japan running news

A day on from the Marathon Grand Championship, Japan's 2020 Olympic marathon trials event, JAAF marathon development project team leader Toshihiko Seko, 63, spoke to media about the race, which broke from the tradition of the JAAF choosing national team members from multiple races to at last have the contenders all race head to head in a single competition.  "It takes at least six months to prepare for the Olympics," he said. "If you don't know whether you're on the team it creates a lot of uncertainty and worry. That's not going to be the case this time. The MGC was perfect. We came together in humility to put it together." With a laugh he added, "I want a 100 million yen [~$925,000 USD] bonus for it. All we got was the burden of responsibility."

Seko, who in his prime earned the reputation of being the nation's "TV ratings generator marathon man," eagerly anticipates a resurgence of popularity for the marathon thanks to th…

On May 7 an information session took place in Tokyo for athletes who have qualified for September's new "one-shot" selection race that will determine at least two members of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics men's and women's marathon teams. Two of the top men and women at the Sept. 15 MGC Race will be named to the three-member marathon team rosters for the Tokyo Olympics.

34 men and 15 women qualified for the more-or-less "one-shot" race, which will be a first in Japanese Olympic selection. 40 of the qualifiers and their coaches attended the May 7 briefing session in Tokyo. One notable absence was U.S.-based men's marathon national record holder Suguru Osako. JAAF marathon development project team leader Toshihiko Seko began by reiterating the significance of the new-format selection race.

Seko told them, "This race will be challenging and will place tremendous pressure upon you. The athletes who can deal with that will be the ones who become our true O…

Entry lists were announced Feb. 6 for the 2019 National Cross Country Championships, to be held Feb. 23 in Fukuoka's Uminonakamichi Kaihin Park.

The senior men's 10 km field of 165 is led by last year's 5000 m national champion Hazuma Hattori (Toenec), 2019 Marugame Half Marathon 4th-placer and new Aoyama Gakuin University captain Takato Suzuki, and Fukuoka native Shota Onizuka who ran the First Stage on 2019 Hakone Ekiden champion Tokai University's winning team.

The senior women's 8 km features Yuka Hori, Fifth Stage record breaker at last year's National Corporate Women's Ekiden for national champion Panasonic, her teammate and Third Stage winner Nanami Watanabe and 2018 Asian Games 5000 m 6th-placer Minami Yamanouchi (Kyocera). 102 women are scheduled to run. The national championships will also include junior men's 8 km and junior women's 6 km races.

JAAF marathon development project leader Toshihiko Seko commented, "The men's race sh…

On Nov. 13 Rikkyo University, which will celebrate its 150th anniversary in 2024, announced its new "Rikkyo Hakone Ekiden 2024" project, naming DeNA corporate team runner Yuichiro Ueno, 33, as head coach of its ekiden program.

A graduate of Nagano's Saku Chosei H.S. and Hakone powerhouse Chuo University, Ueno has been well-known for his unique personality as well as his achievements both at those schools and at the SB and DeNA teams. He will leave DeNA at the end of November and take over at Rikkyo effective Dec. 1 to lead its ekiden team to qualify for the 100th Hakone Ekiden in 2024. He plans to remain active as an athlete, training directly alongside the athletes he will supervise.

If successful it will be Rikkyo's first time qualifying for the Hakone Ekiden since 1968. For a school more than half a century removed from the Hakone frontlines Rikkyo's new development project is an ambitious one, and the appointment of the idiosyncratic Ueno as head coach adds …

Tanzanian marathon legend Juma Ikangaa, 58, visited and talked with students at Kita J.H.S. in Nagai, Yamagata on Oct. 19. In the 1980s and early 1990s Ikangaa was one of the top marathoners in the world, representing Tanzania at three Olympic Games. Ikangaa was part of a Tanzanian delegation visiting Nagai, which will host the Tanzanian national team for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The welcome event and exchange with students took place in the school gymnasium, where the visiting delegation sampled local products. After watching students show off their skill at difficult kendama moves Ikangaa tried his hand with the traditional toy. Afterwards while eating lunch he talked to students via an interpreter about various aspects of Tanzanian culture.

"Listening to Mr. Ikangaa made me interested in Tanzania," said one male student. "I'd like to try to learn Swahili." Ikangaa commented, "I was delighted to speak with the students today. I hope …

Coached by JAAF Long Distance and Marathon Development Project team leader Toshihiko Seko, 62, the DeNA men's corporate team announced on Sept. 28 that it will no longer run ekidens. Last year it placed 3rd at the East Japan Corporate Ekiden, qualifying for the Jan. 1 New Year Ekiden national championships where it placed a competitive 6th. However, this year it did not submit an entry for the Nov. 3 East Japan race, meaning it will not run the New Year Ekiden either. An official statement is expected to be released early next week.

The DeNA team was founded in 2013. Including Seko, the majority of its staff and athletes came from the historic S&B corporate team following its dissolution. Prior to its termination S&B also stopped running ekidens. Led by 2012 London Olympics 10000 m 5th-placer Bedan Karoki of Kenya, the current team members will focus on their individual pursuits on the track and in the marathon in the coming seasons.

The DeNA news followed shortly after a…

JAAF Board of Directors member and Marathon Development Project leader Toshihiko Seko, 62, was given an official warning by the JAAF after making inappropriate comments to a female TV announcer. Seko acknowledged having made the remarks and expressed regret, saying, "I'd like to exercise more caution about what I say."

According to the JAAF and the DeNA corporation where Seko serves as executive head coach of the men's ekiden team, at an afterparty following April's Gifu Seiryu Half Marathon where he was working as a guest commentator, Seko made inappropriate remarks toward a female TV announcer who was also attending the party. The announcer reported the incident to the network, who reassigned her superiors who had told her to attend the party.

The DeNA corporate headquarters PR office confirmed in an interview that Seko had made the inappropriate remarks and that as an employer it had given him an official warning and apologized to the TV network where the ann…

A Bank of America Chicago Marathon press release

The Bank of America Chicago Marathon announced today that reigning Boston Marathon champion and “citizen runner” Yuki Kawauchi and 2016 Olympian and Nike Oregon Project runner Suguru Osako will join the elite competition as they both seek to become the first Chicago Marathon champion from Japan since Toshihiko Seko took the crown in 1986.

"I'm really happy to have the chance to race in the Bank of America Chicago Marathon and the Abbott World Marathon Majors," Kawauchi said. "I'm looking forward to running the same race where Toshinari Takaoka set the former national record and so many other great Japanese athletes have run well. My results in the other American Abbott World Marathon Majors races, Boston and New York, were pretty good, and I'll do everything I can to line up in Chicago ready to produce good results there too."

“Yuki and Suguru are exciting additions to our elite field,” said Executive Rac…

Ancient History I went to Wesleyan University, where the legend of four-time Boston Marathon champ and Wes alum Bill Rodgers hung heavy over the cross-country team. Inspired by Koichi Morishita and Young-Cho Hwang’s duel at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics I ran my first marathon in 1993, qualifying for Boston ’94 where Bill was kind enough to sign a star-struck 20-year-old me’s bib number at the expo.

Three years later I moved to Japan for grad school, and through a long string of coincidences I came across a teenaged kid named Yuki Kawauchi down at my neighborhood track. I never imagined he’d become what he is, but right from the start there was just something different about him. After his 2:08:37 breakthrough at the 2011 Tokyo Marathon he called me up and asked me to help him get into races abroad. He’d finished 3rd on the brutal downhill Sixth Stage at the Hakone Ekiden, and given how he’d run the hills in the last 6 km at Tokyo ’11 I thought he’d do well at Boston or New York. “If M…

https://www.lequipe.fr/Athletisme/Article/Le-japon-le-nouvel-empire-du-marathon/890018

The six members of Japan's men's and women's marathon teams at the ongoing London World Championships returned to Tokyo's Haneda Airport on Aug. 9. Decked out in the official team suit, Japanese team captain and at 9th the top-placing Japanese marathoner in London Yuki Kawauchi (Saitama Pref. Gov't) spoke to the media.

Having declared pre-race his intention to withdraw from consideration for future Japanese National Team positions, post-race Kawauchi showed no change in that intent. With regard to his future plans, his motivation as a competitor likewise remaining unchanged, Kawauchi indicated that he will run Decmeber's Fukuoka International Marathon,where his 3rd-place overall finish last year earned him his place in London. "In Fukuoka I want to break my PB and run 2:07," he said. "There are things I want to accomplish besides being on the National Team."

Kawauchi revealed that his next marathon will be September's Oslo Marathon, whe…

JAAF marathon development project leader Toshihiko Seko, 60, and three-time Hakone Ekiden champion Aoyama Gakuin University head coach Susumu Hara, 50, appeared together June 7 at the JAAF's kickoff meeting for its 2020 Tokyo Olympics-centered marathon development plan. Speaking frankly, the pair caused a stir in the Japanese athletics world.

Concerning Japan's biggest race Seko said, "The Hakone Ekiden is a local competition. If you have some success you're treated like you rule everything under the sun. Even athletes who haven't done anything particularly special get coverage in the media. They're quick to earn the label "God," but that is a misunderstanding. I tell you: there is no God." With the top corporate league coaches looking on he continued, "Toyota, Konica, Nissin Shokuhin, Fujitsu, they have to do better with the talented athletes they have. I'm not kidding. For real."

Hara was just as sharp in his words, saying, "…

"It seems like I'm always getting bullied by the Nikkan Gendai, and whenever I see one of those articles it's like, 'Here we go again.....'"

From the beginning, he's overflown with idiosyncrasy. On the frontlines of the marathon without belonging to a corporate team, Japan's "strongest amateur runner" Yuki Kawauchi, 30, has always brought controversy to the Japanese marathon world with his outspoken comments. Having said that his appearance at August's London World Championships will be his "last time running on the national team," the Nikkan Gendai asked Kawauchi to tell us all about the current state of the marathon world.
"It feels like the war." Kawauchi was the top Japanese finisher at 3rd overall in 2:09:11 at last December's Fukuoka International Marathon, the first domestic selection race for the London World Championships team. His ticket to London was in his hand. At a press conference later in March, J…

by Brett Larner

U.S.-based for the last few years as part of the Nike Oregon Project, Suguru Osako makes his marathon debut at tomorrow's Boston Marathon.  It's had the Japanese media and other critics clucking that the choice of Boston "goes against the conventional wisdom of Japanese long distance" and that Boston's one-way, net downhill course means that he's more likely to run a fast time but that it "won't count."  The idea that Boston is a waste of time for Japanese runners because it's not record-elligible is a relatively recent one.  There's a pretty good argument to be made that the era of Japan's greatest strength as a marathon power lined up reasonably well with when the best Japanese marathoners were regularly in Boston and winning or placing, that once the powers that be decided Boston was off-limits to the best due to the risk of "wasting" a good one on a record-inelligible course Japanese marathoners stopped …

http://www.hochi.co.jp/sports/etc/20170330-OHT1T50055.html

translated by Brett Larner

Regarding the men's and women's marathon selection for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, on Mar. 29 the JAAF announced a new selection process in which the top two Japanese men and women at a new Olympic Trials marathon to be held in the fall of 2019 or later will be named to the team.  Beginning this fall the existing set of selection races will become qualifying races, with athletes needing to clear specified times and placings in order to qualify for the Olympic Trials race.  In that way Olympic marathon team selection will become a two-stage process, a major change from the current process of comparing the results in different races and one that ensures transparency in national team selection.  The move is expected to be confirmed at next month's JAAF executive board meeting.

With the Japanese marathoning world in the midst of a downtown the move is a major shakeup, the JAAF's shift in poli…

http://sports.yahoo.co.jp/column/detail/201701140003-spnavi

translated by Brett Larner

Part three in a three-part series written by Yuki Kawauchi and published by Sportsnavi. Visit the above link to their original Japanese-language article for more photos. Click here for part one in the series, “The Miracle in Fukuoka,” and here for part two, “Bringing All My Experience Into Play in London.”


During his days at Gakushuin University Yuki Kawauchi (Saitama Prefectural Government) ran in the Hakone Ekiden as part of the Kanto Region University Select Team. After graduating he chose to take a job as a Saitama Prefecture employee rather than going into the corporate running leagues, and since then he has run countless marathons as an “amateur runner.” By choosing a different road from the elite runners who join the corporate leagues Kawauchi has worked on the marathon under his own power and has put long and serious thought into it. His path has shown the runners to come the way to a new optio…