Kadowaki-Fleming hopes India T20I is 'first step in a long history' of playing top-tier teams
Charlie Hara-Hinze is familiar with some India players, having rplayed them at the 2024 Under-19 Asia Cup • ICC/Getty Images
Kendel Kadowaki-Fleming and Charlie Hara-Hinze, Japan's captain and their 17-year-old allrounder respectively, expect the one-off T20I against India later this month to be more than just a landmark; they are hoping for it to be a springboard for the game to take off in the country.
"As exciting as the occasion will be of playing India, we're not there to just celebrate the occasion. We're there to show what we can do as a men's team," Kadowaki-Fleming told PTI about the September 22 fixture in Sano. "Obviously, a team like India have all bases covered, whether it's fast bowling, batting or spin. So it's just going to be great to be able to watch world-class players and the best team in the world in that format go about it.
"Hopefully this is the first step in a long history of playing against and competing against Full-Member countries."
India will travel to Japan for the first men's international game between the two countries. The women's competition would already have started at the Asian Games, with the men's event to start on September 24.
"It's very exciting," Kadowaki-Fleming said. "And I think a massive development for cricket in Japan to have countries like Afghanistan and Nepal coming here [and it] is something that we probably would have thought was very difficult to manage even a couple of years ago."
Hara-Hinze, the spin-bowling allrounder, is familiar with some India players, having run into Ayush Mhatre and Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, among others, at the 2024 Under-19 Asia Cup.
"That was a game we definitely went into with a lot of excitement," he said. "We got a lot out of it in terms of bowling to these guys, seeing first-hand how good they are and the standard at which they played. You had very little margin for error as well.
"The Indian cricket team coming to Japan to face us was something that doesn't sound real to many people and still probably hasn't quite sunk in."
Kadowaki-Fleming expects all the high-quality cricket over the September-October window to open doors for the game in a country dominated by baseball.
"We're obviously a long way from producing cricket's version of Shohei Ohtani [baseballer currently with Los Angeles Dodgers in MLB], but someone has to be the first, right," Kadowaki-Fleming said. "Even if a small amount of the kids that are watching cricket on TV during that time then want to go and pick up a cricket bat or sign up with a cricket club in Japan and play for the first time, then I feel like that's a success in itself."
"Cricket, it is growing, but at a very slow rate," Hara-Hinze said, adding that more facilities and sponsors would help accelerate its development. "[But] I can't see a reason why in 20-30 years, we can't be like Nepal or Afghanistan. I think there's definitely a potential for a very large cricketing market in Japan."
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