Mito Hollyhock and Friends: Bizarre J-League Team Names
When the J-League was formed in 1992, Japanese football officials had the challenge of trying to create an image for the new league. Soccer had relatively little history in the country and so the officials began, essentially, with a blank slate. The J-League could become anything marketers wanted it to be.One thing Japanese marketers wanted to do was differentiate it from the most popular sport in the country, baseball. One way they would do this was by creating a distinct “soccer” attitude, which would stand in contrast to Japanese baseball players, who are, as Steven Brull wrote in the International Herald Tribune in 1994, “treated like salaried employees, expected to toe the corporate line in all aspects of their behavior.” J-League players, on the other hand were to “act like those in other countries, expressing their idiosyncrasies by celebrating goals gleefully, wearing their hair long, or even growing beards.”
Yokohama F. Marinos player Daisuke Sakata (shockingly) sports long hair and a goatee
Long hair would not be the only shout-out to soccer’s European origins. The names of many J-League clubs incorporated words from foreign languages, ranging from English to Spanish to Italian and beyond. But the names were not to be simple linguistic heists.
As Japanese people have done with so many foreign influences, J-League officials took these foreign words and combined them with local references. The end result is a set of clubs with some of the most bizarre names in the world, almost all of which have an interesting story behind them. Here are some of the best.
Some team names incorporate foreign words simply because they “sound cool.” Take, for example, Jubilo Iwata. The team, based in the city of Iwata, simply added an interesting-sounding foreign word to get their name. As the team’s official website puts it:
“Jubilo” means “delight” in Portuguese and Spanish. We named our club Jubilo with a great wish to provide joy and emotion for our supporters and all other people.
English makes an appearance in the name of Shimizu S-Pulse. The name is basically a nonsense mishmash: “S-Pulse is a combination of the S from Shizuoka, Shimizu, and Soccer, and Pulse from English to mean the spirit of all those who support the team.”
Some J-League team names use foreign words in combination with local references in interesting ways. The Antlers in Kashima Antlers, for example, refers to the city name, “which literally means ‘deer island’.”
Similarly, Nagoya Grampus Eight (the team Arsene Wenger coached before heading to Arsenal) has a name with local references in a foreign tongue. The team’s name is derived from the two most prominent symbols of Nagoya: “the two golden grampus dolphins on the top of Nagoya Castle, and the Maru-Hachi (Circle eight), the city’s official symbol.”
A grampus dolphin
Sanfrecce Hiroshima mixes two languages in one word. “Sanfrecce” is an invented word that combines the Japanese word for three (“san”) along with “frecce,” which is Italian for arrows. Frecce refers to the legend of Mori Motonari, who who “told his three sons that while an arrow might be easily snapped, three arrows would not be broken and urged them to work for the good of the clan and its retainers.”
Consadole Sapporo might have the most difficult to decipher. So, let Wikipedia do the explaining:
The club name of “Consadole” is made from ‘consado’ as reverse of Japanese word Dosanko (DO-SA-N-KO, ??? = people of Hokkaido) and ‘Ole’. The name is to symbolize the strong feelings in their hearts that all citizens of Hokkaido have for the club.
Tourists who visit Kyoto often experience temple-fatigue. Japan’s former capital is well known throughout the world for the more than one thousand temples that dot its landscape. It is wonder, then, that the local J-League team’s name makes reference to the importance of religion. The “sanga” in Kyoto Sanga “is a Sanskrit term meaning ‘group’ or ‘club’, often used to denote Buddhist congregations.” Until recently, Ji Sung Park’s former team was known as Kyoto Purple Sanga, the color “reflecting Kyoto’s status as Japan’s ancient imperial city.”
Mito Hollyhock? Yes, it really is the name of a J-League club. The Hollyhock in the Mito-based team’s name refers to the hollyhock flower that features on the “family crest of the Tokugawa clan who governed from Mito in the Edo period.”
And finally, what is the “thespa” in the name of Thespa Kusatsu, you ask? Italian? Spanish? Portuguese? Um, no. That would be “the spa,” as in the spas of the Kustasu region. Perhaps the oddest usage of foreign words in a J-League team name. But the spa sure does look lovely, doesn’t it?
Brought to you by Ericae.net
Everyone knows that soccer and other sports are an important part of a physical education curriculum. But did you know that you can learn more about physical education online? These days online education covers everyting, you can even take online college courses in sports medicine!
May 21st, 2007 13:38
Damn it. Now I want to visit that spa.
May 21st, 2007 13:59
HeiaVincent – Having been to Japanese spas, I have to say they are wonderful.
June 12th, 2007 04:43
An interesting piece on a very interesting blog.
One thing worth bearing in mind is something that you touch upon right at the beginning of the article – the importance as far as the J-League is concerned of there being some kind of cultural space between football and baseball. You comment upon the supposed contrasts in the players’ behaviour and appearance, but when the J-League started, right at the top of the list of requirements for clubs wanting to join the new league was that they abandon their old company name – and instead choose a handle that would serve, in some way or another, to ground them within the context of their local community.
Some clubs clearly took this idea to heart and were keen to take on a name that reflected one or more significant aspects of their home towns. This goes some way towards explaining the background for such apparently strange choices as Nagoya Grampus 8, Sanfrecce Hiroshima and Consadole Sapporo (if they had kept their corporate names, they would have been called simply Toyota, Mazda and Toshiba).
Interestingly, however, this trait has spread further down the Japanese football pyramid as well. The J-League as a general policy is keen to expand the number of members (i.e. professional clubs) across the country as far as possible and, this being the case, over the last few years a growing number of semi-pro and amateur teams have emerged who are explicitly targeting a J-League place in the not-too-distant future.
With this in mind, part of the attempts of such clubs to establish and develop the required fanbase at grassroots has frequently included the adoption of a colourful name which – as per Mito Hollyhock or Kyoto Sanga – acknowledges some part of their area’s cultural history. To find examples, you have only to look at a list of teams that won the nine Regional Leagues in 2006.
V Varen Nagasaki took the title in Kyushu, their name taking its cue from the status of Nagasaki as the sole city in Japan that had contact with two main groups of Westerners during the 250 years of the country’s self-imposed isolation: the V stands for the Portuguese word for “victory” – “vitoria” – while “varen” is Dutch for “to go”. At the other end of the country, Norbritz Hokkaido used to be known as plain old Hokkaido Electric Power before adopting their altogether more dynamic moniker – a corruption of the German words for “northern lightning”.
Elsewhere, on Shikoku island it has to be acknowledged that Kamatamare Sanuki’s name caused some considerable amusement among non-league fans when it was first announced prior to the 2006 season (they were previously known rather unimaginatively as Takamatsu FC). It contains references not only to the famously beautiful coastline of the club’s home prefecture, Kagawa, but also to that part of the country’s best-known culinary delicacy: sanuki udon noodles. One additional curiosity to have emerged from this is that fact that the club’s badge is perhaps the only one in the world to incorporate a likeness of a cooked foodstuff.
To finish, though, with a team that have their roots in a representative club for teachers living in working in Yamaguchi prefecture at the far southern tip of Honshu. The Prefectural FA gave its full support to the idea of basing upon the old Yamaguchi Teachers side a club that would effectively act as their local J-League franchise – should they ever be able to rise that far up the footballing pyramid.
Not surprisingly, the FA immediately started casting around for possible names for the venture and an invitation for suggestions resulted in more than 600 proposals coming in from all over the country. In all honesty, the winning idea fails to tick the box marked Local Cultural Icon, but it does without question have the advantage of uniqueness. Renofa Yamaguchi is one of those names that at first seems particularly difficult to get to grips with – until, that is, you learn that “Renofa” is an amalgamation of the English words “renovation”, “fine” and “fight”. Now that’s something that local fans can surely get right behind.
June 12th, 2007 17:43
Furtho – Thanks for this incredibly informative comment. I learned a lot about Japanese soccer below the J-League, a topic about which I knew relatively little.