Women’s Rugby Continues to Bloom in Japan
Japanese women’s rugby is entering an exciting new chapter, with growing opportunities for players, coaches and administrators, increasing international exposure and a new identity designed to take the game to a wider audience across Japan.
Three years after the Japan Rugby Football Union launched its Women’s Rugby Mid-to-Long-Term Strategic Plan, JRFU Director of Women’s Rugby Akane Kagawa believes significant progress is being made towards its long-term goals.
Appointed to the role in 2023, Kagawa took on further responsibilities when she became a Vice President of the JRFU in June this year. Looking back over the past three years, she identifies three particular areas where the strategy is making a big impact: player and coaching pathways, building the women’s rugby community and developing women as leaders within the game.
“We have been building up step by step each year, and are starting to see and feel real forward momentum,” Kagawa said.
One of the most important developments has been strengthening the pathway for young players. From April this year, the JRFU introduced a new Under-17 development programme, which brings coaches into ten regions across Japan to deliver high-performance training programmes while also working to identify high-potential talent.
The programme connects with another important initiative, the Female High-Performance Coaching Academy. Launched in 2025 with an initial cohort of four coaches, the programme has welcomed a further five this year, with participants gaining practical experience working with young players while developing towards future roles at the highest levels of the game.
The Under-17 programme is also providing an opportunity to address one of the long-standing challenges facing Japanese women’s rugby: the development of greater depth among forwards.
While Kagawa acknowledges that this remains an area requiring continued attention, targeted development is increasingly taking place both at a national level and through regional unions. The intention is to introduce more forward-specific elements into the Under-17 programme as it develops.
While attracting girls to the game is important and has always been relatively successful, retaining them as they move from high school into university and then into adult life has traditionally been more difficult. Kagawa sees the university game as one of the areas with considerable potential to close that gap.
The JRFU’s annual university sevens competition is helping provide opportunities for female students to continue playing, while building and strengthening rugby teams in traditional rugby universities like Waseda and Keio.
Kagawa hopes that over time more of Japan’s universities with long established men’s fifteens programmes will follow, creating a clearer pathway for girls who want to continue playing after high school. The onward progression of this would be the development of a stronger women’s university fifteens competition to mirror that of the men’s game.
The JRFU’s Girls Rugby YouTube Channel is helping to tell those stories to a wider audience. A recent programme focusing on women’s university rugby has been the show’s most watched episode to date, demonstrating what Kagawa believes is considerable untapped interest in this part of the game.
Retention, however, is not only about young players.
The JRFU is also looking at ways of bringing women back to rugby after they have stopped playing because of work, marriage, children or other life commitments. Opportunities through non-contact formats such as T1 Rugby, together with the longer-term possibility of more playing opportunities for senior and masters-age women, are intended to reinforce the idea that rugby can remain part of a woman’s life well beyond school or university.
At the elite end of the pathway, Japanese players are also continuing to look beyond Japan for development opportunities.
Japanese women are playing in overseas competitions including Australia’s Super W and New Zealand’s Super Rugby Aupiki, giving them experience of different playing environments and standards. Kagawa believes that exposure remains an important part of developing players capable of competing at the highest international level.
That international outlook has also become firmly established within the Sakura Fifteen.
Former Head Coach Lesley McKenzie completed seven seasons in charge following Rugby World Cup 2025, leaving what Kagawa regards as an important legacy for Japanese women’s rugby.
“One of the biggest legacies she left for the team is the confidence to challenge internationally,” Kagawa said. “This is both in terms of challenging as Japan in international competitions, but also about getting out of Japan and testing themselves in international environments like Australia, New Zealand and Europe.”
Through greater exposure to international rugby and a much more regular programme of test matches, McKenzie helped broaden the players’ understanding of what was required to compete internationally. Just as importantly, Kagawa believes the experience gave Japanese players much greater confidence in their ability to challenge the world’s leading teams.
That provides an important foundation for new Head Coach Toshizumi Kitagawa, his coaching staff and the current generation of Sakura Fifteen players as they begin a new cycle towards Rugby World Cup 2029. With a more internationally experienced playing group and clearer understanding of the standards required at the highest level, the challenge now is to build further on those foundations over the coming three years.
Japan’s approach also continues to place considerable value on both forms of the international game.
Rather than viewing sevens and fifteens as competing programmes, Kagawa sees the ability to develop players through both formats as one of the distinctive strengths of Japanese women’s rugby.
“We put an equal focus on both sevens and fifteens.” she said. “That diversity is very important. As a union, we work hard to develop players within both sevens and fifteens, and I think that is quite unique.”
BLOOM HOPE
Bringing those different elements together is also central to the JRFU’s new BLOOM HOPE concept, a common identity for Japanese women’s rugby encompassing both the Sakura Fifteen and Sakura Sevens.
The initiative is designed primarily to reach beyond rugby’s existing audience and increase the profile and awareness of the women’s game within the wider Japanese community.
For Kagawa, that is directly connected to one of the JRFU’s major long-term ambitions: bringing a future Women’s Rugby World Cup to Japan.
“If we want to host the World Cup sometime in the future, we need to raise the awareness of women’s rugby throughout Japan,” she said.
BLOOM HOPE also gives the JRFU a way to present women’s rugby as a whole, rather than presenting sevens and fifteens as separate programmes with separate identities.
“We need to establish a holistic image of women’s rugby, combining sevens and fifteens,” Kagawa said.
The concept of turning differences into strength also reflects the diversity that exists within the game — different players, different formats and different pathways, all contributing towards a common ambition.
With 2026 marking the JRFU’s centenary year, Kagawa believes the timing provides an opportunity both to celebrate the progress already made in women’s rugby and to introduce it to new audiences.
Building that wider community is important not only for attracting supporters, but also partners and investment capable of supporting the continued development of the game. Kagawa also sees greater international promotion of Japanese women’s rugby as an important part of demonstrating Japan’s credentials to the wider global rugby community as it works towards the ambition of hosting the World Cup.
That ambition remains firmly in place.
Were Japan to host the tournament, it would be the first Women’s Rugby World Cup staged in Asia — something Kagawa believes could provide another transformational moment for the women’s game in Japan and across the region.
Developing Leaders Through Rugby
The ambitions of the JRFU’s women’s strategy also extend well beyond results on the field.
Developing women as coaches, referees, administrators and decision-makers remains an important part of the plan.
At present, 25 of Japan’s 47 prefectural rugby unions have a woman serving on their board. Kagawa wants that figure to reach all 47 by 2028.
She has presented that objective to representatives of the prefectural unions, while the JRFU is also planning opportunities for female board members to share their experiences, discuss the challenges they face and learn from one another.
The Female High-Performance Coach Academy represents another part of the same process — creating visible pathways for women to progress into senior coaching positions and, potentially, national-team roles.
For Kagawa, however, leadership development is about more than creating opportunities within rugby.
She has long viewed the sport as an environment in which girls and women can develop confidence, independence and leadership qualities that they carry into their wider lives and communities.
“We are still building momentum,” she said. “We have not seen all the results yet, but we are building up with small steps each year and moving forward with purpose.”
Those small steps now stretch across the game: more structured pathways for young players, investment in female coaches, stronger university rugby, opportunities for women to remain involved throughout their lives, greater international experience and a growing emphasis on female leadership.
The ultimate goals remain deliberately ambitious: a stronger and more sustainable women’s game throughout Japan, national teams capable of challenging the world’s best, and, in the future, a Women’s Rugby World Cup in Japan.