Soccer, the world's most popular sport, is generally considered to have a low cost of entry. We often see in advertisements or match image movies that poor children can afford soccer as long as they define scoring goals in the yellow earth. What's more, it's not uncommon to see stories of impoverished South American wizards rising to the top of the world. It doesn't seem to matter that they don't need to be top players because soccer is cheap and they can have fun.
Japan has a highly developed economy. It is the world's fourth largest economy based on nominal GDP. In the eyes of Taiwanese, Japan's prosperity and development is almost a given. As an emerging soccer nation, the aggressiveness and brilliance of Japanese soccer seems to have nothing to do with poverty. However, TBS NEWS DIG, a news program on Japan's TBS TV, has drawn the attention of the community with its theme of children who have to give up soccer due to poverty.
According to Japan's Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare in 2020, about one in seven Japanese live in poverty, and the relative poverty rate for children 17 and under is 13.5%, or about 2.8 million people. So what is the poverty situation of soccer children in Japan? So far, there are no accurate statistics, and 1% Football, a soccer poverty alleviation program, used the JFA's number of logged-in athletes to calculate that nearly 90,000 underprivileged students still play soccer as athletes. In a subsequent study, it was concluded that 31% of families borrowed money to allow their children to play soccer, while 6% of elementary school families could not allow their children to play soccer for financial reasons, even if they wanted to.
Love Football Japan, another organization that provides support for underprivileged soccer students, has supported more than 100 cases in which people have given up soccer due to poverty because they have received an application for admission to one of the country's strong and luxurious high schools. The cases are supported by single mothers. In junior high school, they joined a local soccer club. The initial fee was about 300,000 yen and the next month's fee was about 50,000 yen. The club always went on adventures during long vacations, and a three-day, two-night trip cost 60,000 yen, four times a year. In the blink of an eye, my mother applied for 300,000 yen in credit for this. Therefore, when he received an offer from a powerful school, his mother could not bear the financial burden of entering a school that was heavier than the club and had to give it up. During that time, there was a conflict between mother and son. In the end, he not only gave up on enrollment, but enrolled in a high school that did not have a soccer team.
Why attending a strong high school puts more financial pressure on parents?In 2020, some parents on the Internet in Japan said that if their children study in public schools and want to participate in community activities, they must first pay 60,000 yen for clothing. In other words, even for public schools with low tuition fees, parents are responsible for various tuition fees, such as textbooks, off-campus instruction, and athletic uniforms.
In some schools, extracurricular activities that are available to anyone seem to have become 'paid options' for extracurricular activities that are only available to children who can afford them. Parents can also find it difficult to say no due to group pressure, and being unable to do anything about it can be seen as 'I don't want to spend money on my child'. Whereas 'being able to spend money on your child' is often perceived as such 'good parenting', in contrast, people are seen as out-of-touch parents who don't value their children, and other parents and teachers find it hard to hear the voices of economically challenged families. In this way, children in families often fail to participate in extracurricular activities. Even when they do, parents are often too busy attending parent-teacher conferences or cheering at games because they have to work long hours to earn money.
It is foreseeable that if children give up community activities and have too much free time after school and start hanging out in the city, the risk of going astray increases. From an initial problem of poverty, the problem eventually evolves into a social problem, as ties to the group are weak, self-affirmation decreases, and loneliness increases.
Japan's top scorer Yutaka Kobayashi had a poor childhood. His mother dragged her two children to grow up alone. When she played soccer, she wore worn-out spikes and went to her mother's friend's house with her brother to eat leftovers. But especially looking back, Kobayashi Yo didn't find these days painful. He thinks the reason is 'love'. His family was full of love. Although life was difficult, he received so much love from his mother and brother that he was invited into the scene Football During Japan's promotional activities, he was especially willing to talk to these children who were in the same predicament in hopes of generating a better response through companionship and love.
