It’s Saturday in Kashiwa and the streets smell like bratwurst, beer foam, and nervous tension. Outside the SANKYO Frontier Kashiwa Stadium, fans stream in for REYSOL OKTOBERFEST — a festival of sausages, ¥100 Asahi Super Dry pints, and lottery tickets for signed shirts. Inside, though? There’s no carnival mood. This is the J1 League’s Matchday 33, and for one side it’s an existential knife fight.
Kashiwa Reysol, settled and smug in 4th place, welcome Yokohama F. Marinos — a fallen giant skating on usuragori (薄氷, thin ice). The Original 10 club, the pride of Yokohama, sits 17th in the table, clinging to survival by a single breath of goal difference. And above them, a corporate guillotine swings: Nissan, their majority owner, drowning in red ink, publicly weighing how much longer it can keep the club on its books.
This isn’t just a match. It’s a referendum on survival — of a club, a legacy, and maybe even a civic identity.
The Stakes: Survival vs. Stability
Reysol come into this clash with calm assurance: 57 points, 4th in the table, with a League Cup semi-final looming. They’ve already beaten Yokohama three times this year. Their Oktoberfest is timed perfectly — nothing like beer-fuelled contentment when the football feels secure.
For Marinos, every pint would taste bitter. Seventeenth place. Level on 31 points with Yokohama FC, surviving only on goal difference. Six matches left. One slip and the Original 10 club becomes relegation fodder.
And that’s before you mention Nissan. The corporate overlord, bruised by a ¥670.9 billion loss, has reassured fans it’ll “remain the biggest shareholder.” But insiders whisper that a partial sale is inevitable. The players hear the rumblings, youth-team parents panic about the future, and the city mayor has already written begging letters to Nissan HQ.
So what does that mean for this game? Reysol are playing for points and party tricks. Marinos are playing for their lives.
Captain Kida: A Manifesto in Motion
Every sinking ship needs a captain willing to strap himself to the mast. For Yokohama F. Marinos, that’s Takuya Kida. His diving header against FC Tokyo last week wasn’t just a goal. It was a manifesto.
“I wanted to save the team,” he said afterwards, drenched in sweat and defiance.
It wasn’t pretty football — and maybe that’s the point. Marinos aren’t playing for aesthetics anymore. They’re playing for survival. Kida’s header screamed 泥臭い勝利 — “a gritty victory” — and it captured exactly what Oshima’s battered squad is being asked to deliver every week.
Hideo Oshima: Pragmatist in a Storm
Manager Hideo Oshima is living a paradox. Every tactical note he scribbles has to balance between desperation and patience. He admitted it himself after the Tokyo game — switching to a five-back at 3-0 nearly cost them the match. “Naïveté,” he called it.
Against Reysol, his mantra is brutally pragmatic: no open contests, no heroic cavalcades of possession. Long balls, second balls, set pieces, dirty points. He even framed the three straight losses to Kashiwa as a kind of lesson:
“We lost twice in the Levain Cup, but there were several things we could view positively. We gained something, so we want to channel that into the next match and get three points.”
Translation: forget romance. Survive.
The Human Subplots
Miyaichi’s Professionalism
Ryo Miyaichi, back from concussion and still quick enough to burn full-backs, shrugs off the corporate circus. “We don’t have anything we can do, as it’s something happening above us. Our job is only to provide the best possible performance.”
That’s professionalism talking. But it’s also a shield. Miyaichi knows as well as anyone that the ground beneath Yokohama feels like it’s cracking.
Matsubara’s Absence
No such shield for defender Ken Matsubara. Out for six months with a knee injury, his absence leaves Marinos vulnerable, their backline stretched thin. Miyaichi has said he’s fighting to “create a place for him to come back to.” Noble words, but noble words don’t clear corners.
Uenaka’s Frustration
Forward Asahi Uenaka hasn’t scored in two months. He admits it’s getting to him: “It is meaningless if I don’t score, so I am practicing shooting intensively.” Against Kashiwa’s disciplined defense, this might be the acid test of whether a dry spell becomes a crisis.
The Stars Who Could Swing It
Kaina Tanimura – The Summer Saviour
His brace against FC Tokyo was a striker’s clinic: one ruled out by VAR, two hammered home with authority. Tanimura is everything Oshima’s new style demands — physical, direct, aerially dominant. When the long ball game gets ugly, he’s the man fighting for scraps.
“I was entrusted with this frontline. My hard work delivered the victory.”
For a relegation fight, he’s the perfect foil: an old-school No. 9 in a survival trench war.
Kashiwa’s Commander: Kohei Kozumi
But don’t pretend this is all one-way traffic. Kashiwa’s heartbeat is Kohei Kozumi — the 司令塔 (commander) with stamina and tactical vision to strangle games from midfield. Marinos want chaos. Kozumi thrives on turning chaos back into order. If Reysol seize control through him, Oktoberfest becomes a funeral march.
X-Factors
Ryotaro Tsunoda (YFM): Two goals and an assist in five games. Determined not to “lose four times to the same opponent.”
Kota Watanabe (YFM): Cameo heroics with a sublime assist last week. Reysol’s Oktoberfest Crowd: 600 lucky fans drinking 67-cent beer could either turn this into a carnival — or a pressure cooker.
This is Oshima’s “現実的な策” — the realistic strategy. It’s ugly, but ugly is survival.
Atmosphere: Oktoberfest vs. Thin Ice
At SANKYO Frontier Stadium, fans will gorge on sausages, beer, and novelty health checks from Meiji Yasuda. The whole thing feels like a contradiction: Oktoberfest cheer outside, thin-ice terror inside.
Meanwhile, back in Yokohama, the sense of civic dread lingers. Mayor Yamanaka has begged Nissan to keep the club. Fans chant “Fight, that is the path to freedom.” They know the stakes. A founding club slipping into J2 under corporate neglect would be a humiliation beyond relegation. It would feel like erasure.
Prediction
Let’s be blunt. Kashiwa have beaten Yokohama three times this year, and they have the structure to do it again. Kozumi in midfield, the comfort of 4th place, the Oktoberfest tailwind — it all points to another Reysol win.
This isn’t just Kashiwa vs Yokohama. It’s corporate Japan vs civic pride. Oktoberfest vs thin ice. A club drinking beer vs a club drinking in its own mortality.
If Marinos survive this season, it won’t be because Nissan bailed them out. It’ll be because players like Kida, Tanimura, and Miyaichi strapped themselves to the mast and fought every match like it was their last.
And in a way, that’s exactly what this is.
doragon sports 