The Rugby Experiment

"Hi my name is Toru!” "So?” said the boy, and turned back to the foreigners. ”Right, we got everything Gazza?” “Well Toru & Takeshi are here for a start Bruce!” “What about their gear, passports, money?” “What money? What are a pair of twelve year olds going to buy in Hong Kong” “Well they’re orphanage kids, they’re probably into drink & drugs already! no the boss has allocated some expenses, you know for nice shirts, shoes things like that!” "I hope it is for shirts and shoes, knowing what fun they are in for over the next few years, if they make it, I don’t think the boss will be too impressed if they were caught drinking or doing drugs, I think we would have a few things to answer for”. The plane took off bound for Pacifica via Hong Kong. Takeshi and I sat next to each other; I guessed that Takeshi had a very difficult childhood up to now, as with basically all orphanage kids, I decided not to ask about any family he may have had. I also decided that Takeshi wasn’’t the type of person you wanted to get to close to uninvited. Gary and Bruce sat behind us. Takeshi asked me ‘what we would be doing? Where we would be going? And why we were picked to go’? I couldn’t answer him with any certainty on anything. One big advantage I had over Takeshi, about getting information from the foreigners, was that even though I couldn’t speak English, or more correctly I didn’t have the confidence to speak to Gary or Bruce, however I had learnt enough English from my father and relatives to understand some of what Gary and Bruce were saying to each other. "I can’t believe that we were in Japan for five weeks, and all we got were two kids!” said Garry "Well we still filled our quota of two, the boss wanted quality not quantity” replied Bruce "They are so young, how can you really tell, how good they’ll be at this age?” "Well the boss wanted eleven to twelve year olds, any older, he said would already be too late, and these two were the only ones who got past the eighty percent grade!” "A couple of them were only a few percent shy, we could have changed the odd figure here and there!” "Well we could of, but I’m quite fond of this job, we’ve got our brief, it is black and white, eighty percent meant they could come back to Pacifica, Seventy nine meant they couldn’’t, we had to find a minimum of two candidates from Japan, we’ve got that, don’t forget we are looking through other countries as well, if they don’t get the required fifteen candidates, we were told we could re look at the seventy five to seventy nine percenters again”. "One of them looks to be a good kid, but I’m not too sure about the other one, there’s something about him, he looks mean, even though he’s so young!” "Takeshi you mean? Nah! He’s got attitude, we need that sort of attribute, and to me that’s a bonus!” Takeshi was quiet on the plane, he insisted I give him some of my food, that was given out by the hostess, which I did, as I wasn’t overly hungry, and I didn’t want Takeshi to cause a scene, as I knew he would. I could sense he was really scared, although he would never show it of course. Hong Kong was warm; it was strange after coming from the cold frost of Kobe, barely a day ago. Even though it was actually coming into winter in Hong Kong as well, Hong Kong had this comforting warmth that you feel in the tropics, that lasts relentlessly all through the night, there was none of the freshness that you feel in Kobe at this time of the year. We were in transit there for about forty-eight hours. We were allowed to walk around Kowloon, down to the waterfront, take the star ferry across to Hong Kong Island. We had some money we could spend on sweets and the like. Gary and Bruce bought us some clothes, shirts, shoes, toothbrushes. It was in Hong Kong that Takeshi decided to run away. We were going back to the Eaton Hotel on Nathan Road, at about 9pm, when Takeshi bolted down the underground at Jordon. Being Japanese, Takeshi was just another face in the crowd. It would have been impossible for Gary and Bruce to catch him, the only reason they were able to, was that, just as soon as Takeshi ran down the underground, Bruce was on his trail, always being slightly suspicious of Takeshi’s intentions, he saw Takeshi duck down the underground immediately. Takeshi slipped as he was about to jump over the turnstile, and Bruce was able to grab him, amongst hundreds of eyes looking at him with suspicion. "Brucey my boy looks like you saved our bacon!” Gary said after five minutes had gone by after Takeshi had first disappeared, and they both had re-appeared at street level again. After Bruce ran after Takeshi, Gary grabbed me and made sure I wasn’t going to do likewise, in which I had no intention of doing so anyway. "The bloody little bugger, I told you this one was trouble Gazza! attitude indeed!, if he got away from us, and its only luck that he didn’t!, we would have to go back to Japan and get another kid, I think the boss wouldn’t be too impressed! Don’t you! Especially after the size of the bribes his orphanage wanted out of us”