Japanese Athletics and the Limits of an Operating System: Ekiden, a Home World Championships, and the Question That Should Have Stayed Silent

On January 2, 2026, at exactly eight in the morning Japan time, ten university runners stood behind the starting line in front of the Otemachi district in central Tokyo. They were not running for a football club, they held no significant personal sponsorship deals, and most of them would never appear on an international news feed. They were running for their dormitory. Over the next two days, ten relay legs would carry them all the way to Hakone and back, a total of 217.1 kilometres. The national broadcaster carried it live, and for many years the ratings for this race have rivalled those of the most-watched sporting events on the planet. This is the Hakone Ekiden. For anyone who covers sport in Japan, it is the mandatory starting point for understanding a paradox: a country that produces layer upon layer of world-class distance runners, yet is almost absent from finals in the 800m and 1500m, and even in the men's 5000m is far thinner than its population and running culture would suggest. That paradox is not an accident. It is the product of a system designed so perfectly for one objective that it has locked itself out of the others. To understand why, we need to return to the structure of Japanese athletics. Unlike most countries, where track athletes grow up in a school system and then move on to American university scholarships or national training centres, Japan runs two parallel and tightly interlocked systems: a university system tied to ekiden, and a corporate system known as jitsugyodan. In the jitsugyodan model, large corporations — from carmakers to printing firms, from electronics to insurance — hire athletes as full-time employees. They draw a monthly salary, receive social insurance, have a promotion path, and their main duty is to run for the company colours in the national relay races, above all the New Year Ekiden and the All-Japan. This is a peculiar sporting labour market, in which a stable wage and social standing matter more than individual prize money. The result is an enormous distance-running workforce, paid to run long distances, and judged mainly on their ability to run long distances within a collective framework. The 2026 context makes this story hotter than ever. Japan is hosting the World Athletics Championships at home, at the National Stadium in Tokyo, in mid-September. This is not merely a sporting event. It is a stress test for the entire system: can a country that stages a magnificent championship, that has one of the most sustainable development systems and one of the most passionate crowds, convert those advantages into medals in the individual events? As someone who has followed Japanese athletics for more than a decade, I believe the answer lies somewhere few want to look: the system is optimised for a disguised team sport, and that is both its weapon and its shackle. The crux lies in the incentive structure. In an ekiden, you do not need to be the fastest runner. You need to be the most consistent runner, the one who does not collapse on the eighth leg, the one who holds the rhythm when teammates have placed you in a position you must protect. The reward does not belong to individual peaks, but to collective depth. A team with seven runners around 28 minutes 30 seconds for 10 km will beat a team with one star running 27:40 but three others above 29 minutes. The reward system teaches everyone a single lesson: be the best version of yourself within the framework, never try to become the exception. The three great student ekiden — Izumo in October, All-Japan in November, and Hakone in January — form a season that lasts almost all year and dominates the entire training calendar of a young athlete. A freshman joining a strong team will spend two or three years training for a single leg, and if lucky, be selected for one leg at Hakone. That is the career peak for most of them. Not the Olympics. Not the World Championships. Hakone. The consequence is a paradox of depth. Japan can field dozens of marathoners under 2 hours 10 minutes, a number most European nations can only dream of. In many seasons, the number of Japanese runners under 2:10 has exceeded the combined total of entire broad regions. But when you look at the peak — those running under 2:05, those capable of contending for a medal at an Olympic Games — that number shrinks markedly. I call it the paradox of the inverted funnel. The system produces a vast flow at the bottom, but narrows steadily as it rises, because every incentive pulls the athlete toward collective safety rather than individual risk. At the bottom of the funnel, you are rewarded for stability. At the top, you need explosion — but explosion is precisely what the system treats as abnormal. There is one notable exception: the relay events, above all the men's 4x100m. There, Japan does not merely compete — it wins medals. At Rio 2026, the Japanese men's 4x100m relay took Olympic silver, one of the greatest collective achievements in the nation's athletics history. Japan's baton-passing technique has long been regarded as a global standard, studied and copied by other nations. This is no coincidence. A country obsessed with relay culture will naturally become excellent in events where precise coordination matters as much as raw speed. It is evidence that the system can produce medals — provided the event allows a collective element. Then there are the short individual events. Yoshihide Kiryu became the first Japanese man to run 100m under 10 seconds, and Abdul Hakim Sani Brown followed with further sub-10 runs. Those were historic moments. But viewed soberly, Japan has still not produced a world champion in the men's sprints. Those stars are, in part, the product of individual effort and international training environments, not of the ekiden system. They are exceptions born despite the system, not because of it. In the middle distances, the gap is even clearer. The 800m and 1500m demand a very different mix: lactate-fuelled speed, the ability to accelerate over the final 200m, and a psychology that accepts short, sharp pain. That is precisely what Japanese distance culture, focused on distributing effort evenly over dozens of kilometres, does not prioritise. A good 800m runner needs to be allowed to fail, to try risky tactics, to run a bad race in order to learn. The ekiden system has no room for that kind of failure, because every individual failure drags the whole team down. Race walking is another story. Toshikazu Yamanishi once brought home an Olympic gold for Japan in the 20 km walk, an achievement built on strict technical discipline — exactly the quality that Japan's collective culture nurtures best. But race walking is an event the global public cares little about, so success there is rarely mentioned as a symbol. This is a blind spot in the media: we praise the spirit of endurance, yet turn away from the sport where that spirit is expressed most clearly. And the women's marathon. Naoko Takahashi and Mizuki Noguchi once brought home Olympic golds, moments that shaped an entire generation. But in retrospect, those peaks appeared in a specific period, and afterwards Japan's flow of women's marathon medals thinned markedly. The question is not why they were once great, but why they could not sustain that peak while the depth remained intact. Over many years of watching ekiden races and the open sessions of jitsugyodan teams, I noticed something the statistics tables never show: the training intensity here is not low at all. On the contrary, the weekly volume Japanese athletes absorb is among the highest in the world. The problem is not whether they train little or much. The problem is that this enormous volume is oriented toward a specific objective, and that objective is not peak speed over a short period. This explains a phenomenon I once witnessed: a runner excellent over 10,000m who, when moving down to the 1500m, looked utterly lost. A body trained to expend energy slowly and steadily is not trained to accelerate suddenly. That is not the athlete's fault. It is the fault of a system with only one door in. If you look at the prize structure, it becomes clearer. The ekiden races pay the collective, sponsor the team, and confer fame on the school or company. International individual races pay the individual, but to get there, a Japanese athlete must fend for themselves within a support system designed for a different objective. It is no surprise that many young talents choose the safe path: join a jitsugyodan team, run ekiden, and enjoy a stable ten-year career. Compare with other nations to see the difference. Kenya and Ethiopia have no ekiden system, but they have a natural talent flow nourished by geography, a childhood running culture, and a global road-racing market. The United States has a strong university scholarship system, allowing athletes to pursue individual goals while still being properly coached. Japan has the jitsugyodan system — strong in depth, weak at the peak. Three models, three different outcomes. Notably, other countries have learned from the Japanese model, but selectively. They copy the discipline, the volume, and the collective culture, but not the structure that fully collectivises incentives. The result is that they can retain both depth and peak. This is a lesson Japan, as host nation, has a special opportunity to reflect upon. One more detail rarely mentioned: the system also produces a psychological effect. Athletes raised in the ekiden environment learn that their value is bound to the collective. When they step onto the individual international stage, they face an environment where victory belongs to one person, and defeat also belongs to one person. That shift is not easy, and it is not coached. It is a competitive skill, not a moral quality. I once sat in the stands of the National Stadium on a competition evening, watching a Japanese athlete start very well in a middle-distance event, then fade in the final lap. What was striking was not that he faded, but how he faded: there was no reckless acceleration attempt, no gamble. He ran exactly as taught — conserve, make no mistake — and lost exactly as the system had ordained. It was a moment I would call a glorious failure, in the sense that it exposed precisely the limits of a way of playing. What is worth saying is that none of this makes me think the Japanese system is bad. On the contrary, judged by the criteria it set for itself — producing a large, disciplined, and sustainable distance-running community — it is one of the greatest achievements of sports organisation in the world. The problem lies only in the fact that we keep measuring it by a different yardstick, then acting surprised when it falls short. When the World Championships come to Tokyo, the pressure will fall on the individual athletes. The stands will be full. The media will report around the clock. And if the results do not meet expectations in the middle-distance events, there will certainly be commentary about spirit, about character, about athletes not daring to surpass themselves. That commentary will be wrong, in the way it has always been wrong. The counterintuitive view I want to defend is this: it is precisely the success of the ekiden system that is the main reason Japan lacks individual medals, rather than being the foundation for them. Japanese public opinion tends to treat ekiden as the cradle of the nation's athletics, and believes that if you merely tend that cradle, individual medals will come of their own accord. I do not believe that. Public opinion dislikes the contrarian view, but history nourishes it with time. A system designed to maximise the number of good runners will always trade away the peaks of a few individuals. That is a law of resource allocation, not a matter of spirit. Continually attributing failure to will or character is a way of avoiding a look at the structure. When a country has had no medal in the 800m for decades, the cause cannot be a lack of determination, because determination is not lacking. The cause lies in the fact that no one was trained to run the 800m in the first place. And this is where we must speak plainly: if a country pours hundreds of millions of dollars a year into a collective distance system, then expects that system to produce an 800m champion, that is not an expectation — it is a carefully packaged illusion. I do not say this to criticise the system. I say it to point out that a great system can still fail at a specific goal, and that does not make it any less great — it only makes us understand more clearly what the system was built to do. There is a secondary paradox worth pondering: countries with less of a collective distance tradition often produce excellent 800m and 1500m runners, because they lack too strong a cradle to hold talent in place. A lack of structure is sometimes the condition for individuality. Japan has so much good structure that no one wants to leave it, even when the road they wish to take lies elsewhere. Every upheaval begins with a question that should have stayed silent. The question here is: what would happen if Japan treated the 800m and 1500m as a separate national project, with its own scholarship system, a group of international coaches, and a regime that permits failure? No one dares to ask it, because it implies the current system is not perfect. But it is precisely the questions deemed disrespectful that tend to open new roads. Athletics, at its deepest level, is not a contest of who runs faster. It is a contest between systems about how to nurture human beings. Each country chooses an answer, and each answer has its price. Japan chose collective endurance, and paid with individual peaks in the middle distances. The question is not which system is right, but whether a nation dares to acknowledge the price of its own choice. And that, in the end, is a question for all of us — not only for athletics.