Japan’s Rugby World Cup success was improbable. Can it keep it up?
Impressive upsets have happened before. Building on these victories will be trickier
FEW PEOPLE expected Japan to embrace this year’s Rugby World Cup, the first to be held outside of the sport’s traditional heartlands, to the extent that it has. Its popularity is in large part down to the scintillating performance of the home team. Four years ago, in perhaps the greatest upset in the history of the World Cup, Japan stunned fans by beating South Africa, the two-time champions. This year, the team has surpassed even that.
RugbyVision, a prediction model built by Niven Winchester, an economist at MIT, gave Japan a modest 21.7% chance of reaching the quarter-final stages of the competition at the beginning. They have defied the odds with a series of commanding victories, including one over Ireland, who started the competition at the top of World Rugby’s rankings. This weekend South Africa got payback, and beat Japan in the quarter-final to end their World Cup. But this time the Springboks were careful not to underestimate Japan’s Brave Blossoms. What explains Japan’s unlikely success, and what will it take to maintain it now that the team’s tournament is over?
As a squad, Japan both reinforced their strengths and mitigated their weaknesses ahead of the World Cup. Japanese rugby has long emphasised speed and agility, giving the country a leg up over heavier, slower teams. Under Eddie Jones, who coached Japan until 2015, the team worked hard to build up their fitness. Conditioning has remained a priority for Jamie Joseph, their current coach. Three of Japan’s four tries against Scotland last weekend were scored by wingers, typically the most nimble players on the field.
This year Japan have combined that frenetic tempo with a new-found endurance. According to Opta, a provider of sports data, Japan’s ball-in-play time averaged almost 37 minutes in the team’s first four matches, well above the tournament average of less than 34 minutes. Mr Joseph says he would like to raise that even higher, to an unheard-of 50 minutes. In doing so, Japan are turning rugby union from an often plodding game into a frenzied one.
At the same time, Japan, historically a lightweight side, have worked to bulk up. John Pryor, the team’s former head of performance, has said that when they began preparing for the 2015 World Cup, the players weighed on average 8-13kg (18-29 lbs) less than their tier-one opponents. They were still the lightest team in the quarter-finals, but the gap has narrowed. In this World Cup the average weight of a player in Japan’s starting 15 is 98kg, against 103kg for South Africa, according to Opta.
Japan’s new-found ability has not only come from training on the pitch and in the gym. The squad has more experience of high-level games than ever before. Many of them have spent the last year playing in Super Rugby, a league made up of 15 professional southern-hemisphere teams. In 2016, a year after Japan’s shock victory over South Africa, the Sunwolves, a team closely resembling Japan’s national side, entered the league. The similarities didn’t stop with the team sheet: Mr Joseph also took charge of the Sunwolves in 2017, making them in effect an extension of the national team. Japan’s domestic league, made up of semi-professional teams owned by big corporations, has never offered players the chance to compete against world-class opposition. The Sunwolves’ entry into Super Rugby has forced players to up their game.
Finally, Japan have something that no other team enjoys: home advantage. Research shows that avoiding the wear and tear of travel, biased officiating and perhaps a psychological advantage from playing in front of a supportive crowd provide a significant boost to a team’s performance. Rugby is one of the sports in which it is most apparent. In his predictive model, Mr Winchester affords an advantage of five points to the home side.
Japan aren’t the only supposedly second-rate team to upset the sport’s big guns at a World Cup. In 2007, Fiji knocked Wales out of the tournament, and (like Japan) proceeded to the quarter-finals. But four years later, in New Zealand, the Pacific nation crashed out having lost every game but one, against lowly Namibia. At first glance there seems little reason to think that the same won’t happen to Japan.
The Sunwolves performed poorly in the league, and a lack of funding means that they won’t be competing in Super Rugby next year. Japan’s semi-professional domestic league, meanwhile, could do more to grow the profile of the game. Its 16 teams are all owned by corporations (many players are technically employees), and most tickets are bought by the corporations for their customers or staff. Japan lacks the type of academy system that produces talent at clubs in countries such as England and Australia. Instead many young and talented players are plucked fully formed from university teams. This, as well as a short season, makes Japan’s league less competitive than many professional leagues, and it struggles to attract top players. The biggest draws for fans are famous names who are coming to the end of their career. Last year Dan Carter, a former New Zealand fly-half who stopped playing internationally four years ago, joined the Kobelco Steelers, a team belonging to a big steel manufacturer.
The league might be about to change. Japan’s rugby union plans to expand the domestic league to more teams, although it is still reluctant to turn them into professional outfits. Instead Katsuyuki Kiyomiya, the vice-president of the union, wants to launch a new league, with a longer season and teams funded by the sale of broadcasting rights. If he succeeds, it could attract more fans, better players and encourage clubs to do more to develop the game at a junior level. But challenges remain, some of them tediously practical. Japan has only three purpose-built rugby stadiums, and other sports can be reluctant to share their grounds because rugby’s rough nature can damage the pitch.
Another way to boost Japanese rugby would be to give the national team more opportunities to compete against the world’s best. This year Japan played in the annual Pacific Nations Cup, against Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, America and Canada. With the exception of Fiji, none of these teams challenges Japan at their best. Japan returned to the cup after a three-year hiatus as part of their World Cup preparations and duly won. Earlier this year World Rugby proposed a “nations championship”, pitting southern- and northern-hemisphere teams against each other. This would have given Japan a chance to play more top-tier teams, and even supplant struggling teams such as Italy from their privileged place in the rugby hierarchy. The plan was abandoned, however, after northern-hemisphere teams objected to the idea of promotion and relegation.
Instead, a more viable option would be to join the Rugby Championship, made up of southern-hemisphere teams. Japan’s audacious, fast-paced style matches that of teams such as New Zealand well, and their inclusion offers lucrative audiences for southern-hemisphere unions that are struggling financially. This would give the national squad a regular opportunity to play against the world’s top teams, rather than once every four years or in the occasional exhibition match. If Japan were to develop a domestic league that better nurtured and rewarded talent, and its national team faced regular tests against the world’s best, Japanese rugby would have a better chance of building on its impressive World Cup performance. If not, the best that Japanese rugby fans can hope for is yet another upset in four years time.
