I've met Seiji Hirao several times. He wanted to catch the Southern Hemisphere so badly.
On all occasions he was visiting Australia for the purposes of furthering Rugby in Japan, although the very last time I met him, he was the guest of Japan Airlines to talk about Australian wine and rugby at this very strange event I produced. It's weird when you meet famous people and they want to talk to you as if you know every aspect of their careers. He had a lot of rugby career that he assumed I would know, and his conversations would just start from some point of thought in the long line of his successful life. I would often just shut up and listen - he was unique because he was the embodiment of all rugby in Japan. Where he went, what he learned, what he applied, was all important. Every bit of it; and he had been living that life since he was a teenager.
His playing career was prodigious in Japan, representing the national team at the age of nineteen. He was somebody who had success early but also went out to the world to find just how big the world was. It humbled him and made him very frank. I recall him discussing the defeat of Japan at the hands of the All Blacks in the 1995 Rugby World Cup where he was the head coach of Japan. Before leaving Japan - knowing his team would face the All Blacks in the group rounds, - he asked his mentor if there was any one aspect of the game where the Japanese team could get an edge on the All Blacks. He was told, absolutely none. And so it became a mission to play hard and die on the pitch.
And that's how that went down.
The amazing thing about meeting Seiji Hirao was that he never ran or hid from that 145-17 defeat which remains the largest margin of defeat in Rugby World Cup history. When I - rudely, because I am a rude man - asked him about it, he smiled and said, sometimes the other team is simply too good. You can live with defeats like that. There's an important life lesson right there. Everybody is born to a different star with different talents and circumstance. Sometimes you meet opponents who have much, much more than what you can bring to the field. There is no dishonour in those losses, no regrets or recriminations.
He was very much a man from Kansai, that is to say he had a deeply rational approach to things and relied deeply upon his intuition and inspiration. I think he liked to be unpredictable to get an edge, so in that sense he was a speculative kind of guy. There was something infra-cultural about that I recognised as my own, that drew me in. He certainly wasn't short of charisma, but the bit that appealed to me the most was his fearless desire in going for the long shot. Whatever one thought of the man, you had to admire that spirit.
It is reported he was battling illness for a long while. He never made public what it was, but 53 is much too young. RIP Seiji Hirao.
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