Australian rules football in Japan

He founded the Seisoka Football Club and was successful in introducing it as a sport to four large high schools in Tokyo by having the rules translated into Japanese.

However the Japan leg was cancelled due to the prohibitive logistics (and a lack of support from the game's governing body) and the tour went only as far as the US and Canada.

In 1936 the Australian National Football Council debated supporting an effort by Victorian student T. W. Ekersley to reintroduce the sport to Japan.

[6] In 1945, the crews of HMAS Nepal and HMS Shropshire contested a match at Yokohama watched by a crowd of Japanese and American nationals.

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

[10] In 1964 Japanese schoolboy Hideki Oka spent 12 months in Australia under Rotary Club sponsorship where he played Australian rules football.

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 Nippon AFL appeared to become dormant in 2008, but not before the mighty Nagoya Redbacks won three premierships in a row all thanks to the bustling centre half forward Bradley Manson who averaged 3–6 goals per match.. Japan entered two sides into the Asian Australian Football Championships in 2019, fielding an all-Japanese University-based team, the Warriors in Division 2.