Despite Kawata's success at Stanford, he still harbors a larger goal.
"I still have unfinished business," Kawata said. "We have no Japanese NFL player."
According to Kawata, in order to truly raise the profile of football in Japan, more of his countrymen need to play at the highest levels in America.
"How do we make this sport better and more popular?" Kawata asked. "I realized that we need to have the Ichiro of football. Or the Hideo Nomo of football."
That will be hard to do in Japan. Facilities are lagging, and baseball, soccer and sumo wrestling reign supreme in terms of sporting popularity.
American coaches rave about the Japanese zeal for the sport they witnessed on their tours of the country. "You're speaking in a big auditorium with 200 Japanese coaches," Bloomgren said. "TK is interpreting every sentence I say, and they're just hanging on every word. But passion alone can't maximize the potential of young players.
"The Japanese college football program is not good enough to make Ichiro," Kawata said. "So I have an answer: The best way is 'Made in USA.'"
If Kawata can bring a Japanese football prospect to the United States at a young age, he figures that immersion in the competitive American system can develop the country's first NFL player. There are two Japanese natives in college football right now: Hawaii running back Genta Ito and UCLA offensive lineman Gyo Shojima, who earned a preferred walk-on spot with the Bruins.
"The next step is to get a scholarship kid from Japan," Kawata said.
Although it might not be readily apparent on the surface level, core football tenets might already be entrenched in Japanese sporting culture.
"We [the Japanese] always try to make excuses about size," Kawata said. "But we have sumo wrestlers."
Bloomgren noted the similarities between sumo and football run blocking after visiting practices for both while in Japan.
"We got to talking about all the things with the get-off in sumo and how everything is exactly the same as what we teach on the drive block," Bloomgren said. "Everything from hit low, stay low, to try to get two steps in the ground before contact, eyes in the right place, great hands and finish. ... There's just no outside zone in sumo. It's head-to-head without a helmet on every play."
There's a mentality of physical toughness that Kawata hopes can translate almost directly to the gridiron. Eventually, he wants to be a college offensive line coach, preferably one hired by one of his many former colleagues who have gone on to become head coaches.
"That would make having a Japanese scholarship football player easier," Kawata said.
Sanford believes that Kawata, who is currently taking night classes at the University of San Francisco as he works toward a master's degree in sports management, will one day get that opportunity.
"He's getting better with the language, and that's the component that slowed him down," Sanford said. "Because you have to run a room of guys, so you're going to spend countless hours in a room talking. But TK's football knowledge is remarkable."