Ryūji Nakatake

Ryuji Nakatake is exactly the kind of figure I find myself quietly admiring — a rugby union coach from Fukuoka who built his reputation not in the spotlight but in the unglamorous, essential work of shaping other people into something better. Coaching rugby is genuinely thankless compared to playing it — no one's putting your face on a poster — yet the cultural and tactical fingerprint a great coach leaves on a squad is permanent. He never played a first-team match at Waseda until he was voted captain in his final year, then came back to coach the club to two national university titles and went on to shape coaching across Japanese rugby, and that path says more about his character than a trophy cabinet ever could. That's the Fukuoka grit for you.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Ryūji Nakatake is a Japanese rugby union coach born on May 8, 1973, in Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan. He captained Waseda University's rugby team, then coached it from 2006 to 2010, winning the All-Japan University Championship in 2007 and 2008. He became the Japan Rugby Football Union's first coaching director in 2010, coached Japan's under-20 side, and founded the leadership training company TEAMBOX in 2014.

Name (English)

Ryūji Nakatake

Name (Japanese)

中竹竜二

Reading

なかたけ りゅうじ

Born

May 8, 1973 (age 53)

Origin

Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan

Occupation

Rugby Union Coach

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Taurus / Ox

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E7%AB%B9%E7%AB%9C%E4%BA%8C
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11366864

Tags

• From Fukuoka Prefecture
• Rugby Union Coach

Last updated

October 18, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.