The shift in the rugby world’s axis was apparent in a suburban Tokyo park last weekend. There was nothing unusual about the dozen schoolboys letting off steam in the late afternoon sunshine. But for the first time any of their parents could remember, they had abandoned their regular kickabout to experiment with a squeaky clean oval ball.
Rugby mania is also seeping into offices and bars, sparking conversations among people who Japanese sporting convention dictates should be chewing over the recent climax to the professional baseball season.
But these are not ordinary times. Japan’s heroics at the Rugby World Cup – where they reached the quarter-finals before being beaten by South Africa – have helped to cultivate a new breed of rugby devotees, including this writer’s normally taciturn barber, who unbidden, brandished his clippers and offered an analysis of the Brave Blossoms’ decisive pool victory over Scotland – only the third rugby match he had ever watched.
More than 54 million people in Japan followed that game on TV – almost half the population and a record for any rugby match. And so the superlatives go on: more than a million people crammed into fanzones and a quarter of a million Japan replica jerseys have been sold. And all this in the first Rugby World Cup in Asia.
Rugby has arrived in Japan, but as England and South Africa prepare to play out its finale, some wonder if the fever will subside as soon as the last 30 men left standing walk off the pitch at the International Stadium Yokohama on Saturday night. That would be a frustrating rerun of the reaction four years ago after Japan’s shock win over South Africa in the Brighton Miracle, now eclipsed by victories this time around over Ireland and Scotland.
“Very little was done by the Japanese rugby authorities to encourage kids to take up rugby after the 2015 tournament,” says Manabu Matsuse, a sports journalist who has covered all nine World Cups. “Inevitably, the boom was short-lived.”
The sport will presumably be on the curriculum when Rugby School opens a sister institution in the Tokyo area in 2022. But what of Japan’s rugby-curious hoi polloi? Space is limited, especially in big cities, many school grounds are surfaced with dirt or concrete and there is a shortage of teachers qualified to coach. Critics of Japanese sports education have called for schools to do away with the bukatsu system – club activities that require children to choose one sport and stick with it for the entire academic year.
The country of 126 million people has 92,000 registered rugby players — there are 10 times as many footballers – and only 1.5% of teenagers play the sport, according to a 2017 white paper by the Sasakawa Sports Foundation. The 16-team domestic Top League features Japanese internationals and well-known foreign imports, but last season only five matches attracted more than 5,000 spectators.
There are signs, though, of an awakening at the Japan Rugby Football Union (JRFU) as it attempts to avoid a repeat of the lost opportunities of 2015. With the help of a tournament sponsor, it will hold a second round of rugby introduction days as soon as the World Cup has ended, with plans to hold open sessions for children and distribute rugby balls to more than 400 schools. In the first sessions earlier this year, an estimated 8,000 children picked up a rugby ball for the first time, according to the JRFU chairman, Shigetaka Mori.
World Rugby, the sport’s governing body, says its Impact Beyond 2019 legacy programme has added 1.8 million players across Asia, including more than a million in Japan, where almost 800,000 children have been introduced to tag rugby.
“Japanese rugby was built on a narrow base made up mainly of university and company teams,” says Yuichi Kurosaki, the founder of the Minato Rugby School in Tokyo. “But Japan’s performance at this World Cup could change that. We have kids coming to training for the first time saying they want to emulate the Japanese team’s players.”
Other rugby schools are reporting a surge in interest in the wake of Japan’s unprecedented run. Morihiro Saito, of the Bunkyo Rugby School in Tokyo, said the 150 children who turned up at last Sunday’s training session included 40 who were there for the first time. “We were really surprised,” says Saito. “We hadn’t done anything special to publicise the session – it just happened.
“We need more spaces and leaders, but the volunteer spirit is particularly strong in rugby, so the solution isn’t necessarily just having more money. And kids are finding out that rugby is about so much more than passing and tackling, that it’s also about togetherness and helping each other out.”
That ethos has impressed parents who once viewed rugby as a dangerous sport for hefty schoolboys put off by the rigours of life as a trainee in a sumo stable. “There is more awareness not just of rugby, but what makes it special,” says Matsuse, a former prop for Waseda University, a student rugby institution.
“People have seen how players literally push their teammates on, how they never give up, and how small players crash into much bigger opponents. Parents have been watching that and are beginning to see rugby’s values as something they would like to instill in their children.”
