The Japan Football Association held the 2014 Match Flag Project workshop at the Japan Football Museum on the 6th May (Tuesday). 

A match flag is made combining flags of two teams that play against each other and something that expresses the love for the game and wish good luck in their game.
In the project this time, original match flags were created combining the national flags and their colors of Cote d’Ivoire, Greece and Colombia, the opponents that SAMURAI BLUE (Japan national team) will face in the World Cup.

Comments

MATSUOKA Sonoko
We really enjoyed the time for making the flags, coming up with ideas, along with the children that I was with at the same table. As a nurse at a kindergarten, I thought that I wanted our pupils to have such an enjoyable time to learn. I would certainly like to join in an event like this. I am wishing all the best to the Japan national team for the World Cup championships.

ROKUGAWA Yuta
I joined the Match Flag Project before the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and this is my second time. The teams that Japan faced in 2010 were of well-known countries (such as the Netherlands and Denmark), but the teams this time are not so well-known. So I thought that it would be great to let everybody know the flags of the nations like Cote d’Ivoire and Colombia while I was participating in it. On the Japan national team, I like Kawashima, the goalkeeper. I also made those flags, putting a wish that I want him to save all the shots made by those opposing teams.

HIBINO Katsuhiko, Japan Football Association board member/professor of Tokyo University of the Arts
As ''the Golden Week'' had its final day today, I saw so many visitors with their children from the Kanto area. It seemed that many of the fathers enjoyed the virtual stadium and the children had fun making the flags, and then they went to the national stadium to watch a J. League game afterwards.

This project aims to get to know the opposing teams along with your groups and creators, express the cultural aspects of football by exchanging conversations, and spread out the football culture.

It’s a World Cup year, that takes place in every four years, this year. I believe that this project gives the opportunity for people to know the world and to enjoy the games by acknowledging the opponents.

Also, for us creators, this is an opportunity to look back his or her own history through the history of the World Cups, while it gives the chance to exchange conversations among us because we have lived in the same time. This is also an opportunity to remember the World Cups of four years ago and eight years ago, talking about ourselves and our societies back in those days, and then direct our thoughts toward the future World Cups. This is sort of a cultural space of football over the times.

Cultures will be made by assembling people and combining them, and spread out.
When two teams get together at a stadium in Brazil, fight against each other, and share the same time together, something new will be born. We are expressing those football cultures through this Match Flag Project as well. I believe that we were able to convey the strong messages by holding it at the Japan Football Museum, where all the Japan football history are collected.