Cherry Blossoms Over Springboks

34-32 - The Win That Shook The Rugby World

I haven't blogged anything to do with sport for a long time. I just don't watch a whole lot of it any more let alone play. It's taken me 19 years from 1996 when I was the definitive sport-nut guy to 2015 where I just don't care much any more. I've seen a lot in the time in-between and heck, even the time before. In the late 1990s I was even tangentially involved with the business of sport when I was roped in to being the interpreter at contract negotiations for Rugby players going to Japan.

This was back in the heyday of Seiji Hirao who was captain of Japan rugby, followed by a stint as its coach. He came down to Australia quite a bit to watch Rugby, talk rugby and drink with rugby players. In one of his talks, he was asked to explain the 17-145 loss to the All-Blacks at the '95 World Cup. Hirao got up and said he went to his mentor leaving before for Scotland where the game was played. He asked his mentor if there was any one aspect of the game where the Japanese team had some kind of edge. His mentor said, "of course there is no such thing. Your team is inferior in every single aspect of the game. You'll lose. Just go lose honourably."

Thus they went like lambs to the slaughter. Japan own some pretty sad scorelines for losses at the World Cup. There's that 17-145, but also drubbing by the Wallabies 11-91, and another drubbing by the All Blacks that is just as lopsided. If you're not the Tri-Nations in the Southern Hemisphere or one of the Five Nations in the Northern Hemisphere, World Cups have been where your country's team goes to get drubbed. It's a small miracle the drubbings didn't flat-out kill the sport in Japan. Each time they got drubbed at the World Cup, they were compared less favourably to the soccer teams that did better at their World Cup.

Still, there's a case to be made that Rugby in Japan had been - to the point they started getting drubbed at World Cups - more successful than Soccer in Japan, in finding its audience and crowds. Lots of good players have gone to Japan to make a living over the years so their industrial leagues are not to be sneezed at. They can easily offer the kinds contracts that the NSW Rugby Union were offering their fringe players, and they send scouts regularly to watch club games in Australia, looking for talent.

During that period, there were several times I found myself in the company of Eddie Jones. Eddie had coached Japan as well by that stage. He viewed it as the poisoned chalice. It's the pinnacle coaching job of Japan but the expectations were too high for what could be realistically achieved with the talent on the ground. Being the interpreter, I'd just sit and listen most of the time, but it was apparent that Japan's Rugby was so far behind the top nations that it was inconceivable to send a team that could compete with a nation like South Africa. Japan Rugby was further behind Australian Rugby than Australian Baseball was behind Japanese baseball.

Eddie Jones is a sanguine kind of character. When he was asked about the legitimacy of the Japanese team being Japanese (it has a third of its squad born overseas), he offered up the reply to the effect that in an ideal world, everything from top down would be Japanese native people including his job as head coach. But that kind of idealism isn't his job; he was briefed to put together a team that can compete at the world level, at the level the World Cup is contested. And so his squad is one third made up of players from New Zealand, Australia, Tonga, and so on. And thus, this team that beat the Boks is a lot more diverse, colourful and different in style to a team that might have been made of native Japanese players. Implicit in Jones' reply is the rhetorical question, does Japan still want to go out and lose 17-145?

Maybe there still are rugby journalists in Japan that want that kind of purity where a team of native Japanese boys go out to the World Cup and get smashed. Like some forlorn Banzai-charge at a machine gun nest or something. It might be a terrible defeat but it would somehow be racially pure, a glorious and grand gesture of defiance or some such nonsense. With all due to respect, I don't think the Emperor himself would be terribly interested in such an enterprise. Even Hirao's team of 1995 featured Hopoi Tainone from Tonga.

My own view is that the best thing about this win is that it allows Japan to see itself very differently from that monocultural monolithic self-image found on racial purity. It's already breaking down, thanks to foreign born Sumo champions dominating what was once the National Sport. It would be good to move on from that kind of self-image. It would be good to embrace people from Tonga and Fiji and even Australia and New Zealand as part of a self-image of Japan. After 20 years of being there, Eddie Jones is as much theirs as ours. How then can those foreign born guys donning the Japanese uniform, not be Japanese? That's the way it should be.

As they say in Japan, winning confers legitimacy.