Paid Vacation or not? How much easier is it to play in Japan compared to elsewhere? (Part 1)

TLDR – It is “easier” to carry the ball but that seems to vary significantly by position. We’ll get to defence in a later post.

Whenever news breaks that a player has signed for a Japanese team, you can usually count on a handful of people in the comments saying that the player is going over for paid holiday, that they won’t be testing themselves, and that the standard of rugby is beneath them. And while these comments are lazy and dismissive, there’s still a sliver of truth to them – and based on Japan’s historical rugby record, it’s an earned reputation that will likely take a while to undo.

But how empirically accurate is the rumor? Until now, it was kinda tricky to tell. Highlights would filter out of the league occasionally showing a great player making an outstanding play, and again the usual casual pundits would again mention how easy this league must be – of course ignoring that great players make crazy plays all the time, that’s why they’re famous and were brought to Japan in the first place.

With player data from OPTA/Rugbypass, we can finally take a crack at answering this. I looked at 20 players that either moved to JRLO this season from a Tier 1 league or made the reverse move. It’s not a lot, but it’s a good start, and we have a decent sample of backs (7) and forwards (12), and players that range from world class (Ardie Savea, Kurt-Lee Arendse), just outside top tier (Shaun Stevenson, .Janse van Rensburg) and more journeymen players (Tom Parton, Cormac Daly).

This isn’t super rigorous, or frankly, that impressive of an analysis. I only used basic carrying (meters gained, carries, defenders beaten, etc) and standardized them either per carry or per 80 minutes played. I then compared how players did on these standardized results in their season in Japan compared to their latest season in the other comp. It’s not fancy, but I think it gets the job done.

Results

First, how much easier is it to gain meters in Japan compared to elsewhere? Looking at our sample group, in the non-Japan competitions, they gained on average 3.35 meters per carry whereas they gained on average 3.78 meters per carry in their time in Japan. On average, it was also slightly easier to beat defenders and create line breaks in Japan.

So is that the answer? If we’re ballparking this, it’s like, what, 20 percent easier to carry in JRLO? I think that is broadly true, but a clear divide emerges if we separate forwards and backs

We’re dealing with a small sample of players here (7), and I’m not sure how well these trends would hold up if more players were analyzed – especially bigger centers like Samu Kerevi or Damian De Allende. But that is a big difference compared to the larger sample, and it alludes to something that I think that is broadly true – it’s not that much easier to be a back in Japan compared to other competitions. This isn’t to say that it’s more difficult either, it seems that if you were great at carrying the ball in the URC, you’ll still be great in Japan – no surprise there. It’s just that this hypothetical player won’t be putting up video game numbers for their JRLO team. And again, this is only looking at carrying, which is a small part of a player’s profile.

Now here comes the part for the haters and doubters, because if the sample analysis showed a) it’s generally easier to carry the ball in Japan, and b) it’s not that much easier to carry the ball for backs, then you could probably infer what this means for c) forwards carrying the ball.

Oh yeah, those are some significant figures.

Discussion

Why is it the case that backs seem to get a very minor if non-existent boost in Japan but forwards seem to be playing in easy mode? After all, it’s not like JRLO doesn’t have a bunch of great forwards in it – Malcolm Marx, Brodie Retallick, Paddy Ryan – they’re all lining up every week. Why don’t they cancel each other out? I don’t have a solid answer at this point with data that can back it up, but I have some half thought out hunches that might be relevant.

My first suspicion was directed toward the JRLO front union, mostly because that's the position where you’ll find the least foreign players. Here’s a chart of all players from every Div 1 team lineup in Week 16, broken down by position group and player origin:

(Cat B/C means the player is foreign and not eligible for the Japanese team. Cat C players are capped players, usually the superstars of the team. Cat B players are usually more of the journeymen).

In most position groups, there seems to be a pretty standard range of foreign vs native born players, somewhere between %30-%60. The obvious outliers are scrum halves (lots of decent Japanese scrum halves available) and lock (close to 0 decent Japanese locks), The other outlier is the front row, and my first thought was that it would make sense that the players from Japan (both native and Japanese schooled) wouldn’t be used to tackling much larger players, especially out of university.

And this might be at least a partial reason, but when I checked the tackle percentage for JRLO front rows compared to the locks and back row players, I didn’t see a big difference. The average tackle completion rate was higher for the locks and back row players, but only by a few points. And that difference seemed to be there for a few Tier 1 teams I used as comparison. The front row could still be the issue, but I’d need a lot more granular data to test that idea. In a related note – if anyone wants to build a web scraper to collect player data, please reach out!

The idea that front row players are uniquely to blame probably lets other position groups off easy, especially the backs. It’s true that backs might not get a big boost playing in Japan, but that could be because Japanese (and Japanese trained) players are used to tackling the standard 85-95kg backfield player. They’ve seen a bunch of those types throughout their high school and university careers. But 120+ kg props and locks? 110+kg flankers? Those are much rarer in the Japanese development system. The first time that many domestic players will have gone up against teams that have multiple forwards over 110 kg will probably be when they get to the professional ranks at age 22.

It would also be wise to consider how the faster playing style plays into this. JRLO is notorious for quick rucks, which leads to more carries, more tackles, more turnovers, more broken play, more everything really. In that sort of playing style, it can be difficult to keep organized on defence, and tired forwards would be a prime target to run at. Having a language barrier between defenders wouldn’t help either.

Until I get bored enough to collect the individual data necessary to test these ideas, the truth is that all these explanations are guesses at best. To recap, it does seem easier to carry the ball, create line breaks, etc. in Japan, but that varies depending on the position of the player. Something to think about though, is that if it’s easier to carry the ball in Japan, might it be harder to defend there as well? Stay tuned for next time.