Cover image courtesy of Japanese Thoroughbreds
Sunday morning, coffee in hand, and Sydney has that particular stillness it gets when half the city has decamped to Europe for the summer. The Wallabies went down to Ireland in a nail biter overnight, Aidan O’Brien won the Coral Eclipse (yet again), and Saratoga is wrapping up its meet.
I’m heading to Hokkaido later this week for the JRHA Select Sale. But before the overnight flight, I thought it was worthwhile spending some time looking more closely at the Japanese thoroughbred industry, not just the horses but the structure underneath them.
With our own numbers in the back of my mind: Australia’s foal crop is heading for its lowest point since the 1970s, despite prize money that has never been higher. We are not in a position to lecture anyone. Which is exactly why Japan is worth studying, because Japan has been where we are, and found a way back.
Will Johnson | Image courtesy of William Johnson Bloodstock
A protected wagering market
Start with the most important structural fact. Legal wagering on racing in Japan exists for exactly four codes: horse racing, bicycle racing, motorboat racing (quite amusing on YouTube) and motorcycle racing, all operated by public or quasi-public bodies.
There is no fixed-odds sports betting market, no commercial bookmakers, no global operators competing for the racing dollar. A modest football pools product and the national lottery sit alongside, and a first casino resort is under construction in Osaka for around 2030, but the wagering landscape racing occupies is protected in a way no other major jurisdiction can claim.
Elsewhere the story is very different. In Britain, sports betting takes a growing share of total turnover. In the United States, most states have legalised sports betting since 2018, and racing’s share of the gambling market has continued to fall. In Australia, wagering operators compete in an increasingly crowded market with no particular loyalty to racing.
Whilst our government moves to place further restrictions on gambling advertising, the pokies, the slot machines affectionately known here as the ‘tradie’s laptop’, continue to get a free run at the gambling dollar. Meanwhile the emerging wave, prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket that let punters trade on everything from elections to economic data, hasn’t reached Japan either.
Racing in Japan doesn’t fight for the wagering dollar. It owns it. That insulation is policy, not geography, and it is the foundation on which everything else is built.
JRA Tokyo Racecourse | Image courtesy of Tabunka Tokyo
The JRA processes over ¥3 trillion (AU$26.8 billion) in wagering annually, roughly one and a half times the entire North American racing handle, across a fraction of the race days. That revenue funds ¥102 billion (AU$910 million) in prize money, ten metropolitan racecourses maintained to a standard most jurisdictions can only aspire to, two elite centralised training centres, and the broodmare incentive programmes behind one of the more interesting supply-side recoveries in global racing.
A second tier, the NAR, runs seventeen local-government racecourses with its own graded programme, and it was the contraction of this tier through the 2000s that drove the foal crop’s decline.
Centralised governance as a competitive advantage
The JRA is a government-authorised public corporation under the Racing Act, overseen by the Ministry of Agriculture. Racing in Japan is a public utility, not a private club dressed up in regulatory language.
Every licensed trainer and jockey operates out of Miho or Ritto. No private yards. Officials have direct, continuous access to horses and participants. Drug testing runs through JRA-operated laboratories. Stewards are permanent employees. The integrity record that produces is exceptional by any comparative measure, and the structure makes consistency far easier to maintain than in jurisdictions where regulation is fragmented across multiple bodies.
JRA Jockeys | Image courtesy of NetKeiba
I saw the transparency side of this first-hand, because the dataset I built for this piece came straight from public JRA and JAIRS records. Not just foal registrations, but broodmare returns going back decades: how many mares were covered each season, how many were barren, how many slipped, how many foals were lost at or after birth. Every covering certificate, every foal return, available to anyone with an internet connection.
The information a breeder in Hokkaido works with is the same information available to a buyer in Lexington or Newmarket. In an industry where information asymmetry has historically been a commercial advantage for insiders, that is a meaningful policy choice.
The foal crop recovery
Here is where the Japan story diverges most sharply from the rest of the world.
Over the past 35 years, Japan’s foal crop has collapsed, stabilised, and recovered. From a peak of 10,212 registered foals in 1992, registrations fell to 6,660 in 2012, a 35% drop driven by the closure of regional government racing authorities through the 2000s, which gutted demand at the volume end of the market.
Once that shock worked through the system, the floor held. Broodmare numbers recovered from 9,253 in 2014 to over 12,000 by 2024. The foal crop followed, reaching 7,925 registered foals in 2024 and holding near 8,000.
The contrast is instructive. North America’s foal crop is down more than 65% from its 1986 peak. Britain’s stallion population has contracted sharply, and Britain and Ireland’s combined crop recorded its steepest year-on-year fall in fifteen years. And Australia, as I said at the top: more money than ever, fewer horses than at any point in fifty years.
Japan has recovered. Now we need to do the same thing elsewhere.
What Hokkaido represents
The JRHA Select Sale is fifty years of deliberate industry building expressed through a sales ring. Northern Farm and Shadai Farm have assembled broodmare bands that compete with anything in Kentucky or Ireland, built through decades of patient importation and development rather than one cycle of speculative investment.
Japanese-trained horses have won the Melbourne Cup, the Saudi Cup and, last November, the Breeders’ Cup Classic, with Forever Young becoming the first Japan-trained winner. The Arc remains the one that got away: El Condor Pasa run down by Montjeu in 1999, Orfevre’s infamous drift into the rail in 2012. That pursuit, and what it has required Japanese breeding to become, says more about the industry’s ambition than any winner’s trophy.
Forever Young | Image courtesy of Dubai Racing Club
Nobody else is getting Japan’s wagering monopoly. That door closed decades ago. But the things that actually turned Japan’s foal crop around, broodmare incentives that paid breeders to keep mares in production, centralised integrity that earned public trust, breeding data open to everyone – none of that requires a monopoly. It requires a decision. Japan’s recovery isn’t a story about unique circumstances.
It’s proof that when an industry chooses its structure deliberately, the supply follows. Every jurisdiction watching its foal crop shrink has that choice available. How each navigates an ever-changing gambling landscape to help fund that, will take some imagination.
