The 23-year-old Mijiu Ito, a Japanese women's footballer currently playing in La Liga, has neither been selected for the Japanese national team at any level from her resume, nor has she had a proud career like her peer who played for Liverpool in the Premier League, or even as famous as her good friend Riko Ueki who plays in Japan's women's professional football We-League, she is just one of the most ordinary Japanese overseas players.
Mijiu Ito, who plays for the women's team of La Liga Alavés
But her playing experience allows us to see why Japanese women's football can maintain strong competitiveness in Asian and even world football like men's football, in August 2019, only 19-year-old Mijiu Ito, officially transferred from her Japanese Tomon VENTUS club to Spain Alavés Women's Football, when Alavés Women's Football was only a member of the Second Division, and Tomon VENTUS Club was an amateur team that only participated in the Japan Women's Football Regional League. Previously, she only played football for the Nippon Gakuen High School soccer team in Himeji City, Prefecture, Japan, and judging from her experience, there was no intersection related to professional football before she came to Spain.
Playing futsal in China with good friend Japanese international Riko Ueki (back row, left, Riko Ueki, right, Mijiu Ito)
In the blink of an eye, she has spent more than three years in Spain, and has spent two seasons in La Liga with the Alavés women's team, she wrote in her diary: "For me, playing in the Spanish league is a dream I had in middle school, and there is an even bigger dream is to play in the Champions League, in the past three years, in order to get closer to the dream, in order to improve myself, I have fought Spanish soil and honed my skills to survive in the Spanish league", reading this paragraph, people really sighed, Compared with the words and deeds of our overseas players on self-media, it can be said that the thinking of Japanese players is really simple.
Japan 20 Miku Ito
However, three years of experience in the ocean did not allow Mijiu Ito to get the invitation of the national team, and there was no possibility of playing in the Champions League, which made her feel a little lost in her heart, but her experience in Spain in recent years was not in vain, here she witnessed more and more young players who were only fifteen or sixteen years old have begun to play in the Spanish top league, and her young teammates have rich game experience and playing wisdom at the age of eighteen through the polishing of the league, which is unlikely in Japan.
Miku Ito plays soccer with elementary school students during her return to Japan (front row, middle)
It seems that going to Europe to play football can not only improve the level, but more importantly, broaden a person's horizons, Ito Mijiu believes that her biggest gain in recent years is to be able to come out and see how important the world is when she was young, and now she has begun to try to do a joint project with the Alavés Academy "to give more young Japanese players the opportunity to train in Spain", so it seems that Japanese players have gone further and done more than we think.
Miku Ito in La Liga
Fairnando, the coach of the Alavés women's football team, commented on the Japanese players, "We have seen a lot of Japanese players, the Japanese are very good and diligent, these are the most valuable things of Japanese players", if we Chinese women's football girls can also see and think more in these days in the ocean, not only to improve their own level, but also through their own role model, to drive more young girls who play football to the outside world to increase their experience, which should be a good thing.
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