the academy in a different part of Japan made me think that I could not give up too easily and go back to Nagasaki after only a year or two. Initially, it was more a case of me feeling that I owed it to my parents to persevere than wanting to meet the expectations of my family. I felt strongly that I just could not go home with nothing to show for their financial sacrifices, and that sense of responsibility turned, in the end, into an inner determination to knuckle down to becoming a professional footballer.

Looking back now, I can’t help but wonder how my parents let their youngest son leave home for a city some 400 miles away at that age. I really want to tell them, ‘It was a brave decision.’ Even though Kyushu and mainland Japan are connected by a bridge and an undersea tunnel, to a 12-year-old boy from Nagasaki it was like going to live in a foreign land. I actually flew over to Nagoya. Now I’m a father myself, I can’t imagine letting my daughter go to live in a city away from home when she is only 12 or 13.

However, it wasn’t the case that my parents didn’t care much about letting their youngest son leave home. The plan was that I would live with my cousin’s family in Aichi Prefecture, of which Nagoya is the capital city. That was part of the reason why I was so casual about leaving home; I assumed, ‘I can go to the academy from their home.’ It was only on the day I was leaving for Nagoya accompanied by my mum, already on the plane and in the air, that she told me about ‘something important’. I found out that living with my cousin’s family was no longer an option due to an unforeseeable circumstance at their end. You can imagine my surprise. I was lost for words, except ‘What?!’

At that time, both my mum and dad were working in Nagasaki, and my older brother had just left for Tokyo to go to university. That meant my oldest brother, who was also away but just preparing to take the entrance exam (equivalent of A-level exams in the UK) again, had to come to my rescue to live with me in Nagoya. It was very last minute and so not according to the original plan. But on the other hand, this unexpected development made it easier for me, in a way, to make up my mind to go to Nagoya, as there was no other choice; I had to accept the reality.

So I left my home for Nagoya, where a different kind of resilience from ‘the strength of the youngest’ would be nurtured.

Anti-complex power

The junior youth (aged 12 to 15) set-up at Grampus was at a totally different level from what I was used to in Nagasaki. The moment I joined its Under-12/13 team, I felt a sense of urgency. Watching other players around me, I was shocked at how good they were. They all seemed way ahead of me, and the exceptionally good ones were invited to train with a team in the age group above us. There were four such players in my age group, and I secretly called them ‘the Big Four’. As for me, I was starting from the absolute bottom in the youth ranks. Every day I could not help but feel, ‘I have to get past every one of them, including the Big Four.’

We all got on well as team-mates but we were in competition to climb up the ladder in the academy. So I had to make sure that I wouldn’t be just one of the crowd but a force to be reckoned with through my performances.

It was as if the world I had read about in football manga (Japanese comics) was there right in front of me as the reality.