Why do Japan play in blue despite the colour not featuring on their flag

It seems there's a reason for it

The Japanese national football team wear the blue shirts that are instantly recongisable.

Brazil wear yellow and green, England wear white, France and the USA wear red, white and blue.

But Japan don’t wear red and/or white as the main colour in their home kit.

The Japanese national team has been ever-present at the World Cup since first qualifying in 1998, which took part in France.

Meanwhile, they are a genuine powerhouse of the women's game after making back-to-back World Cup finals in 2011 and 2015, winning the first.

All of these achievements, however, were done in their blue home shirts.

Why Japan wears blue revealed

The nickname for Japan is the Samurai Buru (Blue), and there is a bit of kit folklore that blue was chosen as a direct nod to their famous pre-industrial warriors.

According to journalist and keen kit historian Joey D'Urso that is nonsense, however, saying that the claim is a bit of 20-year-old marketing guff that has been taken much too seriously over the past couple of decades.

Japan definitely first wore blue all the way back in in 1930, and it has been suggested that their team was apparently made up of players from Tokyo Imperial University, whose kit was light blue.

It would be a bit like if the England national side had originally been a side comprised of players from Oxford or Cambridge who wore their traditional athletic blue.

However, what’s surprising is that the Japanese FA are unable to completely substantiate that, saying: “We're not sure what the exact reason was.”

Japan once wore red and white kits

That being said, blue hasn't been a constant throughout Japan's entire history.

They actually wore white with blue trim in the 1980s, and they did match the flag by wearing red and white between 1988 and 1992.

Japan fell short of qualification for the 1990 World Cup and the 1992 Olympics while wearing that red and white strip, prompting them to scrap the notion and go back to blue, after all.

Meanwhile, two of Japan's geographic rivals, China and South Korea, both wear red strips.

This way, their blue kits stand out a bit more in continental competition, and gives them a bit of useful distinctive branding at a time when that was starting to become pretty important.