Kiri on the Tyne - A Geordie in Japan

Joe Fowler on life and football in Japan as a Toon exile

はじめまして、ジョーです。日本では大物です。.

Don’t worry, you aren’t having a funny turn, in fact, you’ll find nothing funny in this article whatsoever. I’ll let you translate that opening yourself, but in case you hadn’t guessed, I live in Japan, and that is Japanese. This article doesn’t have much of a point, but will be a meandering sojourn through the life of a Newcastle United supporter expatriated to Japan (this all the point it needs! - ed ). I’ll start by introducing myself, warn of the NUFC related withdrawal effects of moving abroad, talk about the price of watching footy on TV, that pre-season tour, and what the future may hold for the success of The Toon Army in Japan.

I started really getting into football, and Newcastle United, around the age of 11, when I saw a Chronicle board declaring Ardiles had been sacked, soon to be replaced by King Kev. Promotion under Keegan sealed the deal a year later and I was hooked. My love of the club was cast in granite when my eldest brother took me to a match for the first time. It was against Norwich in 1994 (fact checkers, please put me right, I remember being told Ruel Fox used to play for them and Darren Peacock had just signed for us!) and we were standing in the Milburn corner I think.

We’ve had season tickets in the family since then, and for the 18 years before I left that sceptered (septic?) isle I had been going with me Mam (or Mum, I’m from Hexham). Her Grandad won the FA Cup with Wolverhampton Wanderers in 1894/5, and was the youngest player (aged 18) to do so until the 1980s, his contract is buried under Molineux alongside the great Steve Bull’s and he holds the record for the most goals scored in a game there (5). She’s a literal card-carrying NUFC fan, though, and continues to attend matches in my absence with my vastly inferior brothers. She makes do.

I moved to Japan in 2018. The hardest and biggest decision in my life. I’d lived here before, for a year, but this was a more permanent move. Yes, at 6’5” and built like a shit brick house, I am kind of big in Japan. Not only that, but aside from my day job (you guessed it, teaching English!) I’m also a massive TV celebrity. Okay, I might be slightly over egging the pudding, but I have been on a national show three times and counting. Here’s my IMDb, if you don’t believe me.

If you’re curious, Japan is an amazing place to live. The mountains are stunning, the weather is great (hot in the summer, cold in the winter, in between inbetween), the food is not just fish, the people are incredibly friendly on the whole, as is the not-too-spicy curry, and it might be a cliché, but (as a man at least) it is undeniably safe here.

On the other hand, technology is NOT up to date, despite what you might think. Still, if you are thinking about it, I’d say take a leap of faith and get yesell ower here! For more Japan stuff you can listen to my infrequently-recorded-because-I-have-a-one-year-old-daughter podcast with a name only a Geordie will fully appreciate the punnality of, Ishikawa: Summit to Sea. Or tune in to Chris Broad’s podcast, featuring NUFC fan Pete Donaldson, called Abroad in Japan.

The biggest wrench moving away was leaving my old Ma and matchdays with her behind (not my Ma’s behind, pull your head out the gutter). I’m not the typical pre-match boozer type; in fact, I avoid any liquids for an hour before the match to avoid needing the toilet during the first half. I also need full and unfettered concentration for the duration of the fixture. Anyway, our ritual usually involved a nice bit of lunch and a gentle wander up to St James’ while my Dad and my wife ate cakes somewhere. My septuagenarian Mother is my best friend, and a magnificent matchday companion. I miss that. So yeah, it was hard to abandon that familial ritual for pastures new. Football is much more than what happens on the pitch after all.

Of course, there is football here, it just isn’t very good in my new home city. I live in a place called Kanazawa: it’s over to the left of Tokyo, way over on the other coast. You might have heard about the devastating earthquake that happened on New Year’s Day 2024 in the Noto Peninsular. I live right next to where that happened (but thankfully not exactly where it happened).

The team here is called Kanazawa Zweigen, and are 13th in the J3 league at time of writing. They are, and I can’t stress this enough, shite. I’ve been to a handful of matches in my 6 years here, and despite having a small but passionate following, the football is bad. Excruciating. Having grown up watching players like David Ginola, Peter Beardsley, and Fumaca, I can honestly say these guys couldn’t lace even Silvio Maric’s boots. Sorry Zweigen, but it’s not good enough. Plus, they play in red. So, my football consumption is entirely TV-based, and obviously all NUFC.

Thankfully I can watch every Premier League match, completely legally, through a streaming channel called U-Next. Last season it was SPOTV, the season before that it was DAZN. In fact, it seems that every season some other channel wins the rights to show the matches and I have to quit and sign up to a new service. It’s annoying. But, it’s faaaar cheaper than if I were in the UK. I think I pay about 15 quid a month, and for that I get all the matches, plus highlights, and I can watch on demand until a few weeks later.

Weirdly, or perhaps not, the commentary is either in Japanese or English, depending on the size of the teams playing, or whether a Japanese player is in either of the teams. I can’t think of any reason they don’t have an option to select the language, if English is always available, but there you go. Luckily, Newcastle United are not yet deemed significant enough to warrant Japanese commentary, so I get to enjoy disagreeing with the commentators quite often. Home matches I am usually treated to Michael Bridges (I think, they don’t tell us who’s commentating, but I figured it out), and away matches it is usually someone who has played for that club offering completely unbiased opinions. Oh, and La Liga is also included. Meh.

The significant part of that last paragraph was the bit where I said that Newcastle United are not yet deemed significant. It’s hard to gauge the level of support clubs have in Japan because people here are generally quite stylish. What I mean by that is that people don’t wear football shirts unless they are playing football, and when they do, it is usually in some Joma top they were given while taking part in a Brazilian futbol camp or something. I’ve played a bit of 5-a-side (or futsal) here, and bloody hell, they’re good.

So it is only really through talking with people that their love of the sport comes through. I’m sorry to report that Arsenal, Man City, Real Madrid, Barcelona, and *any club with a Japanese player* are still kings. I’ll add a caveat. Back in 2005, during my first stint in Japan (a year), I was attending the ‘fog festival’ in a town called Kushiro, which was also famed for its fog. Fog on the 釧路川 doesn’t have quite the same ring to it though. Anyway, there were thousands of people there, and I was jammed in among the throng. I was tapped on my shoulder by a couple of excited lads behind me and asked the usual question ‘Where are you from?’. I said ‘England’, to which they replied ‘Ahhh! Alan Shearer!!’. It made my night, because at that time the only Englishman anyone seemed to know was David Beckham.

In recent years, I come across the odd student with a passion for footy who is aware of Newcastle United, but despite my best efforts (threats of failure if they don’t comply, offers of kets, 4-hour Peter Beardsley YouTube compilation video sessions) I’m making ne’er a dint on the football-loving crowd of Ishikawa.

There is hope though. A friend of mine I made on a chance meeting in The Strawberry many years ago is an avid fan. She’s Japanese. She studied at Oxford (yep, brainy) and travelled up to Newcastle for almost every home match. She has continued that love, in tandem with a love of JEF United, through all the bleakness of the Ashley era. Her friend, whom I met in Tokyo, is an even bigger fan. She put my knowledge of all things Black & White to shame. She is what we call in Japan, an otaku, which means someone absolutely obsessed with one subject. We just need a few thousand more like her and we’ll be grand.

Of course, the club have made an effort to establish just that, an army of Japanese Toon otakus, with the pre-season tour. To say myself and my fellow Toon ex-pats were excited would be an understatement. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the lads play at not 2am, and in the flesh. I eagerly booked a ticket. The only match I could attend was the game against Yokohama F Marinos, which was of course, the wrong one to go to.

It wasn’t necessarily about the football though, because beer also featured quite heavily. Heading to Tokyo and meeting up with friends who live in Japan, old and new, and very old (hi Struan) is always great, but seeing old friends from Newcastle was even better. Paul English, a bona fide superfan I’m sure many of you know, came and ate nothing but pizza and chips, and amazingly, Katrina Gallon, who has a season ticket directly behind mine at SJP (yep, still have it) also made the journey, among many other new friends made on that trip.

Seeing people I’ve known for years in the context of buri kama and Family Mart onigiri is an odd but entirely welcome experience. While the match itself was largely forgettable, the craic wasn’t, or was, actually, on account of all that beer I mentioned. I saw a lot of Newcastle shirts among the Japanese attendees, which was promising. I even bumped into a couple of girls I taught in Newcastle way back in the early 2010s. The national stadium is magnificent too, mainly because beer is allowed in the seats. After merchandise had been purchased, and the ‘English’ pub revisited post-match I wound my way back to the capsule hotel I was to not sleep a wink in. If you don’t know, a capsule hotel consists of boxes slightly larger than a coffin, but with snot on the walls, at least that describes mine.

So, what does the future hold for NUFC in Japan? I think it’s bright. Obviously, I would love more Japanese players to head toonwards, especially given the massive success of Yoshi *coughs in Japanese*. Failing that, I think that once something becomes ‘cool’ over here, and as an exciting prospect Newcastle United are cool, the Japanese mindset is to become absolutely obsessed. It might not be swathes of the nation in Black & White, but as my Japanese friends have shown, all is needed is a core of devoted fans to make NUFC おしゃれ*. Congratulations for reading to the end, you deserve a medal.

From your Japan correspondent, sayonara, Pet.

Joe Fowler

*fashionable