Japan Up Close Essay Series

What connects a small office above a supermarket in Yokohama’s Chinatown, a public sports centre in Tokyo’s Itabashi City, and an archaeological site in Okayama? They all contain sports museums. If you’ve spent any time in Japan, you’ll know the country is packed with museums (more on that later!), but you may never have come across a sports museum. If you have, it’s likely the Japan Olympic Museum in Shinjuku, a short walk from the Japan National Stadium. Yet across Japan there are dozens of sports-related museums, most operating far from that kind of visibility. In early 2026, the Japan Sport Council launched the Japan Sports Museum Network, part of its “Tsunagu” project, aiming to strengthen collaboration between these institutions. So far, only 16 have registered as members, and no one has a full picture of how many exist, short of compiling the list yourself.

Why is the existence of sports museums interesting? In many ways, it isn’t. Some are entirely predictable: the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum sits inside the Tokyo Dome, home to the Yomiuri Giants, while the Hanazono Rugby Museum sits at Japan’s oldest rugby stadium, Hanazono Stadium in Higashi-Osaka. But consider the three examples I opened with. In Yokohama, a makeshift sign stuck to a second-storey window above a Chinese supermarket points the way to the Yokohama Baseball Museum. Climb the stairs, pass doors with obscured glass and business plaques, turn right, and you reach what is essentially an office: a desk and bookshelves. Yet wall to wall, floor to ceiling, baseball memorabilia fills the space. In a residential neighbourhood of Itabashi, a sports centre named after the adventurer Naomi Uemura houses a museum dedicated to his exploits, despite spending only a single summer there between climbing trips; his actual hometown, now part of Toyooka in Hyogo Prefecture, has its own Uemura museum. And in a corner of Okayama’s JFE Harenokuni Stadium, a small museum splits its space evenly between sporting memorabilia and artefacts from the adjacent Tsushima archaeological site, antiquity and modern sporting culture meeting side by side.

Institutions like these sit quietly across the country, each one telling its own story about what Japan chooses to remember and celebrate through sport.