Kōshien baseball tournaments
[1] Both of these nationwide tournaments enjoy widespread popularity similar to that of NCAA March Madness in the United States, arguably equal to or greater than professional baseball.
The tournaments have gone on to become national traditions, and large numbers of frenzied students and parents travel from their hometowns to cheer for their local team.
Due to the recruiting practices of Japanese high schools, top prospects often play on strong teams that were able to reach the final tournament at Kōshien.
Many professional baseball players first made their mark at Kōshien, including Eiji Bandō, Sadaharu Oh, Koji Ota, Suguru Egawa, Masumi Kuwata, Kazuhiro Kiyohara, Hideki Matsui, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Yu Darvish, Masahiro Tanaka, Yusei Kikuchi, and Shohei Ohtani.
[2] In addition, teams are able to practice during the tournament at public and private facilities made available in Nishinomiya, and neighboring Osaka, Amagasaki, and Kobe.
Known in Japanese as 春夏連続優勝 (haru-natsu renzoku yuusho) or Spring-Summer champions, this signifies the winning of both the senbatsu (Spring) and senshuken (Summer) tournaments in a calendar year.
After the game, Kumamoto Tech player Tetsuharu Kawakami grabbed a handful of dirt from the playing field of Kōshien Stadium and put it in his uniform pocket as a memento.
Since then, as a memento of their fleeting time on the hallowed grounds of Kōshien, players from the losing teams take home a pouch of the precious soil.
It was finally broken in 2022, when Sendai Ikuei (Miyagi) beat Shimonoseki Kokusai (Yamaguchi) to become the first Tōhoku school to win a Kōshien championship.
Besides a reprimand for withholding the report until after the tournament, the High School Baseball Federation did not punish Komazawa Tomakomai.
The first passing of Hakone in the spring was achieved in 1957 by Waseda Jitsugyō (Tōkyō), which was led by pitcher and future pro baseball legend Sadaharu Oh.
The championship flags made their way farther north into Kantō in 1962, when Sakushin Gakuin (Tochigi) became the first school to win both the Spring and Summer tournaments in one calendar year.
To reach Tochigi, the flag had to "ford the Tone River," a major waterway that roughly divides the region into northern and southern halves.
Coincidentally, Kokura Secondary repeated as champions in 1948, a feat not matched until Komadai Tomakomai did it in 2004 and 2005, also becoming the first team to bring the title to their region.
When a team from the southern half of Kyūshū wins a tournament, the championship flag must pass Mount Aso in Kumamoto.
Some of the most famous appearances of high school baseball in popular culture are in the manga and anime series Touch, H2 and Cross Game by Mitsuru Adachi, Ace of Diamond by Yuji Terajima, and Major by Takuya Mitsuda.
More recently, the Manga work "Karin´s Mound" (花鈴のマウンド Karin no maundo)[4] also entertained the idea that the Girl's National High School Championship would be also played at Kōshien Stadium, which has happened in the real world since 2021.
In the finale of the anime Zipang, radio broadcast of the "patriotic" 1942 summer tournament is playing in the background when Kadomatsu meets his grandfather back in the past.
