The draw for the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan will be held at the Kyoto State Guest House in Kyoto on Wednesday.<\/b>
\nThe draw for the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan will be held at the Kyoto State Guest House in Kyoto on Wednesday.
Executives from each participating national side will visit Shimogamo-jinja shrine, which is regarded as the birthplace of rugby in the Kansai region and is also a designated UNESCO World Heritage site.
The representatives will attend a ceremony at a monument in the precincts of the shrine that commemorates the birth of rugby in the region. Members of one of the local rugby clubs are hoping the visit will promote the sport in Japan, with a representative saying, „We want to spread the fact that Kyoto is still one of the spiritual homes of rugby in the nation.“
Japanese rugby is said to have started in 1899, when a British language teacher introduced the sport to students at Keio University in Tokyo. According to senior members of the Kyoto University Rugby Football Club, rugby was not widely played in the Kanto region initially. A Keio student taught rugby to his relative and other students of Third High School (now Kyoto University) in the precincts of Shimogamo-jinja in 1910. The following year, the nations’s second rugby club was established at Third High School.
Rugby has rapidly grown in popularity in Kyoto since the early days of the sport’s introduction in the region. Kyoto’s Doshisha University established a rugby club in 1911; a junior high school and a commercial school in the city also established clubs soon after. People from Kyoto who were involved in the sport also appear to have been responsible for establishing rugby clubs in the Kanto region, such as at Waseda University and the University of Tokyo, both in Tokyo.<\/p>\n