Fortunately, I have always been quite good at dealing with life. Even after a defeat or poor individual performance, I rarely feel down once I’m home. I know when I must be switched on and when I can switch myself off as a footballer. There is always something else to take my mind away from football if needed. I’m innately curious; I’ve always been that way.
For instance, when I moved from Nagasaki to Nagoya and realised that there was a tough road ahead at the academy for me, it wasn’t as though I couldn’t think about or do anything other than football. My junior high-school days were not only about football. It was the time when a manga titled BECK was popular in Japan, and I wanted to have the same electric guitar – a telecaster – that the main character played in the story.
Of course I begged and begged my oldest brother, who at the time was also my guardian, to buy me one. One day, after two hours of my begging and his refusal, and getting fed up with each other (it was, I have to admit now, a case of little brother behaving badly), he finally gave in and bought me the guitar I wanted. Needless to say, I was grinning from ear to ear, hugging my precious instrument and snuggling up to my brother sitting next to me on our train journey home. On Mondays, I sometimes enjoyed playing the guitar with my friends after school as there was no team training at the academy.
At the moment, Maya Yoshida the guitarist is in semi-retirement, or has been forced to be so, to be more precise. My guitar has been locked away somewhere in our house so that there is no chance of my baby daughter knocking it down by accident and harming herself. Might I need some resilience to fight off an occasional urge to take out the guitar and play? Probably not. Maya Yoshida the husband and father gladly takes a back seat to his beloved wife and daughter.
High school is hell
As Maya Yoshida the footballer, I basically don’t want to be behind anyone. I don’t want to feel inferior to anybody. And that is why I chose to go to a prefectural high school (age 16 to 18), instead of going to an independent one that was in partnership with the club, even though I was already determined to be a professional footballer by then.
My attitude towards becoming a professional had changed gradually over the course of three years in junior high school. First, I only thought, ‘I should at least give it a real go.’ Then I started to feel, ‘I really want to be a professional.’ And in the end, I simply thought, ‘I’ll be a professional footballer,’ without any doubts.
But pursuing a career as a footballer also made me aware of another anxiety I had inside me. I always thought that people might see me as a boy who wouldn’t be able do anything properly apart from playing football because I’d left home early and wasn’t under the guidance of my parents from a young age. I felt I had to do something to change that perception, for I would hate to be seen that way.
Tuition is much cheaper at a prefectural school. My mum used to tell me in a light-hearted fashion, ‘You go to a state school because an independent school is too expensive for us.’ But my going there was mainly because of my determination to stop people viewing me in a negative way. I didn’t want them saying, ‘Maya lacks common sense because all he has done is to play football,’ or ‘Maya can’t do anything else,’ so I decided to go to a prefectural high school, even if it meant I had to study for the entrance exam (the equivalent of GSCE in the UK). I just couldn’t accept the idea that I might be labelled as someone who would be useless and worthless apart from his ability at football.
I passed the exam and enrolled at Toyota Senior High School. I’d succeeded in what I set out to do but felt miserable right away. As soon as my high-school life began, I felt as though I couldn’t continue. The first thing my form teacher said was, ‘There’s never been a professional footballer or baseball player from this school.’ I understood that this was intended to encourage me, and other students, to study hard so that we might go on to university or college, but it still felt like I had been dealt a major setback from the get-go. I remember thinking as the teacher spoke, ‘You’ll be eating your words some day.’
My team-mates at the Grampus academy were all going to the club-affiliated private high school, which was much closer to the club’s residence hall. I, too, had moved in there after finishing junior high school, but I was going to a different high school. So I had to get up earlier than anyone in the team to start a 30-minute bike ride there every day, sometimes against the elements.
My time at the school was even harder. Although I knew it would be the case, being a youth player at Grampus meant nothing to the teachers and I wasn’t treated any differently to the other students, including in the amount of homework I was given. I got tons.
Moreover, they had very strict regulations. Given that the school’s academic standard was roughly the same as the region’s other state schools, the idea perhaps was to keep the students disciplined to prevent them from falling into pitfalls that might have enticed and trapped them under a more relaxed regime. But it was a very strict environment. I really felt I had arrived in hell once I enrolled there.
In my first year I hardly spoke to any of my classmates. I spent most of the time between classes napping at my desk rather than chatting, and my lunchtimes were spent with a close friend from my junior high school days. I wasn’t always a good communicator, as people (might) think today after watching me on the football pitch. Anyway, taking into account the type of school it was and my difficulties fitting in there, I thought, ‘I’ve f***** up my school choice.’
By the way, at Southampton, where I have happily settled in, academy players study after their morning training session. They take online courses, instead of going to a local school. In Japan, everything is done by the club to help the young player finish their compulsory education curriculum. This may mean that an academy player in Japan ends up more academically advanced than one here. However, I personally think the English way offers a good and practical educational system for a kid who gives priority to his football education, especially for someone who is determined to pursue a professional career from a very young age.
I also think that, over here, it is much more common to steer your own course from a young age than in Japan. That is one of the key differences I have noticed since moving to Europe. In the United Kingdom, for instance, teenagers seem to be given the chance to decide which subjects to study further, based on their particular interests or their intended future career. They start making decisions about their own lives from a young age and do so constantly as they grow up.
How about in Japan? Most young people there, it seems to me, don’t make many decisions concerning the path they intend to follow until they are around 20 years of age. Once you finish your compulsory education you go to a high school, and then take an entrance exam to get into a university or college. As long as you study adequately, you can go up to a certain point, as if you are on an escalator, where you see multiple routes open up in front of you. But at the same time you may also see that you aren’t especially prepared to take any of the routes available to you. It could be said that you have a well-rounded education, but you have achieved almost nothing outstanding.
English and me
Despite feeling as though I was in hell at my high school, one subject I was enthusiastic about was English. I studied very hard because I wanted to. I was never an academic high-flier, but I’m proud of the eagerness I showed to learn English.
Why English? Well, again, it has something to do with my complex – an inferiority complex towards anything foreign. When I was a teenager, I always felt that cultural imports from abroad – whether English pop and rock music, or the latest fashions from Europe or the United States – were better and much cooler than the things I saw or heard in Japan.
At that time, I was living in a place that was essentially a commuter town for people working in the city of Toyota. Naturally, I was surrounded by so-called ‘third-culture kids’ – children who’d come back from abroad where their fathers worked as expatriates at overseas branches or affiliated companies of the Toyota Motor Corporation, in the case of the town I was living in. At my school, it was nothing unusual to find a student or two in the