Why This Topic Landed in Japan

Keisuke Honda's coaching ambitions have come up often enough that the licence question is now a reflex, raised before anyone discusses the job itself. Add South Korea to the mix and that reflex arrives wrapped in the rivalry. Korean media reported a groundswell of enthusiasm for Honda, with talk of all kinds of revolutions and of wanting a Japan-Korea match with an edge to it, and Japanese readers took it as entertainment rather than news.

The second strand was heavier. An image of Black children making slant-eye poses spread on X on 1 August. Korean-language replies to it circulated over 1 and 2 August and ended up spreading more widely than the original image. Japanese readers framed what they were watching as discrimination answered with discrimination, and a number of them reached back to past provocations at Japan-Korea fixtures rather than staying with the incident in front of them.

Key Reaction Themes

  • The licence objection comes first — Before any football argument, the qualification question is raised as a fixed move.
  • Watching rather than wanting — Support was framed as wanting to see it happen, not as thinking it should.
  • Predicting the aftermath in Korea — Jokes imagined public opinion and politics turning on him after a defeat.
  • Criticism of the exchange itself — A steady line held that answering discrimination in kind settles nothing.
  • Reaching for past incidents — Older provocations from both sides were brought in as evidence.

What Japanese Netizens Are Saying

Calls for Keisuke Honda to coach South Korea

The qualification objection and an appetite for the spectacle accounted for nearly all of it.

Sources: Yahoo! news, 2ch

Comments:

  • "Honda Korea lol"
  • "The licence, though."
  • "A future in which the Korean public beats him to a pulp."
  • "Please, go right ahead."
  • "Even if he gets it, don't come bothering Japan."
  • "This is interesting. Let him have a go."
  • "Even Honda wouldn't do it, surely lol"
  • "Honda's character would suit Korea. That bullish personality of his."
  • "After he gets the licence, but sure, go right ahead."
  • "Korean public opinion wouldn't stand for it, surely. Go with Chong Tese instead."

The slant-eye image and the Korean replies

Criticism of the exchange itself sat alongside readers reaching back for older incidents.

Comments:

  • "Still waiting on the apology for Ki Sung-yueng's monkey-mimicking performance?"
  • "'Koreans love trash-talk' and so on — what an idiot, when only the other day a shop in Kyoto was torn to pieces by Korean media and YouTubers on the back of a false rumour."
  • "In another 20 years it feels like discriminating against Black people will be routine anywhere in Asia."
  • "So it has been demonstrated once again that love cannot save the earth...."
  • "When it comes to racial discrimination, no country tops Korea."
  • "I can't accept that Chinese, Koreans and Japanese are all counted as Asians."
  • "Isn't the narrowed-eyes gesture aimed at China and Korea rather than at Asians as a whole?"
  • "Answering discrimination with discrimination — this way discrimination is never going to disappear."