What is Sports Hochi?
Sports Hochi is the newspaper published by The Hochi Shimbun Co., Ltd. The company's own profile gives its founding as 10 June 1872, a capital of 100 million yen and 531 employees as of 1 April 2026, with a Tokyo head office in Yokoami, Sumida ward, and an Osaka head office inside the Yomiuri Osaka building.[1] The same page describes its business as publishing and selling the Hochi Shimbun under the masthead Sports Hochi, issuing the magazines Monthly Giants and Hochi Koko Yakyu, and running the electronic media Sports Hochi, Entapark, Baseball Post, Umatoku and Boat Navi.[1]
The news site sits on its own domain, hochi.news, separately from the corporate site at hochi.co.jp. Its site policy describes the site as operated by Hochi Shimbun and covering the Giants, baseball, football, general sport, entertainment and social news alongside horse racing and leisure, and records that access data is collected jointly with the Yomiuri Shimbun companies.[3]
What does Sports Hochi cover?
The site's own navigation puts the Giants first, ahead of Major League Baseball, general baseball, football, entertainment, golf, the Hakone Ekiden and grand sumo, with sections for horse racing, boat racing, keirin and motorcycle racing and for shogi and go.[3] Its dedicated tournament sections in September 2026 covered the Milano Cortina Winter Games, the World Baseball Classic and the FIFA World Cup.[3]
The paper also awards and organises. Its company site lists the Hochi Film Award, the Golden Spirit Award for community work by professional baseball players, the Hochi Professional Sports Grand Prize, the Hochi Wrestler of the Year award in sumo and the women's Meijin shogi title match.[1] Its history dates the Ome Hochi Marathon to 1967 and describes it as the first mass-participation marathon in Japan, the Golf Japan Series to 1963 and the Hochi Yayoi Sho race at Nakayama to 1964.[4] [5] It holds no broadcast rights, and its video output is a YouTube baseball channel opened in 2021.[6]
What are Sports Hochi's reach and standing?
The sector figure is published by the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association, which counted 1,494,416 copies across Japan's sports newspapers in its October 2025 survey, a fall of 10.9 per cent on the year, inside a national total of 24,868,122 copies.[7] The association's long series shows the same class of title at 6,307,162 copies in 2000.[8]
For the title itself, the company's history records that on 19 May 1965 the paper passed one million copies for the first time, and that it began publishing across all seven prefectures of Kyushu and in Yamaguchi in 1998, which it describes as completing its national structure.[4] [5] No current audited title-level circulation figure is published on the company's own site, and none could be retrieved for this page. The sharpest evidence of standing is the run of stories the company logs as its own: the 1969 professional-baseball match-fixing disclosure, the 1988 report of the Nankai Hawks sale and the 2020 report that the summer Koshien tournament would be cancelled.[4] [5] [6]
Since when?
The paper was founded on 10 June 1872 as Yubin Hochi Shimbun, on a proposal by Maejima Hisoka, as a woodblock-printed booklet issued five times a month; it became a daily set in type the following year and took the title Hochi Shimbun in 1894.[9] Its own record notes a first horse-racing article in 1879 and a sumo column, Dohyo no uchisoto, in 1901.[9]
Three later dates define the present paper. In 1942, under the wartime newspaper control ordinance, the company merged with the Yomiuri Shimbun and the title became Yomiuri Hochi. It was revived in 1946 as an evening paper, Shin-Hochi, recovered the Hochi Shimbun masthead in 1948, and in 1949 moved to Ginza and became a morning sports newspaper.[4] The masthead Sports Hochi first appeared on page one in 1991, the website opened in 1996, and in 2022, its 150th year, the Tokyo head office moved to Yokoami in Sumida ward.[5] [6]
Why does Sports Hochi matter in Japan's sport?
The ownership is the fact a reader needs first. The Yomiuri Shimbun's group company list places The Hochi Shimbun Co. among the newspaper and publishing companies attached to its Tokyo head office, and places Yomiuri Giants Co., which operates the professional baseball club, among the companies attached to the group holding company; a separate entry covers Sports Hochi Western head office, which publishes the paper in Kyushu and Yamaguchi.[2] The daily and the baseball club are therefore parts of one group, and the paper has published a monthly magazine about the club, Monthly Giants, since 1976.[1] [4]
That does not make the paper narrow. It sells nationally, it runs the Ome Marathon and a set of annual awards across film, sumo and professional sport, and it publishes a quarterly on high-school baseball founded in 1978.[1] [4] It does mean that a claim of coverage in three Japanese sports dailies should be read alongside who owns each of them.
References
- The Hochi Shimbun — company profile (会社概要). Accessed September 2026.
- The Yomiuri Shimbun — group company list, naming Hochi Shimbun and Yomiuri Giants. Accessed September 2026.
- Sports Hochi — site policy and section navigation. Accessed September 2026.
- The Hochi Shimbun — company history, Showa era. Accessed September 2026.
- The Hochi Shimbun — company history, Heisei era. Accessed September 2026.
- The Hochi Shimbun — company history, Reiwa era. Accessed September 2026.
- Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association — total circulation 24,868,122, October 2025 survey, published 23 December 2025. Accessed September 2026.
- Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association — circulation series 1970 to 2025. Accessed September 2026.
- The Hochi Shimbun — company history, Meiji era. Accessed September 2026.