Volleyball national side

Japan Women

National team · Japan

«Oriental Witches»

160 Matches

109 wins

51 losses

377–211 Sets

+166 Difference

2.4 Average per match

Form W W W W W L

When the final point dropped in the Tokyo gymnasium in 1964 and the home team beat the Soviet Union for Olympic gold, the newspapers abroad had already settled on a name for the Japanese women who did it: Oriental Witches. It stuck. The nickname came out of the training regime built under head coach Saburo Sugawara, who drilled a low, defensive style of volleyball into a squad that had already won two world titles earlier that decade, and it turned a domestic sports story into an international one.

That 1964 title was not repeated for over a decade — the second Olympic gold came in 1976 — but the pattern set in that "Golden Age" carried through the team's identity for years: win on defence first, let attack follow. Asia offered fewer surprises. Between 1962 and 1978 Japan took five Asian Games titles and added Asian Championship wins in later decades, most recently in 2019, against opposition that has mostly settled into a rivalry with China and South Korea rather than any single dramatic upset.

The team plays under an official nickname now, Hinotori Nippon — Firebird Nippon — though talk of changing it again surfaced in 2024 without displacing the name in everyday use. Coaching has turned over at a pace typical of a national side: Kumi Nakada gave way to Shinya Ishikawa, then Masayoshi Manabe, before Ferhat Akbaş took over in 2025 as the team's first foreign head coach. Saori Kimura, who captained the side to Olympic bronze in 2012, remains the player most associated with the generation after the Witches; the current captain, Sarina Koga, leads a squad still pulling much of its talent from club sides such as Hisamitsu Springs.

None of it changes what the name still points back to: a gymnasium in Tokyo in 1964, and a way of playing that earned a nickname before it earned a trophy case.

Latest results

Fixtures and results

22 Sep	Asian Games Women	China Women H	0:3	L
21 Sep	Asian Games Women	South Korea Women H	3:0	W
20 Sep	Asian Games Women	Chinese Taipei Women H	3:0	W
18 Sep	Asian Games Women	Indonesia Women A	3:1	W
16 Sep	Asian Games Women	Nepal Women H	3:0	W
30 Aug	Asian Championship Women	Iran Women A	3:0	W