"We were too weak in all elements; we couldn't take courage from nothing. If we made a good serve, we'd then make a mistake in our serve; when they go to serve, we made a good reception, then they make an ace. Every time, we were unable to find our rhythm. In the fourth set, I started to change the players to see what was going on, but I already understood we didn't have the power to change anything."

Germany captain Margareta Kozuch - "First of all congratulations to the Japan team. They played really good tonight and knew how to put us in trouble. In the beginning, we started really well and aggressive, but in the second set Japan served really good and we had a little bit of a problem. By the end of the match we had a lot of problems."

(How about No. 16 Sakoda?) "I think she did really good. She made a lot of good actions and put us in trouble. But it's also our problem to change our tactics and do better. I'm sure next time we will do better, but tonight she did really well and got a lot of points." 

Japan coach Masayoshi Manabe - "It was our first game and the players were nervous. I brought in (Saori) Sakoda for (Yukiko) Ebata and she did really well. Ebata was nervous at the start, so I changed to Sakoda. We also served very well today."

"We tried to put a lot of variation in the way we attacked and (Mai) Yamaguchi and (Ai) Yamamoto are good at fast attacks."

Japan captain Erika Araki - "It was our first match and I'm really happy because we did really well. I want to do even better tomorrow because that match (against Poland) is even more important. We haven't won a match aaginst Poland, so I really want to win tomorrow. They are tall and serve well, so we want to come up with a strategy to deal with that."

Japan No. 7 Mai Yamaguchi - "We made a lot of mistakes early on, but after the second set we started doing the things we needed to do and played much better."

(Re. good spiking performance today) "I think part of the reason is that I only had one blocker in front of me most of the time."

Japan No. 5 Ai Yamamoto - "We made many errors in the first set, but did much better after that."