We’re big in Japan
England receive official World Cup welcome ahead of Friday’s kick-off
Wales’s World Cup campaign had a spectacular lift-off here when 15,000 people attended an open training session.
Kitakyushu Stadium was packed as tournament fever gripped a city that has been turned into a home from home for the Wales squad.
Ryan Jones, the former Wales captain and triple Grand Slam winner, has been a driving force in establishing strong rugby links between the Welsh Rugby Union and Kitakyushu.
He said: “I’ve never experienced anything like this in my career. It’s astonishing and it has been really emotional. It’s been like hosting a party. We got up this morning and we were saying ‘oh, I hope it goes well today and people will turn up’.
“Then to see the queues and then to see the players’ faces when they came out, it was just magic.
“It has exceeded all our expectations. But what has really warmed my heart is that it has shown how really strong the brand of Welsh rugby is.
“People know it’s us, they love the colour red, but also how powerful rugby is.
“It’s great as the guys are one week out from our first game, and to have an experience like this brings it home how amazing an event it is. It will give the players a huge lift.
“The dream was to turn the city red and we’ve done that. They weren’t a [World Cup] host city and we wanted to bring the Rugby World Cup to them.
“What we’ve seen today is the result of 18 months of visits. We have done everything from coaches and referees, we’ve been to special education-needs schools, universities, normal schools, businesses. We’ve done talk shows, we’ve done the lot really.”
Huge queues snaked around the stadium more than two hours ahead of the Wales squad’s short journey from their hotel. The players arrived to a sea of red shirts.
Jones added: “Seeing the guys [players] when they arrived at the welcome party the other night, and seeing their faces here, they didn’t comprehend it.”