Looking for Asian Masculinity Model in Football
Spoiler: It's unnecessary
Melbourne, 12 June 2006. I was at my mate’s place, watching the 2006 FIFA World Cup match between Japan and Australia. We were in Australia but rooted for Japan. We were Japanophile Indonesians. Japan led 1-0 up to the 83rd minute. Then Tim Cahill equalized for Australia. 1-1. Then he scored another goal in the 89th minute. Then John Aloisi, who ensured Australia’s first World Cup qualification in 32 years with his penalty shootout goal against Uruguay back in 2005, made it 3-1. It was Australia’s first win at the World Cup. It was a fantastic moment. Objectively, a classic match.
We were in Australia. Why weren’t we celebrating? Why did I feel distressed? I wasn’t just a Japanophile at that time. I hated Australia at that time. Why? No one bullied me in Australia. I didn’t apply for any work or residency visa, so I didn’t get a rejection. The anger of Western-born youth against their country of birth always reminds me of the Madness, a manic episode I still struggle to comprehend.
The Japanese team of 2006 consisted of 22 Japanese men and a black Brazilian, Alessandro “Alex” Santos, who had lived in Japan since the age of sixteen. The 2006 Australian team consisted of a good representation of Australian men. Schwarzer the German. Neill the Irish. Emerton and Beauchamp the Anglo-Normans. Cahill has a mixed heritage of Anglo-Celtic and Samoan. Culina, Popovic, and Viduka, the Croatians. Lazaridis, the Greek. Grella and Aloisi the Italians. Thompson has a Papuan father. Only Asian Australians aren’t represented here.
And not out of discrimination. Like the Jews, Asian Westerners are not interested in professional sports. Certainly, they can be athletic too, and some represent their countries in badminton, diving, martial arts, and gymnastics, but not in team sports. There are theories to explain why: Parental support. Commitment and resilience in facing the locker room culture. The fear of failure and the pressure of success. Physical and mental limitations in full-contact team sports such as football, basketball, and rugby.
Asian Australians are also generally not interested in following local sports. I was taken aback when one a white Australian man asked for a meetup to be changed from the day of the Australian Football League Grand Final weekend (An important weekend in Victoria, if not Australia), and an Asian Australian woman dismissed him by saying “Fuck footy.”. That’s the only time I’ve heard somebody said, “Fuck footy”, and not in jest as a rugby fan.
Irrationally, I blamed the Socceroos for making the Japanese look bad. 2006 was indeed a horrible campaign for Japan. Every team could have a bad tournament. But I needed Japan to be good that year. I needed Japan to represent the (East) Asian masculinity (South Korea, meanwhile, won one match against Togo and held eventual finalists France to a draw). I needed the spirit of 2002 to live on.
Japan and South Korea co-hosted the 2002 FIFA World Cup, where Japan reached the Round of 16 and South Korea reached the semifinals in controversial manners. 2002 and a couple of years afterward was a time when the United States embraced Japanese aesthetics: Anime, samurai, and kawaii ornaments. It was a time when Indonesia, years after the anti-Chinese riots of 1998, was into ‘Oriental’ stuff, from Japanese variety shows and J-pop music videos on TV, to hiring Chinese Indonesian hosts, newsreaders, and artists, to introduce Singaporean kopitiam coffee shops and reintroduce Chinese Indonesian literature.
When I returned to Indonesia in 2007, five years had passed. Indonesia had passed the Oriental trend. I followed the national teams of Japan and South Korea closely while remaining hating Australia, which moved from the Oceania Football Confederation to the Asian Football Confederation. Japan defeated Australia in the 2007 AFC Asian Cup, a sweet revenge for me. In the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, Australia struggled and failed the group stage, while Japan defeated Cameroon and Denmark before losing to Paraguay in the Round of 16. South Korea also defeated Greece and held Nigeria, and entered the playoffs.
Australia’s move into the Asian confederation prompted Australian pundits to envision a tradition of rivalry between Japan and Australia, with Tim Cahill acting as Japan’s nemesis. He did well in the English Premier League, but the younger Australian players were not as famous in Europe as Japanese players. That rivalry could be well-established after Japan defeated Australia in the 2011 Asian Cup final, with the winning goal scored by Korean Japanese Tadanari Lee, who supposedly received worse racist treatments in South Korea.
That rivalry never came. Australians and Japanese never pushed each other and mentioned each other’s mums. Their supporters never made nasty songs about each other. Japan reserved its nasty feelings for South Korea and is most hated by China. I think Australia is most hated by Arab countries and by China (for being white and poorer, especially after 2010), but no Australian matches with the Arabs or with China resulted in a brawl and social media wars either.
Perhaps Football Australia coached its players too well in cultural sensitivity and anti-racism. Perhaps the fans never talked to each other since they were in different environments, and Australian fans never saw themselves as Asians facing other Asians anyway.
Eventually, I saw the Australians as honorable enemies, which might be above what other Asian football fans felt about Australia (non-Asians in the first place, or random white men). I kept track of the Australian players in Europe and Asia as I did with Japanese and Korean players in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, and with Southeast Asian players in Japanese and Korean leagues.
Australia hosted the 2015 Asian Cup, and the participating teams didn’t match the marketing team’s wish list in representing Asian Australian demographics. No Vietnam, no Thailand, no Malaysia, no Hong Kong, and not even Lebanon, as they failed to qualify. Instead, all the Arab states that have no diaspora communities in the West, like Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE. Still, they got China, Palestine (qualified through the easy route against other weak countries), Iraq, and certainly Japan and South Korea. There was even North Korea.
Australia 2015 had players with Asian heritage. Massimo Luongo, who became the breakthrough player of the tournament, has an Italian father and an Indonesian mother. Jason Davidson has a Japanese grandmother. South Korea and Japan? Their players were certainly Koreans and Japanese.
An Asian Australian man told me over Twitter that every time Australia faced an eastern Asian opposition, he instinctively rooted for the opposition because “They look closer to me than the Socceroos”. Australian media might mention Luongo and Davidson’s mixed heritage as an interesting trivia, but Aussie fans see them as blokes, and to this moment I’m still not sure if Asian Australian men qualify as blokes (theoretically, if they are Australian men, they do, but who knows).
Indonesians are never as proud of Luongo the way we had some interest in the Indonesian Belgian Radja Nainggolan (one reason is not just his more Indonesian name, but because most Asians see Belgium as a proper footballing country, and Australia isn’t one). Both players prompted Indonesia and other Southeast Asian nations to look for European footballers with Asian heritage to switch their nationality, as Asians thought it was “improper” for these players to play for white people’s countries.
By the late 2010s, my attention had moved into women’s football, although of course I still follow men’s football. I’m still happy if Japan and South Korea do well in tournaments, although I’ve come to realize that their fortune and misfortune have nothing to do with Asian masculinity.
To put an example into my point, consider Son Heung-min, arguably the most successful Asian footballer of this century. Although he’s been linked to some K-pop figures, his father forbids him from having a relationship well into his thirties, against the grain, where many European footballers have had children before their 25th birthday.
In the 2020s, streaming football matches and commenting on them on social media have gone hand in hand. Every fan knows every star on the planet – every Australian fan knows every Japanese star and every Japanese…well, not really, since while Australia remains a strong footballing nation, the retirement of Tim Cahill, Australian footballers are not household names in top European clubs.
Perhaps I’ve synchronized myself with my alternate selves who are Australians. As Australians, it’s natural for them to root for Australia, regardless of the players’ ethnicity. In my reality, I’m an Indonesian, and happily, I never dislike or disregard Indonesia, and my Australian alternate selves would have been more invested in Australia than I am.
There is no timeline where I am Japanese, so logically, there is no point in being that invested in Japan. But perhaps fandom and a sense of representation rely on irrationality.