In the last two weeks I’ve been witness to two of the three full football matches I’ve seen in my entire life. At age 10 I was taken to see Gateshead United versus Macclesfield Town, and it was there, pressed between the rolls of fat adorning a ‘fellow’ Macclesfield fan and a piece of splintered chipboard advertising the local newspaper, with the rain violently washing mud and earth away from the pitch and onto my feet, that I decided that football really wasn’t ever going to be my thing.

So I spent 15 years avoiding it. Not like one might avoid the rent or dusting, more as if it were never a part of my life at all; like the Russians and Stalinism. So, over-night (and it was to me, literally over-night,) when this particular international soccer tournament crept up on me, I was put into something of a corner. I’m expected to support England, it’s my country after all. It’s that time every four years, where hanging St. George’s cross in your living room window won’t result in a knock at the door from three kindly Community Support Officers, that time when using the first person plural for people you neither know, nor have ever met and are certainly not qualified to be with, seems to be totally fine with everyone.

However. My best friend and housemate is Japanese, and, as my main conduit into the world of football, I had no choice. Those plucky little Asian chaps were MY team now. ‘They’ became ‘us’, going to a bar became going to watch a match, I became a Japanese fan.

This would seem to require a lot less time in photo booths that you might think for a Japanese activity. In fact, as far as I gather, it’s remarkably similar to how I understand the English do it. One sits in front of a television or other viewing device (in the case of one match, a Blackberry) and shouts nonsense in a voice far too loud to allow for proper intonation but not loud enough that the people the advice is apparently for can hear it. In South Africa.

But this particular incoherent nonsense is excusable, it’s in Japanese, a language I only have a very basic grasp of. And it’s rather more endearing to be a part of. There’s a nervous charm to Japanese celebration, as if they’re worried that observers might realise that the last thing they celebrated was Pearl Harbor. More to the little fellows I say, they’re one of those teams that have so little latino blood in them they’re not even considered to be really playing football and yet a 3-1 victory over Denmark, I think, came as a shock to everyone.

But what of a Japan versus England match? Where would my loyalties lie? Would I side with the jet-like Japanese who have thoroughly won my heart over by dragging me into this fatuous little sport and giving me something to cheer and hope for. It’s true that I will be heartbroken as soon as they drop out of this tournament, as even my lifted heart can’t deny they will. Or would I take the side of England? The land that is home to the roundabout infested town of Basingstoke. Where I was born.

性交は日本行く!!!!

Words – Tobias Revell