The Night of 2077 in Osaka: When Vietnamese Drums Woke an Entire City

On the night of June 14, 2077, rain poured down on the Namba district of Osaka. I sat on the second floor of a small café, my hand gripping the recorder that has travelled with me for more than eighty years. Below the large screen, some two hundred people crowded together — Vietnamese, Japanese, and children born here who have never once set foot in their parents' homeland. When the national anthem began, a middle-aged man standing beside me burst into tears. He was not crying over a goal. He was crying because his sixteen-year-old son was singing the Vietnamese anthem, even though the boy had never taken a single Vietnamese class at school. This was no ordinary match. It was the semifinal of a World Cup, the first time Vietnam had reached the final four. Thirty years ago, when I still followed Cerezo Osaka at Yanmar Nagai Stadium, people spoke of Vietnamese football with pity in their voices. Now I sit here listening to Japanese commentators dissect Vietnam's defence in the language they once reserved for Brazil or France. The scene away from the pitch is what I wanted to capture. In the café, a seventy-year-old woman who sells food at Kuromon Market opened a plastic box of bánh chưng. A worker who had just finished his shift at the Sakai industrial zone sat on the floor in his protective gear because there were no chairs left. A group of students from Kansai University, holding red flags with a yellow star printed on paper, sang and tapped spoons against the tables. None of them were here for tactics. They were here for something else. In more than eighty years of writing, I have learned one thing: a team's rhythm does not live in the players' feet, it lives in the shared heartbeat of a whole city. The players play on the pitch, but the drum beats beneath the stands, and sometimes that drum is beaten in a café more than an hour by train from Kansai Airport. I noticed a small detail. In the first half, when Vietnam shifted into a proactive defensive shape, the noise in the café dropped. Not out of worry. Rather, two hundred people held their breath to the same rhythm. They sang the wrong lyrics of the chant in the second half — but that mistake was more precise than any line printed on a flyer. There are goals that never make the match report, only to be found in the way a bar sings the wrong words. In the seventieth minute, when striker Trần Bảo Long equalised for Vietnam, I heard a sound I had forgotten for years: the crack of a plastic cup crushed in someone's hand. No one screamed. There was only the rain, the breathing, and the drum someone had brought from home. At the end, goalkeeper Nguyễn Hữu Thành saved the final penalty. Vietnam won. But what stayed with me was not the score. People still say that the generation of Vietnamese born in Japan — children who speak Japanese better than their mother tongue — is losing its roots. I used to believe that. But the night of June 14, 2077 forced me to look again. The way a sixteen-year-old boy sang the anthem was not proof of memory, but proof of something deeper: a sense of belonging passed down through rhythm, not through language. Perhaps I was wrong to measure roots by the number of years lived in the homeland. A child's roots in Osaka are not written in a household register. They live in the fact that the child, upon hearing the drum from a screen, stands up without being told. And one more thing, perhaps not easy to hear: this victory does not erase the truth that Vietnam is still a long way from the world's top football nations in squad depth. A semifinal does not build a footballing nation. But it does build a night. And on that night, the heartbeats of two hundred people in Namba beat as one with the heartbeats of millions in Hà Nội, in Sài Gòn, in Đà Nẵng. I do not know what will come after tonight. But I know I will play back the recording at 3 a.m., alone in my rented room in Osaka, and listen to the voice of a child who has never lived in Vietnam singing the anthem. The scream of that night still echoes inside me, though Osaka went to sleep long ago. At my age, one does not count trophies; one counts the nights when an entire city stayed awake. And I ask myself: if a child in Osaka can memorise a song from his parents' homeland, what is there left to fear in saying that a generation is losing its roots?