Japan's Kabaddi: How One Comic Built a National Team — And Why Our Akhras Couldn't

Japan's Kabaddi: How One Comic Built a National Team — And Why Our Akhras Couldn't

The schoolchildren got up eight minutes into the match. Lunch. Inside the Nagoya arena, Japan and South Korea were still feeling each other out in the first half, but the class that had come in on free tickets was done sitting — even with a member of the imperial family in one corner of the stands, even with the camera lenses swinging up and down, even with federation officials checking the scoreboard and doing their sums. The very people the whole show was staged for were in the lunch queue.

By then the board read Japan 62, South Korea 35.

The scoreline is not what interests me. The eight minutes are.

Because those eight minutes hold two things at once: in Japan, kabaddi has not yet produced fans — it has produced curiosity. And yet Japan's kabaddi team exists, and it exists because of a comic book. More than 80 percent of Japan's national-team players say they started the sport after reading a manga called Burning Kabaddi. Not a coach, not a camp, not a school PE teacher — a comic.

That is the biggest kabaddi story of this moment, and no Indian broadcaster will lead a bulletin with it.

Indian kabaddi coverage is still busy with Pro Kabaddi League auctions, transfers, strike rates and buyer value. Yet if kabaddi genuinely wants to become an international sport, its most useful piece of information is coming out of Nagoya — and it was printed in a Pakistani English daily, The Express Tribune. An outside eye is not automatically correct, but it is always different.

Some context is needed here, because if you cannot read a kabaddi score, half of this report loses its meaning. Kabaddi is a seven-a-side contact sport. A raider crosses into the opponent's half and must chant “kabaddi, kabaddi” continuously — proof that the whole raid is being done on one breath, not two. If the chant stops, the raid is void. The raid is capped at 30 seconds. A touch or a tackle is worth one point. Crossing the bonus line deep in the opponent's half earns one point, provided the defence has six or more players on court. There are two-point Super Tackles, when three or fewer defenders are on court. And there is the All Out: when one side loses all seven players, the opponent gets two bonus points and the wiped-out side revives. That reset is what makes kabaddi strange — one collapse tends to trigger another.

Now read the 62-35. Ninety-seven points in a forty-minute match. Many will mistake it for a basketball scoreline, or assume two evenly matched sides simply traded blows. The opposite is true. Scores this high in kabaddi usually mean one side kept collapsing into All Outs. A 27-point margin at Asian Games level is not a thriller — it is the arithmetic of a defensive collapse. And the Japan that put 62 on South Korea managed only 24 against India, conceding 49.

Japan's real altitude is written between those two scorelines. Comfortably above South Korea and the rest of the region, a full tier below India. I never read that 25-point gap as the gap of a single match; it is the gap of a system.

To see why, look at how the team is built. These players are teachers and food workers — none of them is paid to play kabaddi. To appear for the national team, they need special dispensation from their employers. The Japan Kabaddi Federation was founded in 2026, and annual tournaments have been held since 2026. Japan won bronze at the 2026 Asian Games, so this is no newcomer — it has been at this level for more than fifteen years. In the same period India moved into the Pro Kabaddi League: full-time contracts, physios, video analysts, sponsors. Japan moved forward with boys who read a manga.

Here is the first genuinely new piece of information: for perhaps the first time in kabaddi's international history, a sport has produced a national team through a pop-culture IP.

Consider how different the models are. Britain, Canada and the Gulf grew kabaddi through diaspora — expatriate Punjabi and South Asian communities handing the game down to their children. India grew it through a league, through television, through money. Japan grew it through a story. No government programme built this squad; a manga series did. In thirteen years of watching the machinery behind sport, I have not seen this before. In a country outside cricket and outside football, kabaddi entered as a cultural product rather than as a sport.

And that is precisely my first unease. The narrower the funnel, the more easily it breaks. If more than 80 percent of the squad comes from a single manga, then the day that IP goes cold, recruitment goes cold with it. In esports I learned that a meta shift can exile a player faster than a bad season. Sport development follows the same rule. India's funnel is many things: villages, schools, railways, police, league. Japan's funnel is currently one book.

Another thing I notice in the scoreline: the side that put 62 on South Korea also conceded 35 in that match. Conceding 35 in a win means the defence has holes. Those holes widen against India. Japan's captain, Tetsuro Abe, has said that with a good environment Japan will be able to beat teams like India and Iran. I respect the ambition. But a 25-point gap is not only an environment gap. It is a talent-pipeline and full-time-professionalism gap. Environments can change in weeks; pipelines take decades.

Let me add something the original report leaves out. Indian kabaddi players have a safety net — railway, police and army jobs, league contracts. Japan's players have an employer's goodwill. Getting leave as a teacher, getting time off as a food worker — that is not an institutional arrangement, it is a personal favour. If the employer's mood changes, a national-team player is not on court. That is not financial weakness; it is institutional fragility.

Commercially, the maths is blunt. In Japan there are no player salaries — Abe himself says they do not get money for playing kabaddi. There are no sponsors; attracting sponsors, in his words, is the goal. What many are calling a rise is still standing at the pre-revenue stage. A home Asian Games hands Japan the biggest opportunity of this decade — a royal presence, free school tickets, national television cameras. But at eight minutes the children left to eat. Curiosity and fandom are not the same thing, and the scoreboard never shows the difference.

Look at the age of the institution. Founded in 2026, annual tournaments since 2026 — forty-five years of survival, without professionalisation. That is a significant administrative finding: an institution can persist without scaling. Stability and scale are not the same thing. I recognise the pattern, because my own country runs the exact opposite pattern — a huge base, zero structure.

I found the mirage in Mymensingh before I found the semifinal in Dhaka. On the mud akhras, boys raid barefoot, spectators sit on earth mounds, and someone keeps score in a notebook. Bangladesh does not lack kabaddi players. It lacks a story. Japan had no players and a story. They turned a story into players; we could not turn players into a story. That is a hard sentence, but the arithmetic is plain. Our akhras keep kabaddi alive but never put it on a television screen; one Japanese comic put it on screen and eventually built a team.

One example stays with me. In 2026 I wrote a feature on women's kabaddi called “Waking up after decades of hibernation.” Reporting it, I saw that our women play far more than they are seen to play — because there is no audience, no writing, no camera. Kabaddi's problem is not a shortage of talent; it is that the sport cannot tell a story about itself. Japan walked the opposite road.

This brings Denmark to mind. At the Euro 2026 semi-final in 2026, Denmark lost to England and the whole world wrote about grief. I wrote then that Denmark's fairy tale was not magic, it was a 3-4-3 system. The fairy tale was not Denmark winning; it was Denmark making grief tactical. I ask the same question of Japan — the fairy tale is not the comic. The fairy tale is that a comic became a national team's recruitment system. And when you look closely at that system, it is one foot wide.

This is where my argument can fail, and I accept that.

First, I may be underestimating the lifespan of a manga IP. Japanese pop culture keeps its IP alive for decades — Captain Tsubasa sent a generation out to play football, and the name still carries weight thirty years later. If Burning Kabaddi gets a comparable tail, my “single-funnel risk” shrinks considerably. One funnel, but a very long tube.

Second, my Bangladesh comparison may be unfair. We are standing opposite Japan, but we are two faces of the same problem. Japan needs players; we need visibility. If Bangladesh ever produces one real sporting story — a film, a franchise league, a star children recognise — our vast akhra base could convert with startling speed. Faster than Japan, because our raw material is already on court.

Third, I am flagging a timing anomaly. The report I am reading is written around the Nagoya Asian Games, yet it contains a reference to Japan winning a 2026 East Asian championship. The Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games are a 2026 event. Either the report's dating is loose or one of the facts needs verification. I will not bet on either, and I would advise readers not to.

Fourth, and most importantly — I should name who my cool analysis costs. The teachers who take leave, who are unpaid, who fold their hands before an employer to play for their country: I do not want to belittle their effort by calling it an “insufficient system.” Rather the reverse. What they have done happened despite the absence of a system. The volunteers of the Japan Kabaddi Federation have kept this going for forty-five years, and that is more patience than many professional federations can show.

So let me offer a clear yardstick for what comes next.

If, after the home Asian Games, the Japan-India margin narrows from 25 to under 10, then the manga model genuinely works — and the International Kabaddi Federation should copy it into other pop-culture-rich, non-South Asian markets. If the margin is still above 20 even at home, then forty-five years of Japanese patience will end as a sweet mirage, and kabaddi will stay a permanent “minor sport” in Japan.

I am not sorry for Japan, because the arithmetic looks crueller when I turn to my own country. Instead let me invert the question: our millions of players, our thousands of akhras, this game mixed into our blood — if someone simply wrote its story, where would we be? Japan has arrived where it is with one comic. We are already there without one. The question is where we could have been.