COPYRIGHT

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

FIRST EDITION

© Maya Yoshida 2018

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Cover photograph © Colin Bell 2018

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Source ISBN: 9780008289331

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008289348

Version: 2018-09-13

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

YOUNGEST SON RISING

CHAPTER 2

FIRST PROFESSIONAL VOYAGE

CHAPTER 3

MOTHERLAND OF FOOTBALL

CHAPTER 4

BATTLE AGAINST ADVERSITY

CHAPTER 5

ARMOUR OF FORTITUDE

CHAPTER 6

SAMURAI RESILIENCE

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION

On 24 August 2017 I opened a new chapter in my life as a Southampton player when I signed a new three-year contract with the club.

I felt rejuvenated. On Southampton’s official website the announcement of my new contract was accompanied by a photo of me with Mr Les Reed, the club’s vice chairman, smiling and shaking each other’s hand.

In truth, the vice chairman and my agent had been locked in a heated discussion until the very last minute in our final negotiation, which was supposed to be a formality, and my presence was required ‘only to sign on the dotted line’, according to my agent. Sitting next to him, I was actually thinking, ‘This is so not what I expected …’, although I also have to admit that a situation like this is not unusual in the world of professional football. Business is business.

The three-month-long negotiation came to a conclusion and a new contract, which had always been the first priority for both the club and myself, was finally agreed. It was, in fact, my second new contract here at this club on the south coast of England. I was delighted that I could continue my journey as a Southampton player and try to better myself through all the challenges we continued to face together. Not only signing, but also announcing the new contract on my 29th birthday, was the best present I could possibly have asked for.

Playing in the Premier League had been my dream ever since I made up my mind to become a professional footballer in my early teens. It was also one of the goals I was audacious enough to believe would eventually be achieved. With the 2017/18 season being the sixth in my Premier League career, I honestly feel, as I said through the club’s website when my new contract was announced, ‘Southampton is my home.’ That was my sincere first thought.

Then I received another ‘offer’, this time from a British publisher. It was shortly after I began my sixth Premier League season as a Southampton centre-back, resolved to make it the fifth consecutive top-10 finish for the club. In England the summer transfer window for a player usually closes at the end of August. The market is always open for authors, though, and I had no reason not to listen to what they had to offer.

The offer was, as it turned out, from one of the major publishers in the United Kingdom. Just by taking a quick look at their authors’ list in the sports non-fiction category, I could see all those big names, including David Beckham and Frank Lampard, with whom I had dreamed to be on the same field when I was a kid. And now, here was an opportunity to put my name onto the same list as them.

Even though the book was explained to me as a joint project with the publisher’s Japan office, to my Japanese mind it felt like I would become the author of a ‘foreign book’. It is true that it has been more than eight years since I moved abroad, so I am used to being away from Japan. I could add that I am now quite comfortable communicating in English. As an author, I already have some experience publishing my books in my native country and, at one time, even joked that I rather fancied a quality post-playing life living on my book royalties. But still, publishing a book in English in the United Kingdom sounded a ‘tough ask’ to me. It was as if I would have the Premier League of publishing to prove myself in, as well as the real Premier League.

Then an editor at the publisher said to me, ‘Don’t worry. You have resilience, Maya!’

‘Ri-zi-li-ens?’ I couldn’t even spell the word in my head at first. There seem to be various meanings in Japanese for this word, such as gyakkyo-ryoku (capacity to recover from adversity), orenai-kokoro (unbroken mind), fukugen-ryoku (ability to spring back into shape) or taikyu-ryoku (durability).

My interpretation is makenai-chikara – strength of unbeatable mind.

Bingo! As soon as this interpretation came to my mind, a light bulb was switched on brightly in my head (in the head of Maya Yoshida the author, I should say) because this particular strength is the essence of ‘Maya power’. That’s the quality that has carried me through, all the way from my childhood to the present day as a Premier League defender, striving to improve to reach a higher standard, sometimes feeling low in a tough environment, sometimes having luck on my side to break through, via the city of Nagoya in Japan and of Venlo in the Netherlands, all the way to Southampton.

Until I received this publishing opportunity, I’d never said this English word ‘resilience’ out loud but it has always been inside me, I realised. The more I thought about it, the more I became sure of it. I also started to believe that I could convey my feelings, thoughts and stories well enough to readers in both the United Kingdom and Japan through a book, if it had ‘resilience’ as its underlying theme.

Needless to say, writing a book itself is not easy. I like writing, but finishing a book under the pressure of an approaching deadline is another matter. I was sure that I would sometimes need to fight off drowsiness as I sat in front of my computer. But I was also sure that my ‘strength of unbeatable mind’ would once again carry me through this new challenge.

It was a huge opportunity that I could not and should not miss – to make my début in the field of English publishing at the top level. There was no time to hesitate, I decided in the end.

Yes, let’s do this! I made one of the biggest decisions of my life. Well, that may be exaggerating a bit, but nonetheless I signed on a publishing contract that was also put in front of me at the beginning of my sixth year at Southampton.

There was one specific request from the publisher’s Japan office about the direction of this book. They wanted me to see myself as a samurai, a warrior of a high social rank in eleventh- to nineteenth-century Japan, but with a size-five football at my feet instead of a shiny sword in my hands. So, to be more precise, the theme of the book should be ‘samurai resilience’.

My initial reaction to this was that there seemed to be a slight difference between what Western people think of as a samurai and what we Japanese do. When I think of a samurai, what comes to my mind is someone prepared, if necessary, to kill himself by committing an act of hara-kiri – cutting his stomach open to die in order to avoid dishonour.

On the other hand, I am under the impression that people in Europe see a samurai in the image of a true warrior: a brave fighter who never gives up and keeps on going till the very end. It is an image of someone with incredible toughness, whose every deed is fortified by resilience. This Western view of a samurai, as I understand it, is also quite different from someone who loves cracking jokes, the image I project in the ‘Maya world’, if I may call it that – the world I have depicted in my blog and previous books.

In the football world, a defender, especially a centre-back, can be an easy target for criticism because a single mistake made in 90 minutes could cost the game for his team. Some might say it is a thankless position because a centre-back won’t be in the spotlight as often as a striker is but will be criticised for one costly mistake, even if it was made after 89 minutes and 59 seconds of an otherwise faultless performance. It may be true and I won’t deny it. But to me, getting criticised is part of the job as a professional defender.

My experience as a centre-back, good and bad, makes me appreciate even more all the support and encouragement I have received over the years. I cannot thank everyone enough. I know people sometimes feel frustrated, or even gutted, after watching my performance, but you ‘Maya supporters’ still cheer me no matter what. That unconditional support has strengthened the unbeatable mind that I have.

If I succeed in passing on some seed of resilience that I have found in my life so far to my supporters, or to people who have picked up this book because of their passion for Southampton FC, the Japan national football team, the Premier League or football itself, I will be a happy author.

Resilience can give you strength to keep moving forwards when you are caught in the rain or a storm, and keep you continuing on your journey through life. And it is a strength that resides in everyone. If you come to realise that, it will be a reward that I genuinely treasure as the author of this book.

CHAPTER 1

YOUNGEST SON RISING

The origin: strength of the youngest

If I am to talk about resilience, I must start with my childhood in a city called Nagasaki where I was born, on the island of Kyushu located about 600 miles south-west of Tokyo. That is because one of the resilient traits I was born with is the ‘strength of the youngest’. I can hear some people saying, ‘What?’ and I certainly understand that there is no such definition for the word ‘resilience’ in any available dictionaries. But believe me, ‘strength of the youngest’ is a definition to be found in the dictionary of Maya Yoshida.

I started playing football for fun just before I was enrolled at a Japanese elementary school (Year 1 to Year 7 in the UK). I was the youngest of three brothers in my family and started playing in a kickabout with my two brothers and their friends. The J.League (Japan Professional Football League) started when I was around five years old, and was initially just a single division – although it has since grown to have three tiers. My brothers, who were already in their impressionable early teens by then, totally immersed themselves in the ‘soccer boom’ sweeping through the country, triggered by the creation of the much-anticipated domestic professional league.

All my brothers did whenever they had free time was play football. It was football during the lunch break, football after school and football at the weekend. Naturally, that meant it was the same for their youngest brother. It was football day in, day out for me, too. In my mind, having fun meant kicking a ball with them.

The city of Nagasaki back then didn’t have a local club in the J.League, so I didn’t really have a chance to watch a professional football game at a stadium. My sole live experience was when Verdy Kawasaki (now called Tokyo Verdy 1969) came to a town called Isahaya located in the middle of Nagasaki Prefecture for a game. If my memory serves me right, it was a game in the Emperor’s Cup (similar to the FA Cup here in England), not a league game, but I still remember the excitement I felt in the stand on that day, watching a professional football game right in front of me for the first time in my life.

I didn’t follow any particular club or players when I was a kid. I was more a big fan of football itself, especially playing the game. In most parts of Japan baseball is the number one professional sport. However, it wasn’t because football was particularly popular in Kyushu that I was drawn to the game. There were kids playing baseball, too, in my neighbourhood.

Having said that, maybe it was significant that there wasn’t a baseball team in my elementary school, but there was a football team. Hmmm, I guess I was fortunate to be born in a football-friendly environment. Anyway, what I wanted to say was that football was around me for as long as I can remember and playing football was just a natural thing for me to do to have fun as a kid.

However, there was one problem. The lads I always enjoyed a kickabout with were my brothers and their friends. I’m seven years younger than my oldest brother and six years younger than the other one. It meant that, even though I was big for an elementary-school boy, there was no way for me to compete physically with them when they were already going to junior high school (Year 8 to Year 10).

I was always the tallest among my classmates. I was 5’ 6” when I was 12, about six inches taller than the national average for that age. I remember also that I shot up to a little over 5’ 10” in the following 12 months. But I must have been only just above four foot tall when I started playing football and I could easily be brushed aside by my brothers and their friends, who were nearly a foot taller than me. So it was only natural for me to try to outsmart the boys who were physically stronger than I was, and try to play clever in order to compete with the much bigger lads. This way of thinking was always with me from the very earliest stage of my development as a footballer.

I was always good with the ball, too, whether it was kicking or controlling it. Yes, the youngest son of the Yoshida family has always had what it takes to be a ‘player’, although he was destined to be a defender. Thankfully, my brothers didn’t really come charging at me, their little brother, at full tilt when I was on the ball. That allowed me a bit of freedom on the playground to express myself, trying to beat an opponent who was bigger than me by being clever or technical, and the fact I could show off my skills made me fall in love with football even more. Maybe that’s why if I have to name one boyhood hero of mine, it would be Dragan Stojković, also known by his nickname ‘Piksi’, who delighted the J.League crowds while I was growing up with his incredible skills in an attacking midfield role at Nagoya Grampus Eight.

Later in my development, when I started watching games from a defender’s point of view, Rio Ferdinand became one of the players that I most admired. The former Manchester United defender had much more success in his football career than his brother Anton, who is seven years younger than him. Among the former Man United defenders, there were the Neville brothers, too. Again, the achievements of older brother Gary overshadow those of the younger brother Phil, in terms of the number of trophies and medals won. But I, for one, believe that a ‘football career favours the youngest’, if such a proverb exists.

I say this because if you are the youngest brother or sister, you tend to play football with someone older, such as your siblings or their friends. That makes you aware of your particular weakness right from the start, whether it is a smaller physique or slower pace, and as a result you sometimes have to endure pain and frustration. But those experiences will toughen you up both physically and mentally, and also can lead you to compensate for your shortcomings in order to beat or stop your opponent, who is stronger or better in some departments. Therefore the youngest, in the end, has more chance to improve as a footballer and surpass his or her elders, who might have found it easy to get the better of someone younger or smaller, without having to make any extra effort, when they were young. That’s what I think, anyway.

I didn’t know it until I started writing this book, but John Terry, the former Chelsea centre-back, is an example of my belief – the younger of two brothers turned out to be more successful as a footballer. I don’t really know him personally, but from purely a centre-back’s point of view it is not bad, I think, to follow the same pattern as him, a defender whom I looked up to, together with the likes of Ferdinand, throughout my development as a footballer.

Eyes of the youngest

The two older brothers of the Yoshida family weren’t born to pursue a career as a professional footballer. Even though, as their brother, I look at them through rose-tinted glasses, I must say they weren’t good enough. My older brother had stopped playing by the time he was 16. The oldest one carried on playing in his high-school years (age 16 to 18) but only as a back-up goalkeeper.

If there was one thing that made me feel, ‘I’m no different to my brothers,’ it was my name, Maya. Even though I was the only one among the football-loving Yoshida brothers to go on to become a professional, I could not avoid the fate of being given a female-sounding name. My oldest brother is named Honami, while the older one is called Mirei. Both names sound feminine to Japanese ears. My dad was desperate for a daughter, I was told, and that may explain the names our parents chose for us.

It’s not as though I didn’t like my name when I was a kid. It was more a case of being annoyed by people so often ridiculing me, saying, ‘You have a girl’s name!’, and especially by repeatedly having to say, ‘I’m not a girl,’ whenever someone called my name for the first time.

For instance, at the beginning of a school year, when a new teacher checked attendance by calling everyone’s name in the class, when it was my turn the call would come, ‘Yoshida Maya-chan?’ (In Japanese, it’s always the surname first, and ‘chan’ is usually added for a girl to make it sound friendly.) When this happened, which was almost every time, I would answer, ‘Yes, I’m here, but I’m a boy.’ It was the same when I went to a hospital or the dentist’s. A nurse would call out, ‘Yoshida Maya-chan,’ and I would reply, ‘I’m not a girl, but it’s me!’ The only good thing that came out of these experiences was that I managed to develop immunity to being teased by people around me from a very young age.

But today I’m glad that I was called Maya. I really want to thank my parents for giving me that name, as it is one that seems easy not only to remember but also to pronounce for a non-Japanese as well.

Here in the United Kingdom, people tend to give a player a nickname with the letter ‘s’ or ‘y’ or ‘ie’ at the end of it, to make it easier to call out during a game, such as ‘Lamps’, ‘Giggsy’ or ‘Stevie’. But I have always been called by my real name, ‘Maya’, including during my time in the Netherlands before my move to Southampton. (Once in a while, a Saints fan would shout ‘Yoshi!’ to get my attention, and I was probably annoyingly slow to react as I’m not used to being called by that name …)

Anyhow, Maya-chan, with a female-sounding name but with a bigger than average body, was a clever elementary-school kid, I must say. I excelled at sports in general and wasn’t too bad academically as well. I wasn’t the smartest in my class but wasn’t one of those who would get scolded by the teacher for their poor grades either. I was very good at dealing with things at school without trying my hardest. It was only after entering junior high school that I changed my attitude, resolving to do my best in whatever I do. Until then I was able to take it easy in most of the things I did at school.

The fact that Maya-chan managed to avoid becoming conceited is pretty much down to my brothers and their friends. Having them around me was like being surrounded by role models. Through my observation of older people around me, I could pick up some of their good habits, thinking, ‘This must be the way to do it,’ or ‘I shall follow his example.’ I became very good at doing precisely that.

Watching them, I sometimes told myself, ‘I shouldn’t do that,’ or ‘I can’t be like that,’ using them as a bad example. People used to call me a precocious brat when I was a kid, and it was true in a way, as I often coolly observed my brothers and their friends from a step or two away. And that I think became the foundation of my ability to look at things objectively from a neutral perspective.

Even from a young age, while watching people around me rather matter-of-factly, I was always thinking in my head, ‘What would I do?’ ‘How can I be like that?’ ‘What should I do if I don’t want to be like that?’ This particular way of looking at things became more and more important and useful as I continued my development as a footballer, especially after I became a professional player, as it turned out.

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.

Every time I made a step forwards, to reach a higher level or rank, there came new rivals. As soon as I thought I had beaten my competition, there was another rival to beat. I tried to keep on running, but hurdles kept on appearing in my path.

The biggest motivation for me when I started out in the academy at Grampus, realising for the first time how fierce the competition would be within the team, was the awareness that I simply could not go back to Nagasaki without giving it proper time. And the fact that I managed to overcome the initial pressure was, I believe, down to my nature. I hate losing. I don’t want to be a loser in whatever I do, so I turn the sense of urgency which comes from thinking ‘I can’t lose’ into positive energy to reach my goal, instead of merely putting even more pressure onto myself. That is how I keep on running this long hurdle race that is the career of a footballer.

I wasn’t a prodigy or an elite youth player who had been developed at the academy of a professional club from the age of six or seven. I was just a kid who played football in a local school team, and I had something of an ‘I-am-a-nobody’ complex when I joined the Grampus academy. So when I saw other academy players, part of me was simply impressed by their abilities while another part was thinking, ‘I don’t want to lose against them no matter what.’ It was the same when I got my first call-up to the national youth team or the Japan senior side. I always had this ‘me against the elites’ feeling inside me.

I believe there are many people with a similar complex around the world, including in Japan and the United Kingdom. I also believe it is possible for anyone to deal with such a feeling of inferiority in a positive way. Thinking that you don’t want to be beaten by it gives you mental strength – ‘anti-complex power’, if I may call it that. And that is certainly a part of the resilience that has helped this Japanese defender end up plying his trade in the Premier League.

By mental strength, I don’t mean something that only a spiritual seeker can master, as though a professional athlete must become a practitioner of stoicism or asceticism. I did try to stay away from snacking and drinking fizzy drinks in my early teens, but what seems equally important to me nowadays, as a professional footballer, in order to develop or use my resilience is being able to switch oneself on and off effectively in one’s daily life. It is more important if you play abroad because you are likely to spend more time by yourself than when you are in your native country, especially right after your transfer to a different country, where thinking about football, about what you should or shouldn’t do as a player all the time, might lead to being too hard on yourself and have a negative effect on you, especially as you are under pressure to perform straight away.

Fortunately, I have always been quite good at dealing with life. Even after a defeat or poor individual performance, I rarely feel down once I’m home. I know when I must be switched on and when I can switch myself off as a footballer. There is always something else to take my mind away from football if needed. I’m innately curious; I’ve always been that way.

For instance, when I moved from Nagasaki to Nagoya and realised that there was a tough road ahead at the academy for me, it wasn’t as though I couldn’t think about or do anything other than football. My junior high-school days were not only about football. It was the time when a manga titled BECK was popular in Japan, and I wanted to have the same electric guitar – a telecaster – that the main character played in the story.

Of course I begged and begged my oldest brother, who at the time was also my guardian, to buy me one. One day, after two hours of my begging and his refusal, and getting fed up with each other (it was, I have to admit now, a case of little brother behaving badly), he finally gave in and bought me the guitar I wanted. Needless to say, I was grinning from ear to ear, hugging my precious instrument and snuggling up to my brother sitting next to me on our train journey home. On Mondays, I sometimes enjoyed playing the guitar with my friends after school as there was no team training at the academy.

At the moment, Maya Yoshida the guitarist is in semi-retirement, or has been forced to be so, to be more precise. My guitar has been locked away somewhere in our house so that there is no chance of my baby daughter knocking it down by accident and harming herself. Might I need some resilience to fight off an occasional urge to take out the guitar and play? Probably not. Maya Yoshida the husband and father gladly takes a back seat to his beloved wife and daughter.

High school is hell

As Maya Yoshida the footballer, I basically don’t want to be behind anyone. I don’t want to feel inferior to anybody. And that is why I chose to go to a prefectural high school (age 16 to 18), instead of going to an independent one that was in partnership with the club, even though I was already determined to be a professional footballer by then.

My attitude towards becoming a professional had changed gradually over the course of three years in junior high school. First, I only thought, ‘I should at least give it a real go.’ Then I started to feel, ‘I really want to be a professional.’ And in the end, I simply thought, ‘I’ll be a professional footballer,’ without any doubts.

But pursuing a career as a footballer also made me aware of another anxiety I had inside me. I always thought that people might see me as a boy who wouldn’t be able do anything properly apart from playing football because I’d left home early and wasn’t under the guidance of my parents from a young age. I felt I had to do something to change that perception, for I would hate to be seen that way.

Tuition is much cheaper at a prefectural school. My mum used to tell me in a light-hearted fashion, ‘You go to a state school because an independent school is too expensive for us.’ But my going there was mainly because of my determination to stop people viewing me in a negative way. I didn’t want them saying, ‘Maya lacks common sense because all he has done is to play football,’ or ‘Maya can’t do anything else,’ so I decided to go to a prefectural high school, even if it meant I had to study for the entrance exam (the equivalent of GSCE in the UK). I just couldn’t accept the idea that I might be labelled as someone who would be useless and worthless apart from his ability at football.

I passed the exam and enrolled at Toyota Senior High School. I’d succeeded in what I set out to do but felt miserable right away. As soon as my high-school life began, I felt as though I couldn’t continue. The first thing my form teacher said was, ‘There’s never been a professional footballer or baseball player from this school.’ I understood that this was intended to encourage me, and other students, to study hard so that we might go on to university or college, but it still felt like I had been dealt a major setback from the get-go. I remember thinking as the teacher spoke, ‘You’ll be eating your words some day.’

My team-mates at the Grampus academy were all going to the club-affiliated private high school, which was much closer to the club’s residence hall. I, too, had moved in there after finishing junior high school, but I was going to a different high school. So I had to get up earlier than anyone in the team to start a 30-minute bike ride there every day, sometimes against the elements.

My time at the school was even harder. Although I knew it would be the case, being a youth player at Grampus meant nothing to the teachers and I wasn’t treated any differently to the other students, including in the amount of homework I was given. I got tons.

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.

It was Mr Pak who converted me back to a defensive midfielder. Defensive midfielder? Convert back? Yes, that’s right. Maya Yoshida wasn’t a natural-born centre-back.

Pre-centre-back era

When I started to play football for fun, I was kicking the ball as if I was a fantasista on the pitch. Everybody did so as a kid, I believe, and I was no exception. I was playing as a striker or a number 10, a star role in my team when I was little. I had no inkling whatsoever of my suitability as a defender. I never ever thought, ‘I’d be good as a defender.’ Even when I watched a game of football, my eyes were drawn to attacking players.

I think it is particularly the case with my generation that, as kids, we preferred playing behind the striker and setting up a goal rather than actually scoring as a forward. We had grown up reading a hugely popular football manga titled ‘Captain Tsubasa’ (a modern Japanese version of the Roy of the Rovers cartoon strip character over here). I was one of numerous Japanese football kids who wanted to play the number 10 role, just as the main character, Tsubasa, did in the manga. When in a one-on-one situation with a goalkeeper, I would rather square the ball nonchalantly for my onrushing team-mate to score than beat the goalie and score myself. That was cool, like Tsubasa, and I loved it.

However, as I grew up and climbed the ladder towards a professional career, my position on the pitch moved further and further back. Now playing as a centre-back, there is only a goalkeeper left behind me. But until I reached around 14 years of age, towards the end of my second year at junior high school, I was a central midfielder. And when Mr Pak became a coach at the Grampus academy he put me back in the middle of the pitch.

Recently, I had a chance to join Kei Yamaguchi, a former defensive midfielder and my senior from my Grampus days at a football clinic held in Japan, and there I discovered that even he and many other seniors at the club thought I’d come up through the youth ranks as a centre-back. Little did they know that I became a professional footballer as a central midfielder.

People see me solely as a centre-back these days, but in my mind I’m always a former midfielder. I believe my experience in an anchor-man role helped me to make a great leap during my youth development. I even think that I couldn’t have become a professional if I hadn’t spent my final two years in the youth team (age 16 to 18) as a defensive midfielder. That is how strongly I feel about the importance to me – in terms of my career – of having formerly been a midfielder.

The fact that I’m comfortable with my allegedly weaker left foot, a trait more common among midfielders than defenders, however, has more to do with the fact that I’ve always tried to be two-footed since I was a kid. In my elementary-school days I used to practise using a slope near my home. I kicked a ball up from the bottom of the slope and when the ball was rolling down back I controlled it and kicked it again. I repeated this over and over again, using my right and left foot in turn.

My background as a defensive midfielder still influences how I play today. As a centre-back, when I have to deal with the ball either with my foot or my head, I usually try to check my team-mates’ positions around me and make a pass rather than a mere clearance, if possible. That awareness of space and the position of a team-mate comes from being a defensive midfielder.

I also know from experience that it will be really tough for a defensive midfielder if a clearance by a centre-back gives the ball straight back to the opponents. My teammates’ workload depends on whether or not we can build up from the back line after stopping the opponent’s attack. If I can feed the ball to a team-mate, it gives the whole team time to move forwards rather than retreating to defend again.

That’s just a small part of what we defenders do but it’s the sort of detail that can make a huge difference in terms of how a game goes and how tired team-mates become. When I started watching games on DVD, I realised that good Premier League players always care about such details. Those viewing sessions were very beneficial for someone like me, adept at learning simply through observation.

Players I admired – and hugely optimistically started looking forward to playing with on the same pitch, whether as a team-mate or an opponent – were also mainly midfielders, such as Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard or Claude Makélélé. Gerrard and Lampard were especially influential for me. I thought they were a class apart even among the other accomplished Premier League players of that era.

Playing in central midfield gives you a different view of the pitch from the one you get in the middle of the defensive line. As a centre-back, your view is basically locked in on what is going on ahead of you, while as a central midfielder you need a much wider range of vision. You get pressure from your opponents from the side or behind as well as in front. At first, when playing in that role, there were times when the ball was nicked off me by someone whom I wasn’t paying enough attention to. But once you get used to playing in the middle of the pitch, you start enjoying it more, too. I felt it was fun to initiate an attack from a deep-lying position. Also, it felt good every time I sniffed danger and stopped the opponent’s attack before it actually developed.

In midfield, I also found that I could polish what I had been trying to equip myself to do since I started kicking a ball with my brothers and their friends, such as developing complete control of the ball and learning to think quickly in order to beat older, more developed opponents. That, I think, is why Mr Pak put me back in midfield – to improve my technique and awareness.

Beginning of the long-distance hurdle race

The role I was given by Mr Pak in the Grampus youth team was that of anchor-man – a one-man shield for the back line. While I was learning and performing in that pivotal role between the team’s attack and defence, I was also named team captain. My character – naturally positive but objective and realistic at the same time – no doubt contributed to me getting the armband.

By the end of the season I led the Grampus Under-18 team to just one win away from being crowned as the national champions in the 2006 Prince Takamado Trophy All Japan Youth Football League, in which professional clubs’ youth sides competed with high-school football teams. That professional club involvement distinguished the tournament from the two other major domestic youth tournaments in Japan, namely the All Japan High School Soccer Tournament and the Inter High School Sports Festival (Football). In the tournament proper, 24 teams who came through regional qualifiers were divided into six groups of four in the first round, and then the top two teams in each group competed in the knockout stage to reach the summit of the Japanese domestic youth football world.

We lost to a team from Takigawa Dai-ni High School in the final, but my performance in the tournament as an anchor-man wearing the captain’s armband didn’t go unnoticed by my coaches. By then I had already occasionally been invited to first-team practice sessions at Grampus. I don’t think my overall physical strength really stood out among my professional seniors, but I believe the coaches thought I was worth taking a closer look at in the first-team environment because of my height and ability to build up from the back. When I joined the academy at the age of 12, I was in awe of players around me such as the ‘Big Four’, the four team-mates who were regularly called up to join the team in the higher age group, but now I felt I had a chance of being promoted from the youth to the first team at Grampus.

It would be a lie if I said that, as a high-school student, I didn’t feel uncomfortable or like an outsider when all the others in my class were thinking about going on to have a higher education while I was trying to set out on the path to becoming a professional footballer. But quitting school was never an option because I didn’t want to be labelled as someone who could do nothing but football. At the same time, I didn’t want to be viewed by people at the academy as a youth player who couldn’t make it because he was going to a state school. I have always set myself targets that seemed difficult to reach.

At a J.League club, only a few players are given a professional contract at the end of the youth development process (at the age of 18). I have heard that only around 1 per cent of youth graduates at a Premier League club make it, but even in the J.League I reckon that only around 2 per cent of youth players go on to become a professional with their club. I, together with three other youth graduates, was given a professional contract by Grampus, and it was unprecedented in the club’s history that four players from the youth academy were promoted to the first team as professionals at the same time.

In order to pass through such a narrow gate, it is important to have a clear vision of how you’re going to reach a higher standard from an early stage in your development. How far you go depends to a large extent on how high you set your goal as well as the actions you take to reach it. I believe this applies not only to players at youth academies in Japan or at J.League clubs, but also to those playing in any league in any country. It could even be the same for players or competitors in other sports, or for those trying to work their way up in a corporation or organisation.

Of course, on your way to reaching your goal there may be times when you feel as though you’ve hit a wall; you feel inadequate or far behind the others. But you can’t give up or lower your aspirations. You shouldn’t swap the high hurdle in front of you for a lower one, imagining that this will make it easier to continue running. If you have the right mental attitude, a sense of inferiority or impending defeat can be turned into a positive energy, a boost to help you clear the hurdle or smash through the wall. That’s how you get used to clearing hurdles one by one, barely noticing that each gets a little higher along the way. Certainly, that was how this youngest brother of three, who left his home town at the tender age of 12, managed to reach the point where, in my long-distance hurdle race towards a football career, I could see the starting line in terms of becoming a professional player.

CHAPTER 2

FIRST PROFESSIONAL VOYAGE

Survival instinct

In January 2007 I signed a professional contract with Nagoya Grampus Eight, and began my new challenge in the first team. It didn’t mean I started to play immediately, though. I was only an 18-year-old former youth player there and I had to wait for about two months before making my first-team début. I wasn’t even on the bench for the first two games of the season (the J.League season usually starts late in February or early March and ends in December in the same year). On the day of our opening game at home, I was instead helping the club off the pitch, dealing with ticket distribution before the match.

Back then, I just did whatever jobs I was given without questioning – even if it meant I would play a ‘position’ off the pitch. But now, I wonder if it was one of those typical old Japanese customs: regarding a young player automatically as an apprentice even if he had a professional contract. I don’t think that would be the case here at Southampton. I believe the club treats such players as professionals once they have a professional contract regardless of their age, even if they are still in their teens.

In general, people over here in Europe focus on doing what they are supposed to be doing, whether they are footballers, office workers or shop staff. They tend to stick with doing what they are paid for under their contracts (although I have to admit that this tendency sometimes makes them look a bit too inflexible to me, as someone who is used to a meticulous level of Japanese customer service).

Having said that, I have no complaints whatsoever about the fact that the first-team opportunities for me were hard to come by at the beginning, because, to put it simply, I was around the bottom of the pecking order. I was a nobody from the youth ranks. Many of the players in the team didn’t even know I’d been originally promoted as a defensive midfielder.

A team on the pitch consists of 11 players, of course. Even in a practice game on the training ground, there can only be a total of 22 players from the squad playing at the same time. And I couldn’t even get into those 22 when I initially joined the first team. When I did eventually have a chance to participate in a practice game at the training ground, the position I played in depended on where numbers were short on that particular day. If it happened to be a centre-back position, I was put in the middle of the back line. If an extra defensive midfielder was needed, I played in the middle of the pitch to fill the vacancy.

There was another wall to break through, a bureaucratic one, in terms of becoming a recognised first-team player. Under the J.League regulations, there are three categories for a professional player under contract: Professional A, B and C. I could only be given a Professional C contract, the lowest category as a player with 450 minutes or less of total playing time in the J1 league (the top division in the J.League). And at our training centre, the dressing room for players with a C contract was separated from the one for players with contracts in higher categories.

I found the atmosphere in the dressing room for the C-contract players rather negative. I’d hear comments like ‘I’m not in the team again!’ or ‘I should be playing rather than him because I’m better’ coming from players who had found out that they were not in the starting 11 or who had failed to make the squad travelling to an away game. Watching those around me during the first month I spent there, and feeling that negative atmosphere in the dressing room, I remember starting to feel, ‘I can’t be stuck in here. I’ve got to say goodbye to this dressing room as soon as possible if I want to make it at the top level.’ It was my survival instinct kicking in, urging me to do whatever I could to leave behind me a depressing environment that could have stagnated my professional career just when it had begun.

I tried my best to get closer to the A-contract players, approaching them off the pitch. Being the youngest of three brothers, I’m naturally used to being among my seniors, and was neither reluctant nor uncomfortable to share the company of those older than me. So yes, my resilience, ‘strength of the youngest’, helped me to make progress there. When we had lunch at the club’s canteen after team training, I tried to mingle at a table where the first-team regulars were. I also had the temerity to occupy the back seat on the team coach when travelling.

In Japan, there is an unwritten rule at a football club, and in the national team set-up too, that the back seat of a team coach is reserved for ‘VIPs’ (Very Important Players). At Grampus in my time there, Toshiya-san (Toshiya Fujita) and Nara-san (Seigo Narazaki), who were both in their thirties, and Kei-kun (Kei Yamaguchi), who was in his sixth year in the first team, were the regular occupants of the back seats. (‘San’ is a Japanese honorific suffix added to either the surname or given name of a person to show respect to someone senior or among equals, while ‘kun’ is an honorific common among male friends.) For someone who had just come up from the youth team to sit in the back seat would definitely be going against the rule. But I realised there was always one more space available in the back seat on our team coach, so I summoned up my courage and sat there one day.

Once I was sitting with the ‘VIPs’, although they frequently made fun of this out-of-the-box new face from the youth team, they never forced me to get out of the back seat. In the end, one of the spaces there became a reserved seat for the ‘VYP’ (Very Young Player); that was me.

My longing to secure a Professional A contract was not the only reason why I was drawn closer to these players. While we (the C-contract players) had to clean our football boots by ourselves, A-contract players had Matsuura-san (Noriyoshi Matsuura), the first professional kit man in Japan, to take care of their boots. For them, a pair of muddy boots they left in their dressing room would always be waiting as a nice and shiny pair of boots on the following day. More important than avoiding having to clean your own boots, a professionally serviced pair of boots makes you feel more comfortable and less tired when wearing them.

To get to a place where I could have the ‘magic hands’ of Matsuura-san take care of my boots became one of my goals as a first-team player at Grampus. And the more I dwelt on that thick wall – both metaphorical and physical – separating us from the dressing room assigned to the A-contract players, the more strongly I felt, ‘I don’t want to be a C-contract player for long.’

A sea of red

The football god seemed to have been listening to my prayers and started answering them little by little, though it was in unfortunate circumstances for the team and some of the regular players that I got my big break. Following Marek Špilár, who picked up an injury on the opening day of the season, other centre-backs who were ahead of me in the pecking order began to join the former Slovakia international on the team’s injury list. So came my first-team début. It was during the ninth league game of the season against Oita Trinita when I was told, ‘Maya, you are on for the second half,’ by the then manager, Sef Vergoossen.

I think I generally have a good memory, but when it comes to matches that I’ve been involved in, sometimes my memories remain exceptionally vivid. Maybe they are stored in a special drawer in my memory bank. I’m going to focus on key matches in my career in each chapter of this book, each one illustrating my ‘samurai resilience’.

My choice for this chapter has to be a J.League game against Urawa Red Diamonds on 19 May 2007. It was the game in which I received my first proper harsh lesson as a professional player at Grampus, a narrow defeat (1–2) due to a late winner scored by the former Brazil international striker, Washington (full name: Washington Stecanela Cerqueira).

It was also my full début in front of our home crowd, though I had already been in the starting 11 in the previous two away games. As soon as I ran out for the pre-match warm-up, I was just amazed and went, ‘Oh my God.’ The packed stadium was a sea of red, as this was the main team colour for both Grampus and Urawa Reds.

Besides, I had never seen with my own eyes from the pitch the Toyota Stadium with almost 35,000 spectators packed inside it. The football stadium, the home ground of Grampus, was opened in July 2001. I had watched many games there since an intra-squad game opened the stadium, but the electric atmosphere on that day of the Urawa Reds game was something out of this world to me at the time.

And I was going to play in the starting line-up in that game. I felt an adrenaline rush just from being on the pitch in that atmosphere. I was still gazing at the packed stadium and trembling with excitement at the prospect of playing against one of the big guns in the J.League, when Toshiya-san ran up to me and said, ‘Isn’t this great, Maya?’ I answered ‘Yes!’, but he’d already moved on. ‘How cool is he?’ I thought admiringly, as he made his way confidently about the pitch.

However, all I felt inside me right after the game was disappointment in defeat and frustration about my inability to prevent the winning goal, scored by the opposing team’s lone striker. Washington, who spearheaded the Urawa Reds’ attack, was a strong centre-forward and had been the J.League’s top scorer in the previous season. At that time there weren’t many players in the league who could stop this clinical 6’ 2” finisher. So when the manager told me, ‘Be prepared. You’ll be starting,’ the day before the game, I’d honestly thought, ‘What? Really? Can I deal with Washington?’

On balance, though, my overall performance against Washington in that game wasn’t too bad. To this day, I don’t mind facing strikers like him, whose main attribute is physical strength.

A small margin but a big difference

There were only five or six minutes remaining in the second half. The moment I saw Washington receive the ball to his feet from the right, he turned the other way to shake off his marker and shot with his right foot. I was about a yard away from him, and tried to block his shot with my outstretched leg, but I could only make the slightest connection with the ball. To make matters worse, that tiny deflection changed the flight and took the ball away from the arm of our goalkeeper flying to make a save behind me.

‘If I could have touched just a little bit more of the ball …’ The fact that it shaved my leg made my frustration stronger; it was such a small margin between blocking a shot and conceding a goal. I told myself afterwards, ‘I have to close that small gap which makes such a big difference. Otherwise, I can’t make it to the top in the professional football world. This is the world where only those who make a difference by using that slight margin to their advantage can survive.’ This thought was etched deeply in my mind on that day and has lived with me ever since.

Even now, I sometimes say, ‘It’s a matter of whether I can get one step or half a step closer,’ after the game. I have been trying my hardest to close that gap, but as you make progress towards a higher standard there’s always still a gap to close: a gap that makes a difference between winning and losing. And that difference can mean life or death in the world of professional football.

As a youth player I was almost invincible in aerial battles. I almost always came out as a winner. But against Washington I just about managed to make his life less comfortable when competing in the air. Not only the resulting defeat, but also the whole 90 minutes, was a really tough lesson for me on that day. The god of football certainly seems to be good at using a carrot-and-stick method to keep me motivated …

Two former ‘teachers’

Sef, the first manager I had as a professional footballer, was a very forgiving boss. It may be a common characteristic among managers and coaches from the Netherlands, his native country, but he was especially tolerant of positive mistakes by young players. Having said that, he must have needed great patience to keep playing me in my first year in the first team. Back then, I made two or three mislaid passes per game. There was one occasion when my mind was so preoccupied with making a forward pass to a team-mate’s feet that I actually passed the ball instead to the opponent’s striker standing right in front of me. But Sef still kept using me.

However, even he would surely have had second thoughts about playing me if the team had kept on conceding due to my mistakes. So I really have to thank Nara-san, our goalkeeper at that time. He kept making saves while this inexperienced centre-back kept making mistakes. Because of his skill in goal, my blunders didn’t prove fatal to the team. Not only did he save us from conceding goals; he also saved me from being dropped to the bench on countless occasions – a true guardian of young Maya Yoshida.

In his managerial style, Sef seemed to me more of a teacher type than a typical football coach. He saw a player’s behaviour both on and off the pitch as an important part of his quality as a professional. If a player did or said something deemed inappropriate by the manager, he wouldn’t be playing afterwards, even if he was good enough to be a national team player. Sef had that sort of disciplinarian side to him, too.

In contrast, Dragan Stojković, aka Piksi, who succeeded Sef at Grampus in 2008, was a very demanding manager even to young players.

He was my idol in his playing days. When I was little, he was merely a player whom I liked, but after I joined the academy at Grampus, the club where he became a legend thanks to his brilliant technique and creative vision, I started to see Piksi as my hero. When he hung up his boots in 2001, I even went to watch his farewell ceremony at the stadium. So I was simply overjoyed to have an opportunity to play in a team managed by him.

He still had outstanding ball skills even several years after his retirement. On the training ground he could deliver an inch-perfect pass to a receiver’s feet; sometimes he was angry with himself when he thought the quality of the pass was not up to his ultra-high standard.

He set the standards for his players quite high, too, and rightly so, never overlooking a single mistake in a game. The former fantasista known for his deft touches had a strict side as a manager. He may have been known for his good looks but his face was nothing but scary when he pointed out the mistakes we had made in a game and demanded an immediate response from us to improve. In one team meeting, while he was shouting at us, ‘Why did you guys concede such a cheap goal?!’ he banged a whiteboard he was using so hard that a magnet stuck to the board’s surface came flying towards me.

As it turned out, having a forgiving and understanding manager, almost like a school teacher, in my first year as a professional, and then a much more demanding and strict manager in my second year, seemed to help me greatly in terms of my first-team survival. My ideal style of football – the skeleton of which took shape while I was coached by Mr Pak as a youth player – was fleshed out under Sef and Piksi, my first two managers as a professional footballer. I have added more substance to that skeleton ever since, and being someone who is good at learning from people around me I still keep on fleshing it out as a Premier League player, too.

From the motherland to the Netherlands

At the end of the year 2009, it was time for me to switch stages to perform as a footballer outside Japan. A new challenge began when I signed a three-and-a-half-year contract with VVV-Venlo in the Eredivisie, the first division in the Dutch football league.

If someone were to ask me whether it was an easy decision to leave Grampus, where I had spent nine years since joining its academy, my answer would be, ‘No, it wasn’t.’ The people at Grampus, including managers, coaches and senior players, had taught me to grow both as a professional footballer and as a young man. It was there in Nagoya where the foundation of today’s Maya Yoshida was formed.

But I believed that I was making the right decision in my professional career, and that it wouldn’t be wrong to leave the club at that point. I even thought that a young Grampus player going abroad to advance his career would be beneficial to the club in the long term, so the Grampus supporters shouldn’t be feeling too sad about me leaving the club.

How did my parents and brothers take my decision? Well, I don’t really remember, to tell you the truth. I rarely ask my family members for advice and I certainly don’t remember asking them, ‘I want to move abroad to play, but what do you think?’ before deciding to move to VVV. That now makes me wonder how they would have reacted had I made wrong decisions when I was younger. Would any member of the laissez-faire Yoshida family have told off their youngest boy? I’m not sure, but then again, I don’t think I’d have made the sort of rash decisions some young people do.

Having said that, it was not like I had many options to consider before making a decision at that time. VVV were the only club I could go to if I wanted to move to Europe. I had just three years of experience in the J.League as a professional with no particular achievements even at the domestic level. There was no way for such a player to attract much interest from clubs abroad. On top of that, only a handful of Japanese were playing in Europe at the time and it was still difficult for a younger generation, my generation of Japanese players, to go abroad, even if we were keen to try.

For me, the move only became realistic six months or so after Honda-san’s (Keisuke Honda) move to VVV. Other Japanese playing in Europe around that time were all from an older generation, such as Shunsuke Nakamura (then at Celtic) and Daisuke Matsui (then at Saint-Étienne). Under those circumstances, a young player like myself, the nobody of nobodies, had no right to complain about having no choice of foreign clubs to move to. I was just fortunate to share the same agent as Honda-san and was able to count on his strong connections with VVV.

It was the summer of 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics. At the Shenyang Olympic Sports Center Stadium in China my agent was watching a men’s Group B game between Japan and the Netherlands in the stadium with Mr Hai Berden, the chairman of VVV.

I’d only just made the Japan national Under-23 squad for Beijing and was not involved in the first two group games. But my chance finally came in our third game against the Netherlands, with Japan’s elimination from the tournament already confirmed after two defeats.

We had nothing other than our pride to play for, but for the Netherlands a place in the knockout stage was still at stake. Therefore we faced a strong Dutch side and I was fortunate to have the chance to play against attacking talents such as Roy Makaay (then at Feyenoord) and Ryan Babel (then at Liverpool) while the chairman of VVV watched on from the stand. And it was right there that a conversation between Mr Berden and my agent took place – one that can be very simply summarised as follows:

Mr Berden: ‘That defender looks quite good.’

My agent: ‘He’s our player.’

Mr Berden: ‘Oh, well, we shall make an approach then.’

Since I already had a vision of furthering my career step by step overseas, I didn’t have any problem at all with making my first step abroad in the Netherlands. In fact, I welcomed the challenge, as it was the country I could imagine myself moving to and playing football in based on past experience at least. Just before I became a high-school student in Japan I’d briefly had a chance to visit the Netherlands with a Grampus youth team, and had watched league games there and played against some local youth sides.

Some people were strongly against my decision to leave Grampus for VVV, saying, ‘Why do you have to move to such a small club in the Netherlands?’ But to me it was never that I felt I ‘had to’ move there, and it wasn’t like I chose VVV instead of some bigger clubs in other countries.

Piksi, my manager at Grampus, was also against the move at that point in my career. ‘It’s too early for you,’ he told me, on more than one occasion. Every time we spoke about my possible transfer, he said, ‘It’s not too late if you move after at least one more year here,’ or, ‘You’d better have enough under your belt before you move abroad,’ as he tried to persuade me to stay.

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