MLB’s single-elimination bracket format has revitalized the Home Run Derby—last night ruled—but can we do even better? As with game shows, the Japanese remain light years ahead of us in Home Run Derby technology.
Belgium’s round-of-16 win over Japan was a shocker, with the Red Devils coming back from an 0-2 second-half hole to win 3-2 on a thrilling counter at the very end of stoppage time. It’s gotta be difficult to swallow for Japan, because that final counter—an absolute thing of beauty—came off a poorly plotted corner…
More than any other soccer skill, positional awareness comes with the widest gulf between how important it is to a team’s success and how readily noticeable it is to the casual fan watching at home. This is partly due to the limitations of broadcast camera angles, and partly due to the fact that smart movement often…
After an uneventful first 45 minutes, Belgium and Japan put together the best half of soccer in what has already been an extremely entertaining World Cup. Belgium generated more dangerous chances and generally looked like the better team throughout the first half, but it was a cagey affair and it seemed likely that…
Senegal got knocked out of the World Cup this afternoon after they lost to Colombia by a score of 1-0. This is a bummer, because Senegal were one of the most entertaining and likable teams in the tournament. However, Senegal have no one to blame other than themselves for how things went down.
Senegal’s second-ever World Cup is over and it couldn’t feel worse.
Today group stage World Cup match between Japan and Senegal, which ended in a 2-2 draw, wasn’t exactly a world-class showcase of skill and talent in the way that later rounds of the tournament will be. But damned if it didn’t have a boatload of charisma, which made it infinitely more entertaining than a 1-0 slugfest…
The Japanese national team is built around an extremely solid core group of 30-somethings who have all proven themselves at the highest levels of European soccer. This is probably their last shot at World Cup glory, though they have a steep road ahead of them if they want to qualify past Colombia, Poland, and Senegal.…
A single dirty hit in a college football game three weeks ago has become a such a scandal in Japan that the perpetrator held a nationally televised press conference today to explain himself.
Ryozo Tatami, the mayor of a small town in Kyoto prefecture, was delivering a speech Wednesday before an exhibition sumo match when he suffered a brain hemorrhage and collapsed, according to the New York Times. Even though women comprise a large part of the sumo fanbase, they’re forbidden from entering the ring…
The 2018 Winter Olympics are over, and there was one clear winner: Soohorang, mascot of the Pyeongchang games.
It does not take a curling genius (or, barring that, just a regular old Canadian citizen) to figure out that Japanese skip Yusuke Morozumi really boinked this one against Denmark.
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — The period of Japanese colonial rule in Korea, from 1910 until 1945, was characterized by executions, forced labor, systematic rape of so-called “comfort women,” and other human rights atrocities. Japan’s whitewashing of this time period in their history books today is a continued source of…
Last time the youth of Japan were given an opportunity to demonstrate their sporting acumen in the whimsical world of Japanese game shows, 55 children tried and failed to best a team of a mere two professional players in soccer. Recently, that same game show gave 100 more kids the chance to redeem themselves by…
Kenny Omega is considered by many to be the best wrestler in the world. Chris Jericho is an unquestioned wrestling legend. They both showed why in Tokyo on Thursday.
Yesterday, the committee organizing the 2020 Toyko Summer Olympics announced the finalists for the official mascots of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. As you can expect in a mascot-mad country like Japan, the process was complicated. Seriously, there were eight meetings of the Mascot Selection Process Panel, then…
In the first round of the Nippon Professional Baseball playoffs in Japan, the Hanshin Tigers and Yokohama DeNA Baystars battled through absolutely absurd conditions to play an entire baseball game in the mud. The result was unlike any baseball game I’ve ever seen. To watch the highlights with the full swampy effect, …
Japanese baseball star Shohei Otani, who is in the midst of a Ruthian season for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters—the two-way stud had a 1.86 ERA and 174 strikeouts in 140 innings, to go along with 27 homers and a .322/.416/.588 triple slash in 2016—is reportedly ready to play ball in America. He’ll be doing so on the…
Remember Momo, the 12-year-old who got booked for an MMA fight in Japan against an opponent twice her age? She choked out the 24-year-old in question in the first round.
