KICKED TOUCH? INTO
Japan has rugby fever but when the show rolls on will it get...
As fans poured out of the Tokyo stadium on saturday, Team No- side were dutifully on parade. In giant lines at all the major exits they held out their palms to invite a high-five.
Few refused, some moving gleefully along, slapping each hand as they went. No country gives better tournament than Japan. They get into it like no other hosts on earth.
No-side translates, roughly, as full-time in English. The original plan was for 10,000 volunteers, but 38,000 applied, so they ended up with 13,000. The male-female ratio is even, the youngest is 18 and the oldest 88. They pay for their own travel and if a match finishes too late to get home, their own hotels too.
The only payment in kind is a jacket and polo shirt, with Rugby World Cup branding. some say they will retain them as family heirlooms. And for that they stand in the rain, high-fiving boozy foreigners — or gaijin as they are known here — as they make their way back to Tobitakyu station. They really are the nicest folk.
In Japan, go to a cinema and everyone remains silent in their seats until the titles have rolled and the house lights come up. Go to a gig and the venue floor is still spotless at the end because nobody would consider dropping a plastic cup. stand on a backstreet corner looking hopelessly lost for a minute or two and somebody will emerge to offer assistance, despite some very apparent language barriers.
It will be a great pity if rugby does not receive the boost it hopes for from coming here, because it deserves to. Japan couldn’t have worked harder to make this competition a success.
But it is hard. In less than a year, another big show comes to town and it is impossible to escape the feeling that the Rugby World Cup is merely the support act for the five rings. Tokyo 2020, not Japan 2019, logos are everywhere. It is the password for your hotel’s Wi-Fi, it is the banner across the overpass, the branding on the bus at the traffic lights.
Rugby’s problem here is that it is still a niche sport. It enjoys occasional spikes of interest — 32.8 per cent of the population watched Japan’s most recent win over samoa, with a peak of 46.1 per cent, making it the biggest sporting event of the year — but without the bedrock of widespread participation.
The underlying problem here is that rugby is not a popular school sport. Judo is compulsory, football and baseball commonplace, rugby is at best fourth on the bill if it is played at all. After the age of 12, often it is not. since being awarded the Rugby World Cup on July 28, 2009, participation numbers have actually dropped.
It is the reason Japan’s World Cup squad contains 16 foreignalways born players. There simply isn’t the local talent to compete at this level. In 1995, a largely native Japanese team lost 145-17 to New Zealand at the World Cup, and conceded 252 points in three games. since then, they have embraced rugby’s somewhat
laissez-faire rules around nationality, and prospered.
And the achievements of the Brave Blossoms — as the team are rather incongruously known — are going down big, have no doubt of that. The win over Ireland was a front-page story in a country with a population of 125million that buys 50m newspapers each day. supplies of Japan’s iconic red and white hooped shirt have all but run out, although that is as much due to a failure of imagination on the part of the manufacturers, Canterbury.
Local players such as Kazuki Himeno, scorer of a fine try against samoa, or leading points scorer Yu Tamura, are becoming break-out stars. On sunday, those record viewing figures are likely to be topped as Japan face scotland in Yokohama.
A win would see them heading the group, unbeaten, an incredible feat. Japan’s coach, New Zealand-born Jamie Joseph, summed it up with a phrase that owed considerably more to Otago than Osaka. ‘It’s going to be a real ripper,’ he said.
In a country that hasn’t been welcoming of foreigners — the cartoon strip Gaijins was a staple in the Mainichi Daily News for many years, mocking the obvious discomfort of outsiders in Japan — the diversity of this rugby squad is part of its charm. The coming together of cultures is important. Tamura admits he rarely understands a word in player leadership group discussions because they are conducted in English, between captain Michael Leitch and his deputy Pieter Labuschagne. Leitch, meanwhile, celebrated his 31st birthday this week by joining the rest of the team for a shabu-shabu meal, a traditional beef hotpot. He is the most Japanese of gaijans anyway, having been here from the age of 15. In 2013, he became a naturalised Japanese citizen, and inverted his name to Leitch Michael. Without delivering the most astonishing performance in competition history, however, Japan will lose sooner rather than later. Knockout permutations will pit them against either New Zealand or south Africa in the quarter-finals and there participation is likely to end. Japan’s win over the springboks was the shock of the 2015 edition but, even on home ground, is unlikely to be repeated and beating the All Blacks is even unlikelier. What will happen to Japan’s Rugby World Cup then?
In all likelihood, it will survive. Not with 46.1 per cent of the country tuning in perhaps, but the stadiums will be full and the support fervent. Japan likes a big event and the locals are malleable in their affections.
When Wales trained in Kitakyushu before their opening game, 15,000 gathered to watch them, schooled to belt out a word perfect take on Bread of Heaven. There are Japanese supporters at England games who have God save The Queen off to a tee, too. And they like supporting. AT football’s World Cup here in 2002, locals buying tickets for a match were given the name of the country they should follow that day to balance the appreciation. They then went out and enthusiastically bought a Nigeria shirt, or painted their faces in the colours of Italy.
Little has changed. At saturday’s match in Tokyo, a gentleman enthusiastically purchased an Argentina jersey on the walk to the ground, which he put on over the England shirt he was already wearing. The lads who were so keen on saving the Queen could then be seen cheering Argentina’s early offensive plays just as heartily.
There is a rugby super fan, known as Bak-san — real name Hiroshi Moriyama, from Osaka — who has his upper torso painted with the colours of 20 different teams, en route to attending 27 games before the tournament closes. His wife, Rika, painstakingly replicates the details of a new team jersey each day, a twohour study, down to the finest details of badges and insignia.
The All Blacks are huge here, too. Understandably so. Japan loves style and that black look is the slickest. Japan loves ceremony and the All Blacks have the haka. And if you’re new to rugby New Zealand are the biggest and best. They have also worked hard at leveraging their brand so that they are by far the most significant commercial entity here, a more visible presence even than the Brave Blossoms. They have tie-ups with two major Japanese companies, Mitsui Fodusan (real estate development) and Nissui ( fishing), and visit regularly. Other All Black sponsors, Adidas and AIG, are pushing them hard, too, on television screens from homes to trains to taxis.
New Zealand Rugby Union’s special focus was on heavily marketing their product in Japan in 2019, and it seems to have worked. England, by comparison, are close to invisible — a surprise given the background of coach Eddie Jones.
Yet whatever this tournament brings for Japan from here, interest will endure. Whether it survives longer term is harder to calculate. Tokyo sunwolves will disappear from super Rugby — the premier club competition in the southern Hemisphere — from 2020, having been asked to pay roughly £7.5m annually by the organisers to participate.
It seems as short- sighted as wasting the 10 years of build-up by not spreading the gospel of rugby in schools. This may well be the best, the friendliest, the most constantly surprising Rugby World Cup there has been. And by this time next year, it could be all but forgotten in the country that made it so.
What a pity for Team No-side if all their high fives were in vain.