With the art of Karate at a crossroads in its home country of Japan and the sport featuring in the Olympic Games for the first time at Tokyo 2020, the Japan Karate Federation leveraged the Games by launching a campaign to drive domestic participation.
‘Step Into The Light’ launched well ahead of the Games and featured six of the best Japanese Karate stars in Kiyou Shimizu, Ryo Kiyuna, Ryutaro Araga, Ken Nishimura, Ayumi Uekusa and Miho Miyahara, plus singer Miliyah Kato.
Created by agency Wieden+Kennedy Japan and featuring Kato’s song ‘The Fate’ (which has been adopted as the federation’s official support anthem), the film features footage of Japanese athletes competing throughout their careers while showing the difficulties as well as the triumphs.
The spot, which was helmed by Director Xavier Tera and produced by Twin Brains Films, set out to shine a light on the athletes and their training regimes. The film’s creative includes footage from past athlete’s matches through their careers and a series of visual metaphors to represent the challenging journey they’ve taken to arrive at the biggest stage of all – the Olympics – as they finally step into the light from the darkness of years of training and anonymity.
“I feel any sounds can be incorporated into music, so I sampled the sound of athletes’ movements to take in the power of their souls into the song,” explained singer Kator. “It was a great honour to be able to work with the athletes representing our country and to be able to make the song.”
Comment:
With Tokyo hosting the first Olympic Games to ever feature Karate, there was plenty of pressure on the host nation’s competitors to perform and while it was the European nations (Bulgaria, France and Spain) who picked up the gold medals, Japan’s Kiyou Shimizu did win silver.
However, there remain questions as to whether the sport will remain part of the Olympic programme.
Nevertheless, despite only taking one medal from its own sport of Karate, the home nation won more golds and total medals than ever before and finished an impressive third on the medal league table behind the USA and China.
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.