The final match of this season is one for the history books as another international team comes to Iffley Road; the Japanese U19 team will travel to meet the Dark Blues on the 50th anniversary of their first ever overseas tour. The match takes place on Thursday 13th March, 5 days after the Varsity Matches at StoneX and tickets are available here.
The Japan U19s visit is reminiscent of the 1977 OURFC tour which celebrated the JRFU’s 50th anniversary (as well as OURFC Chair John Webster's 20th birthday) and both are evidence of the long-held respect and relationship between Oxford and Japanese rugby.
This connection began in September 1952 when Oxford was the first international team to travel to Japan after the end of World War Two seven years earlier. Giles Bullard’s squad of twenty-four players set off from Balliol College at 2:30pm on September 3rd despite this personal and political environment and established an enduring friendship which exists into the present day.
Louis Cannell was among the Dark Blues invited to make the journey and we are lucky enough to have the letter he received from Bullard in our archives, including an instruction to attend preseason training in August.
The tour lasted over a month and the itinerary is preserved below with several useful notes on the various cities. A particular favourite is the description of Fukuoka. The travel time is also remarkable for a modern audience: what is a direct flight in 2025 took several days in 1952, including stops to refuel. The flights were also sure to be an entirely different experience with smoking allowed and a standing bar on several of the planes.
One of the teams played in the 1952 tour was a combined side from Kyoto, Dohshisha, and Kanseigakuin Universities, another relationship which has grown into the twenty first century. In 2023, the Men*s Greyhounds embarked on their first international tour to Japan, playing Kyoto on the hundredth anniversary of both rugby teams. Though the teams met on the pitch for the first time two years ago, the link has been long established in the shared Dark Blue (adopted by Kyoto in 1920) as well as the exchange of alumni players since 1980. This habit of celebrating anniversaries together welcomes a team of recent high school graduates to Iffley Road on Thursday 13th March.
These players are looking to represent their country before moving up into the competitive world of student rugby at university as part of the pathway from school rugby to professional corporate rugby. Japan Rugby League One was renamed from the ‘Top League’ in 2022 and is the professional competition which sees teams from various companies competing for titles in Divisions 1 through 3. The Kobelco Kobe Steelers team sits firmly in Division 1 and has links with Oxford dating back to the late 1970s when they began to recruit graduates with a particular interest in rugby players. Many familiar OURFC names have been involved with Kobe Steel, including Philip Woodhead, Reg Clark, Hal Cochrane, Simon Wensley, Ian Williams, Mark Egan, and David Henderson. This relationship resulted in seven consecutive national rugby championships for Kobe Steel and a 1985 UK tour for Gakushi Rugger – a team for players from Japan’s national universities. This tour inspired Reg Clark to found an equivalent in the UK in 1988, the Richmond-based Kew Occasionals.
This year, the Japan U19s squad, after finishing high school in February will then travel to England to play an OURFC Select XV. Three days later, they take on a Saracens Academy team before an England U19s team put together specifically to face them on Saturday 22nd March at Cambridge RFC. England development teams are typically U18 and U20 and an U19s team has been specifically for the purpose of playing this visiting Japanese squad.
We hope to see many friends of OURFC and international rugby in the stands at Iffley Road on March 13th, supporting the last Men's OURFC match of the 2024-25 season.
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