Unbeatable Mind

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.