Jun Endo looks at her friends and teammates, Hannah Stambaugh and Miyabi Moriya. “Scary, so nice,” she laughs, pointing at Stambaugh and then Moriya—those were her impressions of the two when she first met them as a middle schooler at the Japan Football Association (JFA) Academy.
They’re sitting in a semicircle in the media room at the Angel City performance center, reflecting on a friendship that goes back almost 15 years—back to their youth soccer days, and to a disaster that profoundly affected the sport in Japan at all levels.
On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake struck the Tōhoku region in northern Honshu, Japan. It was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in that country, and the fourth most powerful ever recorded worldwide. All told, the earthquake and subsequent tsunami killed more than 19,000 people and caused $360 billion in damage—the costliest natural disaster in history.
The JFA Academy—where about half the senior women’s national team played their youth soccer, including Endo, Moriya, and Stambaugh—was located in Fukushima, roughly 100 miles away from the epicenter. Modeled on INF Clairefontaine, the training center that produces most elite French players, the academy is a training center for top Japanese middle and high school-age soccer players, who live and train there and attend local public schools.
Miyabi—the oldest of the Angel City trio at 28—was in her dorm room at the academy when the earthquake hit. She had overslept that day. “I woke up and was rushing to put my shoes on when the shaking started,” she says through translator Saki Watanabe. There had been a handful of small quakes in the preceding days; it took a moment for her to realize this was something else.
“An upperclassman who happened to be there said, ‘come on, let’s go outside,’ and the whole world was shaking and rocking,” she remembers. “We got down on the ground, but even the ground started to crack. I thought I was going to die.”
After six minutes, the shaking stopped. Miyabi later found out that a second-floor classroom had collapsed. It was sheer luck that no one had been inside the building.
Miyabi and her classmates spent two uncomfortable nights sleeping in the gym before buses arrived to evacuate them to Tokyo. From there, everyone went home to their families, having no idea what the future held for the academy; no one knew of another training facility that could accommodate its 150-odd students. Fortuitously, though, there happened to be a site in Shizuoka, a couple hours southwest of Tokyo. The Japanese school year runs from April through February, and the academy was able to start the new school year on time after the March break.
That was the year Stambaugh started. She’d had her tryout in Fukushima, but didn’t start at the academy until they’d moved to Shizuoka. For Stambaugh, who grew up in the Tokyo area and was there when the earthquake hit, the disaster felt distant. “I knew it was serious, obviously,” she says, “but I was seeing it through a screen, on TV, so it felt unreal, almost like something that was happening in a movie.”
It wasn’t until she arrived at the academy that she started to understand exactly what had happened. “When I got to Shizuoka, the first thing I noticed was how absolutely exhausted and shell-shocked everyone was,” she remembers. “I would hear adults talking about it, and gradually it sank in how impactful the disaster was.”
The people of Shizuoka rallied around the young soccer players, hosting a welcome party with mochi pounding for them—a small example of the spirit of togetherness and unity that took hold across the country in the aftermath of the disaster.
Soccer brought the whole country together that summer, when the Women’s National Team made an impossible run in the 2011 World Cup. Having confirmed they would participate at the last minute, the Nadeshiko beat their German hosts, the reigning champions, in the semifinal, to punch their ticket to the final against the USA—a team they had a 0–22–3 (W–L–D) record against. They drew the top-ranked USA 2–2 and won on penalties. Their unlikely victory galvanized the nation and showed young Japanese players what was possible.
"Watching these players, who experienced the same earthquake, the same struggles, play in the World Cup, made me think, I can do this too," Endo told Gwendolyn Oxenham in 2023.
Endo, who is two years Stambaugh’s junior, grew up in Shirakawa, Fukushima Prefecture. She was changing clothes for gym class when the quake started. The meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant released radioactive particles over a wide area, prompting safety regulations that kept kids from playing outside. As Oxenham writes, being forced to play inside, sometimes in cramped spaces like hallways, honed her technical skills and shaped her as a player.
Adapting to a highly regimented life at the academy was difficult for Endo, and she often felt like quitting. Not long after she arrived at age 12, she was asked to play up an age group, against the high schoolers. She really was afraid of Stambaugh: at 5’9, the goalkeeper was one of the tallest athletes there, and Endo found her short hair intimidating. But over the course of Endo’s time there, they ended up becoming friends—and in 2018, both played key roles in Japan’s win at the U-20 World Cup.
The trio arrived in LA in reverse order: Endo in 2022, then Stambaugh two years later, then Miyabi this season.
Endo says her first year at Angel City was relatively easy. She scored the game-winner in the club’s first-ever regular-season game, and the fans embraced her immediately. Since it was the team’s first year in existence, she felt less pressure to perform than she would later. The language barrier, though present, felt manageable. “To me, it felt very free,” she remembers. “Everyone was just expressing themselves on the field.”
In year two, that changed. The team was forming more of an identity, and the pressure to achieve something on the field was ratcheting up. She’d learned quite a bit of English, but still struggled to communicate complex ideas and emotions, and often felt that she was holding things in.
Everything got easier when Stambaugh arrived. “When Hannah came, I was able to say whatever I wanted in my native language,” Endo says. “Whereas before I was holding everything in, now I feel like letting it all out. I feel a lot more clarity in my mind and my emotions.” Then she turns to Stambaugh and adds, “thank you for coming.”
Stambaugh had her own struggles in her first year at Angel City. Endo already being here was helpful, but goalkeepers do most of their training apart from the rest of the team, and no one else in the goalkeeping corps spoke Japanese. On top of that, as the only player who can see the entire game, communicating with the back line is one of the keeper’s most important roles—something the language barrier complicated greatly for Stambaugh. “I was always wondering, ‘should I say this?’” she says. “‘Am I saying it right? Are they understanding what I'm saying?’”
Through that experience, though, Stambaugh’s confidence has grown. Last year, she told AngelCity.com that when she was struggling, she sometimes thought about a Japanese word, taihen, meaning “challenging,” whose characters—大変—mean “big” and “change” individually. It’s a connection that could apply equally to the group’s academy years or to their move to the US. Difficulty both forces us to grow as individuals and forges friendships.
As for Miyabi, with two old friends already here, transition to life in LA has been easy.
“The experience really brought us together,” she remembers of the weeks in Shizuoka after the earthquake. “I’m so grateful for the support we got in that moment, and now I just want to pay it back.”
