Hideki Matsuyama: Japan’s Olympic hype machine will need to tread carefully with mild-mannered Masters hero
- Master’s champion Matsuyama is known for being a retiring character in his homeland, but he may find himself at the forefront of an Olympic-sized PR push on his return
Ten years ago the golf world said hello to Hideki Matsuyama when the 19-year-old Japanese prodigy captured the amateur title at the Masters. But he told them he didn’t even want to be there. A native of Sendai, his hometown had been rocked only a few weeks earlier by the Great East Japan earthquake, a 9.0-magnitude tremor that unleashed a series of cataclysmic tsunami triggering the Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown.
“Knowing such a hard situation back home, I am not sure if I should play at this Masters even at this moment,” Matsuyama told the golf media as he recounted the thousands of lives lost, the thousands still missing and the thousands living in makeshift shelters. He had been convinced by family and friends that his presence at the event would be inspiring and also ensure that the focus stayed on the plight of his home region.
The horrific images of the tsunami were impossible to ignore even in the insular world of golf and Matsuyama garnered universal admiration for the way he handled himself that week. A decade later, almost to the day, Matsuyama was back in Butler Cabin, this time in the big boy’s chair putting on the most sacred garb in sport as Masters champion.
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Less than one per cent of the Japanese public has been vaccinated and the government has been staggeringly inept in dealing with rising Covid numbers. Up in the Sendai area, the toxic residue is still everywhere, from the Fukushima power plant to the contaminated soil packed up in bags and spread out all over the prefecture.
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While massive infrastructure work has been done, only in the fractured prism of political optics would anyone claim recovery is complete. However, golf is now an Olympic sport and just in time for our nationally beloved conquering hero to return home. In the hope of rallying the country behind an unpopular and vulgarly expensive Olympics, the exploitation of Matsuyama will be impossible to contain.
But be careful, Japan. Matsuyama is a painfully private man of few words who is both PR conscious and cautious. Golf media types joke that while Matsuyama doesn’t speak much English, he speaks even less Japanese. Like a plague of locusts, the Japanese media routinely swarm him with one inane question after another. They get little in return and it’s no coincidence that with the Japanese media almost completely absent from Augusta this year, he could finally breathe.
It would be fitting of a champion and hardly surprising if this enigmatic hero turned that massive spotlight right back on the issues facing both his home region and country
“He seemed very relaxed and he’s been smiling, which you don’t see that often,” Japanese golf writer Reiko Takekawa told the New York Post as she watched him on TV. Takekawa described Matsuyama’s relationship with the media “as bad, very bad. He reads everything, all the articles written in Japan about him. Every single story”. Of course he does. He’s a golfer, he keeps score.
Matsuyama is also intimately aware that no one suffocates the celebrated like Japan, particularly their own. It would be fitting of a champion and hardly surprising if this enigmatic hero turned that massive spotlight right back on the issues facing both his home region and country.
