Japanology Plus 2016-06-02 - Running

In many countries around the world, the long, lazy New Year’s vacation is a time for relaxing at home, glued to the sofa and snacking on the leftovers of the year’s festive feast. Japan is no exception, and in another parallel with certain other parts of the globe, sports often feature heavily in the holiday TV schedule.



But in contrast to the leisurely regimen of darts coverage that once typically accompanied the cold turkey sandwiches and stale mince pies in this writer’s British household, January 2–3 each year consistently finds almost 30 percent of Japanese homes tuned to a rather more energetic spectacle as they polish off the last of the traditional New Year’s osechi ryori.



The event in question is the annual Hakone Ekiden, a grueling two-day relay race in which teams of university students compete over the 10 stages of the 200-km-plus round trip between Tokyo’s Otemachi, and picturesque Hakone, in the hills near Mount Fuji.



With a history dating back to 1920, the event has even been called "one of the world’s three great road races," and continues to capture the imagination of the general public thanks to its strong team ethos, and dramatic stories such as the seemingly improbable consecutive triumphs in 2015 and 2016 of Aoyama Gakuin (a school not previously known for running prowess), or the emergence several years ago of Yuki Kawauchi, now a civil servant who trains and runs without sponsorship, winning renown for his amazing achievements outside Japan’s established framework of university and corporate teams.