13 - Introduction of Football from Britain into Nineteenth-century Japan: Rugby Football and Soccer

Summary

RUGBY FOOTBALL AND soccer/football have already been covered separately in this Biographical Portraits series, namely by Alison Nish's ‘British Contribution to the Development of Rugby Football in Japan 1874–1998’ in Biographical Portraits volume III and Derek Bleakley's ‘British Links with Japanese Football’ in volume VII.

My research has revealed that versions of rugby football were being played regularly season after season by talented non-Japanese players in Japan from much earlier than was believed and that there were talented Japanese players playing in the UK before the sport was introduced to Keiō University students.

For most of the period the sport being played in Yokohama and Kobe was simply referred to as ‘football’ with its rules determined by the local club. Soccer/association football as we know it today was still in its infancy and there is no evidence of it being played in Japan until the 1880s. Then in the early and mid-1890s it actually eclipsed rugby football – so much so that rugby stopped being played for a while and soccer itself was simply referred to as ‘football.’

ORIGINS OF RUGBY IN JAPAN

It is widely believed that rugby football started in Japan in 1899 when Tanaka Ginnosuke and Edward Bramwell Clarke introduced the sport to Japanese students in Keiō University. However, the reality is that rugby has been played in some form almost continuously for longer in Japan than in almost every major rugby playing country outside of the British Isles and Australia.

The earliest evidence of football in Japan is in a 1908 Sydney newspaper article reporting how Admiral Sir Harry Rawson (1843–1910), then governor of New South Wales, ‘recalled playing in the first cricket match played in Japan in 1863, a remarkable feature of which was the fact that half the players were playing football’. One can only surmise that perhaps a number of batsmen on both sides were enthusiastically playing with a football when not actually batting or after the cricket match finished.

The oldest reference to football in early Yokohama newspapers is dated 26 January 1866.