Handing Off the Tasuki  How Japan's marathon traditions are
changing  July 1, 2010   Compared to Hakone and the New Year
Ekiden, women's university and corporate ekiden teams receive
moderate attention, but despite a considerably shorter history,
Japan's most famous and respected runners these days are its
female marathoners. The Asahi Kasei company funded one of the
first women's corporate teams way back in 1951. In the mid-'70s,
expat Miki Gorman scored Boston and New York wins to become the
first great female Japanese-born marathoner, but it wasn't until
the late '70s that domestic women began to appear in overseas
marathons and not until 1983 that one, Akemi Masuda, made the
top 10 worldwide. When the Tokyo International Women's Marathon
(pictured below) was founded in 1979 as the world's first elite
women-only marathon, Japanese women were nowhere near able to
compete with the invited foreign competition.  But like the
early days of Hakone, Tokyo Women's, along with later elite
women's races in Nagoya an