Gavin Rich's diary: The land of the long, winding queue

The arrival in the port city of Kobe on Saturday afternoon was followed by my first visit to a proper Rugby World Cup fan park in Japan. I use the word proper because there have been a few outside the stadiums, but this one wasn’t connected to a stadium and wasn’t in the city that the Japan/Samoa game was being played.

If confirmation was needed that the World Cup is catching on in Japan then the fan park on the Kobe harbour front provided it. It was packed and by the time the Japan game kicked off it was hard to find a good spot to watch from. The problem was that I’m not sure the organisers expected that level of support, for the queues for beer and food were long.

Well at least they were long before the game. Unsurprisingly, given how ordered Japan is, it was easy to get to the beers during the game, for everyone was transfixed to the screen.

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Well not everyone. At halftime I headed to the urinal only to discover that the queues there were a different level. Clearly Japanese bodies react to beer in the same way that South African ones do. The queues snaked one way for several metres, then back again, then back in the opposite direction again…you get the idea. Everything in Japan is quick moving so it wasn’t quite like the seemingly stationary queue you get in South Africa. It was certainly moving quicker than I was moving towards the end of the last Comrades I attempted.

But goodness, did it take long. Almost 25 minutes. I wasn’t that desperate to go when I first headed in that direction, it was just that halftime seemed like a good time. But by the time I got to the front of that queue I was almost standing on my head trying to hold everything together.

I did think of doing what we’d, meaning males, would do back home and try and find a tree but I’m not sure how that sort of thing is viewed in Japan. I didn’t want to find out.

As you can imagine, the length of the queue did kind of ruin the experience. In the sense that I was terrified of drinking anything else for fear of having to go again. I suppose it is one way of controlling alcohol intake.

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That fan park was very different to what one in South Africa would be like. Everyone stood very respectfully for the playing of the Samoan anthem and there was polite clapping when it was over. There was also clapping when Samoa kicked a penalty, and polite silence when they lined the kick up. Just as is the case at the stadiums, there was no remonstrating or abusive language when the referee penalised the home teams.

Another thing - everyone sat down on their patch of ground. There was none of the standing and blocking other people’s views, thus forcing everyone onto their feet, that we’d expect in South Africa. Even when the excitement levels were raised there were very few people jumping up.

The most animated the crowd got was every time Japan lined up a kick. Then there’d be a slow clap gradually increasing in loudness until a crescendo was reached as boot met ball.

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There is a lot of interest in South Africans from the Japanese and that Japan win in the 2015 World Cup in Brighton has created a strong link. When we were heading out of the rural part of Japan we stayed in during the Shizuoka week, a group of schoolgirls eventually summoned up the bravery to enquire very politely where we were from. When we told them we were South African they told us they had learnt about Nelson Mandela and Francois Pienaar. In their English classes! My money though says that if we asked them what Pienaar looked like, they’d provide an identikit for Matt Damon. That they knew of Pienaar might just have been an indication of Hollywood’s reach as much as much as of rugby’s growing popularity in this part of the world.

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One thing I am going to struggle to get used to again when I arrive home in four weeks from now is tipping. I’ve always been a good tipper - my wife reckons its a compulsion that’s going to leave me destitute - but have finally got used to the idea that no matter how much a person puts themselves out of their way to help you, and there is a lot of that in this country, you are not to tip them. In fact it is considered impolite to even think of it.

Early in this tour we were chased down the street by a restaurant proprietor who wanted to hand over the small change that he’d been left with when when we took our leave.

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?What could drive me batty if I lived here is the protocol at stop streets and road crossings. Even if it is in the middle of the night, and you are faced with a narrow side street with not a car or any other living soul in sight, it seems you are expected to wait for the green man before you cross the street. And people do wait.

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Phew! Rassie Erasmus did have some of us fretting after all his stressing over Italy last week. I have a hunch Rassie never had any doubt his team would win the decisive Pool game, and just hyped the game up to give his players a dry run dress-rehearsal of the pressure they will face when they get to the knock-outs.

But still, had the Boks lost to Italy they’d be heading home after Tuesday’s game against Canada. And so probably would most of the media. And I did have a horrible dream the night before the game. It involved heading back to South Africa before the World Cup proper itself had properly started. Which it would have felt like if we’d had to go home now.

Journalists aren’t supposed to get too emotional about the teams they write about but at World Cups there is vested interest. I have vivid recall of how stressed fellow scribe Mike Greenaway was in the second half of the quarterfinal between the Boks and Wales at the last World Cup. It was hard not to notice it as he was sitting next to me. He was going home if the Boks were knocked out at that point, as he had done after the quarterfinal defeat in Wellington in 2011, and he was enjoying his World Cup too much to want that to happen again.

He was probably more overcome with relief when Fourie du Preez scored the winning try than Du Preez was himself.

If journalists feel the pressure like that imagine what it must be like for a player. Pressure is a massive factor once the knock-outs arrive and Erasmus is right to be preparing the players’ minds for it.

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One thing it is hard to take seriously in Japan is a long range weather forecast. It feels like almost every week starts with some dire warning about conditions that should be expected on match day only for those conditions not to materialise. But it does feel like an end to the humidity that has been such a talking point at this World Cup is on the way. There’s nothing scientific in that pronouncement, it is just something you can feel in the air. There was far more warm clothing in evidence at the Shizuoka game. There was a definite nip in the air. And over the past few days it has just felt far less like Durban in mid-summer and more like Port Elizabeth or Cape Town in spring or autumn, maybe without the wind. I’m heading out for dinner now and I am definitely taking a jersey. Two weeks ago there was no question of doing that.

If the humidity does disappear, and it is anticipated that it will, it is going to be interesting to see how the teams react in terms of the rugby they play.

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If colder weather does arrive it will be welcomed for it will give me a chance to finally put half the contents of my suitcase to use. A former Bok who played in Japan warned that the weather would suddenly change markedly during the course of the tournament, and I have packed accordingly. Up to now though it has been mostly shorts and T-shirts outside of when we head to a match.

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Sorry I can’t report on the earthquake some of my colleagues got excited about last week. It seems one of the side effects of the good red wine that was on offer at a get together with some of the Bok management last week is that it helps you sleep through an earthquake.

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Talking of earthquakes, given the tsunami and earthquake warnings dotted around the coastal cities in this country, there is something unnerving when a siren goes off and you don’t understand the words that are being blasted over the loudspeaker.

Normally it is nothing to really panic about, but you can’t be quite sure when you don’t understand what is being said.

It was definitely earthquakes and tsunamis that entered my mind when a siren and barked instructions over a loudspeaker met my arrival at the beach during a morning run in Omazaeki. It was an isolated beach, no-one else in sight, so there wasn't any way of measuring if there was a reason to panic.

I thought it would just be a drill, but the point is you don’t understand what is being said. So my run home back to the hotel, which was supposedly a safe point in that town and away from the coast, was my quickest in years. Just in case.