the Japan women's volleyball team Print, Vintage Pallavolo Poster, Giappone Retro Wall Art, Sports Gift, Black and White Sports Print

STREGHE D'ORIENTE 1964 — a LostTeams editorial print telling the existing story of Streghe d'Oriente 1964, 1962-1964.

Two hundred and fifty-eight matches without losing. That is the figure usually given, and even if the true number is a little lower, nobody has come near it since.

They were not full-time athletes. They were women who worked at a textile mill in Kaizuka, in Osaka Prefecture, spinning and weaving for a company called Nichibo. The volleyball team was the company team. They finished their shifts in the late afternoon, went to the company gymnasium, and trained until midnight or past it, six or seven days a week, for years.

Their coach was Hirofumi Daimatsu, a former soldier who had survived the Burma campaign and came back to run a factory volleyball team the way he had been taught to run other things. The training was violent. He threw balls at them until they could not stand. He hit them. He was called the demon and did not object to it. In the 1960s a good deal of Japan found this admirable, and some of it still does, and the women themselves have given answers over the years that are more complicated than either.

What came out of it was a defensive technique nobody had seen: throwing the body flat at a ball and rolling back onto the feet in one movement, so that a dig did not end with a player on the floor. Every volleyball team on earth does it now.

In 1961 they toured Europe and won everything, and Soviet journalists called them the witches of the Orient. In 1962 they won the world championship in Moscow. In 1964 volleyball was in the Olympics for the first time, in Tokyo, and they beat the Soviet Union in the final.

Something close to two-thirds of Japan watched it on television. Then most of them retired, in their twenties, and went to get married.

What they left behind is larger than the medal. Japanese volleyball kept winning: silver in 1968, gold again in 1976. And the story of the mill team became a genre. A comic about a girl and a punishing coach began serialising four years later, and the whole tradition of Japanese sporting fiction built on suffering as the route to worth traces back to a gymnasium in Kaizuka.

Hang it. One day someone will ask you what it is, and you will know where to begin.