From the time Japan sent its first fencer to the Summer Games in 1952 through the delayed 2020 Games in Tokyo, the nation earned a total of three medals in the sport.
Over nine days of competition in Paris, Japan’s swordsmen and women bagged five, including two golds, making it the first non-European country to top the sport’s medal table at an Olympics.
That meteoric rise — which included the country’s first individual champion (Koki Kano in epee) and its first female medalists in the sport (a bronze in women’s team foil and saber) — didn’t come by accident. Instead, it was the result of years of concentrated effort by a small but dedicated community.