When Japan’s ninth-wicket pair of Hugo Tani-Kelly and Chihaya Sekine trudged off the field after their innings against Australia in Windhoek, some of Australia’s youth cricketers wrapped their arms around Tani-Kelly and spoke to him in English with a distinct Australian roll of the tongue. Tani-Kelly, the innings top-scorer with an unbeaten 79 and his country’s first-ever centurion in an U-19 World Cup, spoke back in a similar accent. Little wonder, because he turns up for Northern Suburbs Cricket Club in the outskirts of Brisbane.
Not only Tani-Kelly, who impressed with a typical Australian staple of cuts and pulls, as many as six of the squad turn up for the third and fourth division teams of the Northern Suburbs, including the captain Kazuma Kato-Stafford and three Hara-Hinze brothers. Two others in Japan’s squad too are of Australian descent—Taylor Waugh (no relations to the Waugh twins) and Skyler Cook. Few teams in the World Cup have as many cricketers drawn from a single club, let alone a state. Bolstered by deep diplomatic ties, Australia and Japan share a strong sporting bond too. Japan has started a T20 league, which has a substantial sprinkling of cricketers featuring in the Big Bash League.
Kato-Stafford was raised in Australia. “A fair few of us have grown up here. We’ve been brought up with Australian culture and cricket,” he told The Australian. Around 50,000 people of Japanese descent live in Australia and Brisbane has a heavy concentration of 15,000-odd people. Naturally, some of them were drawn to cricket. Harnessing them is Northern Suburbs. “Northern Suburbs has been very supportive. There aren’t many clubs around the world that would have guys playing third and fourth grade going away on international duty, and be so understanding and accepting of that,” Kato-Stafford added.
The guiding light for them is Norths’ first-grade star and Japan U19 assistant coach Kendel Kadowaki-Fleming. He has been coaching and guiding them with a clear line of progression to Japan’s youth system. Despite the Australian upbringing, Kato-Stafford insists that they are aspiring to forge a clean Japanese identity. On the field, they make a conscious effort to speak in only Japanese. They perform a war cry akin to All Blacks’ Haka, called Honki Janken (pronounced yakyuuken). It means baseball fist, a Japanese game based on rock–paper–scissors. “I think we definitely (value) the ideology of fighting to the end, it began in the Shogun and Samurai era,” Kato-Stafford told ICC.
“Never giving up under any circumstances. I think that’s something that we definitely try and play with. It doesn’t matter what the scenario is, whether we’re going really well, we’re going really poor, making sure we’re always giving our best until the very end of the game. That’s something that we try to incorporate into our game, and something that is a very big part of Japanese identity,” he added.
After hitting every boundary, they shout Dosukoi (borrowed from sumo wrestling which is loosely translated as burst of power). The word sliced through the air whenever Tani-Kelly hit a four. He has become Japan’s talisman after his century, but Kato-Stafford points out that they have a core of young players that could improve Japanese cricket. “Eight of the 15 players would be eligible to play in the next U-19 World Cup too. We are a young but competitive team. The future looks really bright. Not just for the Under 19s, but for the men’s team as well. All of these guys are very skillful and they’re only going to get better,” the captain added. And behind them is a modest club in Queensland.
