Kosuke Kimura, The Only Japanese Player in MLS

Note: This is the ninth and final part of my American Soccer Road Trip, which will involve me traveling across the country, finding stories that exemplify the diversity that exists in American soccer. Check back soon for further updates.

If I had to choose one word to describe Kosuke Kimura, it would have to be determined. The Colorado Rapids midfielder would not be where he is today were it not for his determination. From a young age, he knew he wanted to be a professional player, but at times it seemed such a goal would be impossible to attain. He has achieved his goal, although far from Japan, the country where he grew up. But determined as Kimura is, he is unwilling to rest on his laurels, and now has new goals for himself as a player.

Kosuke Kimura (photo: Colorado Rapids/MLS)

I knew of Kosuke Kimura because he is the only Japanese player in MLS. The league has said that it wants to attract Japanese players, but has yet to do so (my own hypothesis is that Japanese players aren’t that interested because the level of play is not much higher than the J-League and the pay is often lower). MLS didn’t attract Kimura to the league; he found it through his own roundabout career path. He sat down recently in Denver to talk about how he got to the US and differences he sees between American and Japanese soccer.

Kimura realized when he was in elementary school that he had quite a talent for soccer. But he did not have connections to professional teams that lead many similarly talented youngsters to spots on J-League youth teams. In middle school, he heard about an open tryout at his local team, Kawasaki Frontale. Of the nearly five hundred players there, the team announced they would select only three for their youth program. At the end of the tryout, Kimura heard his name called. It was an incredible boost to his confidence. He said of that day, “I felt like I had something. I felt like I could make it.”

Kimura began training with the youth team at Frontale and did so well that at age 15, he began practicing with the first team. Everything was going smoothly until, in his last year of high school, he broke his fifth metatarsal. Kimura recovered, but couldn’t return to his previous level of play and Frontale released him. It was a huge setback, and one that might have dissuaded Kimura from pursuing his goal of playing professionally. But it didn’t.

The other option for Kimura at that point was to play college soccer in Japan. But, he told me, “The problem is, in Japan, usually people go pro after high school. Only a few people go pro after college.” Kimura had a friend who told him that in the US, college players often did turn pro. His friend had recently received a scholarship to play in the US and urged Kimura to do the same.

The idea of playing college soccer in the US was appealing, but posed a major problem: Kimura spoke almost no English. He used the little English he had to research schools and write to college coaches. He got some responses, but none offered scholarships. Several offered to have him come to open tryouts, including the coach at Western Illinois University. He spoke to the coach there, who told him he could come but only if he attended an ESL (English as a Second Language) class that began in two weeks. Fourteen days later, Kimura boarded a plane for the US.

After his ESL class, Kimura was immediately thrown into regular college classes, which he found difficult. The first semester, he said, “I had no idea what the teachers were talking about.” Dealing with difficult academic material in a new language, he had to work twice as hard as his classmates.

On the soccer field, however, things went much more smoothly. He went to the college team’s tryout with a Kuwaiti he had met in his ESL class and both thoroughly impressed the coach. After the first practice, the coach came up to the players and said, “You guys have to come. You guys have to help us.”

And help they did. The team won their conference championship three out of the next four years and made the prestigious end-of-year NCAA tournament. Not coincidentally, Kimura was named to the All-Conference after three of his four seasons with the team. Upon his graduation, Kimura’s coach said of Kimura, “he has been an inspiration to his teammates over the last four years.”

Kosuke Kimura playing at Western Illinois University (photo: AJ Self/Western Courier)

Despite his stellar college career, it was a bit of a surprise when the midfielder found out he had been drafted by the Colorado Rapids. His college team had never gone very far in the NCAA Tournament, and he assumed this would put a damper on his hopes of going pro. But the Rapids saw enough of Kimura to offer him a spot on their team.

Since coming here four years ago, Kimura has come to appreciate many aspects of playing soccer in the US. Here, he said, he gets along well with all of his teammates, whom he finds very open. “It’s much easier to interact with teammates here.”

He contrasted that openness with what he saw in Japan. There, Kimura found that Japanese society’s emphasis on hierarchy (see this discussion of sempai / kohai) hampered relationships between teammates. “In Japan, it’s hard to break down the relationships … When I was in junior high school or high school, I didn’t talk to older people. If they wanted to talk to me, I talked to them, but I never tried to talk to them.”

Kimura has also noticed differences in the style of play that characterizes Japanese and American soccer. The J-League is “much faster” with more “skill and technique” while MLS “is more mixed … It combines the skill and physical [strength].” Kimura posited that MLS’s style of play is due to its drawing players from all around the world.

He also suggested that the difference can be partly accounted for in the different ways youth players are coached in the two countries. “When I was a kid in Japan, they focused on little details. When I was little, my coach only focused on skills.” In coaching he’s done in the US, Kimura says he’s often been shocked at the poor level of skills he has observed.

(Were I to explain this difference, I would point to Japanese society’s emphasis on perfecting the proper process of doing things. Often seen in martial arts training, Japanese society traditionally encourages a mastering of process, or kata, through repetition. In my work in a Japanese middle school, I observed this emphasis on mastery of process through repetition and noticed how different it was from the typical American ideal of learning through exploration and expression of creativity. The constant repetition of Japanese education that encourages children to repeatedly work to improve their skill would undoubtedly make more skillful players, though one might wonder if they would lack creativity. That said, Celtic’s Shunsuke Nakamura ain’t bad.)

Critiques of American youth coaching aside, Kimura is happy to be playing in the US. He’s far from home, but “right now, I want to stay outside of Japan and try to move on with different soccer. I want to get more experience and work hard towards the future.”

Kosuke Kimura playing for the Rapids reserve team (photo: Mark Leffingwell/Daily Camera)

Kimura has achieved his goal of becoming a professional player, albeit far from Japan, but Kimura is now aiming higher. “Whatever I do, I try to follow plans,” Kimura told me. “For now, my short term goal is to make it to the first team and play. It’s going to be hard because we have so many older, good players and this is only my first year. After that, something will open up for me. I have to play for the first team first and maybe some people will see me and I’ll have another chance … Eventually, the ultimate goal is to play for the Japanese national team.”

Right now, Kosuke Kimura is a long way from that ultimate goal. But given the determination he’s shown throughout his career, he might just reach it.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 6:57 am and is filed under American Soccer Road Trip, Asia, North America, Player Focus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.