Coach Ian Foster has fired back at Jamie Joseph's parting shot at the All Blacks, after their narrow 38-31 victory over Japan at Tokyo on Saturday.
The Brave Blossoms coach delivered a brutal assessment of their opposition after the test match, and questioned whether the All Blacks have lost their aura.
Joseph's Japan will take on England at Twickenham in two weeks, which he believes are a "better side" than New Zealand.
"Everyone is thinking about the All Blacks and that's part of their armour, really," Joseph said post-match.
"Having played for the All Blacks, one of the things we used to talk about 25 years ago was that everyone was a wee bit scared of us.
"Perhaps that's not the case anymore, I'm not sure."
"The guts of it really, we just made too many mistakes at the wrong time.
"We shut their lineout down, shut their maul down, but it still wasn't enough and that sort of tells you how good the All Blacks are as a team.
"The key for us really is to go to England now and replicate that performance against a better side."
Foster was quizzed on Joseph's remarks, and responded with an equally cheeky jab, but admits there are plenty of areas to work on.
"It's nicely mischievous isn't it?" He said of Joseph's comments. "He's obviously very happy with a close loss and he should be proud of his team's effort, but we'll take the win and move on.
"I've been around a lot of All Black teams where our first game as a group after a spell we've struggled.
"But there were certainly some parts that weren't up to our standards, we scored 38 points with five nice tries, but if you look at your performance - particularly our lineout - it really didn't function particularly well.
"We left a lot of opportunities there and probably our transition defence, where we just looked slow to move and not really connected - a couple of pretty critical areas I don't think we were up to par.
"But it was also a pretty good Japan team we played against and in particular, that transition defence is an area of strength for them,
"They fed off the scraps and did it very well, we knew that was coming and we weren't quite quick enough but a good building block going forward."
