Running Through History: What Ekiden Reveals About Japan

# Running Through History: What Ekiden Reveals About Japan

In January 1917, a group of runners set off from Kyoto's Sanjō Ōhashi bridge. Their destination was Ueno Park in Tokyo. The race took place over three days, covered roughly 508 kilometers, and was conceived as a way to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Meiji imperial government's relocation of the capital from Kyoto to Tokyo. The organizers — editors at the newspaper *Yomiuri Shimbun* — called it the *Tōkai-dō Ekiden Tokuhon*. The word *ekiden* itself is a compound: *eki* (station) and *den* (transmit or convey), a direct reference to the old feudal relay system in which official dispatches were carried between post stations on horseback, and later on foot. They were replacing horses with men, news with a baton, empire with sport. The metaphor was almost too perfect to be accidental.

The baton, by the way, is called a *tasuki* — a fabric sash, usually about a meter long, worn diagonally across the chest. It gets passed from runner to runner at designated exchange zones. Watching a *tasuki* exchange in person, when a spent runner gasps to a halt and throws the sash over the next runner's head and shoulders, you understand immediately why Japanese commentators sometimes describe it with the same vocabulary used for inheritance.

What Ekiden Actually Is, and Why It's Not the Olympics

Most first-time visitors to Japan have never heard of ekiden before landing here. I hadn't either, and I've been writing about this country for eight years. The format is simple enough on paper: a long-distance road race divided into stages, each run by a different member of the team. Think relay race, but instead of 400 meters on a track, each leg might be anywhere from 4 kilometers to over 20, and the whole event might span two days and 217 kilometers of open road.

What makes ekiden Japanese is not the mechanics — it's the moral weight placed on the act of passing something forward.

The most famous ekiden in the country is the Hakone Ekiden, run every January 2nd and 3rd between Tokyo and the mountain resort town of Hakone in Kanagawa Prefecture. Twenty university teams each send ten runners over two days: five legs on the outbound journey to Hakone, five legs returning to Tokyo. The course runs along Route 1, the old Tōkaidō highway, and passes through Tsurumi, Totsuka, Hiratsuka, Odawara, and then climbs sharply into the mountains at Hakone itself — that fifth leg up the mountain, called *Yama-nobori* (Mountain Climb), has a reputation that makes elite university runners train for it the way sprinters treat the 100-meter final.

The television broadcast, which airs live on Nippon TV, draws somewhere between 27 and 30 million viewers on each of the two days. That figure is not a misprint. To put it in context: the 2023 Super Bowl drew around 113 million viewers in the United States for a population roughly 2.5 times larger. Hakone Ekiden is, in terms of cultural penetration, Japan's Super Bowl — except it happens every year without fail, regardless of weather, and nobody is selling halftime show tickets.

The First Time I Actually Watched One

I was living near Sangenjaya when I first realized I was standing next to a route. It was a weekday afternoon in late autumn, and I'd walked out to find my street inexplicably lined with police barriers and old men in orange vests. My neighbor, a retired schoolteacher named Ōhashi-san, explained that a corporate relay race — a local regional qualifier — would pass through in about forty minutes. He said it the way you'd mention that the 7-Eleven was getting a delivery: matter-of-fact, mildly anticipatory.

What came through forty minutes later surprised me in a way I still think about. A dozen or so runners passed in intervals of several minutes, each one escorted by a bicycle and a small support vehicle crawling behind. The streets were not packed. There were perhaps thirty spectators at the spot where I stood. But those thirty people watched with a focused, almost reverent silence that felt less like a sporting event and more like something passing through on its way to somewhere important. When each runner appeared, a quiet collective attention gathered. When they disappeared around the corner, it released. Ōhashi-san nodded after the last one passed and said, *"Gambatte iru ne"* — they're really giving it their all. Then he went back inside.

The *tasuki* passes in two seconds. The weight of what it carries takes a lifetime to understand.

I've since watched the Hakone Ekiden in person twice — once near the start in Ōtemachi, once at the Tsurumi relay zone in Yokohama, which is one of the better places to see the actual *tasuki* exchange. The Tsurumi relay zone sits about a 4-minute walk from Tsurumi Station on the JR Keihin-Tōhoku Line. On January 2nd, the exchange happens in the late morning, somewhere between 10:30am and 11:00am for the lead teams, though slower teams trickle through for another hour after that. Go early — by 9:30am the sidewalk crowds have already thickened along Dai-ichi Keihin Street, and the best sightlines go quickly. Admission is free. Bring something warm. Hakone in January is brutal.

The Corporate Leagues and the Year-Round Calendar

Hakone gets the attention, but it's the Jitsugyōdan Ekiden — the corporate relay leagues — that reveal how deeply ekiden has woven itself into everyday Japanese working life. Major companies across Japan field competitive running teams. Hitachi, Toyota, Fujitsu, Honda, Kanebo — dozens of firms sponsor athletes who are, technically, employees, but whose primary job function is to train and race. This system has produced some of Japan's finest long-distance runners, including several who've competed at the Olympics.

The corporate leagues run throughout the calendar in regional and national competitions. The New Year Ekiden, held January 1st in Gunma Prefecture, kicks off each year's racing calendar and features the top corporate teams in the country. The National Ekiden for women, the All-Japan Ekiden, runs in November through the streets of Nagoya. If you're anywhere in Japan between November and January, there's a reasonable chance an ekiden is happening somewhere within commuting distance — check the Japan Association of Athletics Federations calendar before your trip, and cross-reference with your trip planning to see if dates align.

How to Actually Experience One as a Visitor

You don't need a ticket. That's the first thing to understand. Ekiden happens on public roads, and spectating is free. The challenge is positioning.

For the Hakone Ekiden specifically, the stretch along the Tama River as runners pass through Kawasaki gives you open sightlines and isn't as congested as Ōtemachi near the start. The Hiratsuka relay zone on the outbound route, accessible from Hiratsuka Station on the JR Tōkaidō Line, tends to draw local crowds rather than tourist crowds, and the atmosphere there — older residents in foldable chairs, middle school kids from the local athletics club, a few convenience store onigiri being passed around — feels more representative of how Japan actually experiences this event than the media circus at the finish line in Ōtemachi.

If you want the finish-line energy on January 3rd, the runners arrive back in central Tokyo at Yomiuri Shimbun's headquarters near Ōtemachi Station. The first runners reach there sometime around 1:30pm depending on conditions. The surrounding streets fill early — be in position by noon — and the noise level shifts noticeably from collective holding-of-breath to genuine roar as the lead runner turns into the final stretch. The sound of that crowd is one of the few sporting sounds I've heard in Japan that doesn't feel politely restrained.

For context on getting around between viewing spots, understanding Japan's rail network pays dividends here — course sections are almost always reachable by train, and the flexibility to hop between relay zones makes the experience significantly richer than planting yourself in one spot for three hours.

What This Is Actually About

I want to push back against the easy interpretation, which is that ekiden is about group harmony, self-sacrifice, collectivism — all the things Western writers reach for when covering Japanese sport. That reading isn't wrong, exactly, but it's incomplete in a way that flattens the thing.

Watch the fifth-leg runners on the mountain course at Hakone. These are twenty-year-old university students running up an eight-percent grade for about 23 kilometers, alone, often in single-digit temperatures, with a support vehicle barely keeping pace behind them. There is nothing gentle about what their faces look like. Suffering of that quality is not performed for the team — it goes too deep for that. The *tasuki* is the mechanism by which something deeply individual gets handed forward into something collective. It's not that the individual disappears into the group. It's that the individual's private effort becomes the group's visible momentum.

That distinction — private effort becoming collective momentum — is something you see throughout Japanese culture if you know to look for it, from the way a sushi chef's decades of fish-aging knowledge becomes the restaurant's reputation, to the way a neighborhood shotengai association's unpaid maintenance work becomes a street that somehow always feels cared for. Ekiden didn't teach Japanese people to think this way. Ekiden just made it easy to watch.

I've eaten at a small ramen shop in Toshima called Menya Musashi Taketora — a 6-minute walk from Ikebukuro Station's north exit — the morning after watching a qualifier race pass nearby. Bowl of tsukemen, cold noodles dipped in rich dashi broth, ¥980. A few runners from one of the club teams were at the counter still in their gear, eating quickly, not saying much. Outside, the course was empty again. Someone had already swept up the orange cones.

That's how ekiden ends. The street returns to the street. The runners get on trains. And the *tasuki* goes into a bag somewhere, waiting.

If you want to start exploring what else is happening on Japan's streets on any given weekend, you'll find that ekiden is often the invisible logic behind why a particular road is closed, why there are orange-vested men at intersections, why an old woman is standing at a corner in January holding a small flag. The infrastructure of this country bends around running in ways that took me years to notice.

Pay attention to the flags.

---