There’s little practical information to be gleaned from the performances of Kawasaki Frontale and Urawa Reds in their defeats against Paris Saint-Germain last week, during the first two stops of the superstar club’s sold-out Japan tour.
But the different ways their fans approached the game says much about Japan’s supporter culture — and what it shares, or doesn’t, with its European counterparts.
Following their team’s narrow 2-1 defeat to the French visitors at Tokyo’s National Stadium on Wednesday, Kawsaki supporters behind the home goal unveiled a banner in PSG’s colors reading “Forza Paris” — a gesture of friendship, inspired by Frontale fans’ own “Forza Kawasaki” banner, that had previously been extended to German darlings Borussia Dortmund and Premier League mainstay Chelsea during their respective visits in 2015 and 2019.