What is Number?
Sports Graphic Number, published and read as Number, is a sports magazine issued by Bungeishunju Ltd. of Kioicho, Tokyo. The publisher's corporate page lists Number, Number PLUS and Number Do among the magazines it issues, alongside the monthly Bungeishunju, the weekly Shukan Bunshun and the literary titles Oru Yomimono and Bungakukai, and gives the company 351 employees as of July 2023 and a capital of 144 million yen.[1]
Bungeishunju describes Number as a general sports magazine that has set out to establish sports journalism as a genre in Japan, and states that its editorial method since launch has been to render the appeal of the people in sport through bold visual treatment and writing with its own angle.[2] That is the publisher's account of its own title. The magazine's website, Number Web, sits at number.bunshun.jp, a subdomain of the publisher's news domain rather than a domain of its own.[3]
What does Number cover?
Number is multi-sport by construction. Its website's own index of sports covered runs professional baseball, Major League Baseball, high-school and university baseball, the J.League, the European club leagues and the Japan national football team, golf, tennis, horse racing, boxing, professional wrestling, sumo and judo, motorsport, rugby, figure skating, basketball, volleyball, athletics, ekiden, table tennis, swimming, gymnastics and winter sport, with shogi carried alongside them.[3]
The form is long-form rather than results. The publisher states that Number Web took over from the results-and-bulletin pattern that dominated Japanese sports writing online, publishing columns intended to be read rather than scanned, and that the magazine's print issues are built around a single themed package each fortnight; the schedule published in August 2026 set out the themes to January 2027.[2] The title also runs an annual award, Number Sports of the Year, and a YouTube channel with interview output.[2] [3] It carries no live coverage and holds no rights.
What are Number's reach and standing?
The publisher's media information gives an average print run of 114,714 copies and a readership it characterises as nationwide, roughly eight-tenths male and concentrated in the forties and fifties.[2] For the website it states 106 million page views and 10.27 million unique users a month, and reports a peak of 179.24 million page views in March 2023, which it describes as its highest recorded month.[2] These are the publisher's own figures; no independently audited figure for either the magazine or the site could be retrieved for this page.
Context for the print number comes from the newspaper side of the market rather than the magazine side: the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association counted 1,494,416 copies across all of Japan's sports newspapers in October 2025, so Number's print run is a small fraction of the daily sports print sold in the country while its web audience is counted in the millions each month.[4] [2] The magazine's standing rests on form rather than volume.
Since when?
Bungeishunju's corporate history dates the company to January 1923, when the writer Kikuchi Kan founded it and launched the magazine Bungeishunju, and records its reconstitution as Bungeishunju Shinsha in June 1946 and the adoption of the present company name in March 1966.[1] Sports Graphic Number was launched in April 1980, the same list records, after the Bunshun Bunko paperback line of June 1974 and before CREA in November 1989 in the company's chronology of its imprints.[1]
Two dates mark the website. Number Web opened in June 1999, according to the same corporate chronology.[1] The publisher's media information then states that Number Web has been operated in-house since April 2009, and dates its record traffic month to March 2023.[2] Number Do, a running title, became a regular periodical in October 2011.[1] Issue 1153, announced for sale on 8 October 2026, is built on a themed package about partnerships in sport.[2]
Why does Number matter in Japan's sport?
Japan's sports print market is dominated by daily titles counted in hundreds of thousands of copies and organised around same-day reporting.[4] Number occupies the other position: a fortnightly built on commissioned long-form writing and photography, published by a general publisher with no newspaper, no broadcast interest and no stake in a professional club.[1] For a reader assessing whether coverage of an athlete is independent of the bodies that run the sport, that ownership is the relevant fact.
Its subject range is the second reason it belongs on a national list. The site's index carries figure skating, volleyball, athletics, ekiden, gymnastics, swimming and winter sport as standing sections alongside baseball and football, so disciplines that appear in the dailies only during championships have a continuous home there.[3] The publisher's stated aim for the title, to establish sports journalism as a genre in Japan, is its own formulation, but the structure that follows from it — bylined feature writing, archived by author and by sport — is what makes the title citable years after publication.[2] [3]
References
- Bungeishunju — company profile and chronology (企業情報／沿革). Accessed September 2026.
- Bungeishunju AD MAP — Number and Number Web media information, print run and web audience. Accessed September 2026.
- Number Web — site front, sport index and author archive. Accessed September 2026.
- Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association — total circulation 24,868,122 and sports papers 1,494,416, October 2025 survey. Accessed September 2026.