“If they don’t do things right, it will be the same as in the past.”

Over coffee in Tokyo recently, Suzuki recalled those dark days. In the 1990s, some players had to borrow money to travel abroad with the national team. Only a few hundred fans attended women’s games, and the teams did not sell tickets — because if they did, stadium owners would charge higher rent. Japan’s economic funk led companies to disband their teams, including the brokerage Nikko Shoken, which in 1998 stopped financing the Dream Ladies, which had won three straight league titles. A top executive from the company went to the clubhouse to tell the players, who tearfully pleaded with him to reconsider.

Suzuki, who also coached that Nikko Shoken team, remembers the frustration that his players felt. The men’s J-League was in the spotlight and growing, but women’s soccer was an afterthought.

“When the J-League started, some of my players said, ‘Why was I born a girl?’ ” Suzuki recalled. “We were working so hard, but it still wasn’t enough.”

The fear of returning to obscurity is a big motivation for Japan, which is trying to become the first women’s team to hold the World Cup and Olympic titles simultaneously. For older stars like Homare Sawa, the world’s top female player in 2011, the Olympics could be a happy swan song. For younger players, the Olympics are a chance to show that their World Cup victory was not a fluke.

“I think the U.S. doesn’t particularly think they lost to us yet, so we have to win a gold medal at the London Olympics,” said Aya Miyama, who replaced Sawa as captain of the national team.