And when you are done looking at this site for the Scots input on football world-wide, here are two more.
For those who literally want to trace on the ground the local development of Scots and Scottish football in our own and other countries there is the newly available and ever-expanding site of:
The Scots Football Historians' Group
And on Scottish sports history in general but inevitably including fitba', see Andy Mitchell's inestimable:
But even before football had begun to take root in Latin America it was being played in Asia. In Burma it arrived in 1879, when George Scott is said to have organised the country’s first game. But it is the story of football in Japan that has the strangest twist, with lemonade at its heart. In 1869 Alexander Cameron Sim had arrived in the Japanese open port of Nagasaki. By “open port” is meant a place where foreigners were allowed to settle after the decade of Bakumatsu, ‘the lowering of the curtain’, the end of Japanese isolation.
Cameron Sim had been born in 1840 on the Highland fringes in Aberlour on Speyside and trained in London as a pharmacist. It was as such that he was working in Japan, just ten years after the country started slowly to open itself up to the West. In 1870, by then aged thirty, Cameron Sim still moved to Kobe, to its three-hundred-strong, foreign settlement, where after a short period working for another company he started his own, A.C. Sim Shokai, specialising in the import of medicines and medical supplies. And Kobe seems to have suited him. He remained there and in 1884 branched out, introducing a lemonade drink called “Marbu Soda”, so called because of the ‘marbu’, the marble, used as a stopper in the bottles, in which the drink was sold. Marbu Soda became very popular, not just with the foreign community but also with the Japanese, after it achieved a reputation for prevention of disease, specifically cholera. That reputation was completely unjustified and ultimately somewhat ironic, as Cameron Sim was to die in 1890 in Kobe a victim not of cholera but of typhus. He is buried there, in the Foreigners’ Cemetery, long outlived by the drink. It, now called Ramune, ‘Lemonade’ as said by a Japanese, is still very popular, sold throughout Japan and to the Japanese community worldwide, and still with its iconic bottle design and marble pebble cap.
However, Sim was also a keen sportsman, said to be “an all-round athlete”. Whether he was a footballer or not is unclear. Had he trained in Scotland it is unlikely. The game only really arrived North of the Border after he was already thousands of miles to the East. But having trained in London it is possible. In 1863 when Association football came into being he was twenty-three with the possibility, if slim, he became involved. However, he was clearly an inveterate organiser. Already in 1870, very shortly after his arrival in Kobe he was one of the instigators of the Kobe Regatta and Athletic Club. It like Ramune is still there.
The club’s founding group, thirty-one in all, had in response to a newspaper advertisement, met at the city’s Oriental Hotel on 20th September. A committee was formed including Cameron Sim himself with an initial emphasis on then fashionable rowing, in reality Sim's sport of choice. Within a short time a boathouse and gym were constructed and a regatta followed with Cameron Sim as starter and umpire.
The concept of the regatta was then expanded, Kobe Rowing Club competing against its Yokohama equivalent and the Nippon Rowing Club. Plans were also put into place for the construction of an area and facilities for athletics, finished in 1877. By then football had already made a first tentative appearance in Japan. In 1873 the 30 year-old Lt. Cmdr. Archibald Lucius Douglas had arrived in Tokyo. He commanded the Royal Navy’s Mission to Japan. He and his men played a form of football together and taught their Japanese pupils the game.
However, in spite of his very Scottish name, Douglas, who would become an admiral, was born in Canada and the ad-hoc games were neither recognised as “official” nor is it clear, to what rules they were played. Indeed, given the date it seems unlikely it was the association variety. In fact, it would be another fifteen years before it would officially come to Japan. And the game in question, played on February 18th 1888, earlier than in much of Europe and all of South America, would be between Cameron Sim’s Kobe Rowing and Athletic Club and the Yokohama Country and Athletic Club with Kobe the winners, quite possibly with him watching on.