World Cup Tour Tales: Week 1 (Tokyo)

Published on

JON CARDINELLI reflects on a week of wrong turns, wrong stadiums and the fan experience on the opening weekend of the World Cup in Japan.

I’m writing this diary on a Shinkansen bound for Nagoya, some 350km west of Tokyo. The Springboks will be based in one of Japan’s largest port cities for the buildup to the next pool clash against Namibia on 28 September.

As the bullet train flies away from the Japanese capital at 320km/h, I find myself reflecting on the amount of time I’ve spent on the local trains over the past seven days.

It’s easy enough to research the best routes and to download all the relevant map and translation apps. A transport system as vast and as complicated as Tokyo’s, however, is always going to defeat you at some point.

‘Don’t play games, Jon,’ Gareth Jenkinson said this past Friday, after I joked that our train was heading in the wrong direction.

The East Coast Radio journalist and I got horribly lost en route to the captain’s press conference at the Yokohama Stadium. By the end of a roundabout tour of the Yokohama region, Jenkinson had lost his sense of humour.

After setting out from Shibuya, we got off at the wrong stop and missed our connecting train to Yokohama. We hopped from one platform to the next, checking the digital displays – which relay information in English as well as kanji and hiragana characters – for the departure time of the next train.

A friendly rail worker told us to take the express rather than the local option. We made another connection. We thought that we were on the right track.

As we boarded the carriage, my eyes were drawn to a pink sign on the window. “Women Only” it said, and I recalled something I’d read before about trains in Japan reserving a few carriages for the fairer sex.

I looked around. A carriage full of women stared back at me. We apologised to an elderly lady who was watching us with something resembling pity and then changed carriages at the next stop.

Now we were on right track. Or so we hoped.

We compared routes on our mapping apps. One appeared to be more direct than the other.

As we exited the station, the route suggested that the Yokohama Stadium was just around the corner. The moment we rounded the bend, however, we realised that we had the wrong place.

A flashy billboard celebrating the Yokohama Dena Baystars confirmed that this was in fact the home stadium of the local baseball team. The Yokohama International Stadium – or the Nissan Stadium as it’s better known in these parts – is about 10km north.

We paced the streets in search of a train station that could deliver us to Siya Kolisi’s pre-game press conference. The oppressive heat and humidity started to take its toll.

I popped ¥140 (about R20) into a vending machine – there’s one on just about every street corner in the greater Tokyo area – and punched the button for a bottle of water. As the sun beat down, I wished that I’d enjoyed fewer Suntory draughts at a bar near Shibuya Crossing the night before.

We found another station. It wasn’t the one we were after. It wasn’t even a subway station.

The man behind the ticket window didn’t speak much English. At that point, our collective Japanese vocabulary didn’t include much more than ‘Konnichiwa’ (hello), ‘Arigato’ (thank you) and ‘Wakarimasen’ (I don’t understand).

We managed to communicate through a series of gestures toward an iPhone screen. He pointed out the best route, and we finally found the subway line bound for Shin-Yokohama.

Later that evening, as I travelled to the opening game at the Tokyo Stadium, I overheard a couple of South African fans conversing in Afrikaans.

As fate would have it, they were plotting their route from a hotel in central Tokyo to Yokohama Stadium ahead of the big clash between the Springboks and All Blacks. It didn’t surprise me to hear that they were puzzling over the fact that there were two Yokohama Stadiums.

The opening match between Japan and Russia in Tokyo was a unique experience with the local fans putting on an unforgettable show. The buildup to the match in Yokohama was quite different, though, with hordes of South African and New Zealand fans invading the area.

I only noticed one sports bar on the road between Shin-Yokohama Station and the stadium itself. It didn’t take long for the place to fill to capacity, or for more fans to pack the pavement outside the window. The game between Australia and Fiji was being shown on the TV inside.

Most of the fans had figured out that the beer in the 7-Eleven across the road was cheaper than the brew sold inside the bar. People flowed between the two venues.

We joined South African, New Zealand, Australia and Japan fans in sipping an ice-cold Sapporo and shouting at the TV set behind the bar window. When a couple of World Cup volunteers came down the road to inform us that the stadium gates were open to the public, very few people made an immediate move to leave.

Post by

Jon Cardinelli