A former midfielder, Takakura joined Japan’s national team at age 15 and played in the inaugural Women’s World Cup in 1991 and the first Olympic women’s tournament in 1996. She succeeded at 5 feet 4 inches with an assured presence, tactical awareness and a technical flair that compensated for her lack of size.

It is a quality Takakura called “thinking soccer,” and it is what she preaches as coach. It means that Takakura wants to complement Japan’s well-honed possession style of short, triangular passing — sometimes compared to Barcelona’s tiki-taka brand — with a new freedom for players to express their individualism in a country, and a team, that more often has prized the collectivity of the group.

“I don’t want us to be really systematic,” Takakura said. “I want the players to be independent, to think for themselves, to play what is right in a specific situation.”

Takakura is the first woman to coach Japan’s national team, which has not generally received the same broad respect, financing and support that, say, the American team receives in a country where participation of women in sports is bolstered by the rule of law.

Infamously, after winning the 2011 World Cup and boosting the morale of a country devastated months earlier by the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, Japan’s women’s team had to fly coach to the 2012 London Olympics while the men’s team flew business class on the same jet. (The women won the silver medal in London, while the men finished fourth.)

There are only about 50,500 female players registered with the Japanese Football Association, compared with an estimated two million registered with the United States Soccer Federation. Many players in Japan’s women’s league, the L League, still are essentially semiprofessionals who support their careers by working in office jobs, shops and restaurants.

In Japan, too, there are fewer than 2,800 women among the approximately 81,200 coaches affiliated with the country’s soccer federation, including only 13 of the 34 who coach female players at the national training center.