History of Padel in Japan

A single court in Tokorozawa

Padel arrived in Japan in October 2013, when the company Seiritsu Co. Ltd built the country's first club in Tokorozawa, a city in Saitama Prefecture about an hour north of central Tokyo. There was no existing constituency for the sport and no obvious way to describe it: the early years were spent explaining what padel was to people who had never seen a court, and it took more than two years to assemble even a small group of regular players.

The solution was social rather than sporting. Rather than promote padel as a competitive discipline, the first operators built events around it — barbecues, meals, family days — and recruited from the one pool that already understood a racket and a net. Japanese tennis players formed the base of the early playing population, and court numbers grew slowly outward from that first site.

A federation, and a manga artist

Three years after the first court opened, the Japan Padel Association was formalised in 2016 and affiliated to the International Padel Federation, giving the sport a governing body and a route into international competition. Its honorary president is Yoichi Takahashi, the creator of Captain Tsubasa — an appointment that says something about how the association approached the problem of recognition in a crowded sporting market.

Institutional standing followed. Koji Nakatsuka, the association's president, was re-elected to the FIP board for a second consecutive term at the federation's general assembly in Doha in October 2024, giving Japan a voice in the governance of the world game that is disproportionate to the size of its playing base.

Growth by increments

Japanese padel has grown steadily rather than explosively, which distinguishes it sharply from the European markets that boomed and corrected. Registered competitive players numbered around 140 in 2017, roughly 220 in 2018 and about 420 in 2019 — a consistent upward line from a very small base, with no speculative court-building behind it.

The pandemic accelerated things. Registrations rose by around 120 per cent between March 2020 and March 2021 as players looked for outdoor, low-contact recreation, and the sport emerged from that period with a larger and more committed base than it had going in. By late 2024 the country counted roughly 21 facilities and 44 courts, around a thousand registered competitive athletes, and a recreational playing population estimated in the tens of thousands.

Those figures are modest beside Spain or Sweden, and the constraint is structural rather than cultural. Land in Japanese cities is expensive and scarce, and a padel court is a poor use of a square metre compared with the alternatives; padel also competes for participants against tennis, badminton and other racket sports with a century of institutional history behind them. Growth has therefore come club by club rather than through the investment waves that built — and in places overbuilt — the European market.

Domestic competition

The association built a competitive structure early, and Japan has run both a national tour, the Japan Padel Tour, and a national championship, the All Japan Padel Championship, for most of the sport's existence in the country. These provided the ranking and selection framework that made a national team possible, and they remain the route by which Japanese players are identified before any international step.

Onto the international stage

The women's national team was first to travel, competing at the World Championship from 2018; the men qualified for Asian competition in Dubai in 2021. At the 2024 World Championships in Doha, Japan finished eleventh of the sixteen nations present, with the women's side beating Uruguay along the way — a respectable placing for a country whose entire competitive population would fit inside a single Spanish club.

The breakthrough came at the inaugural FIP Asia Padel Cup, staged at the Khalifa International Tennis and Squash Complex in Doha in October 2025. Japan won the women's competition, beating Iran in the final. Nagomi Utsumi and Kotomi Ozawa took the opening rubber after almost three hours, recovering from a set down, and Mako Mizunuma and Saki Tsukamoto closed the tie out in straight sets. It remains the country's most significant result in the sport and the clearest evidence for the pattern that defines Japanese padel: the women are ahead.

Players abroad

Kotomi Ozawa has gone furthest. A two-time All Japan champion and the youngest player to win that title, she relocated to Europe for an extended training block and set the explicit goal of becoming the first Asian woman to sustain a full-time professional career on the international tour — a step beyond representing Japan at team events, and one no player from the region had taken.

On the men's side Kazuki Tomita has been the most prominent, combining competition with a substantial online presence and a signature racket produced with Royal Padel. The gap between the leading Japanese men and the leading women in world ranking terms has been persistent rather than incidental, and closing it is the men's game's central problem.

Hosting, and what comes next

Japan has begun to appear on the international calendar in its own right. The FIP Bronze Tokyo event was held in July 2025 at Padel and Futsal Hare Nochi Hare in Chiba, drawing an international field and won by the Mexican-Spanish pairing of Diego Arredondo Garcia and Sergio Alba. Hosting ranked events matters disproportionately for a country at this stage: it gives domestic players ranking points without the cost of a flight to Europe.

The larger opportunity is regional. Padel was added to the Asian Games programme for the Aichi-Nagoya edition in 2026, putting the sport in front of a mainstream Japanese audience on home soil for the first time and giving the association a target that domestic sports funding recognises. Whether that converts into courts, participants and a deeper professional contingent is the open question of the next decade of Japanese padel.