The Japanese school where rugby has taken over

Stumbling blind through suburbs of Sapporo, following a sketchy set of directions from a stranger who took pity on me, I find a 6ft x 10ft picture of Japan's captain, Michael Leitch, scoring a try in that famous game against the Springboks in 2015. It is posted above a set of double doors set in what looks like another office block. This must be the place. And around the side of the building, in a muddy yard surrounded by a chain fence, 15 kids are running passing drills and, in the far corner, 15 more working a scrum machine. This is Yamanote High, the best rugby school in all Hokkaido, one of the most famous in all Japan.

“Up here,” says Vea Taumoefolau, “as soon as you say ‘Yamanote’, people will say ‘rugby’.” Vea is the school’s big, warm, softly spoken No 8. In 2016 he found two Japanese scouts waiting for him outside his house in Auckland. They had seen him playing for his school under-15s and wanted to offer him a scholarship in Japan. Vea had never even been so far away as Wellington and he already had a place lined up at Mount Albert Grammar, one of the strongest rugby schools in New Zealand. “It was pretty far out there,” he says. “But I decided I wanted to try something new.” Besides, “Tokyo was on my bucket list of places to go.”

Yamanote used to be better known for women’s basketball. A teacher, Mikio Sato, set up a rugby club only to give the drop-outs something to do. At first he had to offer free ramen to get them to come to training. In their first three years the club won one game. Things started to change in 2004, when Leitch came over from New Zealand on a school exchange. He was 15, too.

“Leitch was a very shy boy,” says the current coach, Hironori Kuroda. He points to the horizon, which is dominated by a short, steep pyramid mountain called Sankakuyama. “He used to run up that every day, after training,” Kuroda says, full of admiration. Vea sighs wearily. “It’s so steep you have to do some of it on your hands and feet.” It takes the boys about 30 minutes to make that run. By the end of his time here Leitch used to do it in 15. “The mountain was his playground.”

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“Leitch put Yamanote on the map,” says Vea. “A lot of the kids here came to play for us just because this was his school.” Vea wants to go on and play for Japan too, just like Leitch. He has already played for the national U18 team. First he has to finish his business with Yamanote. They have the national championships, Hanazono, next month.

Vea is not the only foreign player here. His cousin, Stefarhn Vahafolau, plays fullback and their outhalf, Ashden Ewens, has come over from New Zealand too. They say the game is faster here but more skilful there. They all agree that the biggest difference is how much harder the kids work in Japan. “They take everything way more seriously than we do in New Zealand,” says Ewens. “In New Zealand we were training twice a week. Here we’re training every day of the week except Monday.” Vea is in the gym by six every morning for a 90-minute workout, then he has seven hours of school and, after that, another three or four hours of rugby training.

They are burning a lot of calories. “Usually we have three bowls of rice and three chicken breasts for breakfast, with soup, water and milk, then more rice and chicken breast for lunch,” says Vea. “Then dinner is a meal called viking, where we have whatever we want, fried chicken, fried rice.” He sighs again. “I’m on the heavy side, though. I was 130kg when I came here and I’m trying to get down to 110kg, so I have to skip that. What I have is a lot of salad and fish.”

Vea had never seen snow till he arrived in Sapporo. He got sick the first week because he could not stand the cold. The culture took some getting used to, too. “In New Zealand you sometimes see teachers as your friends. Here you have to talk to them in a very formal way. I feel like my neck is bent from bowing morning to night.” It’s not just the teachers. “In New Zealand all the players are treated the same but here they have a system called senpai-kohai, senior-junior, which means you have to do what the older boys tell you to do. It makes it very hard to communicate with them on the field.”

Japan can be a hard place for a foreigner, especially out here in the suburbs. People tend to duck out of his way when they see him coming. “But it’s not so bad. At least I can always get to what I want in the shop when I’m in a rush,” he laughs. “And I’m glad I came, there are so many opportunities for me here,” Vea says.

He is a senior himself now, a leader in the team and around the school. That was part of the deal. His time here has not just been about what he could learn from the Japanese but what he could teach them. “They’re always asking me, why are the All Blacks so good?” he says. “These guys are scared of foreigners. They were scared of me and Ashden the first time they saw us. I tell them, ‘We’re all just people, with the same skin and bone.’” He says their other problem is that “they don’t know that we can’t carry the team by ourselves. We have to have them to help us.”

This year Vea wants to teach them brotherhood, get them to see each other as family, rather than friends. “I want to persuade them that instead of always doing things the Japanese way they could use a little bit of the New Zealand way too,” he says.

(Guardian services)