Ask a Japanese person about "any news" the Monday after a national football win and brace yourself, because the pride comes out of them like a Las Vegas fountain. I teach one-to-one lessons at a conversation school, mostly adults, and I have lived through this exact ritual more times than I can fucking count. "Japan won. Japan is very sutorongu." That's it. That's the lesson. Forty minutes of beaming, undiluted national glory for a goal scored by a bloke who plays his club football in Belgium.

Now. Here is the bit that makes me want to throw the textbook out the window. The football only exists when Japan wins. That's the whole con. Win, and it's the only news on Earth, the only event that has ever happened, the sun rose specifically to illuminate the scoreboard. Lose? Lose and the entire fucking tournament vanishes into a memory hole so clean you'd think it had been professionally laundered. The team ceases to exist. The sport ceases to exist. You ask, gently, "did you watch the football?" and you get the face. You know the face. The slow, pained inhale. "Ohhh. No no."

Of course you didn't, mate. Of course you bloody didn't.

The art of selective national pride

What you are watching, when you watch a room full of Japanese football fans pretend a 2-0 group-stage defeat never happened, is a masterclass in glory supporting. And before the comments section warms up its single working brain cell: yes, every nation does this, English fans included, we are a shower of berks too. But there is something uniquely committed about the Japanese version. It is not sulking. Sulking implies the loss registered. This is full historical revision, performed politely, with a smile, by a salaryman who forty-eight hours ago was going to die for Mitoma.

It's the same muscle as tatemae, really. The public face, surgically separated from whatever's actually going on underneath. The win is tatemae. The loss is honne, locked in a drawer, never to be discussed in front of the foreigner who might, God forbid, make a joke about it. Because the joke is the real crime here, isn't it. Not the loss. The loss is fine. The loss simply didn't happen. The unforgivable thing is some sarcastic English tosser bringing it up over a vocabulary worksheet.

And the language. "Japan is very sutorongu." Strong against who? You lost to Iraq, mate. You went out in the round of sixteen on penalties and I had to sit through a week of you telling me the cherry blossoms were nice instead. The football team had been declared legally dead. Schrödinger's Samurai Blue: simultaneously the pride of a nation and a thing that has never once existed, depending entirely on the final fucking scoreline.

When the team comes back from the dead

The best part, the genuinely magnificent part, is the resurrection. Because they always come back. Win a friendly against some knackered Central American side eighteen months later and the corpse sits bolt upright. "Japan won! Did you see?!" Did I see. I have been waiting. I have been waiting in the spiritual departure lounge with the rest of the international tossers who got dumped out of their own tournaments and had the basic decency to stay miserable about it in public.

There is no in-between. There is no "we played alright but the keeper had a shocker." There is no analysis, no recrimination, no bloke down the pub saying the manager's lost the dressing room. There is only WIN, screamed into your face, and the absolute void. A binary. On or off. A football fandom designed by the same committee that designed the hanko system: zero nuance, maximum ceremony, and an institutional refusal to acknowledge anything that might be a bit embarrassing.

For fuck's sake. Just be sad about the football like a normal person. I'll teach you the past tense for it. "Japan lost." Go on. Say it. I'll wait.

No? Ohhh. No no. Of course not.