Traffic has flowed steadily to Japan for a few years but is increasing because clubs there are now allowed to contract an extra "foreign" player as long as their eligibility hasn't been captured.
Super Rugby has always seen reasonable player movement to richer northern clubs but the volumes haven't historically been this high and more of a worry is that the underlying factors driving it have no obvious solutions.
The weakness of the rand is driving South Africa's exodus, but the situation is not being helped by the difficulties their Super Rugby teams are having staying competitive.
Sanzar chief executive Andy Marinos said this week that he felt South Africa had shown they don't have the playing resources to support the sixth team they were granted this year, while commercially, the Australians are struggling to run five as the Western Force are now being underwritten by the national body across the Tasman.
Of further concern in the bigger picture are the respective decisions by both the Springboks and Wallabies to allow players based offshore to be eligible for selection. Significant change is needed to put the southern game on a better footing and work has already begun on two major fronts.
The first project is creating a global season - or at least a more logical alignment between the two hemispheres. There's unanimous agreement that players around the world need a greater off-season and ideally, from a southern perspective, new structure would allow Super Rugby to be played without pausing for test matches.
New Zealand Rugby chief executive Steve Tew has said he won't agree to any tests beyond 2019 until they have an agreement about restructuring the season. He's hopeful that a plan could be agreed by the end of the year, and reiterated yesterday that he would take aggressive action if an outcome could not be reached.
"In reality the north can't do without the south at the international level and we can't do without the north, either," he said.
"We really don't want to have to take the negotiation to a point where we call that card but we're reasonably confident if we can't get an agreement that's satisfactory - and there will be a compromise - then we'll certainly talk about playing among our southern colleagues at bit more and we might go and negotiate one or two test matches on the side and they'll be very different financial arrangements than the ones we have now. But I'm 99 per cent sure we won't get to that point."
The second project is also underway, which is a massive review of the current Super Rugby set-up, which will lead to a detailed recommendation by the end of the year as to what changes need to be made.
Marinos wants for the south to have a strategic vision and long-term goal for Super Rugby in terms of competition structure and geographic footprint, and for that to hold enough appeal to deter players from looking to ply their trade elsewhere.
