Meet the Jewish Player on Japan's National Lacrosse Team

When Kinori Sugihara Rosnow helped his Japanese national team secure sixth place at the 2018 World Lacrosse Championship by winning a crucial faceoff, 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 against Israel, which for Rosnow, a Japanese-American Jew descended from Holocaust survivors, gave the moment special significance.

“Playing that game was like my two worlds colliding,” Rosnow, now 29, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Because my dad is Jewish and my mom is Japanese, and we were playing that game, and there was this moment. We thought, this is crazy. It was the combination of all of that.”

Rosnow still plays for Japan and could face Israel again this month, as teams from both countries are scheduled to compete in the 2024 World Indoor Lacrosse Championships in Utica, New York, an indoor tournament that begins Friday. Israel has emerged as a powerhouse in the sport, ranked No. 5 in men’s indoor lacrosse, while Japan is unranked in the sport (though it is No. 5 in men’s field lacrosse).

“My mother is very interested in how my sister and I feel: Do we feel more one or the other?” Rosnow said, referring to her Jewish and Japanese identities. “It’s not a 50/50 issue. It’s easier to tell people that we’re half this and half that because of our parents, but in reality, we feel fully both.”

From left to right: Yuriko Sugihara, Kinori Rosnow, and Harley Rosnow. (credit: courtesy of Rosnow)

Mixed heritage

Rosnow, a software engineer who lives in suburban Philadelphia, was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, to a Jewish father, Harley Rosnow, and a non-Jewish Japanese mother, Yuriko Sugihara. His mixed heritage is reflected in his first name, which means “my harp” in Hebrew and can be written in Japanese characters that connote intelligence and charity, according to an essay by his father.

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

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

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

Harley Rosnow’s parents both survived the Holocaust. Her 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 were portrayed in the 2008 Oscar-nominated film “Defiance.”

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

Kinori Rosnow cultivated both his Jewish and Japanese identities, which required a considerable investment of time during his childhood. After a full week of school, he attended 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 him the nickname “the Japanese Schindler.” Harley Rosnow, however, has said, “That would be a hell of a story.”)

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

“For the first couple of years of playing, we felt like a bunch of kids going out on a field with sticks and messing around with our pads and hitting each other,” he said. “Most of us didn’t really know what we were doing.”

In Grade 10, Rosnow said he had a “defining moment” that solidified his dedication to the sport. During an early-season game that his team was losing, Rosnow remembers sitting on the bench in the rain, discouraged about not getting playing time. He remembers what his parents told him after the game.

“We have a rule that you have to finish a season, no matter what you do, no matter what we commit to doing,” Rosnow said. “We paid for the registration. You have to finish the season. But we’re going to waive that rule, and you have the right to stop now.”

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

He had a knack for the game—he described himself as a “Swiss Army knife player” because he could play multiple roles on the field—and was recruited to play Division III at Oberlin College in Ohio. His big break came early in his sophomore year, when Oberlin’s lead faceoff man transferred schools, leaving a vacancy that Rosnow would eventually fill.

Faceoffs, where two players compete in the middle of the field for control of the ball, are a crucial element of lacrosse games. That season, he won 206 of 288 faceoff 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 interned there during the summer before his senior year of college and returned full-time after graduating in 2017. He tried out for the national team in December 2017 and was officially selected 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 was left without a team when the MLL merged with the Premier Lacrosse League in 2021.

He continued to train, and when travel resumed in 2022, Rosnow returned to Japan, where he was part of the sixes team, a fast-paced version of lacrosse that will be played at the Olympics for the first time in 2028.

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

Rosnow said he was fortunate not to encounter anti-Semitism as a Jewish lacrosse player, although he said the intensity of his athletic program could make it difficult to get involved in Jewish life. He enjoyed the camaraderie that came from meeting other Jewish athletes, including on Israel’s national teams.

But Rosnow said he has felt the ripple effects of the war between Israel and Hamas, and the corresponding rise in anti-Semitism, off the lacrosse field.

“I would say the biggest change has been, and I hate to say it, feeling comfortable being open about my background,” Rosnow said. “There have been times when I’ve found myself in conversations and encounters with random people, where I’ve thought maybe I shouldn’t reveal everything about who I am. That makes me really sad.”

With the prospect of playing Israel again soon, Rosnow recalls that 2018 game felt like a moment where he was able to fully honor his legacy. Winning the key faceoff in that game didn’t hurt, either.

“I felt like I was heard,” Rosnow said. “At that point, as I was running away, I started crying, because I think that game was enough to say thank you.”