Japan has been enjoying rugby long before the World Cup arrives on its shores but its history is blurred by urban myths

On 31 March 2016, an urgent call went out from the president of the rugby section of the Yokohama Country & Athletic Club. The guest speaker at a gala dinner at the club planned for 2 April had pulled out and a replacement was needed. The problem was this was no ordinary dinner. It was the centrepiece of a weekend celebrating 150 years of rugby in Japan, which arrived in the country five years before the creation of the Rugby Football Union.

More of the emergency stand-in later but fast forward to last week as Japan kickstarted its buildup to the World Cup with the unveiling of a memorial plaque in Yokohama’s Chinatown area, close to where the then Yokohama Foot Ball Club held its first meeting.

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“Building the monument will help create a new [understanding of] history in Yokohama, with the city expected to draw attention from the world in two weeks,” the Kanagawa governor Yuji Kuroiwa said.

The plaque was official confirmation from those who run the game that Japan’s rugby history was considerably older than previously recognised, while the ceremony was a fitting start to the festivities for the World Cup, the origins of which are as blurred by urban myth as the birth of the game in Japan.

The late Katsuhiko Oku, a diplomat with the United Nations who had played rugby for Oxford University, is often credited as being the first person to lobby for Japan to host a World Cup in his role as a member of the international committee of the JRFU. However, his hopes were known to only a few and were certainly not official policy until 2003, the same year Oku was assassinated in Iraq.

The reality was apparently a slightly more off-the-cuff move. “I remember [former] chairman Nobby Mashimo wanted to say something “big” at a new year’s speech [to the press] in 2003,” says Koji Tokumasu, a director of the World Cup 2019 organising committee. “I suggested he say Japan wants to host the World Cup. I called [former International Rugby Board chief executive] Mike Miller and asked what he thought. He said: ‘It’s not impossible’ – and it sort of went from there.”

Japan lost out to New Zealand for the right to host the 2011 World Cup. Despair, however, turned to joy when Japan was awarded this year’s tournament, turning the spotlight on the sport in the country and prompting renewed delving into its origins.

The long-accepted view had always been that the sport was first introduced to Japan by Edward Bramwell Clarke and Ginnosuke Tanaka to students at Keio University.

The two Cambridge graduates wanted to give their students something constructive to do to “keep them from idling and wasting the lovely autumn weather” and started a rugby club in 1899.

On 7 December 1901, Keio played the YC&AC – an amalgamation of the Yokohama football (rugby), athletics, baseball, cricket and tennis clubs – and the sport eventually spread to some of the other top educational establishments.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The first Japan national rugby team jersey, worn in 1930. Photograph: Newscom/Alamy

A memorial stone at Shimogamo Shrine in Kyoto marks the spot where rugby was first played in the Kansai area in 1910, and such was the quick spread of the sport that the national high school championship was first contested in 1917.

In 1926 the Japan Rugby Football Union was formed, and four years later the national team – coached by Shigeru Kayama, who had played for Harlequins during a trip in London as the attendant to Prince Chichibu – played its first overseas matches on a tour to Canada in 1930, drawing 3-3 with British Columbia in a game the JRFU designated as a Test. Two years later, Japan hosted its first Test match when the home side defeated Canada 9-8 in Osaka.

In 1948 the national corporate championship began with three teams vying for the title. The competition continued until 2003 when it was absorbed by the Top League.

But back to the early days, and historian Mike Galbraith has proved that the “Keio story” is not 100% accurate when it comes to the origins of rugby in Japan and his research has shown that “football” was being played in Japan as early as 1863, the year cricket was formally introduced to the country.

“I am very glad that my efforts bore fruit 10 years after I discovered the history,” Galbraith told reporters after the unveiling of the plaque in September.

According to Galbraith, Sir Harry Holdsworth Rawson, the governor-general of New South Wales in Australia, gave a speech in 1908 describing the first game of cricket in Japan – “A remarkable feature of which was the fact that half the players were playing football.”

That game was played between a Royal Navy team drawn from officers on ships sent to protect British expats in Japan and those under their protection following a declaration by Shogun Tokugawa Iemochi that foreigners who ignored his order to leave Japan should be killed.

With the garrison at Yokohama strengthened, it soon became commonplace for the soldiers stationed there to play rugby against civilians – who may well have included Clarke’s father who was a baker in the small port town – culminating two years later in the formation of the Yokohama Foot Ball Club.

“As we happen to have two or three Rugby and Winchester men in the community, we may be certain that we shall have really good scientific play,” said an editorial in the Japan Times dated 26 January 1866.

Hence the dinner 150 years later and the urgent call for a guest speaker who could represent the history of rugby in Japan. A history that incorporated its expat beginnings, its development and the eventual rise of the national team to one that caused one of the biggest upsets sport has ever seen with the win over South Africa at the 2015 World Cup.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eddie Jones celebrates with Suntory Sungoriath after winning the All-Japan Rugby Championship Final in February 2011. Photograph: Sankei/Sankei via Getty Images

There was really only one man who could fit the bill and as luck would have it a former Tokai University, Suntory Sungoliath and Japan head coach landed in Tokyo just a few hours after the call went out.

Perhaps wanting to make up for the duck he scored for a Chairman’s XI against the Japan national cricket side in the 2013 game commemorating 150 years of cricket in Japan, Eddie Jones, fresh off winning the grand slam in the Six Nations with England, agreed to attend the dinner.

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The guests, including local politicians, sports dignitaries and a number of past players who had flown in from all over the globe, had not, however, been told of the last-minute change of speaker and the look of astonishment and joy on their faces as Jones took to the stage was one to behold.

“That’s what rugby is all about,” he said when asked why he had no hesitation in giving up some of the little free time he had on his short trip back to Japan. It is fair to say, with close to 500,000 foreign fans expected to hit Japanese shores for the World Cup, that not only local rugby fans but the population as a whole are about to get their own taste of what rugby is all about.