Lee Cataluna: Throw A Flag On This UH Football Marketing Ploy
The team is doing well. The students are having fun. Does it always have to be about making money?
October 19, 2025 · 6 min read
About the Author
Something unusual is happening in Mānoa.
The University of Hawaiʻi football team is winning.
Not only that, their games are really fun to watch.
Freshman quarterback Micah Alejado, who is 5 feet,10 inches tall and looks like he’s still in high school, has a remarkably accurate left arm and plays with a kind of happiness that is endearing. Wide receiver Pofele Ashlock has sticky hands and bounces around the field like his legs are made of rubber.
The team is full of talent, but there’s also a soulfulness to this year’s crew. After last week’s drubbing of Utah State, the entire Hawaiʻi team joined with the entire Utah team on the field to kneel together in prayer. In this current era of rancor and discord, it was stunning to see a moment of grace and unity among opponents.
And then there’s Hawaiʻi’s kicker, Kansei Matsuzawa, who is very good at his very specialized job. He has a great backstory about growing up in Japan playing soccer and teaching himself how to kick a football by watching YouTube videos, and he speaks earnestly about his lofty goal of playing in the NFL.
You gotta love a story like that.
However, you don’t have to exploit it.
There is a difference between supporting talent and commodifying it. Hawaiʻi leaders often don’t know where that line is, and it ends up feeling icky.
At the urging of meddlesome state lawmakers, Matsuzawa was given a jersey to wear that has his name on the back spelled out in kanji rather than in the English alphabet like every other player on the team. On the one hand, it was cute. On the other hand, it kind of exotifies him.
Matsuzawa spoke to reporters ahead of the team’s trip to play Colorado State on Saturday, and was asked how it makes him feel to have his last name in his “native language instead of in English” on his jersey.
Matsuzawa chuckled like he knows to play the game around the game of football, where you have to say what you’re told to say to make sponsors, coaches and certain Japanophiles in the Legislature happy.
But first, maybe because he’s a 26-year-old senior and not a nervous freshman, he had the guts to give a candid answer:
“Honestly, I don’t feel any difference. You know, like, I’m a player and it doesn’t matter kanji or English. I’d rather have English, honestly, because it’s kind of weird, little bit.”
It’s probably very weird to be made to wear a jersey that is different from everybody else on the team in a team sport like football; to be singled out and “othered” when all you want to do is focus on the role you play to help the team succeed.
Here’s a guy who is working so hard to learn English — he gets better by leaps and bounds each successive interview after every glorious win this season — and somebody decides the school can make money off him by making him a special Japanese jersey and selling it to fans. Yikes.
The fascination with this football player’s race borders on a special brand of racism, the fetishizing kind, the kind that says, “Wow! Imagine someone who ISN’T from here doing something that we can do! That’s amazing!”
Yuck.
Obviously, he is an amazing player. And obviously he’s not from here. But he should be the one who gets to say how he wants his name written on the back of his jersey. His kuleana is to help UH win games and follow his own career path, not carry on his back Hawai‘i’s 1980s-era obsessive dream of Japanese money saving Hawaiʻi’s economy.
In that interview this week, Matsuzawa course-corrected and answered the question the way he was supposed to:
“But it’s so nice to, uh, represent Japan and the State of Hawaiʻi as a Rainbow Warrior football team. Yeah, I want, uh, there’s a lot of Japanese in Hawaiʻi, like Japanese Americans, so I want everyone to come and support us and we only have, like, three home games and yeah, I want everyone to show up at the stadium. Yup.”
Just this week, it was announced that the rest of the UH home games this season will be televised in Japan. Like maybe this will bring Japanese tourists back to Hawaiʻi to stay in all the big hotels the Japanese built 40 years ago.
To be sure, Matsuzawa does not look like he is suffering by being exploited. He’s joking about how weird it all is and plugging that pigskin up and over the goalposts time and time again.
The University of Hawaiʻi has a solid football team this year, coached by a Native Hawaiian UH alum who came home for his dream job. The games fit nicely into the T.C. Ching arena on campus, where students can just walk down from the dorms to support the team and where TV cameras catch gorgeous pink skies as the sun sets and Matsuzawaʻs kicks sail neatly through the uprights. The quarterback has a great arm on him. The back-up quarterback has been stellar. There’s a bouyancy to their play on the field.
Can we just rejoice in the football? Can it just be about student athletes playing the game and not about, “Ooh, how can we make money off these guys?”
Because right now, a big lesson Matsuzawa seems to be learning in college is that to play football, you have to play the game where someone else tells you what youʻre to be called and how you are to be marketed.
Sign up for our FREE morning newsletter and face each day more informed.
Read this next:
About the Author