Maya Yoshida - Unbeatable Mind

Moreover, they had very strict regulations. Given that the school’s academic standard was roughly the same as the region’s other state schools, the idea perhaps was to keep the students disciplined to prevent them from falling into pitfalls that might have enticed and trapped them under a more relaxed regime. But it was a very strict environment. I really felt I had arrived in hell once I enrolled there.

In my first year I hardly spoke to any of my classmates. I spent most of the time between classes napping at my desk rather than chatting, and my lunchtimes were spent with a close friend from my junior high school days. I wasn’t always a good communicator, as people (might) think today after watching me on the football pitch. Anyway, taking into account the type of school it was and my difficulties fitting in there, I thought, ‘I’ve f***** up my school choice.’

By the way, at Southampton, where I have happily settled in, academy players study after their morning training session. They take online courses, instead of going to a local school. In Japan, everything is done by the club to help the young player finish their compulsory education curriculum. This may mean that an academy player in Japan ends up more academically advanced than one here. However, I personally think the English way offers a good and practical educational system for a kid who gives priority to his football education, especially for someone who is determined to pursue a professional career from a very young age.

I also think that, over here, it is much more common to steer your own course from a young age than in Japan. That is one of the key differences I have noticed since moving to Europe. In the United Kingdom, for instance, teenagers seem to be given the chance to decide which subjects to study further, based on their particular interests or their intended future career. They start making decisions about their own lives from a young age and do so constantly as they grow up.

How about in Japan? Most young people there, it seems to me, don’t make many decisions concerning the path they intend to follow until they are around 20 years of age. Once you finish your compulsory education you go to a high school, and then take an entrance exam to get into a university or college. As long as you study adequately, you can go up to a certain point, as if you are on an escalator, where you see multiple routes open up in front of you. But at the same time you may also see that you aren’t especially prepared to take any of the routes available to you. It could be said that you have a well-rounded education, but you have achieved almost nothing outstanding.

English and me

Despite feeling as though I was in hell at my high school, one subject I was enthusiastic about was English. I studied very hard because I wanted to. I was never an academic high-flier, but I’m proud of the eagerness I showed to learn English.

Why English? Well, again, it has something to do with my complex – an inferiority complex towards anything foreign. When I was a teenager, I always felt that cultural imports from abroad – whether English pop and rock music, or the latest fashions from Europe or the United States – were better and much cooler than the things I saw or heard in Japan.

At that time, I was living in a place that was essentially a commuter town for people working in the city of Toyota. Naturally, I was surrounded by so-called ‘third-culture kids’ – children who’d come back from abroad where their fathers worked as expatriates at overseas branches or affiliated companies of the Toyota Motor Corporation, in the case of the town I was living in. At my school, it was nothing unusual to find a student or two in the class who, let’s say, had just come back from the west coast of the United States or had visited several countries while in Europe. I could sense something different about those kids, a scent of foreign culture, and I was attracted to it. In my mind, anything foreign was extremely cool and the English language expressed that coolness verbally. That’s how I initially got into the language when I was a junior high-school student.

Then, at high school, I decided that English was an essential subject. My desire to play football abroad had developed into something like a plan for my future by the time I became a high-school student. ‘To go abroad, English is a must as a communication tool,’ I thought. So I studied it really seriously.

I can’t say I did anything special or extra apart from attending my English classes. Unlike during my previous three years at junior high school, I didn’t have much energy or time left after spending the day at school and then at the club for football training. But at least I tried to put 120 per cent into my English class. I did my best to learn English grammar and to increase my vocabulary without falling asleep (‘You can’t call that a big effort,’ some might say …).

I know grammar and vocabulary aren’t everything when it comes to learning a foreign language, but in any language, including my native Japanese tongue, if your grasp of its grammar and vocabulary is poor, your writing and speaking will lack clarity, as you will end up repeatedly using similar and awkward expressions. I didn’t want to be like that when it came to moving abroad, so, to me, getting the basics of English grammar and vocabulary right in my high-school years was very important.

In terms of having a conversation in English, I was nowhere near being able to do that at the time. There was a class for listening and speaking at school, but I didn’t find it very practical or useful. At Grampus there were some foreign coaches and foreign first-team players, but none of them were English natives. I had heard that watching English movies without Japanese subtitles could be a good way to improve one’s listening comprehension, but I found that too frustrating. Besides lacking patience, I was also short of the stamina required, after a day’s school and youth-team training, to sit through another 90 minutes or so of watching a movie that I couldn’t really understand.

But I was training my English ears a little by listening to the American or British music that I loved. Again, it’s not like I made an extra effort, such as trying to remember the lyrics or to understand the words with a dictionary in my hand; I’d simply been getting used to hearing English in this way since my early teens. In my high-school days I remember listening to songs by an American band called Maroon 5, whose popularity rose in Japan at that time. I also liked the music of rock or blues gods such as Aerosmith or Eric Clapton, though I tended to go for slower, mellower tunes, such as their ballads, as it was easier for me to catch some of the words in the lyrics.

It was at this time that Sugao Kambe and the late Che Hyon Pak helped me to see England as the ultimate destination in my football life. They came to the Grampus academy as coaches from another J.League club called Jef United Ichiahara Chiba when I was 16. Mr Kambe had more of a directorial role; Mr Pak spent most of his time coaching us, and so was key in helping me to become a Japanese centre-back playing abroad.

Under the new coach, we started – or were ordered, I should say – to watch Premier League games on DVD as part of our football education. Watching matches involving clubs like Liverpool or Chelsea, I couldn’t help but be super-impressed. The fans were so noisy, I could feel the atmosphere inside the stadiums through the TV screen! When a goal was scored, I could feel the passion of the fans as they went nuts.

Watching these matches, I immediately wanted to play in England, and somehow I soon came to believe, ‘That’s where I will play.’ It was typical of me; my innate optimism and self-belief have, I believe, helped me every step along the way to get to where I am now.