Japan Women's Soccer Team Wins the World Title

The whole of Japan nearly exploded when Japan Women's national soccer team won the 2011 World Cup final by beating the US team 2-2, PK 3-1. It was in the small hours of 18 July, Japan time, at Frankfurt, Germany. The US team was ranked at the top of the world against Japan's 4th. They were so powerful that, in the past 24 matches between the two, Japan drew three times and lost all the other 21 games. This time also as the score would show it was a close fight. One of the factors mentioned is that the average age of the players was three years younger on the Japanese side. Anyway Japan exploded because this was, with all my respect to the 21 Japanese women players, a miracle, something unprecedented, something too fantastic to believe.
It was too good to believe as, the readers may guess, Japan is currently not in a good shape, and that is so nearly all around. Therefore the New China News Agency is quite right when it reportedly commented on the victory that it will give a nation suffering from earthquake, tsunami and radioactive fallout an unparallelled confidence. The News Agency deserves to be congratulated for such a generous comment.
The national team must have come a hard way in finally capturing the world cup trophy. Not only in women's soccer, but in other women's sports, and also in almost all the major areas of public activities, the Japanese women are handicapped, still now. So much so that in the past year or two we have been startled by the resounding come-back of a forty-year old woman tennis player K. Date Kimiko in most of the major tennis tournaments of the world.
May not be only in Japan. If we see the eight national teams which fought their way into the tournament for the women's soccer championship this time, we notice that with the exception of Japan and Brazil all the others are from the countries with predominantly white population, with many of the usual names of soccer countries lacking. Judging from the newspaper photographs, moreover, few, if any, of the US players are African Americans. It will speak a lot for the existing disabilities along the racial and ethnic lines.
A reader sent a joke to the editor. In Japanese "shushou" means a captain. The captain of the soccer team, Ms Sawa Homare, a great player and a leader, has been selected the MVP this time. But "shushou" also means a Prime Minister. The joke said, under a different shushou the circumstances would change so much.
That apart, let us share the words with which the players went around the stadium after everything was over. "To Our Friends Around the World--Thank You for Your Support."