How to experience Japan through its most famous sports

Japan is a place where passions, hobbies and interests aren’t just encouraged, they’re deemed as being essential to a healthy society — a concept known as ikigai. It’s no surprise, then, that this is a sport-mad country, from baseball and football to the highly developed art of sumo, which blurs the line between sport and ritual.

Attending a sporting event may not be top of the list for most travellers to Japan, who often flock first to the country’s famed temples, nightlife and natural beauty spots. However, going to a game gives visitors an insight into a contemporary, high-spirited side of Japanese life, allowing you to spend time with the locals as they let their hair down while enjoying watching high-level athletes do what they do best. Here’s what to plan for your next trip.

Sumo

The ultimate Japanese sport, sumo offers the perfect blend of history, culture and sporting spectacle. Sumo is a form of full-contact wrestling, where participants (known as rikishi) attempt to force one another out of a circular ring using throws, shoves and grapples.

Japan is the only country in the world where sumo is practised professionally, making it a one-of-a-kind experience. The sport has millennia-old origins and is intertwined with Shinto mythology, with the first written reference to sumo going back to 712 CE in the form of an account of two kami (deities) wrestling for control over Japanese islands. Prehistoric wall art suggests that sumo may have originated as a ritual dance, carried out in hopes of a good harvest.

Today, sumo still includes many ancient ritual elements, such as throwing salt, stamping feet to drive away evil spirits and blessing the ring. The atmosphere at sumo matches is often one of peaceful concentration, bordering on the reverential.

How to do it: Officially sanctioned tickets for sumo venues across Japan can be bought at Ticket Oosumo.

Baseball

Baseball is Japan’s most popular sport, having been introduced to Japanese schools by an American teacher in 1872. It’s now played across the country by some seven million kids and adults, with leagues widespread across high schools and companies, many of whom sponsor amateur teams in what’s known as Industrial Baseball.

Baseball is also by far the most popular spectator sport in Japan, and it’s easy enough to get tickets for professional games. Watching a game is a different experience here to anywhere else in the world, with the crowd highly engaged in chanting — often accompanied by brass bands — for hours on end, rarely sitting down to rest. It's unlike the laid-back pace of baseball in the US, for instance. The food and beverage options are different, too, with takoyaki (octopus balls), curry rice and yakitori (grilled chicken skewers) among the stadium staples. You won’t go thirsty, either, thanks to wandering vendors with huge beer kegs strapped to their backs, dispensing cold beer to you at your seat. Japanese baseball is also famous for its colourful mascots, with actors dressed in costumes ranging from anthropomorphic seagulls to dancing skeletons.

Some of the rules are slightly different here, too, with a smaller, harder ball, and the possibility for games to end in a tie — but knowledge of the technicalities is by no means necessary for a fantastic day out.

How to do it: Tickets for baseball matches are best purchased directly through the website of individual teams, which vary in ease of use for foreigners. Some of the more accessible sites include the Hiroshima Carp and Tokyo Yakult Swallows.

Football

There’s no game with global appeal quite like football and Japan is no exception, with some 40% of the population counting themselves as fans. The sport’s history in Japan goes back to 1873, when it was introduced by British Royal Navy officer Archibald Lucius Douglas while he was serving as an instructor to Japanese navy cadets in Tokyo. Football steadily grew in popularity over the following century, before exploding in popularity in the 1980s after the publication of Captain Tsubasa, a manga comic book series that became so popular that football briefly displaced baseball as the most widely played sport in Japanese schools.

The top level of professional football in Japan is the J. League, often considered the leading league in Asia. Attending a game is great fun, with none of the hostility sometimes encountered between fans at European games — rather, there’s a festive atmosphere and, like baseball, non-stop chanting.

How to do it: J. League tickets are easily purchased from the official English website.

Drift racing

Tokyo is famous for its drifting culture, a driving technique involving deliberately oversteering around a corner so that the tires lose traction and billow with smoke. Drifting first became popular in Japan in the 1970s, and, just like football, hit new heights with the publication of a manga, Initial D, in the mid-1990s.

In Tokyo, there’s a thriving underground street drift-racing scene, as popularised in the West in the film The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift, although street drifting is illegal in Japan. Happily, drifting is also a popular professional sport, with events like the D1 Grand Prix held at venues across the country, including Ebisu Circuit in Fukushima and Odaiba Island in Tokyo Bay. D1 is a unique event to watch in the context of motorsport, as all the action is concentrated in the corners, where the drifting takes place. Drivers are judged on the speed and style of their drift, with factors like the angle of the wheels and the amount of smoke they produce taken into consideration.

How to do it: Tickets can be bought around a month in advance of races at the official D1 Grand Prix website. The site is in Japanese, so a translation add-on to your browser is useful.