Meet the Jewish player on Japan’s national lacrosse team

When Kinori Sugihara Rosnow helped his Japanese national team clinch sixth place in the World Lacrosse Championship in 2018 by winning a crucial face-off, the game meant more to him than just a tally in the win column.

The match was held in the Israeli coastal city of Netanya, and Japan’s victory was over Israel, for Rosnow, a Jewish Japanese-American descendant of Holocaust survivors, that filled the moment with significance.

“Playing in this game was like the collision of my two worlds,” Rosnow, now 29, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Because I have my dad’s Jewish heritage and my mom, she’s Japanese, and we were in this game, and there was this moment. We were just like, this is crazy. This is the combination of everything.”

Rosnow still plays for Japan and may face Israel again this month, as both countries’ teams are set to play in the 2024 World Lacrosse Box Championships in Utica, New York, an indoor tournament, beginning Friday. Israel has become a powerhouse in the sport, ranked No. 5 in men’s box lacrosse, while Japan is unranked in that sport (though is No. 5 in men’s field lacrosse).

“My mom is very interested in how my sister and I feel — do we feel more one or the other?” Rosnow said, referring to his Jewish and Japanese identities. “It’s not a half-and-half thing. It’s easier to describe to people that we’re half this, half that because of our parents, but really, we feel fully both.”

Mixed-Heritage

Rosnow, a software engineer who lives outside Philadelphia, was born in Brookline, Massachusetts to a Jewish father, Harley Rosnow, and a non-Jewish Japanese mother, Yuriko Sugihara. He carries his blended heritage in his first name, which means “my harp” in Hebrew and can be written in Japanese characters that convey brilliance and charity, according to an essay by his father.

The family moved to Kirkland, Washington, when Kinori was 1 year old, and he and his sister Rina both formally converted to Judaism as infants. Rosnow said his family celebrated Shabbat and High Holidays growing up, sometimes spending holidays with his grandparents, and he had a bar mitzvah.

“We were intentional about it from the beginning, we knew we had a choice,” Harley Rosnow told JTA. “We could raise them one way or the other way, or nothing, or both or something else.”

The elder Rosnow, who worked for Microsoft for 27 years, said he felt it was important for his children to have a religious foundation. He said his family joined a Reform synagogue because it “would accept Yuriko the way she was, and honor her for raising Jewish kids” in a way Conservative synagogues they attended had not.

Harley Rosnow’s parents both survived the Holocaust. His father and two aunts were members of the partisan group led by the Bielski brothers who fought the Nazis in what is now Belarus, and who were depicted in the 2008 Oscar-nominated film “Defiance.”

Born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1932, his mother fled with her family to British Mandate Palestine in 1936, shortly after the antisemitic Nuremberg Laws were passed. They lived in the northern coastal city of Nahariya until 1948, when the family moved to Italy. They eventually settled in San Francisco.

Kinori Rosnow has cultivated both his Jewish and his Japanese identity, which involved a serious time commitment growing up. After a full school week, he would head to Japanese school on Saturdays — and then Hebrew school on Sundays. (Rosnow is not related to Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat who saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, earning the moniker “Japanese Schindler.” Though Harley Rosnow said, “That would be quite the story.”)

Rosnow discovered lacrosse in sixth grade but he didn’t learn the fundamentals of the game — such as passing and catching — until high school.

“For the first two years of playing, it felt like a bunch of kids who went out to a field with sticks and had fun with their pads and whacked each other,” he said. “Most of us didn’t really know what we were doing.”

In 10th grade, Rosnow said he experienced a “defining moment” that solidified his dedication to the sport. During an early season game his team was losing, Rosnow remembers sitting on the bench in the rain, disheartened that he wasn’t receiving any playing time. He remembers what his parents said to him after the game.

“We have a rule that you have to finish a season of whatever you do, whatever we commit to doing,” Rosnow recounted them saying. “We paid for the registration. You need to finish the season. But we’re going to forgo that rule, and you’re allowed to quit this now.”

His response: “And I said, ‘No, I don’t want to do that. I’m going to become so good that they have to play me.’”

He had a knack for the sport — describing himself as a “Swiss army knife player” because he could take on multiple roles on the field — and was recruited to play in Division III at Oberlin College in Ohio. His big break came at the start of his sophomore year, when Oberlin’s lead face-off player transferred schools, leaving an opening that Rosnow would ultimately fill.

Face-offs, where two players battle at midfield for control of the ball, are a crucial component of lacrosse games. That season, he won 206 out of 288 face-off attempts — a percentage that ranked third in his conference. He was named team captain as a senior.

Rosnow had always dreamed of playing for the Japanese national team and learned that his chances would improve if he moved to Japan. He got an internship there during the summer before his senior year of college and moved back full-time after graduating in 2017. He tried out for the national team in December 2017 and officially made it shortly before the 2018 tournament.

Rosnow returned to the United States after the tournament and tried out for the Denver Outlaws, a professional team in what was then Major League Lacrosse. He made the practice squad. But an injury in 2019 and the pandemic in 2020 derailed his progress, and Rosnow found himself without a team when the MLL merged with the Premier Lacrosse League in 2021.

He kept training, and when travel reopened in 2022, Rosnow went back to Japan, where he made the team in sixes, a fast-paced version of lacrosse that will be played in the Olympics for the first time in 2028.

He played with Japan in the 2022 World Games in Birmingham, Alabama, where the country again competed against Israel and won a bronze medal.

Rosnow said he has been fortunate not to face any antisemitism as a Jewish lacrosse player, though he said the intensity of his athletic schedule can make involvement in Jewish life difficult. He has enjoyed the camaraderie that has come with meeting other Jewish athletes, including on Israel’s national teams.

But Rosnow said he has felt the ripple effects of the Israel-Hamas war, and the corresponding spike in antisemitism, off the lacrosse field.

“I’d say the main shift has been, and I hate to say it, it’s been about how comfortable I feel being open about my heritage,” Rosnow said. “There have been times where I’m in moments, in conversations and meeting people randomly, that I’m like, maybe I shouldn’t divulge all of who I am. That really makes me sad.”

With the prospect that he could soon play against Israel again, Rosnow recalled that the 2018 match felt like a moment when he was able to honor his full heritage. Winning the key face-off in that game didn’t hurt, either.

“I just felt like I was heard,” Rosnow said. “In that moment as I’m running off, I started tearing up, because I think that that play for me was enough to say thank you.”