In a 1998 quarterfinal of the national high school baseball tournament at Kōshien, Yokohama beat PL Gakuen in 17 innings. Yokohama’s ace, Matsuzaka Daisuke, threw 250 pitches.
From the spring tournament of 2018, Kōshien introduced a tiebreak. From the 13th inning, each team began its turn at bat with runners on first and second base and no outs. The start of the tiebreak was later moved to the 10th inning.
In a sumo stable, the wrestlers eat chanko, the stable’s stew, around a low table, a few at a time, in order of rank. The highest-ranked eat first. The lower-ranked wrestlers serve the meal.
Nomura saisei kōjō, the Nomura regeneration factory, was the name for the baseball manager Nomura Katsuya’s skill at reviving players who had struggled elsewhere. The sports magazine Number calls the pitcher Tabata Kazuya its finest product. Tabata came to the Yakult Swallows from Daiei. In his first season under Nomura, he started 25 games and went 12 and 12. In his second, he went 15 and 5.
Nomura later said, as Number reports: Tabata ni kagirazu, puro yakyū senshu wa honno hitokoto no adobaisu de kawaru kēsu ga ōō ni shite aru. This is true not only of Tabata. A professional ballplayer is often changed by a single word of advice. Mostly, Nomura added, it is because the player’s earlier thinking was wrong.
In a sumo stable, the stablemaster’s family and all the wrestlers “eat rice from the same pot” and “live under one roof,” as an article on nippon.com puts it. The article calls the stablemaster’s wife, the okamisan, probably the most important person behind the scenes. She manages the money, arranges the parties of supporters and deals with patrons. She also serves as mother to every wrestler and teaches them manners.
Students of Nippon Sport Science University perform shūdan kōdō, group action, at the university’s physical education demonstration. Long lines of students march, turn and pass through one another’s lines. TV Tokyo explains that a diagonal crossing needs exact spacing, stride and timing, or the performers collide. In one show in Abashiri, reported by the Hokkaido Shimbun, 103 students took part.
Japanese Wikipedia credits Kiyohara Nobuhiko, a professor emeritus of the university, with researching and developing it. The students are volunteers and train three days a week for five months. According to TV Tokyo, the practice reportedly began in the university’s dormitories as a way to learn omoiyari, consideration for others.
On September 26, 2018, recruitment began for the volunteers of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The organizing committee sought 80,000 Games volunteers and Tokyo 30,000 city volunteers, 110,000 in total. The volunteers were unpaid.
Critics asked whether this was yarigai sakushu, exploiting people’s sense of worth, as at a “black company.”
Yonen kamisama, sannen tennō, ninen shimin, ichinen dorei: fourth-year students are gods, third-year students are emperors, second-year students are citizens, and first-year students are slaves. A 1991 paper in a bulletin of Kagoshima University cites the phrase as a way in which the hierarchy of university sports clubs was mocked and criticized.
The sports magazine Number used a short form in a headline that rejects it: Yonen kamisama, ichinen dorei de wa nai. It is not fourth-year gods and first-year slaves.
The usual road to becoming a professional shogi player runs through the shōreikai, a training association with its own entrance examination. An article in Gendai Business names one more condition for entering it: Kishi no shishō ga hitsuyō na no da. A master who is a professional player is needed.
On August 16, 1992, at Kōshien, Meitoku Gijuku beat Seiryō 3 to 2. Meitoku walked Seiryō’s batter Matsui Hideki intentionally in all five of his plate appearances. Megaphones and other objects were thrown from the stands, and the game was stopped for a time. When Meitoku’s school song was played after the game, the crowd chanted kaere, go home.
Meitoku’s manager, Mabuchi Shirō, faced fierce public criticism. After the game, Seiryō’s manager, Yamashita Tomoshige, praised Matsui for taking the twenty pitches without lunging at them or glaring at the pitcher.
On December 20, 2017, the Yokozuna Deliberation Council discussed the techniques of the yokozuna Hakuhō. Its chairman, Kitamura Masatō, criticized his slaps, the harite, and his forearm blows, the kachiage. He said: “Harite, kachiage, on ten days or more out of fifteen. This style can hardly be called the sumo of a yokozuna. It is not beautiful. I do not want to see it.”