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Peter Tasker: Planet rugby sends the world a message
It was one of the biggest upsets in sporting history. In their first game in the 2015 Rugby World Cup in England on Sept. 19, Japan’s unfancied Brave Blossoms overcame the mighty South African Springboks by 34 points to 32. The South Africans did not play badly, but ultimately it was the elan and never-say-die attitude of the Japanese that won the day through a last minute try.
Rugby has been played in Japan for more than a century, and the country has the fourth largest rugby-playing population in the world. Yet Japanese rugby remains a minority sport. Even such a passionate rugby man as ex-Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, the current president of the Japan Rugby Football Union, could hardly have dreamed of victory over the behemoths of South Africa.
If this was the moment Japanese rugby went global, the groundwork had been laid in advance. Japan is not known as a multi-cultural society, yet the national team includes players of mixed ethnicity — several naturalized Japanese, a player of Zimbabwean-Japanese parentage and a Japanese who has spent so much of his life overseas that he has lost fluency in his native tongue. Japan’s highly experienced coach, Eddie Jones, who took Australia to the World Cup final in 2003, is half Japanese.
In rugby such cross-cultural blending of talents is now the rule, not the exception. For example, Mako Vunipola, an England player, was born in New Zealand of Tongan parents who subsequently moved to Wales; hence his strong Welsh accent. When England plays Wales on Sept. 26, he will face his cousin, Toby Faletau, in the opposing team.
Once upon a time sports fans might have looked askance at such mobility and the players might have been dubbed “mercenaries” or “ringers” — a sporting term for players who do not really belong in a team. Today their presence is broadly accepted because migration, cross-border marriage and multiple identities have become common phenomena.
In a world of blurred lines, the old sporting qualification rules based on birthplace no longer make sense. The rugby authorities have recognized this, to the advantage of the development of the sport — and much to the benefit of the Japanese team.
In this context rugby presents a picture of the world that is simplified and distorted, yet also more globalized, meritocratic and forward-looking than the real world. It may offer some clues as to how to manage the stresses our societies and institutions are undergoing.
Planet Rugby is a strange and rather attractive place. Japan and the U.S., which have the world’s third-largest and largest national economies respectively, are plucky minnows that most neutral supporters wish well. South Africa — in the real world beset by sky-high unemployment, a plunging currency and social unrest — is an undoubted superpower, having won the World Cup twice. The arrogant hegemon that everyone fears and secretly hopes will slip up is New Zealand, which has a population of just 4.5 million.
“The World in Union” has been the theme song of the Rugby World Cup since 1991. While the stirring melody is taken from the patriotic British song “I vow to thee, my country,” the modern lyrics offer an idealistic vision of human fellowship.
There’s a dream, I feel
So rare, so real
All the world in Union
The world as one
Back in the real world, though, the forces of disunion are in the ascendant. The same structural factors that bring together rugby players of different origins and ethnicity — the unprecedented ease and cheapness of travel and communications — also give millions of people the means to flee poverty, oppression and war or simply seek better opportunities in the wealthy developed countries.
Hooligans and gentlemen
The current migrant/refugee crisis in Europe, the long-lasting debate about undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and the controversy over migrant boats seeking to dock in Australia may seem like separate issues, but they have the same root cause.
People, even those who are desperate and impoverished by the standards of rich countries, are on the move as never before. Ordinary citizens of the host countries are increasingly fearful of the impact of the influx on social cohesion and, amidst weak economic performance, standards of living.
As Oxford University Professor Paul Collier notes in “Exodus”, his study of the economics of migration, “in the absence of controls, migration and the diaspora will expand without limit.” In other words, the movement of peoples is of such a potentially vast scale that it must be controlled. The only question is, how?
As an old phrase has it, rugby is a sport for hooligans played by gentlemen — in contrast to soccer (better known as “football”), which is said to be a sport for gentlemen played by hooligans. From its beginnings at Rugby School in the England of the 1820s, the sport has been heavily freighted with social and political values.
According to the foundational myth, the progenitor was a pupil called William Webb Ellis who, as recorded by a school plaque, “with a fine disregard for the rules of football … first took the ball in his arms and ran with it” in 1823. On Oct. 31, 2015, the winner of the Rugby World Cup final will be presented with the Webb Ellis Cup by a member of the British royal family.
Under the inspirational leadership of Thomas Arnold, headmaster at the time, Rugby School became one of Britain’s leading educational institutions, molding the characters of the men who would go on to administer the British Empire. The novel “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” — based on the writer Thomas Hughes’ experiences of school life under Arnold — was one of the most popular textbooks of foreign origin in Japan’s Meiji era (1868-1912), a period in which the country modeled itself on several aspects of Britain, including its empire.
Since then rugby has evolved dramatically while maintaining the basic principles of the game. What began as a healthy pastime for upper-class English schoolboys and their equivalents in the colonies has become much more inclusive. The previously amateur game went professional in the early 1990s. Meanwhile the rules are in a constant state of flux. Throughout, the sport has embodied the classic statement of pragmatic conservatism from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s “The Leopard” — “Everything needs to change so that everything can stay the same.“
From the convention-defying improvisation of the schoolboy Webb Ellis to the razzmatazz of the World Cup, the rock-hard constant in rugby has always been the ethos of the team. If you buy into that, you are worthy of respect, whatever your color or creed. If you do not, then you remain a perpetual outsider.
There can be no “ifs” nor “buts”; no concessions to incompatible values. Likewise, the team is a pure meritocracy; you are chosen on performance, not because of your connections or good looks. In order to be accepted you have to offer something valuable to the team.
Companies, institutions and nations that follow these principles stand a better chance of holding on to their core strengths in the disorderly, disunited world we inhabit. Those that do not may be significantly weaker by the time the next Rugby World Cup comes around — in 2019, in Japan.
Peter Tasker is an analyst at Tokyo-based Arcus Research.
