Now it can be told that Hawai'i's influence upon world events extends far beyond teaching Iraqis the shaka sign, introducing the hula to Germany and showing Australians how to surf. Did you know that the first football players in Japan were from Hawai'i?

The subject of who brought football to Japan arose recently when sports-minded Japanese decided to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the first big football game in the Land of the Rising Sun. Asahi Sports, the Sports Illustrated of Japan, came out with a big story about it.

Picture the University of Southern California against the Japan All Stars in 1935. But the Japan All Stars weren't from Japan. Most of them were Japanese-Americans from Hawai'i going to college in Japan.

We have it on no less an authority than Tokyo cinemaphotographer Hideaki Onuma, who spent a week in the Islands to locate the surviving gridiron pioneers. They are Yutaka Nii, Tomatsu Oomai, Masaru Sakamoto, Iwao Motoyama of Honolulu and Kazumasa Ikeda of Hilo.

They were students at Meiji University when U.S. Ambassador to Japan Joseph C. Grew got the idea to introduce football as a means of easing tension between the two nations that were heating up into a war.

Enthusiasm was so great that Hakizo Matsumoto, a professor at Meiji, started the American Football Society. It was easy to recruit members for the society but finding football players was more difficult. "Japanese were small," Onuma explained. Also, the complicated rules of football, American-style, light years apart from sumo, turned off some prospects.

Students from Hawai'i stepped forward. They already knew the rules and were eager to prove themselves to Japanese classmates.

Going to school in Japan was not easy, they discovered, because they were looked on as foreigners from America, not as Japanese.

All this was going on in 1934, Onuma said. The universities of Keio, Hosei, Nippon, Rikkyo and Meiji fielded teams and most of the players were from Hawai'i. In the following year, Southern California came to play an all-star team composed largely of Hawai'i players.

Records show that a huge crowd filled the stadium and that the Japan All Stars lost 85-6. Onuma said the university teams also played each other and attracted big attendance. Then World War II came along and football ended. The sport was revived in Japan after the war but few remember those pioneering days when nobody knew the rules except the boys from Hawai'i.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.