Japan Page 4 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Dodgers, Cubs to open 2025 MLB season in Tokyo
Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and the Los Angeles Dodgers will open the 2025 season against Japanese countrymen Shota Imanaga, Seiya Suzuki and the Chicago Cubs in Tokyo on March 18-19, Major League Baseball announced Thursday.,The opening series at Tokyo Dome marks the 25th anniversary of the f...

Japanese Baseball Is Back and You Know a Bunch of These Guys
As Major League Baseball and its players continue to collectively unholster a giant middle finger at all of us, another country has uncorked action on the diamond....

The Olympics Are Coming To Tokyo, And So Is The Movement To Kill The Games Forever
TOKYO, JAPAN — In the lobby of the Marunouchi Nijubashi Building, which is undergoing final preparations to host the 2020 Olympics, a robot is on patrol. A combination of information kiosk and surveillance camera, the robot stops directly in front of me. It has the word ALSOK plastered across its ne...

An Unlucky Handball Sends Japan Out Of The World Cup
An exhilarating World Cup round of 16 rematch between the Netherlands and Japan got decided in favor of the Dutch in the 90th minute, thanks to a penalty kick converted by forward Lieke Martens. The PK gave the Dutch a 2-1 win over the same team that kicked them out of the 2015 World Cup, and it put...

Japan Arrive At The World Cup With A New Look And Something To Prove
The USA’s top nemesis in the Women’s World Cup comes into 2019 with plenty of questions to answer, despite winning it all in 2011 and placing second in 2015. A disastrous failure to qualify for the 2016 Olympics ended the eight-year tenure of Japanese manager Norio Sasaki, and as Japan enter their f...

Nathan Chen Repeats As World Champion
After cruising to his first world championship gold last year, American wonderteen Nathan Chen (who is also a pre-med student at Yale, no big deal), managed to top an incredible free skate by Japan’s two-time Olympic champion Yuzuru Hanyu to win back-to-back world titles. ...

Ichiro Forever
The news circulated through the Tokyo Dome soon after first pitch. As reported by Kyodo News, Ichiro Suzuki had told the Mariners he would retire after the game. A real retirement this time; not the stepping-away of last May, when it became clear that the aged Japanese superstar didn’t have major-le...

Japanese Government Wants Evacuees To Return To Fukushima In Time To Make Olympics Look Good<em></em>
One of the few things that the Olympics do well, aside from putting cities in significant debt that can take decades to pay off, is symbolism. It was on display last year in Pyeongchang when the North and South Korean delegations marched into the opening ceremonies for the Winter Olympics, and if th...

Qatar Tuned Up For The 2022 World Cup By Winning The Asian Cup For The First Time
On Friday, the Qatari national soccer team did what it had never done before, beating Japan 3-1 in the final of the Asian Cup to claim its first continental trophy ever....

Floyd Mayweather Changes His Mind About Fighting Japanese Kickboxing Phenom
Remember two days ago when Floyd Mayweather held an hour-long press conference in Tokyo to announce that he would be fighting 20-year-old kickboxing genius Tenshin Nasukawa in Japan on New Year’s Eve? Ha ha, it was all a misunderstanding, according to Mayweather, who announced in a lengthy Instagram...

Why Does This Japanese Reality Show Have So Much American Sports Team Gear?
I can’t remember which coworker of mine recommended it. Billy or Giri, I think, but maybe both. But after watching the first episode of Japanese reality show Terrace House, which is basically Japan’s Real World, I was hooked. The show’s appeal is simple: you get to watch young attractive people hang...

Martial Arts Legend Kid Yamamoto Dead At 41
The MMA world has lost one of its pioneers, as Japanese combat sports lifer Norifumi “Kid” Yamamoto died, a month after being diagnosed with cancer. He was 41 years old....

Watch This Weird Old Japanese Home Run Derby Featuring Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, And Bernie Williams
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....

I Am Not Superstitious, But Japan <i>Definitely</i> Lost Because Its Psychic Octopus With A Perfect Record Was Killed, Sold, And Eaten
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 ...

Romelu Lukaku Is A Genius
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 sma...

Most Thrilling Half Of The World Cup Ends With Belgium Sticking A Dagger In Japan's Heart
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 se...

FIFA's Goofy Yellow Card Rule Isn't To Blame For Senegal's World Cup Exit
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 Crashed Out Of The World Cup In The Cruelest Possible Way<em></em>
Senegal’s second-ever World Cup is over and it couldn’t feel worse. ...

More World Cup Games Should Be Like Japan-Senegal
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 th...

Will Japan's Experience Be Enough To Spring A World Cup Upset?<em></em>
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, P...