In 2004 I conducted a Forum on boys education at the University of Sydney that attracted leading scholars from a range of fields working on boys education. From the many excellent papers presented I invited presenters working in relevant areas to contribute to a special issue of Sport, Education and Society, the leading journal with the highest impact factor in the physical education field. Four years after the forum this excellent collection of articles will be published in issue xxx (2). It is an international collection of writing by some of the best scholars in the field working on gender and sport with papers written on boys experiences of physical education, dance and sport in Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand. Contributors include, Raewyn Connell, Patricia Vertinsky, Michael Gard, Chris Hickey and Richard Pringle. My paper in this collection looks at the class and culture specific forms of masculinity learnt by young men through years of playing rugby in Japan.