'Japan looked inward for the answer': how Korea's press read the Oiwa succession

The headline Korea gave it

The Japan Football Association settled it at its July 23 board meeting: Moriyasu, 57, stays through the AFC Asian Cup in Saudi Arabia (January–February 2027), and from the March 2027 friendlies through the 2030 World Cup, Go Oiwa, 54, takes the senior team while keeping the U-21 side aiming at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. The Korean outlet STARNEWS, reporting the confirmation, logged Moriyasu's overall senior-team record at 108 matches — 74 wins, 16 draws, 18 losses — and, citing the Japanese paper Nikkan Sports, noted that the JFA plans not to extend him even if Japan win the Asian Cup. Sports Chosun, as relayed by the Japanese outlet Soccer Digest Web, framed the same news more sharply: 'a first in Japanese history,' the formal appointment of 'the master who destroyed Korea.' STARNEWS added a detail that makes the half-year look deliberate rather than indecisive: JFA president Tsuneyasu Miyamoto is understood to have personally, if informally, asked Moriyasu to stay on only through the Asian Cup, and Moriyasu accepted.

What Korea read as 'continuity'

The interesting part is the reasoning Sports Chosun attached. 'The JFA analyzed for itself how it should move forward to win a World Cup,' the paper wrote. 'If there is continuity in which homegrown coaches who develop the country's own players from a young age go on to lead the senior side, good World Cup results can follow. Once again, Japan looked inward rather than abroad for the answer.' That reading has a basis. Since Akira Nishino led Japan at the 2018 World Cup, the federation has built a domestic coaching line; Moriyasu himself ran the U-21 team in 2017, joined the senior staff before the 2018 World Cup, then held the senior and Olympic jobs together. Oiwa is the next link in that chain rather than a break from it. He is not a caretaker name either: a Kashima Antlers manager who won the club's first AFC Champions League title in 2018 and was named AFC men's coach of the year, before taking the U-23 side to the Paris 2024 Olympic quarterfinals and back-to-back U-23 Asian Cup titles.

Why Korea called him 'the one who destroyed us'

The phrase was not thrown in for color. Sports Chosun recalled that Oiwa, on the way to those consecutive U-23 Asian Cup crowns, 'overwhelmed the Korea U-23 side with a perfect game.' It is a striking thing for a Korean paper to say about the man about to run Japan: their own coverage frames him through a defeat their team took from him. For a Japanese reader used to hearing the succession described as an internal, low-cost promotion, that is the added detail — the rival's press does not see a bargain hire. It sees a coach who has already beaten them.

Moriyasu's farewell stage, the Asian Cup in Saudi Arabia, is the same field Korea and Saudi Arabia are on. Oiwa first takes senior training in March 2027. Whether Moriyasu can reclaim the Asian title Japan last won in 2011 before he hands it over is still unknown.