The 2002 World Cup ended with a peculiar sort of disappointment for Japan, and not just because they lost 1-0 to Turkey in the last 16. The disappointment was comparative. South Korea, their co-hosts, had reached the semi-finals. Japan had topped their group, played decent football, and gone home. The contrast stung like a wasp at a picnic.
Twenty-two years on, the sting has not faded. It has calcified into something more useful: ambition.
Jonathan Wilson writes that Hajime Moriyasu's side have quietly built something that challenges the traditional order. Not by luck, not by favourable draws, but by doing the hard, unglamorous work of developing strength in depth. Japan missing key players used to be a crisis. Now it is just Tuesday.
Depth beyond the starting XI
In 2002, Japan's squad had a clear top 14. After that, the drop-off was steep enough to sprain an ankle. In 2024, Moriyasu can rotate six or seven players without the team suddenly resembling a pub side on a Sunday morning. Midfielders who would start for most Asian nations sit on Japan's bench. Centre-backs with European experience are left at home.
This is not an accident. It is the result of a decade of deliberate structural investment. The J.League has become a conveyor belt of technically sound, tactically flexible players. They are quick, they press intelligently, and they rarely look overwhelmed by the occasion.
But here is the uncomfortable truth that Wilson's analysis nudges towards: being the best in Asia is table stakes now. The question is whether Japan can translate that domestic dominance into something more substantial on the global stage.
The glass ceiling of the round of 16
Japan have reached the World Cup knockout stages four times: 2002, 2010, 2018, 2022. They have never gone further. Each time, they have exited with a sense that they were competitive but not quite enough. Against Croatia in 2022, they led 1-0 before losing on penalties. Against Belgium in 2018, they led 2-0 before losing 3-2 in one of the great World Cup collapses.
The pattern is not lack of talent. It is a specific kind of fragility — a tendency to stop believing in the final quarter of games against elite opposition. Moriyasu has talked about changing the mentality, about teaching players that leading against Belgium is not a miracle but a baseline expectation.
Wilson notes that Japan's current squad has more European-based players than ever before. That matters. Playing in the Bundesliga or the Premier League changes how you see a game. It removes the awe. A Japanese player who has faced Erling Haaland on a wet Tuesday in Manchester is unlikely to be intimidated by a group-stage match against Germany.
The irony of South Korea's shadow
There is a delicious irony here. South Korea's 2002 run was glorious but also anomalous — aided by questionable refereeing and the unique energy of a home crowd. Japan's progress has been slower, less spectacular, but more sustainable. They have not had a single golden generation. They have had five or six solid ones, each slightly better than the last.
If Japan do finally break the round-of-16 curse, it will not be because of one magical tournament. It will be because they stopped hoping for miracles and started building a system that produces good players the way a bakery produces bread. Reliably. Daily. Unspectacularly.
That is less romantic than a fairy tale run. It is also more likely to last.
"Being the best in Asia is no longer enough," Wilson writes, paraphrased, and he is right. Japan have outgrown that title. The question is whether they are ready for the next one.
The answer will come not in a friendly or a qualifier, but in the 75th minute of a tight knockout game against a European giant. That is the moment that defines nations. That is the moment Japan have spent two decades preparing for.
And if they bottle it again? At least they will do it with more depth than ever before, and a perfectly valid excuse about missing key players. Progress, after all, is not always linear. Sometimes it just looks like a slightly different flavour of disappointment.