The only Rugby World Cup venue in the Tohoku region, the Kamaishi Recovery Memorial Stadium in Kamaishi, Iwate Prefecture, will host its inaugural game with a pool-stage match between Fiji and Uruguay. Namibia and Canada are also scheduled to face off at the stadium in the pool stage.
A local volunteer group is helping to liven up World Cup activities and promote the community.
About 28,000 people from 386 organizations inside and outside the prefecture, including from schools and companies, have registered for the Iwate Kamaishi Rugby Cheering Squad volunteer group, for which the city and prefectural governments recruited people separately from official RWC volunteers. The cheering squad volunteers will clean up the area around the stadium and participate in tag rugby experience events. They will also act as guides in the city center on game days.
At the municipal Odaira Junior High School, one of the participating organizations, students take turns promoting the World Cup to passing vehicles on the national highway in front of the school on weekday mornings. "Some people wave and honk. I feel rewarded by contributing to the public relations effort," said a third-year student who is on the student council.
Third-grade students at Kamaishi Higashi Junior High School, a municipal school near the stadium, distributed leaflets in Ueno Park, Tokyo, in April during a school trip to the capital.
The squad includes 268 businesses, such as bars and hotels, that are recognized by the city government as supporting the events. They are providing menus of ingredients from the prefecture and have made guides in foreign languages.
A long-established ryotei restaurant has waitstaff serve foreign customers in kimono to give them a sense of Japanese culture, as well as explaining etiquette and how to eat certain dishes. "Kamaishi is known as a 'city of rugby' and 'iron town' but I want people to know that there is a restaurant culture too," said Takashi Kanazawa, managing director of the restaurant.
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