With Kei Nishikori about to compete for Japan’s first grand slam (more on that comment in a minute) I suddenly find myself thinking about other Japanese who’ve won things and those who haven’t.

As a rule, the Japanese focus primarily on baseball with priority given to the local major leagues. When a Japanese player goes to the US majors, he’s given what can only be described as a base level of popularity. The news will always report what he’s doing, especially if he’s doing well. If he’s a star, Matsuzaka, Ichiro, Hideki Matsui, he’ll get a shocking amount of media coverage. If he’s playing, NHK (Japan’s BBC) will cover the game, until the moment he’s pulled and then they switch to regular programming and viewers never learn what happened. (No joke, I’ve seen this happen twice.)

However, everyone loves a winner, especially Japan which suffers from a very strange lack of confidence you wouldn’t expect from the third largest economy in the world (for now). The Japanese press is always looking for “Local kid makes Japan look awesome” stories and is always interested in what foreigners have to say about Japan, so long as what the foreigners have to say is positive. If it’s negative, there’s lots of excuse making and accusations that Japan is being picked on even though it’s the only country to have been attacked with atomic bombs. (Yes, they really do go there sometimes, especially on panel shows.)

Before 2011, barely anyone in Japan could name more than a couple players on the Japanese women’s soccer/kick ball team. Everyone knew their nickname “Nadeshiko Japan” but knew little else about them. Nadeshiko, by the way, is a surprisingly sexist thing to be called. It’s roughly the equivalent of calling them “They don’t make women like that anymore Japan” or “Good girls Japan”. However, after they won the world cup, they were suddenly popular. Attendance at women’s soccer started breaking records (at least for the team with the most “Good girls”) and some of them started appearing on TV a lot.

The same happened with a group of women wrestlers who brought home Olympic medals, and even a group of women archers and a some badminton players. They didn’t even have to be cute, just successful, although if they wanted to make real money from their 15 minutes, they had to be cute.

That said, no one is as brutal toward their athletes as the Japanese. If someone loses, a reporter will ask “what happened” in a very strict tone. The athletes have their own cliches “Well, I got a bad start and I wasn’t able to swim my race, I had to swim their race” or “I wasn’t able to play my badminton and couldn’t make the shuttlecock work for me”. At that point, it’s common for the reporters to say something like “well, I hope you’ve learned from this and will do better next time.” (I would love to hear the expletives some US athletes would unleash on a reporter who said that.)

This brings us back to Kei Nishikori. If he doesn’t win, he’ll get some praise for going where no one has gone before but we’ll see at least two weeks of detailed analysis about why he sucked. If he wins, we’ll hear about it for at least month and it will be considered a victory for Japan. (Even though he spent most of his career at IMG Bollettieri Tennis Academy and is currently coached by American Michael Chang.)

I hope he does well, but part of me kind of hopes he doesn’t, because the press coverage will stop sooner.