Growing up in the UK in the 1980s as a British sports fan was a very different time. Sport on TV was fairly limited and indeed people sat down on Saturday afternoons to watch whatever Grandstand (BBC TV) and World of Sport (ITV) showed. This could sometimes be a mix of cricket, golf, athletics, speedway, horse racing, squash and wrestling which was certainly a sign of the times but the public lapped it up.

Transworld Sport (Channel 4) in the very early hours of a Saturday morning (around 6am!) was something I’d set the timer on the video recorder from time to time and was an alternative to the two programmes previously mentioned. As time moved on having a range of sports as part of a framework under a single banner became outdated as subscription TV aquired more and more sporting rights.

Many younger British people nowadays are only into Premier League football or whatever and just don’t follow too many other sports outside of the Olympics. I too have fallen into such ways but last year, with no real major sporting event taking place, I thought I’d try out a few new sports.

Aiming for ten different sports seemed a little optimistic at the start of the year but that had pretty much been done by the middle point so I changed it to incorporate ten sports that I had never ever watched in person in Japan. Things got a little out of hand though and it ended up being 15! It’s too hard to rank them so instead I’ll just show them in alphabetical order…

1. American Football @ Kawasaki (Kanagawa Prefecture), 30th April – A sport I’ve never really had too much interest in and hadn’t seen since it was on terrestrial TV in the UK in the 1980s. I’ve still never seen a single Super Bowl but this match was brought to my attention by a friend who mentioned there was an X. League in Japan for American football. Keen to go to as many single letter named leagues as possible I jumped at the chance of going when I heard this match was free entry with a complimentary scarf too! More details here.

2. Athletics @ Yokohama (Kanagawa Prefecture), 21st May – The golden period for athletics in the UK was the 1980s; a time when many different sports got fairly equal TV coverage. Nowadays the only track and field action I see is at the Olympics. I’m hoping to get tickets for the the 2025 World Athletics Championships in Tokyo and so saw this as a (very) early warm up to that event. More details here.

3. Badminton @ Yoyogi, Shibuya-ku (Tokyo), 28th July – A sport I’d barely ever taken any notice of and just considered to be really popular and fun to play as a recreational sport. However, this live experience showed that it can be interesting and entertaining to watch as a spectacle too. More details here.

4. Boat Race @ Miyajima, Hiroshima (Hiroshima Prefecture), 2nd January – Is it really a sport? It certainly is for the sake of this post! This is one of the three gambling sports in Japan alongside horse racing and keirin. Beforehand all I could picture in my mind was people racing with remote-controlled boats. There are of course far more famous and popular things to do in this part of Hiroshima! More details here.

5. Canoeing (& Kayaking) @ Edogawa-ku (Tokyo) – I guess I could count these sports as two separate ones but as I could barely tell any difference there doesn’t seem much point. Apologies to kayaking fans in particular! This was an actual qualifying event for the Paris 2024 Olympics and hopefully I may recognise one or two of these competitors in the summer. More details here

6. Cricket @ Yokohama, (Kanagawa Prefecture), 24th September – A sport I have watched before in Australia and New Zealand but this was the first time in Japan which is something I never expected to happen given how completely unknown the sport is here.  More details here.

7. Field Hockey @ Shinagawa-ku (Tokyo), 3rd September – One of the sports I had tickets for in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics was field hockey but of course Covid_19 put paid to my plans to watch that. I can’t say that I had a real itch to see a live hockey match in the aftermath of the Olympic games but that changed this year as I became more and more interested in experiencing sports I’d never seen live before. The moment I found out about this Somo Japan Cup tournament I was keen to attend. More details here.

8. Futsal @ Komazawa, Setagaya-ku (Tokyo), 17th March – Until I started teaching in Japan I have to admit that I had never heard of this form of football, and I even thought the students were making mistakes and that futsal may have been a Japanese-English word. It’s relatively unknown back in the UK but is popular in the likes of Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Argentina and Japan. More details here.

9. Handball @ Tachikawa (Tokyo), 21st November – This fairly minor indoor sport has been a regular Olympic sport since 1972 (1976 for the women’s game) although it was first played at the Berlin 1936 games outside. Despite having been an Olympic sport for my whole life I am sure I had never seen more than a few seconds of a match so it was time to change that! More details here

10. Karate @ Shibuya-ku (Tokyo), 15th October – It’s fair to say that the Karate Kid films in the 1980s had a profound affect on my life, and since the Cobra Kai series began in 2018 it has become my all-time favouite TV series. Of course it’s not only about karate but that is a staple. However, it is a sport which I’ve pretty much never watched outside of this franchise so it was time to change that and see what it was like in reality. More details here

11. Skateboarding @ Ariake, Koto-ku (Tokyo), 15th December – I really can’t remember too much else about the ill-fated Tokyo 2020 Olympics apart from what happened in this  sport which made its debut. Why I ended up watching so much Olympic skateboarding was probably just because Japanese TV happened to show it a fair bit at a time of day that was convenient for me! Japan were the strongest nation overall and so it was pretty cool to see some of those stars in action at this World Street Championship. More details here

12. Swimming @ Koto-ku (Tokyo), 22nd October – Tokyo Aquatic Centre was one of the new constructions for Tokyo 2020 but due to the pandemic very few people actually got to step foot inside it. Just over two years later and I finally got to. Twice. The swimming action was the first of two events I saw there inside one week.  More details here

13. Table Tennis @ Yoyogi, Shibuya-ku (Tokyo), 26th March – Each and every time the Olympics take place I often find myself watching a fair amount of table tennis. It’s not because I’m particularly interested in it but it’s just that the Japanese TV broadcasters seem to show it a lot. That’s probably not too surprising as there are a lot of very good players and some of them were taking part at this epic women’s title decider. More details here.

14. Volleyball @ Ota, Ota-ku (Tokyo), 22nd January – The first proper sport I saw in 2023 was one of the noisiest I’ve ever experienced and sadly it wasn’t for such positive reasons! I really was impressed by the sporting skill and game play itself though but it’s just a shame we didn’t know the scoring system for the final set decider which saw a more sudden end than expected for us. More details here.

15. Water Polo @ Koto-ku (Tokyo), 27th October – Little did I know that all the teams involved here were university ones. Female ones too so I don’t know what the other spectators must have thought when they saw a foreign man of my age watching alone, and through binoculars at times too!! More details here

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