Blue Samurai, the Bundesliga, and How Japanese Soccer Players Found a Home in Germany

One of the strangest things about Japan's recent 6-0 thrashing of Honduras was, lopsided scoreline aside, how few of their goals came from players based in Germany.

The Blue Samurai could field an entire team of fußballers right now, and still have left-overs on the bench. By comparison, only two Japanese players can be found in Italy's Serie A. In the Premier League, there's just the solitary one.

Just where Germany's fascination with the Kings of Asia has come from is hard to put a finger on, but it's clearly a relationship that's working both ways.

Borussia Dortmund picked up Shinji Kagawa for a bargain in 2010, and it was there, during a golden period for the club, that he blossomed into the attacking midfielder he is today. When a move to Manchester United turned out to be less fruitful, he was warmly welcomed back to the Westfalenstadion.

Japanese players have been a rare sight in the Champions League, but it's something Germany, more than any other country, is helping to change. Kagawa and Dortmund have topped their group, finishing ahead of Arsenal, while Atsuto Uchida has been a part of Schalke's progression to the group stages.

Down in the Rhineland, Shinji Okazaki is in career-best form. The 28-year-old also moved to Germany at the start of the decade, but it was only after switching to mid-table Mainz last year that he started piling on the goals. He's led the league's goal scoring table at various times this season, and recently became Japan's all-time leading scorer in the Bundesliga.

"The biggest thing for me is that both coaches and the team understand me," Okazaki says of the golden touch he's discovered at Mainz.

"Japan and Germany are different. Japanese football, generally speaking, is about working together. Players co-operate and pass, pass, pass. In Germany, it's not like that. It's about speed and strength, and if you see the goal you shoot.

"That said, there are many different types of players, so fitting in with them has to be part of your mentality too."

"Following the wheel ruts" is how Stuttgart's Gotoku Sakai describes the Japanese mentality. It's an expression with both positive and negative interpretations.

"The Japanese are really good at working together and being team players. When I look at the German national team, I see the same thing. So in that sense, Japanese players suit the German system, it would seem.

"But Japanese players don't think about whether there are, in fact, a lot of rules or not. They just do what the coach asks of them and what he lets them do. For the Germans, this team philosophy is more of a tactical thing, I think."

For Uchida, it's the conscientious way he and his compatriots go about things that has made them such a good fit for the German game.

"It's not like Japanese people follow rules blindly, but there is a certain discipline, and it's something the Germans also have. For Japanese players, there's almost no sense of being 'left out of the game' when you're playing for a German side. I guess you could say that Germans and Japanese really match up in that sense.

"For a long time, Japanese players have been paying attention to German football. To a certain degree, we have been wanting to be signed by clubs that would take a chance with a Japanese player and, I guess, here I am."