From our other sites
The story
A thread titled “Why Japanese horse racing has declined” started from one premise, but that premise got flipped on its head halfway through. Someone pointed out that total betting revenue hit roughly ¥3.5059 trillion in fiscal 2025 — marking 14 consecutive years of growth — hardly a sign of decline. At the same time, talk about Japanese horses struggling to win on European turf, and about racetrack crowds shifting from older men to young women and families, got mixed into the thread, leaving the gap between people who feel the sport has “declined” and those who feel it’s “booming” as unresolved noise.
What people said
Old guys are starting to feel out of place
Young people are the ones glued to their phones placing bets
No need to actually show up at the track
Do they even need to win in Europe?
Doing well in the Middle East, the US, Australia, Hong Kong, and Japan is plenty
It's not weird at all
Horses from bloodlines that could win in Europe (like the Orfevre line) have a hard time shining on Japan's current fast tracks
Smoking around Umeda on Sundays with zero manners
They'll probably win there eventually
A loser that couldn't even ride the Uma Musume (horse-girl game) hype wave.
With other forms of sports betting getting legalized one after another, I can only see it fading into total irrelevance.
The racehorses are basically idols without the talent
There's been a huge surge of young women doing "oshi" fan-support stuff (treating horses like idols they stan)
They stand frozen outside the paddock waiting like statues even when it's not even a G1 race, and it's in the way lol
In recent years, driven by the spread of online betting, the industry has pulled off a dramatic V-shaped recovery, recording roughly ¥3.5059 trillion (on a total-bets basis) in fiscal 2025 — 14 consecutive years of growth.
have way too many security guards pointlessly stationed all over
They must have so much leftover budget they don't know what to do with it
Apparently traffic gets insane on race days
I don't drive there so I wouldn't know
old guys have been saying for decades
that more and more young people are joining lol
Horse racing switched to lottery-based seating
so the socially-maladjusted old men who used to camp out at the gates to hog free seats disappeared, and more young people and families started showing up
and more the same vibe as going to Disneyland or Universal Studios
They bet tiny amounts and still have a blast
and when they see the horses in the paddock they get super hyped, like 'whoa, those muscles, so cool!'
I go to both Disneyland and the racetrack a lot, and honestly the crowd — especially the women — feels pretty similar
What's even the point of that building anyway? Don't need it
Narita Brian
Silence Suzuka
Special Week
That was the peak of horse racing
Racing back then actually had romance to it
'Romance' in horse racing? Your brain's been eaten alive by Dentsu (the ad agency) marketing
Different caliber of brain
Short-term stock trading doesn't correlate with intelligence
Fighting-game skill matters more, honestly
Japanese racetracks are already better designed, so why would they need to copy the European style?
If they really wanted to, they probably could build one
I've heard that landing a post at JRA
is considered the top-tier amakudari gig for a bureaucrat
because the budget is just insane
Whaat?! Going from bureaucrat to taking care of horsies?
It's already saturated going back to Deep Impact's own sire, so they keep bringing in stallions from overseas now and then
Background and Key Points of This Topic
JRA’s total betting revenue has been on an upward trend since fiscal 2011, driven by the spread of online betting (such as the “Soku-PAT” service) and the expansion of off-track sales. The figure cited in the thread — “14 straight years of growth, roughly ¥3.5059 trillion” — is close to the actual published data, and contrary to the decline narrative, the scale of horse racing itself hasn’t shrunk. What split opinion in the thread was what exactly “declined” was referring to: the economic metric of revenue got conflated with the impressionistic sense of the atmosphere among crowds at racetracks and WINS branches. As for why Japanese horses struggle in European Group 1 races, many point to the idea that bloodlines suited to Japan’s fast modern tracks (such as the Deep Impact line) don’t adapt well to Europe’s heavy turf and tough going — a hypothesis often discussed among racing fans in terms of bloodline theory and track-condition theory. The shift in racetrack crowds is also tied to operational changes, like the introduction of lottery-based reserved seating, so it can’t be fully explained as simply “organic growth in youth popularity.” When reading the article, it helps to keep the growth in revenue and the aging/de-aging of the crowd as two separate axes — doing so makes the thread’s point of disagreement much easier to follow.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “Why Japanese Horse Racing Has Declined wwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.”
Leave a Reply