Ekiden: How the century-old race spread from Japan to the UK
In June 1983, a young Japanese man named Naruhito arrived at Merton College, Oxford, to study. Already in possession of a history degree from Gakushuin University in Tokyo, he was there to write his thesis on a very English topic: A Study of Navigation and Traffic on the Upper Thames in the Eighteenth Century.
A decade later, back in Japan, his time in the UK had stayed with him to the extent that he was inspired to publish a memoir: Thames To Tomo Ni (The Thames and I), in which he recalled watching the traditional Boat Race against Cambridge, climbing the highest mountain peaks of England, Scotland and Wales, seeing the Bond film Octopussy at the cinema and being refused entry to a nightclub because he was wearing jeans.
It’s not a well-known book, but it’s notable because of the later life of its author. In 2019, Naruhito acceded to the throne as the 126th Emperor of Japan.
In late June 2024, Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako (who studied international relations at Oxford’s Balliol College a few years after her future husband had left the city) returned to Merton College to plant a cherry tree. It was the final part of an official state visit that had included a carriage journey with King Charles and Queen Camilla down The Mall to Buckingham Palace for a state banquet, a visit to Kew Gardens and a trip to see a wide stretch of his favourite river at the Thames Barrier. In a speech at the Palace, the Emperor said: ‘We now have an even stronger sense of the deep significance of the exchange between Japan and the United Kingdom, forged over so many years.’
He may or may not have been aware that timed to coincide with his visit, along a 122km stretch of the Thames from Oxford to Windsor, a running-focused effort to unite British and Japanese culture is taking place: the inaugural UK Ekiden. Ekiden is a long-distance relay format that’s bigger than Godzilla in Japan but little known elsewhere. I’m invited as part of a 10-strong team jointly representing Runner’s World UK and JET alumni – people who have lived in Japan as university graduates through the Japanese Exchange and Teaching Programme. My RW teammates are Rachel Boswell, Jen Bozon, Ali Ball and Rick Pearson, who, having been assigned pretty much the only leg that strays from the Thames Path and features a big hill, feels like he’s been stitched up.
As with the Greek messenger Pheidippides, who legend has it brought us the concept of the marathon, this type of running event has its origins in Japanese couriers of the 17th to 19th centuries passing messages between one another across the country. Blending the Japanese words eki (‘station’) and den (‘convey’), it can operate over a variety of distances and number of legs, as long as the team members are passing a tasuki – symbolic sash – rather than a baton. In our case, the longest of the 10 legs is 14km, while the shortest is 8km. We ought to be strategising about our relative talents as runners, assigning legs to start strong and finish with a bang. However, I pick leg four, mainly because it finishes near my aunt and uncle’s house and I thought that I’d pop in for lunch.
Anna Dingley is taking things more seriously than we are. Describing herself as the founder and ‘chief evangelist’ of the UK Ekiden, her goal is for ekiden to be recognised as a significant race format over here. The Henley-on-Thames resident has a long history
of bringing Britain and Japan closer, from teaching English in Kagoshima in the late 90s to managing the UK Pavilion at the World Expo in Aichi in 2005 and founding a company, Japan Connect, to advise businesses from both countries. She confesses that even with her deep knowledge of Japanese culture, she was fairly oblivious to ekidens when she was
a resident. ‘Most people who visit Japan or live there as a gaijin (‘foreigner’) have never heard of them,’ says Dingley. ‘For the Japanese, though, they’re massive.’
Imagine if the Super Bowl lasted two full days. That’s the scale of the popularity of the most famous ekiden race, the Hakone Ekiden, which takes place on 2 and 3 January each year. Those dates are public holidays and anywhere between a quarter and a third of Japan’s 124 million inhabitants are at home watching the live broadcast on Nippon TV. It’s a 10-leg road relay of roughly a half marathon for each runner, heading south from Tokyo to Lake Ashi outside the town of Hakone on day one, then back the other way on day two. It has something in common with the Tour de France, for the large crowds of spectators gathered along the roadsides and the competitors who specialise in different stages. It also echoes the popularity of American college football or the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race, because the teams are drawn from the best athletes at 20 Japanese universities (plus a 21st team mixing together the best runners whose institutions just missed out).
Dingley wanted the UK Ekiden to pay tribute to Hakone, which began in 1920 but, due to a gap around the Second World War, was celebrating its 100th edition in 2024. ‘I felt, wouldn’t it be amazing to show how impressed we are by them reaching 100, to say: “We’ll start ours in your 100th year?”’ she says.
Throughout the year, Japan holds different ekidens of different sizes. High schools tend to have teams of five girls running a half marathon distance in total, or seven boys covering a marathon distance as a team. The first ekiden race was in 1917 and covered the 500km between Kyoto and Tokyo in 23 legs. The biggest beast was the Round-Kyushu Ekiden, at 1,060km and 72 segments. It first took place in 1951, but ended in 2013 due to difficulties with the 10 days of logistics. Very occasionally, gaijin get involved: in 2005, Paula Radcliffe led a British team at the International Chiba Ekiden, in which teams of six covered a total distance of a marathon. Kenya won.
Beyond the Olympics and World Championships, running doesn’t tend to get that much TV attention over here – so why has the Hakone Ekiden earned such a prime spot in Japanese culture? Part of it is the drama resulting from the limited timespan that a university student has to be picked for their team. Before the event, the public is fascinated by the ins and outs of the potential participants, who’s on the rise and who’s injured, in the same way that we might speculate on a football manager’s teamsheet before a major tournament. ‘The public gets really invested in the stories and the emotion as supporters,’ says Dingley. In many cases, this could be the runners’ only real chance to shine on a big stage. Spending your prime years specialising in hilly half marathon road running doesn’t necessarily translate to being world-class at the 10,000m or marathon in international athletics.
More importantly, though, the concept of wa, or ‘harmony’, is very big in Japan. It influences family life, work culture and even turns traditionally individual sports into team events, explains Masahiro Haneda. He’s a computer engineer who organises an ekiden for workers in the financial industry in Japan, and who advised on and took part in the UK Ekiden. ‘Teamwork, or working for someone else, is a spirit we really love. It’s very deep inside Japanese culture. Even though you’re running on your own in an ekiden, you still feel very strongly part of the team.’
Tasuki on Thames
When I arrive at the Oxford Spires Hotel the evening before the UK Ekiden, our team spirit is in short supply. Anna seems rather disappointed to learn that I haven’t yet met any of the other nine RW/JET representatives in person. As I’m a freelancer, even my RW colleagues only know me as a disembodied emailer asking for extensions on his deadlines. This is highly anti-wa and counter to the way that Team Paris Marathon, for example, is operating. They’re a group of Japanese runners who know each other from travelling to the annual race in France’s capital. This evening, they’re all dining together and have taped a large map to the wall showing details of the 10 legs that will take them from the Thames Path beside their Oxford hotel to the Brocas meadow beneath Windsor Castle.
Unlike us, most of the other teams have got matching vests or T-shirts. The idea is for this race to have lots in common with the Hakone version, so there are strong teams of athletes currently studying at Cambridge and Birmingham universities, plus A and B teams from Oxford. Loughborough University was also meant to be involved but dropped out, leaving us slightly short of Hakone’s traditional 21 teams. Among the civilian teams are representatives from the Japan-connected financial world, such as Nikko Asset Management and Daiwa Capital Markets, the event’s sponsor, the Financial Times, and its Japanese owners Nikkei, the Japanese disability charity Momiji and a speedy bunch from the Osaka-based sportswear company Mizuno. The nicest vests belong to Namban Rengo, a running club for Tokyo residents who mostly aren’t Japanese. The name means ‘Barbarian Horde’.
Even though our leafy, Wind in the Willows route couldn’t be more English, the event does feel very Japanese – partly because of an enthusiastic bunch of taiko drummers making our 7am trudge to the start line coach feel significantly more exciting, and also because the first-leg runners are wearing the navy blue tasuki sash, making them look like Miss World contestants late for the swimsuit round.
We’re shown a good luck message from Susumu Hara, the head coach of the Aoyama Gakuin University ekiden team, which has been victorious in the Hakone Ekiden for seven of the past 10 years. Apparently, this is like receiving a personal video from Pep Guardiola before you play your next football match. The way that he talks about the tasuki, it’s clear it has huge, talismanic significance. ‘In an ekiden, you take this tasuki and pass on the feelings of each individual,’ he says. ‘Unexpected problems, accidents and troubles may occur. However, if each and every individual strives to keep pushing forward, their feelings and their hearts will ride on with the tasuki. In this ekiden, you cannot win alone. You must fight together with your team.’
Ironically, on the day, I spend more time with my supposed rivals than my teammates. Team RW/JET have at least summoned the togetherness to set up a WhatsApp chat and share our locations, but we’re all waiting in different places to begin our legs. I end up spending most of the morning with the others who have been designated as runners of stage four, from Wallingford to Goring. I’ve lingered at much worse start lines than the Howbery Business Park, which turns out to be a former manor house with expansive riverside lawns. The weather is blazingly sunny – not ideal for running, but perfect for lazing on the grass for several hours watching dots on your phone map.
It feels a bit like there are two separate races going on, with the determined young university students handing over well before the corporate teams. Anna says that the eventual plan is to have a Hakone-style event solely for university athletes, on a separate day from the teams with a more casual approach.
Our sash is delivered to me around 11am by Stuart Drinkwater, who is running his first race since 2017. Stu has been through a torrid time to become fit enough to run the 8km of stage three between Little Wittenham and Wallingford, which he blames partly on another aspect of Japanese culture. In late 2014, the maths graduate moved to Tokyo to take a job with the big accounting firm PwC.
‘They warned me that there’s a busy season of three to four months, which is, in their words, “intense” – but I was 24 and looking forward to the challenge. I thought that I could handle it,’ he says. I ask him if he felt that he was burning the candle at both ends. ‘I would describe it as more like taking the candle and throwing it into Mount Doom.’ A YouTube video he made in March 2015, ‘A week in the life of a Tokyo salary man’, had 1.4 million people watching him marching back and forth to his office, eating grim convenience food and tallying up 35 hours of sleep against 78 hours of work, including clocking off at 10pm on Saturday night.
The idea of the ‘salary man’ is the darker flip side of that one-for-all team culture. These guys live for the company, with even their social lives taking place solely at work events. At its ultimate extreme, that commitment even extends into the afterlife. In Okunoin, Japan’s largest cemetery, you can be buried alongside your co-workers at Panasonic Corporation.
One evening, coming in late again, Stu was standing in his apartment, wolfing down some food, when he passed out. He woke up on the floor, bruised down one side from crushing a small aluminium bin under his body weight. ‘At the time, I just laughed it off. I didn’t even tell anyone about it,’ he says. ‘It’s only now that I can see it was a serious warning sign.’
Back in the UK, working in a different role for PwC, he entered and trained for the 2017 Birmingham Marathon. Two weeks before the race, he developed a bacterial lung infection, was put on antibiotics and told by his doctor not to run. ‘I did the race against the advice of medical professionals and my family and friends, he says, sheepishly. ‘To be fair, I felt okay up to about 14 miles, then I had full-body cramps like never before. I finished the race with a lot of walking, and after that I was just floored. I got really, really ill and never really recovered.’
He visited his GP and was diagnosed with ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome) six months later. ‘I’ve always enjoyed running, so being told that I should try working up to five minutes of walking a day was a real psychological hit. I thought, “What have I done to myself?” I fell into depression, to be honest, having to take on this new identity of someone who was no longer able to say yes to everything, or be the life and soul of the party – it was really tough.’
Today, Stu’s life is far quieter but manageable. He’s launched a business with his cousin, a fitness coach, making a natural electrolyte drink mix they call Mnrls. He says that he thought he’d never do a race again, but the Japanese connection, and chance to catch
up with some JET friends, persuaded him to sign up. ‘It did knock me. I was rough for about two weeks afterward,’ he admits. ‘But I’m glad I did it, for sure.’
Sash and burn
As for me, I’ve got no excuse for my first ekiden being a disaster. I pull on the tasuki Stu hands me, which feels a little odd to run with, and zip off toward central Wallingford, soon buzzing from overtaking two other runners early on. But, after 10 minutes or so, on a long, straight road heading out of town, I begin to sense that something is awry. Wasn’t this relay supposed to take place almost entirely along the banks of the Thames?
After stopping to study my phone and retracing my steps, embarrassed to see that I’ve led a runner I overtook the wrong way, I discover the problem. There was a small red arrow pointing down a narrow lane to the riverside, but I was running on the other side of the road and missed it (though the large bridge and significant body of water I crossed ought to have been a pretty sizeable clue). By the time I’m back on track, I’ve added just over two extra kilometres to my 12.8km leg.
Once I found Britain’s best-known river, the route was lovely. The Japanese race participants must be doubly delighted by how English it all is, with ducks, swans, anglers and intrepid dogs retrieving tennis balls from the water. I have to duck to run under a racing boat that eight rowers are carrying to the river. Two dozen red-jumpered prep-school boys line up to offer high-fives when they see me coming. It’s essentially a very sweaty Richard Curtis movie.
Coming over the bridge in Goring, scanning the waiting runners for my leg five teammate, RW’s Jen Bozon, I’m dismayed to be told that she’s already gone. It turns out that my unplanned detour has made us just miss a strict cut-off time for the handover. Ekiden rules dictated that poor Jen had to set off by a specific time, broadcasting our failure by wearing a shameful green sash instead of the original blue one.
Even though I’ve been running alone, the feeling of being part of a team really hits home, and not in a good way. I feel like I’ve missed a penalty in a crucial shoot-out. I like to think I’m fairly quick for my age, but I’m also a choker, a faller, an arrow misser. I’m quite used to being disappointed in myself at the end of races. Today, I feel the imagined weight of nine other people being disappointed in me, too.
On the plus side, at least we’re not being watched by a third of Japan on television. The rest of the team is full of supportive commiseration on our WhatsApp chat and, thanks to speedy contributions from the other RW dynamos, our position is pulled back from 16th out of 18 to an honourable 10th. ‘There should be a rule that if you claw back to within the cut-off times, you’re given back the blue sash,’ suggests Rick Pearson. ‘But that probably contravenes hundreds of years of proud Japanese running tradition, so I’ll be quiet.’
Most of us travel on to the finish line in Windsor, where we finally meet and bond over Japanese snacks and drinks, watch those taiko drummers again and exchange tales of minuscule direction signs, the opposite of fishermen describing their catch. We see Oxford University A team’s Josephine Auer flying into finish their race in 7:48:10, 37 minutes ahead of second-place Cambridge and – ahem – over three hours faster than our team. They are presented with beautiful glasses as prizes – made in Japan, engraved in Oxfordshire – which feature an acorn to represent the UK and a silhouette of Mount Fuji.
Masahiro Haneda comes in as the 10th runner for Team Paris Marathon, which takes first place among the non-university teams. He’s given a Japanese flag to wave as he crosses the line, with Windsor Castle’s Union Jack visible behind, and the multinational balance of the day feels just right. ‘I’d love to see this become a regular thing and not just be about Japanese culture, but become part of UK culture, too,’ says Haneda. ‘It could be totally different – a translation of what ekiden means to people in the UK. I’d love that.’
To keep the connection going, proceeds from the inaugural UK Ekiden have enabled donations to both the Thames Path National Trail and earthquake recovery in Japan, as well as the Richard Whitehead Foundation for disabled people in sport. Anna Dingley would like the event to become even more like its Hakone counterpart before evolving into anything else. ‘We want it to be seen as a serious race, especially within the university communities, and we may make it an out-and-back course, more like Hakone’s,’ she says. ‘Also, as we’ve been inspired by Hakone reaching 100 years, it might sound flippant, but I do think that this one should also continue for 100 years.’
The Emperor would be proud of such ambition and I’d be glad to come back next year, too. Thanks to my poor navigation skills, I still have a blue sash.
A short history of ekiden
1917
The first ekiden race was held between two teams running between Kyoto and Tokyo, to celebrate 50 years since Tokyo became Japan’s capital.
1920
Hakone Ekiden takes place for the first time and is won by Tokyo Higher Normal School, now the University of Tsukuba.
1988
Tokyo Broadcasting System Television begins showing the New Year Ekiden, another high-profile race held the day before Hakone.
1988
The International Chiba Ekiden is also launched this year. Japan, Ethiopia and Kenya have been the most successful national teams.
2006
The novel Kaze Ga Tsuyoku Fuiteiru, about a team entering Hakone, is published. It becomes a manga comic, a live-action movie and an anime series.
2024
The UK Ekiden is born in Oxford.
The 2025 UK Ekiden will take place on Friday 20 June – you can find more information here.
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