Tokyo Explorer

In terms of sporting options, Japan is up there with the pack.

There are few competitive sports in the world today that cannot be sampled somewhere or other in Japan, while those of us on the lookout merely to serve as spectators have a similar wealth of options to go with.

Baseball is perhaps the de-facto national sport – certainly in terms of popularity. A dozen pro-teams compete for the Japan Series Pennant in a title race that kicks off in late march and runs to the autumn with a recently introduced ‘inter-league’ session held in the early summer.

Football turned pro in Japan only in the mid-1990s, attracted a huge initial following to the two divisions of the J-League, but has slumped somewhat in recent years making tickets a little easier to obtain. The area around Tokyo has at least four or five top flight teams (Urawa Reds, Yokohama F. Marinos, FC Tokyo, Tokyo Verdy and Kashiwa Reysol) worth scoping if a fan of the ‘Beautiful Game’ with tickets going for roughly 2000 – 5000 yen a pop.

Sumo – of course – is a Japanese sport although it didn’t start out that way; sumo, judo, karate and kendo as well as several other related ‘martial arts’ were at first methods of training the individual (mind and body) and were never intended as out and out sports. Sumo tourneys take place six times a year – thrice in Tokyo – in January, May, and September. For the interested – TE’s Sumo Tours would be a great place to get a taster of this ancient aspect of Japanese culture.

Tennis and a range of other sports popular in the west such as American football, rugby, ice hockey, horse racing and even winter sports have their own legion of dedicated fans, with many of the country’s universities home to sports teams and riding clubs that make up regional and national leagues and serve as nurseries for the still fledgling sports such as ice hockey.

Running is perhaps something of an exception in the Japanese psyche – in that it is a sport carried out by an individual in a nation that largely worships team effort and suffering.

The marathon is of particular interest to Japanese, and rightly so with several Olympic and World Championship winners of Japanese (usually female) origin; this summer’s last minute withdrawal of Mizuki Noguchi – gold medal winner four years earlier) from the Beijing Games, seen almost as a national tragedy.