Paul Lewis: Weird World Cup if Japan wins

Those still with warm fuzzy feelings about New Zealand bringing back the 2011 Rugby World Cup must have felt like they'd eaten week-old sushi when they saw the Japanese bid.

Regular readers of this column may recall my initial scepticism that the New Zealand bid would bring home the bacon. There can be no doubt about its worthiness, nor the clever angle that Chris Moller and Jock Hobbs are pursuing in their road trip.

New Zealand, they are saying, is an example of a smaller country which could be priced out of ever holding the Cup again - yet it is one of the strongholds of the game. It is a persuasive and compelling argument and plays on the fact that the International Rugby Board [IRB] will not always base its hosting decision solely on money.

But what money Japan are offering - a guaranteed profit of 100m, with at least 20 of the world's biggest corporations lining up behind the Japanese bid, shouting: "Take our money; take ours". No, the 2011 World Cup decision will not be made solely on money. The IRB will be able to point to all manner of other reasons why they should accept the money - I mean, the bid. They will advocate the need to foster the game in countries outside the big five. They'll point to the fact that a country like Japan has never held the Cup before; they will also point to the fact that 100 million quid goes a long way to raising the health levels of the game globally.

The plain fact is that the World Cup in Japan will be nowhere near as good, nor as much fun, as if it were held in New Zealand. Or South Africa. Not that the Japanese won't do it well. They will. But you can see tickets to the World Cup being hard to sell.

Japan is major bucks expensive and you can see likely tourists wondering about the trip. Some years ago, after an All Black tour of Japan, I take some time off and struck out on my own for a wee holiday. Silly boy. Once the use of corporate credit card was gone, the full weight of Japan fell on me like a sumo wrestler.

Two nights in only a reasonable hotel and I was approaching penury. Finding a backstreet bowl of noodles required a call to my bank manager. Finally, I remembered the words of a friend of mine who has her own travel writing business. Go to the love hotels, she said, much cheaper.

Love hotels, if you don't already know, are the places where Japanese couples go to, er, discuss the economy. They are rented by the hour and come in all sorts of bizarre shapes, sizes and themes.

They are plentiful because many Japanese live in extended families and don't have anywhere to monitor inflation. One I ended up in was a hideous purple and pink affair with gossamer curtains over the bed and the walls decked out with shields, swords and coats of arms and a suit of armour in the corner. Quite what Japanese couples did with or made of this when discussing the economy, I can't say. Do you want the drawbridge up or down, darling?

Virtually no one speaks English and we Kiwis are so useless when it comes to other languages that our Japanese is limited to "Subaru" or "udon". Making yourself understood can be a nightmare in a country where no-one wants to give offence and therefore finds cunning ways of not answering you, rather than offer a direct refusal.

This led to many puzzling conversations in the love hotels. Large, hairy foreigner wants room on his own. This apparently conjured up all manner of indigestible images for mine hosts and they spent a lot of time smiling and nodding but actually doing naff-all until I left, frustrated.

Finally, however, I cracked it and the dubious delights of the love hotels were mine. They were clean, cheap and mostly hideous and, once you found someone who understood that you didn't want to indulge in a marathon of onanism, some adventurous Japanese souls bent the rules and let me stay there.

But to get back to the point - you knew I would eventually, didn't you? A World Cup in Japan will be a strange affair. The host nation will likely not survive the pool play, so who will then go to the cavernous grounds to see the rest play?

Even if the Japanese arrange rent-a-crowds, they will mostly be puzzled old darlings who won't have a clue and will wave their flags at the wrong moments. Even that doesn't really matter. The IRB will still be too hard pressed to go past the 100 million quid.

Which means our bid is doomed. But we probably need to carry it through so we regain the credibility we lost in the 2003 debacle. This may be the one we have to lose so we win the next one.

In the meantime, the NZRU and Government can get on with the business of finding a way to build the one major stadium we need to host a World Cup.