Handing Off the Tasuki

How Japan's marathon traditions are changing

July 1, 2010


Compared to Hakone and the New Year Ekiden, women's university and corporate ekiden teams receive moderate attention, but despite a considerably shorter history, Japan's most famous and respected runners these days are its female marathoners. The Asahi Kasei company funded one of the first women's corporate teams way back in 1951. In the mid-'70s, expat Miki Gorman scored Boston and New York wins to become the first great female Japanese-born marathoner, but it wasn't until the late '70s that domestic women began to appear in overseas marathons and not until 1983 that one, Akemi Masuda, made the top 10 worldwide. When the Tokyo International Women's Marathon (pictured below) was founded in 1979 as the world's first elite women-only marathon, Japanese women were nowhere near able to compete with the invited foreign competition.

But like the early days of Hakone, Tokyo Women's, along with later elite women's races in Nagoya and Osaka, served the purpose of helping to pull them up to world standards. By the early 1990s they became a factor at the world level, with marathon medals at eight of the last 10 world championships and four straight Olympic marathon medals, two of them gold. They even earned a world championships 10,000m medal, something no Japanese man has accomplished. Olympic record-holder and first woman to go sub-2:20, Naoko Takahashi, became a major public figure, the first native-born Japanese Olympic marathon gold medalist and probably the last Japanese runner who will ever hold a marathon world record. Almost any Japanese person can immediately tell you about Takahashi and her achievements.

Nevertheless, women's ekidens fail to receive the same respect. Although all the women's ekidens are broadcast, none has a following close to Hakone or the New Year Ekiden. Even now, the women's races are all shorter than men's ekidens. Where the National High School Boys Ekiden totals a marathon, the Girls Ekiden is a half marathon. Individual stages are also shorter. The longest men's leg, Hakone's 23.4K fifth stage, is more than double the longest National Corporate Women's Ekiden stage.

Perhaps as a consequence, Japanese women have had marginally more flexibility than men to pursue different paths. It has been more common to see top-level Japanese women race overseas than the men in recent years, and the success of women like Takahashi and the Second Wind club team have in different ways involved existences outside the corporate league world.

Defending gold medalist Mizuki Noguchi's last-minute withdrawal with injury and almost everything else about the Beijing Olympics marathons were a major blow to the national confidence level, but Yoshimi Ozaki's silver medal at last summer's world championships showed that the overall level of the elite women is still high. But like the men, the top end has become blunted; three Japanese women in history have run under 2:20, but there's been only one sub-2:23 since 2005. The new Tokyo Marathon's elite women's fields in the last two years have been as strong as those in Yokohama, Osaka and Nagoya, which have not had the same kind of overseas talent as in the past or as is common in almost any other major marathon. If the goal of these races was to elevate Japanese athletes by giving them the opportunity to test themselves against the world's best, the question arises of whether the elite-only format still fulfills this function in the age of the big city marathon.


As at the elite level, the amateur world is oriented toward teams. There is no shortage of clubs who not only train and run ekidens together but eat, drink, watch races on TV and go on gasshuku summer training camps (pictured below) together like the corporate and university teams.

Even among the sub-2:30 men or the sub-3:00 women, there are a nearly unlimited number of people around who ran in high school but weren't good enough to make a university team, ran in university but didn't go corporate, or who retired from a corporate team but are still running. These runners are motivated by trying to get into the small, elite-only marathons and half marathons, to try to beat some corporate or university runners, and, for the best, to win one of the many marathons outside the elite circuit that offer trips to overseas races as first prize.

The difference, perhaps, is that where a runner like this in the U.S. might dream of making it at the national level, there is nearly no chance of that happening in Japan. These runners may enter official selection races, but there is little possibility of them getting a spot on a national team, as they would have to beat every corporate runner in the race.

Where dedicated American amateurs might target Boston's 3:10 and 3:40 qualifying times, their Japanese equivalents are going for Fukuoka's 2:45 B-standard, Beppu-Oita's 2:50, or Nagoya, Osaka and Yokohama Women's 3:15. It's common for marathons in the bracket below these races to have a 4-hour cutoff. You can find plenty of races for those farther back in the pack, but with names like the Turtle Marathon these are explicitly so.

The Honolulu Marathon has long been the destination for those non-runners who wanted to experience one marathon in their lives, but the launch of the Tokyo Marathon in 2007 has had a deep impact. Roughly 272,000 applied for the 2010 Tokyo Marathon, the vast majority of them beginners. Over the four years since Tokyo launched, these beginners have helped the industry thrive, with new professionally coached clubs and brand flagship stores springing up everywhere. Fashion magazines now regularly target the largest demographic in this population of new runners, independent young women in their 20s and 30s. Longtime running havens such as Tokyo's Imperial Palace 5K loop have become almost dangerously crowded, and races of any length anywhere within a couple of hours of Tokyo fill up months in advance. Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe will hold large, mass-participation marathons within the next two years.

And so Japanese distance running is now approaching a potential shift, with waning international success at the elite level, increased attention on university-level domestic competition and a shift toward true mass participation. Whether the sport becomes something purely for the masses, whether the elites pack it in and focus on the domestic ekidens, or whether the rising generation of young talent is able to maintain a competitive place on the world level, Japanese distance running faces deep changes as it hands off to the next stage.

Japan's elites and hard-working amateurs target the same circuit of small, exclusive races. All of them are broadcast live nationwide. Some of the main marathons include:

Race Gender Qualifying Time 2009-10 Field Size*
Tokyo Marathon / Elite Division men sub-2:23 53
Fukuoka International Marathon / A Division men sub-2:27 84
Lake Biwa Mainichi Marathon men sub-2:30 200
Fukuoka International Marathon / B Division men sub-2:45 671
Beppu-Oita Mainichi Marathon men sub-2:50 649
Tokyo Marathon / Elite Division women sub-2:54 33
Osaka International Ladies Marathon women sub-3:15 448
Nagoya International Women's Marathon women sub-3:15 309
Yokohama International Women's Marathon women sub-3:15 404

*excluding invited athletes