Japan women's curling: Top things you need to know about Team Fujisawa

Everything changed for the Japan women's curling team in 2018 when Great Britain's Eve Muirhead missed a tricky shot for bronze in PyeongChang.

The Japanese, whose club team is Loco Solare, already had a devoted following, but winning a first Olympic medal took things to an entirely new level.

Led by skip Fujisawa Satsuki, the core four team members that make up Team Fujisawa are back at Beijing 2022 and are currently in third place with a 5-3 record and on the verge of another semi-final qualification. However, already-qualified Switzerland stand in their way, a team that denied them a World Championship title in 2016.

Ahead of that crucial match, we break down the top things you need to know about Japan's Team Fujisawa.

You can find the round robin standings here and the 16 possible permutations here.

In September 2021, during the play-offs against their fiercest Japanese rivals Fortius, Team Fujisawa needed three wins in a row to keep their Olympic dream alive.

And that's just what they did. "I was scared, very scared. But now I feel as if the spider’s thread has come down," Yoshida Chinami said, comparing the final moments of the fifth match and third consecutive victory to a famous Japanese novel, The Spider's Web, written in 1918 by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, which is used as a metaphor to say that heaven offers help in times of adversity.

To sum up just how popular the team was, and the attention they garnered back home in Japan during the 2018 Winter Olympics, a phrase they used throughout the competition in PyeongChang was chosen by Japanese publisher Jiyukokuminsha as one of the best words to sum up the year.

All of the team members hail from Hokkaido and were heard using the phrase 'sodane', which translates to