A student of mine at Toyo University is a member of the American football team and gave me some tickets to this last Sunday's Ivy-Samurai Bowl at Komazawa Olympic Stadium. The picture above is of an observation tower in front of the stadium where the gaem was played. It was my first time to this park space, which is pretty cool looking and is ahead of it's time design-wise. I'm assuming we're talking about the 1964 Olympics here. The game was billed as a match between Columbia University and Brown University, but there were only a handful of players from either team, the rest were made up of Japanese club members from various college teams. It was interesting to watch, in spite of the fact that it was super humid that day and that I was also suffering through a hangover.
Go Lions!
Funny that they should have an exhibition game in Japan - not exactly football powerhouses.
Posted by: phatrick | June 21, 2005 at 06:49 AM
Well I think that's the point when you are playing teams that would have touble with American high school teams due to lack of size, speed, strength, etc...I imagine Norte Dame's JV squad would end up paralyzing a few bodies. And as I said there were only 3-5 members, of former students on each squad-so sort of false advertising.
Posted by: MC | June 21, 2005 at 02:57 PM
I wouldn't under-estimate the Japanese in contact sports. What they lack in size they at least partially make up for in fearless tackling and whippet like speed. Japan plays Rugby Union, and although they are amongst the lesser known teams (there's only about 10 or 11 top level teams in the world) they nevertheless currently ranked 16th out of 90+ teams.
Posted by: Edward | June 21, 2005 at 04:00 PM