japan running news

In the early days of the Hakone Ekiden Koreans were the first group from outside Japan to run and make an impact on the event's history . 60 years after the first two Koreans ran Hakone, Kenyan Douglas Wakiihuri became the first Kenyan to come to Japan to run when he joined the S&B corporate team. After he won the 1987 Rome World Championships marathon and took silver a year later in the Seoul Olympics the door was open for Kenyan and other African athletes to follow Wakiihuri's lead to the corporate leagues, to universities, and even to high schools. Tsutomu Akiyama was responsible for bringing the first two Kenyans to Hakone, recruiting Joseph Otwori and Kennedy Manyisa Isena to go to Yamanashi Gakuin University . "I went to Kenya to see what the people and environment were like," he told JRN. "I watched a cross-country race and thought, 'We have to get someone like that to run for Yamanashi Gakuin.'" Yamanashi Gakuin had debuted at Hakon...

Half marathon collegiate record holder Mekubo Mogusu 's 10000 m collegiate record lasted for over than 13 years until Joseph Razini Lemeteki  (Takushoku Univ.) bettered it by 2 seconds with a 27:25.65 at the Sept. 27 Nittai University Time Trials meet. Lemeteki's record lasted less than 7 weeks, as Charles Kamau Wanjiku  (Musashino Gakuin Univ.) won the latest Nittai iteration 's A-heat in 27:18.89. With the always-fast Hachioji Long Distance meet just around the corner it was a surprisingly deep race, Wanjiku leading the top four under 27:30 and the top 13 all sub-28, four of them Japanese. In the slowest heat, 57-year old Tatsuo Koizumi  ran 32:38.88, short of Australian Keith Bateman 's M55 world record of 31:51.86 but a M55 Japanese national record by almost two minutes and over 30 seconds under the known age 57 world record . The B-heat was hot too, with three Sendai Ikuei H.S.  runners going sub-29, Boniface Mutech  and Shunsuke Yoshii running 28:11.48...

Track time trial meets are a fact of life in the Japanese system, running all the way through the fall up to championship ekiden season in December. And with the conservative response to the pandemic in Japan in terms of road race cancelation, that's gone even longer, pretty much through the end of the academic and fiscal year in March. But this weekend did have the last major full track meet of the season, the National Corporate Track and Field Championships at Osaka's Yanmar Stadium Nagai. But before we get to that, last weekend's Nittai University Time Trials meet in Yokohama produced one major result that has to be mentioned. With Saturday's usual program of everything except men's 5000 m moving to the public holiday on Monday, Joseph Lemeteki Razini  (Takushoku Univ.) took two seconds off the Japanese 10000 m collegiate record, winning in 27:25.65 over Jonathan Ndiku  (Hitachi Butsuryu) and Ledama Kisaisa  (Kanebo). The previous record of 27:27.64 was set by ...

16-year-old Samuel Wanjiru vs. 15-year-old Mekubo Mogusu on the First Stage of the 2002 National High School Boys Ekiden in their first year in Japan. One of the great races to ever grace Japanese TV, before the big ekidens got together and banned non-Japanese runners from running first.   This race was one of the reasons everyone in Japan knew what was coming with Wanjiru years before he went off to Europe for the first time. Wanjiru and Mogusu came to Japan one day apart and were great rivals for the next three years. Mogusu went on to become the best collegiate runner in Japanese history, running three sub-hour half marathons his junior year at Yamanashi Gakuin University and breaking course records everywhere. Wanjiru went straight to the corporate leagues and on to marathon legend. JRN interviewed Tsutomu Akiyama , who helped bring both of them to Japan, back in 2010 .

Scheduled for September 27, the Ichinoseki International Half Marathon in Ichinoseki, Iwate has been canceled due to the ongoing coronavirus crisis. With a formal announcement of its cancelation issued by race organizers, this marks the first time in the Ichinoseki Half's history that the event has been canceled. Founded in 1982, the Ichinoseki Half attracts top corporate league runners, university men targeting the Hakone Ekiden, and amateurs, with participation numbers rising in recent years to more than 3,000 people from across the country. But as the only one of Japan's 47 prefectures without a single recorded case of coronavirus infection, concerns are high in Iwate about the risk of the virus being brought in and spread by use of public transportation, concerns that were a part of the decision to cancel the race. Entry fees will be returned to those who have already entered. In addition, the second running of October's Iwate Morioka City Marathon is likely to ...

Part three of three in JRN's interview with Tsutomu Akiyama , one of the people responsible for first bringing Kenyan athletes to run in Japan. Read part one and part two. Stephen Mayaka told me that jitsugyodan teams want Kenyans mostly for the New Year Ekiden. In the last few years they’ve restricted foreign runners to one stage, the “International Stage,” and have dramatically shortened it to 8 km. Do you think this is going to result in fewer opportunities for Kenyans to find a place on a Japanese team? With regard to that, my opinion is this: At the Olympics, the World Championships or major marathons they don’t say, “You are faster so you have to run 43 km or 44 km.” It’s the same for everyone. Everyone has the same start line and finish line. In these Japanese corporate ekidens, where they tell fast foreigners that they can only run a particular stage, the only Japanese runners who run that same stage are the slowest ones. It makes it so that you can’t really tell ho...

Part two of a 2010 interview with Tsutomu Akiyama , one of the people responsible for bringing the first Kenyans into Japan's high school, collegiate and corporate running worlds. Read part one here . Can you talk more about World Half Marathon Championships silver medalist Philes Ongori? Well, as of April she’s leaving and going back to be based in Kenya. She’s superb up to the half marathon. She has run in the 67:30’s. At the World Half in the U.K. she ran 67:38 and came 2nd, just beating 3rd at the very end. But looking toward the marathon…she can train up to what’s necessary for the half marathon, but the marathon has to be double that. I don’t know how that’s going to turn out. I can’t say one way or the other. Looking back a bit, when she came over in high school she was running 2:23 for 800 m. The first stage of the National High School Ekiden is the same as the first stage of the National Inter-Prefectural Ekiden. On the first stage of the National High School Eki...

Tsutomu Akiyama is a key figure in the history of both Japanese running and Olympic marathoning. A senior advisor to Yamanashi Gakuin University's ekiden and track and field programs and one half of the partnership responsible for beginning to bring Kenyans to Japan in the wake of Olympic medalist Douglas Wakiihuri 's arrival, Akiyama discovered and has been a mentor to the likes of marathon great Daniel Njenga , World Half Marathon silver medalist Philes Ongori , World Championships marathon medalist Tsuyoshi Ogata , Hakone Ekiden course record breaker  Mekubo Mogusu , corporate league star,  Gideon Ngatuny , multiple world-level medalist  Paul Tanui and Beijing Olympics marathon champion and winner of the legendary 2010 Chicago Marathon, Samuel Wanjiru In 2010 Akiyama gave JRN a one-on-one interview in which he talked about everything, from the human side of his athletes to problems with foreign agents, from picking a teenaged Wanjiru up at the airport during his ...