The Oriental Witches, Read as an Organization

The most watched sports broadcast in Japanese history is a volleyball match played by factory workers. On 23 October 1964 in Tokyo, Japan's women beat the Soviet Union 3-0 for Olympic gold, and NHK's broadcast drew a 66.8% household rating in the Kanto region, a record that still stands. Ten of the twelve players were employees of a textile mill in Kaizuka, Osaka. The team was Nichibo Kaizuka, known abroad as the Oriental Witches. It is usually told as a story about a brutal coach. I want to read it as an organization: where the people came from, how the training was designed, and when the team ended. The part that can't be copied today comes last.

The facts first

The coach, Hirofumi Daimatsu, was born in 1921 and joined Dai Nippon Spinning (later Nichibo, then Unitika) as an ordinary employee in 1941. He took over the Kaizuka mill's women's team in 1953 and switched it to six-a-side volleyball in 1958. At the 1960 World Championship in Brazil, a Japanese side built around Nichibo Kaizuka finished second to the Soviet Union. On a 1961 European tour the team won all 24 matches, and European papers started calling them the Oriental Witches. In October 1962 they beat the Soviets at the World Championship in Moscow. By the time Daimatsu stepped down the team had won 175 matches in a row.

The 1964 Olympic tournament was a round robin. Japan went 5-0, and the match against the USSR on 23 October finished 15-11, 15-8, 15-13. These numbers come from Japanese biographical dictionaries, the Japanese Olympic Committee and the Olympedia database. The only disagreement between sources is the year he resigned, 1964 or 1965.

Two less flattering facts belong in the same paragraph. At the time, a labor union called Daimatsu an enemy of women. Olympedia's entry says plainly that his training methods would today be considered athlete abuse.

Selection: from inside the company, watched for two years

None of the players were interviewed. They arrived by two routes.

One was an internal transfer. The captain, Masae Kasai, started at Nichibo's Ashikaga mill. Daimatsu, still a rank-and-file employee at Kaizuka, took the train to Ashikaga on Saturdays to watch practice and the night train back on Sundays. Only later were the players gathered in Kaizuka. The other route was recruiting from high schools into the company. Emiko Miyamoto came from Wakayama Commercial High School and spent her first two years mostly picking up balls. Kinuko Tanida was spotted at a joint practice while playing for Shitennoji High School and joined Nichibo.

The sociologist Masafumi Arata, in his book on the team, explains the company's side of the deal. Young women recruited in groups from rural areas left the mills within a few years. Textile companies promoted volleyball as cheap, healthy leisure that built friendships and kept turnover down. The team was part of labor management from day one. The factory came first, the team second.

Two features stand out. The pool was closed: the company's own workforce and a few friendly high schools. And the observation period was long: two years of ball-picking before a judgment. For a company today the first is a handicap and the second a luxury. One thing transfers anyway. As I wrote in The first five people in your Japan entity shape the next fifty, the first few hires set the standard. Here, the coach picked the first few personally, one at a time.

Training design: turning a height gap into a technique

Daimatsu invented the rolling receive and a set of swerving serves. His players were shorter than their European opponents. Balls they couldn't reach standing up became a single repeatable movement: dive, roll, get up. An individual physical disadvantage was rewritten as a technical problem the whole team could drill.

Time was designed too. In Arata's account the players got up at six, worked until about 3:30 in the afternoon, then practiced until around midnight. Yoshiko Kanda, who played in the 1964 final, told Daily Sports in 2017 that practice until midnight or one was normal, bedtime was often three, and before big matches training ran until five in the morning.

The same interview has details I find more useful than the word "demon." Players were allowed to drink water during practice, unusual then. Injuries and illness were managed through a hotline to a doctor the coach knew well. Once a month practice stopped early and the whole team went to Namba for a film and a restaurant dinner, with a taxi from the station back to the dormitory.

Intensity paired with pressure valves, as a package. The intensity was remembered. The valves mostly weren't.

The championship lineup took eleven years to build and ended the same year it won gold

Nichibo Kaizuka (Oriental Witches) timeline, 1953 to 1964. Japanese biographical dictionaries via Kotobank, Japanese Olympic Committee, Olympedia, Video Research, Daily Sports interview (2017)

1. 1953Daimatsu takes over the Kaizuka mill's women's teamA company employee coaching company employees
2. 1958Switch to six-a-sideRolling receive and swerving serves follow
3. 1960Second at the World Championship in BrazilA Japan side built on Nichibo loses to the USSR
4. 1961European tour, 24 wins from 24European press coins "Oriental Witches"
5. 1962World champions in MoscowBeat the USSR. Captain Masae Kasai is 29
6. Early 1963Everyone sent home to decide whether to continueThe coach makes "Tokyo or not" the players' own choice
7. 23 Oct 1964Olympic final, USSR beaten 3-0NHK broadcast, 66.8% household rating in Kanto
8. 1964Daimatsu steps down; five of six regulars retire175 straight wins under him. He enters the upper house in 1968

Built for one goal, dissolved the year it was reached. The least documented part of any org design is its end date.

Captain and coach: who held which decision

Daimatsu decided the method. No argument there. But there was one decision he deliberately gave away.

When they became world champions in 1962, captain Kasai was 29. For a woman at a textile mill in that era, that was past the age when you married and left the company. Kasai has said she seriously considered retiring and marrying. At New Year 1963, Daimatsu sent everyone home for several days and told each of them to decide whether to come back. Coming back meant two more years of the same training, aimed at Tokyo.

I think this is the smartest move in the whole case. Two more years of that regime, as an order from the coach, would not have survived to 1964. As the players' own choice, it did. People move on their own when the goal is theirs, which is the argument of Motivation is a design decision. After the Games, Kasai's complaint to the Prime Minister was that training had left her no time to find a husband. He introduced her to someone, and they married. It gets told as a funny story. I read it as the bill. Those two years were the players' choice, and they paid for it themselves.

When the team ended

After the gold medal, Daimatsu stepped down. Five of the six regulars retired. Kanda said she might have followed him for four more years if he had carried on, but with gold at the World Championship and the Olympics she felt that was enough, and has no regrets at all. According to Arata, many of the players married and left the sport within six months to a few years. Daimatsu coached in China in 1965 and was elected to the House of Councillors in 1968. The Nichibo Kaizuka club went on for many years, but the Oriental Witches as a lineup ended in 1964.

This is the organizational reading I care most about. The team had an end date from the start. First the 1962 World Championship, then extended to Tokyo in 1964. Selection, training and every player's tolerance were calculated backward from that date. When the date arrived, the team dissolved and nobody called it a failure.

Companies usually do the opposite. A team is assembled for one project. The project ends, the people stay, there is no new goal, and nobody wants to break it up. A year later the best few have left on their own and the rest are a department whose purpose no one can explain. In Muir's Super-Chicken Study the point was don't stack a team with stars. The addition here: decide when a team will be dissolved on the day you form it.

What can't be copied

The hours can't. Working until 3:30 and training until midnight is a schedule no company could put on paper under today's working-time rules. That has nothing to do with spirit.

The paternal authority can't. In its piece on the 2021 French documentary about the team, nippon.com notes that more than half the players had lost a parent in the war, and that Daimatsu was a father figure to them. That dependence belonged to one postwar decade. Today's employment relationship has no such foundation.

The exit can't. The exit then was marriage and resignation, and both the company and the women assumed they would leave within a few years. Employees today have no such default exit. Ask someone to burn for one goal for two years, and afterwards they still have to find the next job in the same labor market.

And the players' own view comes first. Kinuko Idogawa (Tanida during her playing days), interviewed in 2014, said her only image of Daimatsu was of someone very frightening. Asked whether she had admired him, she laughed and said it was nothing like that. That line deserves a hearing before any version of "a demon coach made a miracle."

What transfers is the design. Pick the first few people yourself. Rewrite individual disadvantages as team technique. Pair intensity with pressure valves. Leave the stay-or-go decision with the person. Set the dissolution date when you build the team.

One thing I haven't resolved. How much of this team's record was design, and how much was the fact that mill girls of that era had no other options? The two can't be separated, and the second no longer exists. So I'm willing to read this case for its structure. I'm not willing to learn its intensity from it.

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