Courtesy:
Futsal Japan group on FacebookA Profile of Japan’s Most Illustrious Futsal Player at the Momentby Steve Harris
“Umarekawaru Chikara (The Ability to Be Reborn)” is an autobiography of Kaoru Morioka that was written with futsal/soccer writer Kenichiro Kita. Here are some of the highlights.
- Kaoru Morioka lived in Peru until coming to Japan at the age of 12.
- His father is a Japanese-Peruvian who had lost his job as a banker in Peru and came to Japan in search of a new career. Kaoru’s mother came to Japan with her sons to join her husband, but the marriage fell apart. The mother returned to Peru with the youngest son. Kaoru, his younger brother and father stayed in Japan.
- Though Kaoru grew up with street soccer in Peru, he had almost no contact with soccer during his first eight years in Japan.
- He dropped out of high school very early and fell in with a group of delinquents, frequently getting into fights.
- It was not until after he served a five-month sentence in jail for theft that he accidentally discovered futsal – at this point he was almost 20 years old.
- He started playing futsal “pick-up games” after getting out of prison. It is common in Japan for amateurs to pay a small amount of money to play with strangers at futsal centers.
- He was “discovered” by a guy name Toshihiro Nakamura who had aspirations about getting into the developing futsal scene at the time.
- The team, Bota Juego, tried to qualify for the national championship but was eliminated. Because this was the only serious competition at the time, the team disbanded after being eliminated from the tournament.
- Kaoru left futsal and went back to hanging out with a bad group of people.
- Kaoru found Nakamura a year later and joined Nakamura’s new team Omoni in an effort to join the new and glamorous Futsal Super League (2001). However, Omoni was eliminated in the competition to qualify for the league and Kaoru again thought that his futsal days were over.
- He discovered a Peruvian enclave in Aikawa, Kanagawa, where he started to live a clean and serious life – and re-learned Spanish. (He had not spoken the language since leaving Peru.) It was here that he started to regularly play in one-day tournaments for Peruvians, Brazilians and other Latin Americans living in Japan.
- Japanese teams attended some of these tournaments. One team, “Black Shorts,” that had been in the Super League wanted to qualify for the other major competition at the time: the Kanto League. The team begged Kaoru to join, even allowing him to only play in games and not have to attend practice.
- Kaoru then transferred to Fire Fox, which was arguably the strongest team in Japan at the time. He was playing for Fire Fox when Yoshihito Sakurai, the man who would become the general manager of Nagoya Oceans, talked Kaoru into playing for Taiyo Pharmaceutical / Banff. This is the team that became Nagoya Oceans, seven-time winner of the F.League.
- Kaoru got Japanese citizenship in 2012. It was his third effort, as he had been denied two times before. Though he had been called up by the Peruvian national team before, he refused because he wanted to play for Japan. He did attend national team training camp once in Peru but found that they were playing a tactically naïve game.
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