Advertisement

The difference between Toyohashi and Toyotashi

rugby30 September 2019 10:30| © SuperSport
By:Gavin Rich
Share
article image
Japan © Gallo Images

There’s quite a big difference actually. The one is the station that connects the outside world with Toyota City and the Toyota Stadium. The other is… well, I’m not quite sure where it is exactly and what its claim to fame is, but if you catch the fast Shinkansen Express train, or one of them, in a certain direction out of Nagoya you can get there in less than half an hour.

Two colleagues and myself did that last Friday. And we thought we were so damn clever. The rest of the media contingent were going on a slow train to Schalk Brits’ captain’s conference on the eve of the match against Namibia. Their trip was going to take anywhere from an hour and 15 minutes to an hour and a half.

So imagine how smug we felt when some official looking person at the Nagoya Station said we could get to Toyotashi in about 25 minutes. What were the others thinking? Well, they had the right letter in the name. An ’s’ and not a ’t’, which unfortunately we only discovered once we got outside the Toyotashi Station and Google maps told us that Toyohashi was actually much further away now than when we started our journey.

The station ticket person informed us we could get to Toyohashi from Toyotashi but it would take us more than an hour. There wasn’t time for that so we had to rely on colleagues sending us audio from the captain’s presser. The difference between the Toyohashi and Toyotashi then is that one led to Schalk Brits and one led us away from him.


Fortunately if you have a Japan Rail Pass a mistake like that doesn’t cost you anything in terms of money. And it’s a great way to get around Japan. A few of us headed to Kyoto last Thursday. I’m not sure it’s quite deserving of the description I saw on a tour bus, which championed it as “The best tourist city in the world”, but if you are heading out to Japan in the remaining weeks of this tournament, it is well worth the visit. It is the cultural centre of Japan. And the train took us the 135 kilometres in just 35 minutes.


We did finally get to Toyota Stadium on the day of the game and compared to Yokohama, where we watched the Boks play the All Blacks the week before, I would say it is much better for rugby. Built for the 2002 Fifa World Cup, which was hosted jointly by Japan and South Korea, the fans are a lot closer to the action and it has better atmosphere than the venue where the World Cup final will be played just over a month from now.

The scene that greeted us outside the station was similar to the scene that greeted us at the station that fed the London Olympic Stadium at the last World Cup. Lots of people in pedestrian streets, lots of beer and other drinks, a carnival atmosphere.


And of course there were also television sets that could be spotted through bar windows. The bars were impossible to get into because they were so crammed, but you could see in from outside. The game between Japan and Ireland had only just kicked off at that point and when we left to continue the walk to the stadium Ireland were ahead. We’d seen enough to suggest it would be a regulation victory for Ireland.

Ireland were still ahead and it was just after halftime when we got to the media centre. But the longer the game lasted, the more evident it became that something unusual, as in unusual in the sense that Brighton in 2015 was considered unusual, was about to happen. Then came that try and with Ireland clearly out on their feet there was only going to be one winner from there. It set up the day, it set up the tournament, and Japan celebrated.


I wish I could tell you what the Japanese papers said about that win. All I know is that it was a big thing for them as the rugby appeared on most front pages. But today, Monday, the sports pages appear to be devoted mainly to baseball and other sports again.


The first thing that crossed the minds of several South African hacks after the final hooter sounded on the Japan win was that we might not see so many Irish journalists at Bok press conferences going forward. There has been a big Irish presence at some of the Bok press conferences, with the Irish travelling some distance from where their team is based to feed their curiosity on the team they were expecting Ireland to face in the quarterfinal.

But think again guys, you might well be playing the All Blacks now. It just requires Japan to beat Samoa and then follow up against the team they were always targeting for a big one at this tournament, Scotland. That game is the last game of the Pool phase. It is one to look forward to and one I am going to try to get to.


Perhaps it was a good thing the Irish were present at last week’s press conferences in Nagoya as once the All Black game was behind them and they headed away from Tokyo there was a sense of anti-climax. Playing Namibia after facing the All Blacks is a bit like playing after the Lord Mayor’s Show. As a journalist it is hard to build up to such a game without being accused of over-hyping it.

That said, the Boks got more out of the Namibian game than I thought they would. That was thanks to the physicality the Namibians brought to the game and in particular the way they defended. It’s amazing what the injection of line-speed can bring to even a tier two team’s defensive pattern.

That and the humidity, which rendered the ball slippery like a cake of soap, contributed to the game being a lot closer than what I thought it would be. I went for a Bok win by 80-plus points in my preview. It was a long way short of that. In retrospect I should have given that more thought. The conditions are a big leveller.


Namibia have shown a gradual improvement in their games against the Boks over the past 12 years. In the game the two teams played in the build-up to the 2007 World Cup the Boks scored more than three figures, while in Albany in 2011 it was 87-0.

As Bok coach Rassie Erasmus pointed out, there is a good reason why teams like Namibia are included at a World Cup. They need to be encouraged to improve and need to be given a proper measurement of where they are and what needs to be done to improve them further.


If you don’t think a team can be improved by featuring regularly at World Cups just think of Japan. They conceded 145 points to the All Blacks in Bloemfontein in the 1995 World Cup and were also comprehensively outplayed by Wales and Ireland, both of whom got to the half-century mark. Now in two successive World Cups they have nailed big teams in the form of South Africa in 2015 and Ireland now and it is time they get taken more seriously.

Conversely, I remember a time when Canada were much stronger than they are now. They were a real handful for some of the bigger opponents at the 1991 World Cup and were also competitive in 1995. Samoa, who competed as Western Samoa in the first few World Cups, appear to be heading in the same direction.


Nagoya is a densely populated industrial city - the third biggest in Japan and a larger version of Pretoria - that I struggled to get used to but which had grown on me by the end. We’re now in Omaezaki, about four kilometres away from the Bok hotel. It is rural Japan, very different to the big cities, and just about everything is written in Japanese. Finding a restaurant was interesting in the sense that there didn’t seem to be any, until a local pointed us in the direction of a house we had passed that had Japanese writing on it. To us it just looked like a house. But what a fantastic meal, close to the top of the tour.

Those readers who have driven the road to Arniston or Struisbaai on the southern Cape/Overberg coast might know the type of place we are in. It is quite similar to Napier or Bredasdorp, with less of a tourist emphasis.

But the remarkable thing about it is that there is a large decommissioned nuclear power station close by. It was closed down about a decade ago because scientists decided there was going to be a major earthquake here within the next 30 years. That news made some of my travelling companions nervous.

I was nervous enough in Nagoya, where I was roomed on the 19th floor and had a bathroom that shook like the toilet inside an airliner when the plane hits turbulence. But my current hotel has a signpost outside it that announces it as the place everyone has to take refuge if there is a tsunami warning.


The natural disaster angle notwithstanding, it is good to be here and to experience the change of pace that has come with it. After the hustle and bustle that comes with being accommodated in the centre of big cities it is good to have some space, and the Boks, who are housed in a golf resort hotel, are probably welcoming the change of pace too. Not that they can afford to slip into holiday mode, for they have a critically important game coming up on Friday.

Advertisement