Australian rules football in Japan

Australian rules football in Japan is a growing team sport which dates back to 1910, but found its roots in the late 1980s mainly due to the influence of Australian Football appearing on Japanese television.

Japan competes regularly at international level and Japan's national team has defeated amateur Australian clubs on numerous occasions. Japan has competed in all AFL International Cups achieving middle order placings maily due to the lack of tall key positional players though their commitment and style of play has drawn popular praise.

Australian rules football was first introduced to Japan in 1910 by a A. W. McLean from Melbourne. He was successful in introducing it as a sport to four large high schools in Tokyo by having the rules translated into Japanese. It is not known what happened to the sport at these schools after that time.

In 1946, a match was played at Kure, Hiroshima between the British Commonwealth Base team and the 168th General Transport Company at Anzac Oval.

In 1964, Japanese schoolboy Hideki Oka spent 12 months in Australia under rotary club sponsorship where he played Australian rules football.

Interest was rekindled when, in 1986, the VFL sent two teams to Japan in an effort to encourage the international recognition of the sport. Hawthorn and Carlton played an exhibition match in Tokyo in front of a mix of expatriate Australians and locals.

The following year saw Hawthorn take on Essendon in the second 'Aussie Bowl'. The curtain raiser for this match was played by a makeshift team of Japanese university students. The nation's two most famous private universities scraped together teams of inexperienced Japanese boys to play Japan's first "real" footy match of the 1980s. The two teams, Keio and Waseda, are arch rivals in almost every sport - creating for a classic rivalry along the lines of Carlton v. Collingwood.

That match was the birth of the Japanese Australian Football Association (JAFA). Those two universities still play a large part, together with another private university, Senshu University. Together they came to form the "Japan Samurais".

The Tokyo Goannas formed in November 1991. Their aims were to publicise and promote Australian football in Japan, arrange games on a regular and more organised basis.