JQ Magazine: Book Review — ‘Marathon Japan’

By Rashaad Jorden (Yamagata-ken, 2008-10) for JQ magazine. A former head of the JETAA Philadelphia Sub-Chapter, Rashaad graduated from Leeds Beckett University with a Master’s degree in Responsible Tourism Management (for more on his life in the U.K., visit his blog at www.gettingpounded.wordpress.com). While in Japan, Rashaad completed the 2010 Tokyo Marathon, ran two half marathons in Yamagata Prefecture, was a part of an ekiden club, and finished fourth in the 2009 Ishidan Marathon (a race up the steps of Mount Haguro).Hopefully, your JET experience included you busting out your running shoes and joining your prefecture (or village) in a road race. It did for me on several occasions. But if you never got around to working up a sweat over 10 kilometers (or maybe even 21), you might remember your school being enthralled by its annual ekiden, or frequently seeing races televised on Sunday mornings.So why have such events become an integral part of Japanese sporting culture? Thomas R.H. Havens examines why in Marathon Japan, the first comprehensive English-language book about the history of marathons and ekiden in the country.Long before Kenya emerged as the world’s elite marathon nation, Japan could make a serious claim to producing the world’s best at 42.195 km. Marathon Japan illustrates the periods when Japanese marathoners dished out most of the world’s fastest times—such as the 1930s (In 1934, nine of the world’s ten fastest times were run by Japanese), the 1960s (1965 alone saw the Japanese record fifteen of the world’s top twenty marathon times), and the 1980s (during which Toshihiko Seko won ten of the fifteen marathons he completed in). And to top it off on the women’s side, in 2004, three Japanese finished among the world’s top eight marathoners.Of course, as people have been running long distances forever and many popular aspects of Japanese culture date back centuries, it’s only natural that distance running has a storied history in Japan. Prior to schools all over the country organizing races as long as fifteen kilometers in the late 19th century, distance running was a symbol of the country’s warrior elite (Havens includes a quote from a Confucian scholar urging soldiers to incorporate running into their training).Marathon Japan was written by a professor of Japanese history, so you would expect the book to contain extensive information about how marathons and ekiden developed in Japan. Havens doesn’t disappoint in that regard, but he also delves into the longtime commoditization and commercialization of road races in the country. Some of Japan’s most prestigious media corporations have long sponsored running events, and numerous newspapers and television channels have spearheaded the launch of several competitions—such as the Asahi Shimbun creating a roughly 100-kilometer annual ekiden from Fukuoka to Kitakyushu for industrial teams (an event that lasted from 1950 to 2012).In addition, Marathon Japan includes plenty of information about the alphabet soup of organizations involved throughout the years in the administration of Japanese sport. While it was absolutely necessary for Havens to state how the government, corporations and sports governing bodies have shaped sport in Japan, those sections of the book were a bit dry and may only really interest people maniacally fascinated by the business of sports.But we follow sports in part to be thrilled by amazing performers and performances, and Marathon Japan comes alive when it introduces readers to champions and Olympic medalists that have contributed to popularizing marathons in Japan, such as Kokichi Tsuburaya (whose bronze medal in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics made him the first Japanese-born athlete to medal in an Olympic marathon), Toshihiko Seto, and Naoko Takahashi—and explains why they became iconic figures in Japanese sport. Havens credits Tsuburaya’s stunning run for sparking the public’s love affair with distance running, which was helped by the race being televised live around the country (thanks to NHK’s decision to borrow a Self-Defense Force helicopter).Despite the vast information detailing the birth and growth of distance running in Japan, Marathon Japan does leave some questions unanswered. While Havens marvelously captures the significance and mystique of the Hakone Ekiden (Japan’s most prestigious ekiden and one of the country’s most watched annual sporting events), the book would be enhanced with more information on how ekiden originated. Havens mentioned that the Yomiuri Shimbun produced what is believed to be the first ekiden—a competition from Kyoto to Tokyo in 1917. But certainly, the origin of that event deserves more than a paragraph.Mizuki Noguchi also gets a bit of a short shrift in Marathon Japan. The Mie Prefecture-born runner won the gold at the 2004 Athens Olympics after finishing runner-up at the previous year’s IAAF (track and field’s world governing body) World Championships. While Havens explained why Noguchi never reached the heights of celebrity like Takahashi—the marathon gold medalist at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and a current television pundit—a few more pages should have been devoted to her accomplishments and career, as they were for Q-chan.And a minor quibble: it would have been nice if Havens could have included a list of marathons, half-marathons, and prestigious 10 km races in each prefecture. While that may have been a bit difficult as the number of road races in Japan is never static, such a list could inspire readers to emulate civilian Akihiko Takeda (who completed races in every prefecture over a span of two decades) as well as promote numerous competitions throughout the country.But if you’re a running fanatic interested in Japan (or the history of Japanese sport), Marathon Japan is an extremely informative read. Havens does not live in the past when analyzing the state of Japanese running and although it is an iconic Japanese cultural activity, he doesn’t always glamorize ekiden, as he includes reasons why it is possibly harming the development of Japan’s top marathon talents. He also outlines why performances by Japanese marathoners at major international competitions have plateaued in recent years.On a much brighter note, Marathon Japan devotes several pages to the spectacle that is the Tokyo Marathon, an event that produced some of my most memorable moments in Japan. While marathons were already popular in Japan prior to its 2007 launch, the Tokyo Marathon has served as the impetus for other cities such as Osaka to create large open-participation marathons, and Havens shines when he illustrates the successful steps organizers took to make the event a smashing success.Even if a Japanese marathoner is unable to duplicate the feats of Takahashi and Noguchi when the world’s elite athletes come to Tokyo in five years, the running boom in Japan shows no signs of slowing. Marathon Japan explains why as it marvelously highlights a growing and evolving sport.For more JQ magazine book reviews, click here.