Japanese distance runner Shizo Kanakuri
As Tokyo prepares to host the World Athletics Championships later this year, we take a deep dive into Japan’s passion for road running and how it helped inspire a love for the sport of athletics as a whole.
The first instalment of this four-part series looks at some of the early figures who paved the way for marathon runners in Japan.
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Shizo Kanakuri holds the world record for the slowest marathon ever run… at 54 years, eight months, six days, five hours, 32 minutes and 20.3 seconds.
The former athlete, who started a lifelong passion for running by jogging the four miles to school each day in the small town of Naomi in the Kumamoto prefecture, became Japan’s much-celebrated ‘father of the marathon’.
And in so doing he helped light the torch paper for a century-plus passion for 26.2 miles in the Far East, which has also diversified into track and field events over the ensuing decades.
Japan’s first Olympic athlete in Stockholm back in 1912 along with 400m runner Yohiko Mishima, he had set the world record for the marathon in the lead-up (although admittedly running 2km shorter than today’s official marathon distance).
Having paid his own way and spending nearly three weeks getting to Sweden across Russia primarily, in swelteringly hot conditions, he retired after just 25km in a competition in which there was a fatality from the 68 entries. Kanakuri promptly joined a family at garden party to drink a glass of orange juice before returning home the next day.
He qualified for the Paris Olympics four years later only for those Games to be cancelled because of the Great War but returned for Antwerp in 1920 where he finished 16th overall.
In the late 1960s, he was tracked down working as a teacher in his native Japan by a Swedish journalist and, aged 75, returned to Stockholm to finish the course some five decades later, even joining descendants of the family with whom he had enjoyed juice all those years earlier. He quipped simply: “It was a long journey.”
He was integral to establishing Japan’s passion for long-distance running which still exists today, launching what is now the Fukuoka Marathon (albeit under a different name) and the Hakone Ekiden, an inter-university distance relay race, with viewing figures of up to 60million people each year on national television. He also helped launched a national shoe brand.
While Kanakuri was one main catalyst for distance running for a wider audience in the Land of the Rising Sun, there are examples dating further back.
Since 1885, the marathon monks of Mount Hiei have set out to complete 1000 marathons in 1000 days as part of their quest for spiritual enlightenment.
In his book, the Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei, John Stevens argued the “running Buddhas” are arguably “the greatest athletes today”. To date, just 46 in total have achieved the feat.
Another iconic figure in Japan’s storied marathon lexicon was Kanematsu Yamada, the son of a salt trader, who trained on his neighbouring shoreline and made it all the way to the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam.
Kanematsu Yamada (264)
A keen smoker – the story being he lit a cigarette before his Olympic final – he led until the last mile where he dropped back to fourth overall. Other running names followed suit, namely the South Korean-born Sohn Kee-Chung, who won gold running in Japanese colours at the last Games before the war in Berlin in 1936.
A further injection to the nation’s obsession with distance running emerged in the wake of the Second World War. Aiming to boost morale, companies set up running teams and marathon running again took off during the 1940s and 1950s.
Playing host to a first Olympics in Tokyo in 1964, the wider appeal of track and field catapulted into the mainstream, partially by success on track but also partially by some failings.
One of the most iconic moments from those Games for the hosts was the unknown Sri Lankan runner Ranatunge Karunananda in the 10,000m.
Lapped as many as four times by much of the field, undeterred he continued to the bitter end first to the bemusement and then utter delight of the 70,000-strong crowd.
The soldier would become known as ‘Uniform Number 67’, a nod to his race bib number, or else the ‘bottom ranked hero’, and even become part of the Japanese school syllabus taught to children nationwide.
As he put it after crossing the line, “The Olympic spirit is not to win but to take part.” It was music to the ears of millions of Japanese people already in awe to distance running but adding to core national values of hard work and never giving up.
Matt Majendie for World Athletics