Rob Gilhooly spurns the renowned comforts of a ryokan in a bid to get a taste of Japan’s great outdoors. While idling away some dead time on a station platform several years ago, my wife and I played one of those write-and-tell games centering on the theme of an ideal holiday. While her list included…

A popular Japanese outdoor pastime offers participants the chance to get well and truly off the beaten track, writes Robert Cameron. It’s summer – time to hit the streams for some sawanobori.  This popular and uniquely Japanese sport, sometimes translated as stream-climbing or river-tracing, is virtually unknown outside of Japan, but is extremely popular here….

Sleep is likely to be in short supply this month as the country follows Japan’s progress in the 2006 Football World Cup in Germany. As the team heads to Europe, Jon Day asks national captain Tsuneyasu Miyamoto what the stalwart defender hopes to take away from soccer’s glamorous tournament. When Japan’s first game at the…

Japan, with its population of 127 million, is set to go down in history in 2019 as the first Asian country to ever host the most coveted quadrennial tournament in the world of rugby: the Rugby World Cup. Following the country’s exceptional performance in the 2015 world cup in England, immortalized by its stunning win…

Officials in the hallowed halls of FIFA have once again decided to tinker with the format of the association’s annual Club World Cup, the final of which is scheduled to take place in Yokohama on December 16. The FIFA Club World Cup, which used to be called the FIFA Club World Championship, is a football…

The America’s Cup is arguably the most difficult trophy in sport to win. In more than 150 years since a yacht named America, representing the New York Yacht Club, beat the best the British could offer and win the Royal Yacht Squadron’s 100 Guinea Cup, only three nations other than the United States Australia, New…

Ice hockey, considered by most to be the purview of toothless Canadians, black-eyed Minnesotans and bloodied Russians has been popular in Japan for years and its popularity has been spreading both in Japan and throughout Asia. Asia League Ice Hockey was formed in 2003 when the Japan Ice Hockey League expanded to other Asian countries…

The last few decades have seen a literal expansion in people; not in numbers, but in size. Worldwide, particularly in developed nations, people have been getting fatter and less fit. Sedentary lifestyles and cheap, high-fat food has led to this trend, with predictions now that in North America, more than twenty five percent of adults…

At the definitive clang of the referee bell, two sweat drenched fighters, clad in somewhat offbeat pink shorts rise from their opposing benches and circle each other in a manner that looks somewhat like an animalistic display of attack and fleeing behavior in a territorial battle between wild cats. Rising and falling in tension, their…

Rally racing has always enjoyed popularity in Japan and with the World Rally Championships returning to Japan for the fifth time, that trend is not likely to end anytime soon. Raced for the last three years in and around Obihiro, the race moves closer to Sapporo this year and will feature narrow forest roads with…