Japan has been drawn in Group I with Malaysia, Vietnam and Macao for the preliminaries of the Under-23 Asian Championship, which doubles as qualifying for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics.
The draw for the 10 groups, A to J, was held at the Asian Football Confederation's headquarters in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday. Japan will play Macao (March 27), Vietnam (March 29) and Malaysia (March 31) for the competition in Malaysia.
The 10 group winners, along with the best five second-place teams, will qualify for the final round of the championship in January 2016 along with Qatar, which will take part as host nation.
The top three from the Qatar round qualify for Rio.
"We know where the tournament is going to be held now, which is good because it was taking a while to decide," Japan's Olympic team coach Makoto Teguramori said in a statement.
"Looking ahead to the final round, we need to start showing what we can do from the preliminaries. I think the three teams we'll face could really make us work, if we face them in Malaysia at that time of that year."