Yesterday the national corporate federation JITA announced major changes to the New Year Ekiden, the corporate men's national championship race around which the entire year is structured. Other top-tier ekidens like the Hakone Ekiden, the National University Men's and Women's Ekidens, and the Queens Ekiden corporate women's national championships all have a seeded bracket, allowing top-placing teams to auto-qualify for the following year's race and exempting them from running in the yosenkai qualifying races the next season. This frees up the best of the best and lets them do other things, whether it's the Izumo Ekiden for university men, overseas fall marathons for women, or whatever.
The JITA has stubbornly refused to put a seeded bracket into the New Year Ekiden over the years, meaning every corporate men's team has to run one of the regional corporate ekidens that took place the last two weekends in order to get back to the national race, even the previous year's winner. The most obvious impact of that is that it pretty much kills off the fall marathon season for all but the biggest teams with enough runners to spare, or the ones willing to take a risk on a quick turnaround from Chicago etc. But the new changes look like a partial fix to that situation.
A lot of details are still TBD according to the official announcement, but the 2 key points are:
- Starting in 2027 the New Year Ekiden will have a seeded bracket, meaning the top-placing teams won't have to qualify in the fall of 2027 to run the 2028 race. Exactly how many places is TBD, but in the case of the Queens Ekiden the top 8 in the field of 24 teams auto-qualify, with the others competing at the Princess Ekiden the next fall against non-qualifying teams to fill the other 16 spots. The New Year Ekiden usually has 37 teams, so it's reasonable to think the seeded bracket could be 12-deep.
- There will be a unified qualification race, probably in the fall of 2027, to fill out the rest of the New Year field. This will be an equivalent to the Princess Ekiden, with teams outside the qualifying bracket competing against non-qualifiers to take the remaining places in the New Year Ekiden field. What happens to the current 6 regional ekidens, most of which has been going for over 60 years, is TBD.
Some initial takeaways:
- Freeing up the best teams' fall seasons by exempting them from re-qualifying reduces the problems caused before Paris by the schedule for the MGC Race Olympic marathon trials, will let more top-level Japanese men run the Tokyo Legacy Half Marathon in October, and opens up Chicago and New York as options for more Japanese marathoners. This year almost everyone who ran a fall overseas major was in Berlin, with just 3 in Sydney, 1 in Chicago, and 1 high-level amateur in New York. Looking at the current world rankings, 7 of the top 10-ranked Japanese men in the marathon run for teams that made the top 12 at the New Year Ekiden this year, so more flexibility is a win.
- At the same time, it could disincentivize people from signing with 2nd-tier teams where the demand to run the qualifying race ties their hands more. That increases the imbalance already in place after the JITA lost an anti-trust case a few years ago and had to lift restrictions on athletes transferring between teams. It's a lot easier now for bigger, richer teams to cherry-pick talent from smaller teams that develop them, and having more opportunity to compete in high-level races could amplify that.
- It's not clear yet whether the existing regional ekidens are going to still play a role, but based on what's in the PDF things could actually become even more rigid. It seems like there's a scenario where the existing races could end up being used as regional qualifiers to get into the new single qualifying race. That would mean that teams that don't make the seeded bracket to auto-qualify would now have to run two ekidens in the fall to qualify instead of the current one regional qualifier on the calendar, which would of course make the disincentivization for the best runners to stay with smaller teams even stronger.
- Without some kind of safeguards in place to game the system a bit the single qualifying race model would surely kill off teams in the smaller regions. The Tokyo-centric East Japan Region has the largest number of teams, and the top few there that don't qualify, like Fujisan GX, SID Group and Comodi Iida this year, could probably beat the best team in the Hokuriku Region, YKK, or most of the 3rd or 4th-place teams in regions with only 4 qualifying slots under the current system. Of course you want to see the best teams at the National Championships, but when teams don't qualify their corporate sponsors tend to lose interest. Just like Tokyo's impact on Japan's demographic problems, it's hard to see how this wouldn't result in a gravitational pull of qualifying teams into East Japan and only a memory of how it used to be in other regions.
- It's not likely that the New Year Ekiden will be renamed Kings Ekiden, but fans are already speculating whether the new single qualifying race will be called the Prince Ekiden. If so you can only hope the sponsors shell out to license "Let's Go Crazy" or another banger for the theme song.
More will become clear as the JITA's plans progress. I'm not 100% sure yet that it's all good, but at the very least opening up the fall World Marathon Majors to more of the best Japanese men is a welcome move.
© 2025 Brett Larner, all rights reserved
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