Japan unveil 2012-13 kits

The Japan Football Association (JFA) and Adidas have officially unveiled the new kit for Japan’s national teams.

The strips were revealed in a ceremony on Monday attended by dozens of press and 500 fans who won an invitational raffle.

The ceremony started with speeches from JFA chairman Junji Ogura and Adidas representatives before continuing with the unveiling of the kit’s theme, Nippon Kessoku, or ‘Japan United’.

The strip itself was revealed to be a dark navy colour with a thin vertical red stripe down the centre, meant to represent a ‘line of unity’.

The shoulder and underarm areas consist of a lighter blue, similar in shade to the kit worn by Japan over the last two years.

Criticism of the national kit is almost a spectator sport in Japan, and Monday’s unveiling was no different.

Comments came pouring in through Twitter and other social media platforms the moment players Shinji Kagawa, Mike Havenaar, and Makoto Hasebe stepped on stage to model the outfits.

‘Lame’ was the most common response used to describe the new design and one fan compared the red stripe to the ritual suicide of samurais by disembowelment known as harakiri.

No second kit was unveiled at the ceremony and the new strip will make its international debut when Japan host Iceland in a February 24 friendly at Nagai Stadium in Osaka.