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The story
On November 14, 2026, Japan’s national rugby team faced England in Round 5 of the Nations Championship and suffered a crushing 15-78 defeat, conceding 13 tries in total (8 in the first half, 5 in the second). The loss set a new record for the most points conceded against England, leaving Japan with a 1-4 record and 5 points in the tournament; the final round will be played in Edinburgh on the 21st. On 5ch’s live-thread, discussion spread across the state of the sport — jokes about how many foreign-born players make up the national squad, comparisons with Japan’s soccer team, and criticism of League One’s management and rugby’s declining popularity.
◇ Rugby Nations Championship Round 5: Japan 15–78 England (November 14, 2026, Twickenham, England)
Japan, ranked 12th in the world, faced 5th-ranked England and lost 15–78 (10–49 at halftime), conceding 8 tries in the first half and 5 in the second — 13 tries in total.
The lopsided defeat set a new record for points conceded to England. Japan’s Nations Championship record stands at 1 win and 4 losses, 5 points total, with the final round set for Edinburgh, England, on the 21st.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Is a rugby broadcast even necessary? Is there demand for it?
Japanese rugby always gets crushed anyway.
It never stands a chance — using the money NHK collects from license fees to force-feed us this is just not right.
If they had, Japan would've conceded 100 points lol
True that
Doesn't feel right unless it's red-and-white stripes
Baseball pigs (slang for obsessive baseball fans)
Soccer pigs (same slang, for soccer fans)
So what kind of "pig" do rugby fans get called? (´・ω・`)
Guess it's a good thing I didn't watch.
Might as well just make the whole team foreigners lol
Rugby has fewer participants than baseball to begin with.
New Zealand, which ranks above Japan, only has a population of 5 million; Ireland 5 million; Wales 3 million; Fiji 900,000; and Scotland has just 500,000 — so that doesn't really have much to do with it.
That was only true up through the 1980s.
Guess you need an all-foreign mercenary squad just to be competitive lol
rugby's total lack of that really shows it's a sport for the upper class.
That's the vibe on the rugby board too.
Feels like that's about the only thing left to keep their pride propped up.
It was such a huge boom in 2019… kind of sad now.
Then why do we keep hearing news about them brawling in bars or getting busted for drugs on a regular basis? lol
Sorry, but as a sport, chaotic soccer is more entertaining than self-proclaimed gentleman's upper-class rugby.
That's not my point
What I'm saying is: with young people becoming an increasingly scarce resource, they shouldn't be funneled into a sport with fewer participants worldwide than baseball.
That's really none of your business
Who do you think you are, talking about kids being "used" like that?
Rugby left a stronger impression on me since they beat South Africa in an actual World Cup match.
You're joking, right?
By that logic, soccer beating Spain and Germany in actual World Cup matches is pretty impressive too.
Trash-talking other sports is what lower-class people do.
They're sibling sports, but the gap in popularity and revenue has become so large it'll never close in their lifetime, so all they have left is to keep cursing soccer over "class."
And this isn't just Japan — it's exactly the same in England, rugby's home country.
"People involved"? Not just fans?
The whole "upper class" thing is really only true in England at most
And even in England, it's not like working-class people don't play rugby
(let alone in other countries…)
They should've focused on lowering League One ticket prices and growing the fan base, especially among younger people.
In the end, opportunities to get into rugby never increased and it's still the same old crowd of longtime fans.
High school rugby participation keeps shrinking too — the prefectural qualifiers are in a dismal state.
This is exactly the kind of delusion they had lol
Sure, top-tier players from around the world did come, but broadcast rights revenue was basically peanuts.
The result of chasing this pie-in-the-sky vision without any grounding in reality: participation numbers collapsed, and now they can't even field a national team made up of just Japanese players anymore.
https://xtrend.nikkei.com/atcl/contents/18/00205/00014/
"We can expect broadcast rights revenue from rugby fans all over the world. That's because if a professional league is established in Japan, it opens the possibility of drawing the world's top players to Japan."
Don't you know about Kiyomiya?
I know who Kiyomiya is, I just don't know about that statement.
Compared to the 145-17 game back in 1995, maybe the gap with the rest of the world hasn't actually narrowed at all for pure Japanese players.
I watched a bit at the start, and there was no way they were stopping that.
The size difference felt pretty massive.
Think about it for a second — they're rugby players too, same age, same height, probably not that different upstairs either.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Japan’s national team fields many foreign-born players under the international eligibility rule that grants eligibility after meeting a residency requirement (currently five years), and the “team’s full of foreigners” jabs repeated throughout the thread stem from this system. The repeated reference to Japan’s 17-145 loss to New Zealand at the 1995 World Cup is meant to place this latest defeat in historical context. The debate over whether rugby is an “upper-class sport” is tangled up with England’s historical class associations as the sport’s country of origin, along with the reality that rugby lags behind soccer in popularity and revenue within Japan — it’s not something that can be settled with a simple ranking of superiority. The gap between League One’s stated vision of attracting the world’s top players to earn broadcast revenue, and the current reality where neither the player base nor the audience has actually grown, is also behind much of the criticism in the thread.
※This article is compiled as an excerpt and summary of the 5ch (Geisports Sokuho+) thread “[Rugby] Japan’s Defense Completely Collapses! 13 Tries Conceded to England in Crushing 15-78 Loss — Worst Scoreline in 15 Years.”
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