Gary Lineker on the J-League: 'It began with an earthquake and a 5-0 loss. And then things got worse'

The day of my J-League debut for Nagoya Grampus Eight began with an earthquake where our whole hotel shook… and then we lost 5-0 and I didn't get a kick. It was not exactly a dream start.

Unfortunately, the football side of things never improved much for me from there but, 30 years on this month, I still look back very fondly at my time in Japan.

It was half a lifetime ago for me now, but going there felt like a big adventure - it was the launch of football as a professional sport in that country and to be involved in something new like that is unusual for any player, especially somewhere that did things so differently.

I just wish I'd been able to play more, although there was absolutely nothing I could do about that. It was exciting to be there right at the start and see it take off the way it did, but it was also where my career ended, and not in the way I wanted it to.

The first I heard about any interest from Japan was in March 1991 when Grampus Eight faxed my agent and my club, Tottenham, about the possibility of g me, but nothing really progressed until June, when I went to Tokyo with Spurs to play in a friendly.

That was the start of discussions which led to me being offered a two-year contract to come and play in the new J-League, which was replacing an amateur league made up of corporate teams - Grampus Eight were formerly known as Toyota Motors, and were still being bankrolled by them.

The opportunity came at the right time because I was already thinking a lot about my future. I was almost 31 and had always wanted to go out of English football at the top, so I was planning to retire when my Spurs contract finished in 1993.

Then the Japanese came in and we thought: "Well, this is something completely different." Obviously it was a big pay-day but I'd always been interested in travelling and experiencing other cultures after playing in Barcelona and this seemed like a really nice way to end my career, in a country that had always fascinated me and would also be safe for my family.

I didn't want to just go gradually downhill in England, which I already felt like I was on the brink of doing because I knew my powers were waning, so it appealed for footballing reasons too. I thought I could go out there and still score a few goals and it all will be really positive.

That was the plan, and the only thing that went wrong with it was when I got injured - although the news we got about my baby son George later that year meant we almost didn't go to Japan at all.

Sometimes things happen very quickly in football, and in life.

In November 1991, I scored the goal against Poland that sent England to Euro 92 and then said I would be retiring from international football after that tournament. The following week, Tottenham announced I would be leaving them in the summer of 1992 as well.

I was getting my wish to bow out of English football at the top and was moving to Japan for a transfer fee of just under £1m, in time for the start of the J-League's launch season in May 1993.

It was all official, and very exciting. Then, only a few days later, everything changed.

We were told that George, who was just a few weeks old, had acute myeloid leukaemia. He'd had a problem with a few lumps and at first the doctors thought it was a skin complaint. In fact he was seriously ill with an extremely rare condition and did not leave Great Ormond Street Hospital for the next seven months.

Football, and everything else, was suddenly on hold, and it was a massively tough period for myself and my wife Michelle. George needed five solid courses of chemotherapy and a couple of times we were told that he wouldn't make it through the night.

We didn't even think about Japan for a long time. George was the only thing that mattered and, eventually, he began responding well to his treatment.

When it got to the end of the 1991-92 season and I said goodbye to Spurs, and to English football, George went into remission at around the same time. We had another eight months or so after that before the J-League started and it was during that period that he came home, but it was only probably at the beginning of 1993 that we were absolutely sure we would be able to go to Japan.

People often say prematurely that, when someone has finished their treatment for leukaemia, they are cured, but that's not the case - being in remission is very different. As the medics will tell you, you are not cured until you reach five years, post-treatment, without a relapse.

So, when we moved to Japan, George had to have tests every two or three weeks to make sure his blood count was where it should be. It was still a very concerning time but we knew the way they treat leukaemia is the same globally, and that his treatment over there would be first class.

We were very lucky in that he stayed in good health and made a full recovery. Still, I know that if George had been ill a bit earlier, when we were making the decision about going to Japan, we wouldn't have gone.

Equally, if he'd fallen ill six months later, in that period where we were just about to go, then we wouldn't have left the UK either.

But the fact we had this cushion of a few months, post-treatment, meant we had a chance to see how he got on. It gave me time to learn the language too, or at least try to pick up enough Japanese to get by.

When we arrived in Nagoya, which is around 160 miles south-west of Tokyo, in March 1993, I could tell a taxi where to go, or ring up and book a table in a restaurant and order a meal - but I couldn't sit down and have a proper conversation with someone. I'd found understanding it far more difficult than Spanish had been.

That didn't really affect things football-wise, because there were always translators around the team. Otherwise it would have been tricky, but what tends to happen in language anyway is that you learn most of the words you need for your particular walk of life, whatever job you are doing, so I picked up all the footballing very quickly.

A lot of them were quite anglicised anyway - offside is ofusaido, good save is naisukipa and good shot is naisushotto. You heard that last one all the time and it used to make me chuckle sometimes, because hearing it spoken in a Japanese manner was quite amusing.

There were a few players at Grampus Eight who spoke excellent English too, like our Dutch keeper Dido Havenaar, who was a lovely guy and became a good friend. But, apart from a few Brazilians, there were not many other foreign players at any of the teams.

That was because the Japanese had learned from what happened in the United States and Canada the first time they tried to launch a professional league in the 1970s, when the North American Soccer League was overwhelmed by imported stars and only lasted a few years before folding.

Instead, Japan only picked a few big-name players - myself, Brazil legend Zico and 's World Cup-winning midfielder Pierre Littbarski - to sign up and publicise it, which was very sensible. Planning everything meticulously is seen as a Japanese trait, and they did that with everything around the J-League too.

They started off fairly small, with only 10 teams in that first season, but the model for marketing and fan engagement was based on established American sports like baseball and American football. They did all of that in a big way because they knew if football was going to catch on then it had to be as entertaining as possible.

So, the emphasis was on fun, with face-paint, huge flags, fireworks and loud music before games plus stacks of merchandise and team mascots - we had Grampus-kun the dolphin, one of the symbols of the city of Nagoya that the team was named after.

It was all very noisy and colourful and nothing like anything I'd seen before, and the way the fans behaved was really refreshing too. Everyone was always extremely excited but they were all respectful and positive, and there was none of the abuse you might get as a player at an away ground in England.

Instead, the atmosphere was more like going to an England schoolboy international, with mainly young people in the crowd, lots of female fans - which was great to see - and screaming. Lots and lots of screaming.

The screaming didn't just happen at games, either. In fact, we were mobbed everywhere we went. It was crazy, really. I always signed as many autographs as I could when I was a player anyway but there was much more demand in Japan.

Again, they were well prepared. I the fans always carried white boards for you to sign your name on, and they always had a marker pen too.

The way they were marketing the J-League meant I also did lots of Japanese TV commercials, which were fun. Whether they were for cars, banks, soft drinks or anything else, I think every single advert I did involved an overhead kick, which they seemed to be obsessed with at the time. I suspect it's moved on a bit since then, but there are probably a few Japanese people who grew up wrongly thinking that was my signature finish.

Everywhere you went, the game was booming and the level of interest was incredible, especially when you consider how tiny it had been in Japan even just before the J-League started. Baseball was the big thing, but football was also behind rugby and all sorts of their own sports, like sumo wrestling, in of popularity.

Their mission had been to change that and, because it was a completely new sport, they were able to innovate to cater for their target audience, which was people under 30. For example, they introduced sudden-death extra time and penalty shootouts to decide J-League matches.

Draws are part of our game, so for me that part was a bit strange, but I understand why they did it and, overall, everything they tried seemed to work. Every game was completely sold out, including our first one, which was away at Zico's team, Kashima Antlers.

We weren't a very good side, which became more and more apparent as the season went on, but that was probably the worst game I played in and it was certainly the most one-sided. Zico had just turned 40 but he was absolutely unbelievable that day, with a brilliant hat-trick including a superb free-kick into the top corner.

They absolutely hammered us and I don't think I got a single chance in front of goal, which was annoying to say the least. That lack of service continued to be a problem and I only scored one goal in my first six games, but far worse was to come.

I had gone there to promote the league as much as to play in it, which was just as well considering what happened.

I'd first injured the big toe on my right foot playing for Spurs halfway through my final season in England. It was towards the end of the second leg of a European tie, we were comfortably ahead on aggregate and I'd been playing a lot of games for club and country so I'd asked Peter Shreeves to take me off for a rest.

He kept saying "give me two more minutes" and that turned into five minutes, and then 10. A ball was played through and I thought I could just nick it ahead of the keeper, and I did… but, as I slid out, his foot came through and crushed my toe.

I played for the rest of that season, in constant agony I have to say, and on pain killers to get me through it. Then I had an operation in the October before I headed out to Japan. It didn't improve things much but I was able to trundle along in training and get through matches - I played the first few games of the J-League season.

But I was starting to get shooting pain in the toe next to it, which felt weird. I mentioned it to the club doctors and they did some X-rays but they said they couldn't see anything. They just said it might be a damaged tendon or something, and that they would give me a little injection to play.

So, for the next game I had a pain-killing injection in it and I was fine for about 40 minutes or so but then my entire right foot just kind of went into spasm. There was no pain but it clenched up, like a claw.

It was the weirdest sensation I'd ever had but I made it through to half-time and I was sitting in the dressing room thinking: "What the hell is this about">