Nihon University's Tsunehiro Nagano, left, on anchor stage of 1943 Hakone Ekiden
Launched in 1920 by Japan's first Olympic marathoner Shizo Kanakuri as a way to cultivate the next generation of marathoners, throughout its history the Hakone Ekiden has followed more or less the same general route, starting in the area of Tokyo Station, heading south to the Shonan seaside, turning west toward the mountains, then making a tough climb on the final leg of its first day to the mountain town of Hakone on the shores of Lake Ashi. On its second day it makes a return trip along the same route, starting with a brutal downhill, then following the shoreline before turning to head into central Tokyo and a finish near Tokyo Station. Five runners handle each day, with each runner covering a distance in the half marathon range.
The exact details have changed as the roads themselves have over the years, but that's been the basic set-up since day one. Its first running was held in mid-February and its eighth in April, but otherwise it was always held the first or second weekend of January until moving into its current dates in 1955. In its earliest years the event didn't have a formal name, going by the relatively generic "Four University Relay Race" in its first running and tweaking that based on the number of teams competing, "Seven University Relay Race," "Ten University Relay Race," and the like as late as the mid-1930s before settling on what is still its official name, the Tokyo-Hakone Round-Trip University Relay Race.
In the mid-1930s Nihon University was the dominant power. From 1935 to 1940 it won every year except 1939, when Senshu University pulled ahead on the Second Stage and managed to hold Nihon back to 2nd by a final margin of 1:47. In that loss Nihon's Kiichi Gono had run a new course record on the Eighth Stage trying to close the gap to Senshu, and in 1940 he was back to put Nihon out front by 1:15 on the First Stage, a lead the rest of the team managed to turn into a massive 31:59 by the race's end.
But it was 1940, and with the expansion of Japan's military activity in Asia and the Pacific the authorities refused to give permission for the race to use the major seaside roads along the Shonan coast for the 1941 edition. Scrambling to find an alternative, organizers came up with an out-and-back course between the Meiji Jingu Pool near the site of the 2021 Tokyo Olympics stadium and Kumano Shrine in the town of Ome in the mountains west of central Tokyo.
At eight stages and a total distance of around 111 km it was only about half the scale of the traditional Hakone Ekiden and only its Third and Sixth Stages approached the kinds of distances Hakone runners typically handled, but on Jan. 12, 1941 the race was held under the name Tokyo-Ome University and Technical School Training Run Relay Race. 13 schools competed, including nine of the ten that had run Hakone a year earlier. Nihon University won, with Gono and four other members of its 1940 winning team making up the majority of its lineup. 1940 Hakone runner-up Tokyo Bunrika University was 2nd again, and there too five of its eight runners had been part of its 1940 Hakone team. 4th at Hakone, Senshu was 3rd with four members of its Hakone roster.
The seaside roads were still off-limits for 1942, so organizers fell back to the Tokyo-Ome course again. But this time there was an extra condition from the authorities. The race had to be bumped up earlier than its traditional date, to Nov. 30, 1941 to be exact. I don't know whether the reasons for the date change were understood at the time, but they became 100% clear exactly a week later on Dec. 7, 1941. In that race in the last moment of calm before what hit Hawaii, Nihon University beat Tokyo Bunrika and Senshu again to win over a field of 12 teams. Six of its runners from the first Tokyo-Ome race were back, five of them having been part of the 1940 Hakone champion team.
With WWII now in full swing there was no real chance for the Hakone Ekiden to take place in 1943. But in a bid to boost public morale, a propaganda effort billed as a "prayer for victory," authorities approved an ekiden between Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, the shrine to Japan's war dead, and Hakone Shrine, ten stages on a similar route to Hakone's, with similar stage lengths and the traditional date. On Jan. 5th and 6th, 1943, the Year 2603 Yasukuni Shrine-Hakone Shrine Kanto Collegiate Training Run Relay Race was held with a field of 11 university teams. Following its 1940 Hakone title and back-to-back wins in the Ome Ekiden, Nihon University won again, with four runners who had been a part of at least one of those wins and two, lead runner Hironobu Teshima and anchor Tsunehiro Nagano, who had helped it win in Hakone three years earlier.
From 1944 through 1946 no race happened, for understandable reasons, and the Hakone Ekiden didn't return until Jan. 4th and 5th, 1947 for what is counted as its 23rd edition. In that total the Yasukuni Ekiden is included, but the two Ome Ekidens aren't. The 1943 Yasukuni Ekiden was closer to the Hakone Ekiden in distance and scale than the Ome Ekiden, but was not exactly the same event. The Ome Ekiden was a shorter length but had the same organization, the same teams, even the same athletes. What makes Yasukuni canon and not Ome?
There's plenty of precedent in the history of Japanese road races for flexibility in counting what is part of a race's history. The Fukuoka International Marathon was considered to have had 75 runnings in 2021, but in reality its early editions were held in ten other cities across the country. The Kagawa Marugame International Half Marathon bills its 2024 race as its 76th, but at various points it has been a full marathon, a 35 km, and a 20 km, and all are included.
Given all that, there's a case to be made that the 2024 Hakone Ekiden could be considered its 99th running, its 100th running, or its 102nd running. It's not hard to see the logic in saying it's the 100th, but with that decision Gono, Teshima, Nagano, and the rest of the early 1940s Nihon University team's names and accomplishment of one of the few four-straight wins ever are all but lost to history. Some universities had athletes who survived the war and returned for the 1947 race, but none of Nihon's were among them. A lot more was lost to history right after they achieved what they did in 1940-1943, but while the Ome Ekiden is almost never even mentioned, the athletes of that Nihon lineup deserve to be remembered among Hakone's very best.
photo c/o Nihon University
text © 2023 Brett Larner, all rights reserved
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