Japan's national sport has two honest answers. By tradition it is sumo, the Shinto-rooted wrestling that is practised professionally nowhere else, staged at a Tokyo arena whose very name, Kokugikan, means "national sports hall". By popularity it is baseball, which arrived in 1872, is played by about seven million Japanese and fills twelve professional ballparks plus the 49-team Kōshien high-school tournament every summer. No Japanese law designates either. Martial arts such as judo and kendo, and football's J.League, launched in 1993, make up the rest of the field.
Answer One: Sumo, From the Kojiki to the Kokugikan
Sumo's claim begins in Japan's oldest books. The Kojiki of 712 describes the possession of the Japanese islands being settled by a wrestling match between two gods, Takemikazuchi and Takeminakata, and the Nihon Shoki of 720 dates the first contest between mortals to 23 BC, when Nomi no Sukune fought Taima no Kuehaya before Emperor Suinin. Those are myths, but they show how early wrestling was tied to the origins of the state. Prehistoric images suggest sumo began as an agricultural ritual performed for a good harvest, and the first historically attested bouts took place in 642 at the court of Empress Kōgyoku, staged to entertain a Korean delegation.
Over the following thousand years sumo moved from the imperial court to the samurai and then to the public. During the Heian period it became a court ceremony, the sumai no sechie; in the Kamakura period warriors used it as combat training; and in February 1578 the warlord Oda Nobunaga held a tournament for 1,500 wrestlers at his castle, where circular rings were marked out to speed up the bouts. That event is taken as the birth of the dohyō, the raised clay ring. In 1684 Edo authorities allowed sumo to be held for charity on the grounds of Shinto shrines, and the first sanctioned tournament took place at the Tomioka Hachiman Shrine. Much of what spectators see today, including the ring-entering ceremony, the referee or gyōji, the training stables and the mawashi belt, dates from this Edo period.
The Shinto connection is still visible at every bout. Wrestlers throw salt to purify the ring, the roof suspended over the dohyō is built in the style of a Shinto shrine, and newly promoted grand champions perform their first ring-entering ceremony at Meiji Shrine in Tokyo. When the Meiji Restoration of 1868 swept away the feudal lords who had sponsored wrestlers, sumo was briefly dismissed as an embarrassing relic; Emperor Meiji revived its standing by organising a tournament in 1884.
The building that sealed sumo's status as the national sport opened on 2 June 1909 in the grounds of the Ekōin temple in Ryōgoku. Its founding committee chairman, Itagaki Taisuke, wanted to call it Shobukan, "home of martial arts", but the writer Suiin Emi persuaded the committee to choose Kokugikan, "national sports hall", a name that cast sumo as the nation's own sport. The present Ryōgoku Kokugikan, next to the Edo-Tokyo Museum, opened in 1985 after sumo left the Kuramae Kokugikan. It seats 11,098, holds the Sumo Museum and the offices of the Japan Sumo Association, and runs a six-month Sumo School where every new recruit studies calligraphy, sports science, sumo history and civics alongside the basic moves.
Six Basho a Year and the Rank of Yokozuna
Since 1958 the Japan Sumo Association has held six grand tournaments, or honbasho, each year: three at the Kokugikan in January, May and September, and one each in Osaka in March, Nagoya in July and Fukuoka in November. Each starts on a Sunday and runs for 15 days. Wrestlers in the top two divisions fight once a day, lower-ranked men seven times in the tournament, and the day builds from morning bouts between novices to the grand champions at about six in the evening. A bout ends when one man is forced out of the ring or touches the ground with any part of his body other than the soles of his feet.
The top rank is yokozuna, grand champion. The first historically recognised yokozuna was Tanikaze Kajinosuke in the 18th century, and promotion still involves a ceremonial rope, the tsuna, made in the wrestler's stable. For decades many in the association doubted that a foreigner could have the necessary dignity, until the Hawaiian-born Akebono was promoted on 27 January 1993. Since then seven of the next ten yokozuna were born outside Japan, six of them in Mongolia, which is why the sport also features in our look at the national sport of Mongolia. The Mongolian-born Hakuhō won a record 45 top-division championships before retiring in 2021 and took Japanese citizenship in 2019. The current yokozuna are Hōshōryū, the 74th, from Mongolia, promoted in January 2025, and Ōnosato, the 75th, from Japan, promoted in May 2025.
Sumo's hold has not been unbroken. A string of scandals between 2008 and 2016 hurt ticket sales and recruitment, and the regimented life of the stables, where wrestlers live communally under strict rules, has been linked to a shorter life expectancy than the average Japanese man. Attendance has recovered as new champions have emerged, but the sport's status rests more on tradition and ritual than on numbers.
Answer Two: Baseball, From Horace Wilson to Kōshien
By numbers, baseball wins. American and British residents played it in the treaty ports from 1859, and in 1872 Horace Wilson, an American teaching English at the Kaisei Academy in Tokyo, introduced it as a school sport. The Shimbashi Athletic Club, the first organised adult team, followed in 1878. The game is now Japan's most popular sport, with about seven million players, roughly 5% of the population.
The professional game took shape in 1934 with the Greater Japan Tokyo Baseball Club and the Japanese Baseball League in 1936. In 1950 it was reorganised as Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), split into the Central and Pacific Leagues, which have held six teams each almost continuously since 1957. Teams carry the names of corporate owners, such as the Yomiuri Giants, winners of a record 22 Japan Series, and the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks, who beat the Hanshin Tigers 4–1 in the 2025 series. NPB has the second-highest total season attendance of any sports league in the world, behind only Major League Baseball, despite playing far fewer games, and in 2025 every one of its 12 clubs averaged at least 20,000 per home game.
The deepest roots, though, are in schools. Hanshin Kōshien Stadium in Nishinomiya, near Kobe, opened on 1 August 1924 specifically to host the national high-school tournaments; with 55,000 places it was then the largest stadium in Asia, and its name comes from the year's sign, kōshi, in the sexagenary cycle. Every August the National High School Baseball Championship, "Summer Kōshien", brings 49 schools there, one champion from each prefecture plus two each from Hokkaidō and Tokyo, after regional rounds from June. It is the largest amateur sporting event in Japan, and a smaller invitational tournament fills the stadium every March.
Internationally, Japan has won the World Baseball Classic three times, in 2006, 2009 and 2023; the 2023 final against the United States drew more than 54 million Japanese viewers, although Japan went out in the quarter-finals of the 2026 edition to the eventual champions, Venezuela. The game's current global figure is Shohei Ohtani, born in 1994, who played as both pitcher and hitter for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters from 2013 to 2017, won the 2016 Japan Series with them, and moved to Major League Baseball in 2018.
Judo, Kendo and the J.League: The Other Contenders
Japan's martial arts have a strong claim of their own, especially on the world stage. Judo, the "gentle way", was created in 1882 by Kanō Jigorō, who dropped the striking and weapons of older jujutsu schools in favour of throws, pins and free sparring called randori. Its success in tournaments run by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police made it the force's main martial art. Judo entered the Olympics at the 1964 Tokyo Games, in the Nippon Budokan, which was built for the event, and it remains one of the sports in which Japan has won the most Olympic gold medals. Kendo, the "way of the sword", grew from the kenjutsu swordsmanship of the samurai and is fought with bamboo swords, shinai, and protective armour, bōgu, and today it is practised widely in Japan and abroad.
Football is the newcomer. Until the late 1980s the national team was largely amateur and the sport less popular than baseball or sumo. The Japan Soccer League ran from 1965 to 1992, and a bronze medal at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City raised football's profile, but without a professional league Japan did not reach a World Cup for another 30 years. The professional J.League kicked off in 1993, and today's J1 League has 20 clubs; Kashima Antlers won its ninth title in 2025. The national team has reached every World Cup since 1998, when it lost all three games, the last 2–1 to the side covered in our guide to the national sport of Jamaica. Japan co-hosted the 2002 World Cup with South Korea, has reached the knockout stage in 2002, 2010, 2018, 2022 and 2026, and holds a record four Asian Cup titles.
The two answers measure different things. Sumo is the national sport in the sense of ritual and history, the one with a hall named for the nation and a calendar of six tournaments that Japan alone sustains. Baseball is the national sport in the sense of participation and crowds, from Kōshien's summer heat to sold-out NPB stadiums. Many of the people who embody both, from wrestlers to ballplayers, appear in our list of famous people from Japan.