Boat Race Marugame

Boat Race Marugame: location and contact details

Marugame sits on the north coast of Shikoku, in Kagawa Prefecture, facing the Seto Inland Sea. The track's official address is 4-1-1 Fujimicho, Marugame City, Kagawa Prefecture, postal code 763-0011¹. The English-language venue page gives the same address in romanized form, so you can hand it to a taxi driver or paste it into a maps app without trouble⁶.

The phone number is 0877-23-5141¹. If you are calling from outside Japan, dial 81 first and drop the leading zero.

For directions, the track publishes its own access page at marugameboat.jp/access.htm, with a smartphone version at marugameboat.jp/sp/access.htm⁶. Those pages carry the walking routes from the station and the parking layout, which is the part you actually need on the day. The Chinese-language version of the same venue page repeats both links, so if you are traveling with someone who reads Chinese, they can follow the same directions⁸.

Marugame is one of 24 boat racing tracks in Japan, and each one has its own character. If you are comparing venues before you commit to a trip, the Boat Race Miyajima track is a short hop away in Hiroshima Prefecture, and Boat Race Suminoe in Osaka is the other big night-racing venue in western Japan. Boat Race Kojima is also in the region, in Okayama.

Night racing runs all year

Marugame is a year-round night track. The venue's own page describes it as "通年ナイター," night racing throughout the year, and that is unusual enough to be worth planning around¹. Across Japan, only seven tracks race under lights⁴. They are:

• Kiryu
• Gamagori
• Suminoe
• Marugame
• Shimonoseki
• Wakamatsu
• Omura

Suminoe runs night meetings all year except for some races, and the other six run them the whole year through⁴.

What that means in practice: you can turn up on an ordinary weeknight in February or a Tuesday in July and still catch a full card under floodlights. It also means the racing day starts later than at a daytime track, so you are not committing your whole afternoon.

The water at Marugame has its own quirks, and knowing them makes the racing easier to follow. The first mark has a large swing, and when the tide is out and there is a headwind, outside boats can come from behind and sweep around the field. When the tide is high, inside passes become more common¹. Windbreak nets are installed around the course, but winter still brings strong headwinds, and the second mark gets rough at high tide¹.

That is not trivia. It is the reason two races on the same card can look completely different, and it is why regulars at Marugame watch the tide table as closely as the form guide.

How a boat race ticket works

Boat racing in Japan, called kyotei, uses a simple paper system that has barely changed in decades. You pick up an OMR betting card and a pencil, fill in the card, and take it to a betting machine⁹. The card asks for the venue, the race number, the ticket type, the boat numbers, the amount and the unit³.

The number of boats you fill in depends on the ticket type. For the three-boat tickets you fill in down to third place; for the two-boat tickets you fill in down to second³. That is the whole trick. Once you understand which boxes to fill, the rest is mechanical.

There are seven ticket types in total, and every one of them can be bought from JPY 100³. That is the floor, not the average. You can spend JPY 100 on a single combination and walk away, or spread the same money across several combinations.

If you have never done this before, the official step-by-step guide walks through the process from buying the card to collecting a payout⁹. The operator also publishes a beginner's guide to making predictions, which explains what the six boats are and how starting positions work⁵.

One practical note: winning cash at Marugame has been paid by staff crediting the winner's cashless card on the spot¹⁰. If you are used to collecting notes at a window, expect a card instead. Bring identification if you plan to sign up for any membership or cashless product, since those are issued to named holders.

Betting types and payouts

The seven ticket types cover everything from picking the winner to naming the first three in exact order. The official game rules give the hit rates for the main ones, which is the clearest way to understand what you are taking on.

Those figures come from the official game rules¹¹. Read them as a rough sense of difficulty rather than a promise: a 1/20 hit rate means the combination is easier to land than a 1/30, and the payout is correspondingly smaller.

Odds are displayed on monitors inside the stadium, on the jumbo screen and on the operator's website¹². The operator's own worked example is a good illustration of how the math feels: if you predict the order 1-3, the odds might be 8.4 times the amount of your bet¹². A separate official example uses a Trio bet on the sixth race at Suminoe with boats 1, 2 and 4, where a JPY 1,500 bet multiplied by 15.3 returned JPY 22,950⁵.

There is more to it than picking who finishes first. The operator describes the range of bet types as a fun variety of ways to place a bet, and that is accurate: you can back a boat to finish in the first two places, or name a pair, or name a trio¹³. The Place-Show bet, for instance, asks you to pick the boat that finishes within the first two places¹².

Payouts at Marugame are handled through the cashless card system rather than at a cash window¹⁰. Keep the card safe; it is the thing your winnings sit on.

The 17 February event: schedule and prizes

Marugame has run a February prize draw tied to its Blue Nighter anniversary. The published details for that event were a 14:00 start on 17 February, running until the prizes were gone rather than to a fixed closing time¹⁰.

The entry mechanic was straightforward. Cashless members got one draw for every JPY 1,000 of undetermined receipts from the Marugame track, with up to five consecutive draws¹⁰. Undetermined receipts means tickets you have bought but not yet settled, so the draw was tied to actual betting activity on the day.

The prize list included a third prize of a free reserved-seat entry ticket worth JPY 1,000, with 50 winners¹⁰. Winning cash was credited on the spot to the winner's cashless card by staff¹⁰.

Two things are worth flagging if you are thinking of traveling for a similar event. First, the "ends when prizes run out" rule is standard at Japanese tracks, and it means the useful window is the first hour, not the last. Second, this event was tied to a specific anniversary, so check the track's current news page before you plan a trip around it. The same pattern shows up at other venues: a garagara lottery at the Rinku ticket shop ran from 14:00 on both event days and ended when prizes ran out¹⁴, and a Nagoya ticket shop event started at 13:00¹⁵.

If you want to see how these draws work at other tracks, the Boat Race Heiwajima page covers the Tokyo venue, and the Boat Race Miyajima page covers the Hiroshima track, which has run its own lottery events with prizes handed out after the final race¹⁶.

What boat race betting is legal in Japan

Boat racing is publicly managed sports betting in Japan¹³. That is the short version, and it is the version that matters to you as a player: the tracks are run under public authority, the betting is authorized, and there is no rule that limits it to Japanese citizens.

Visitors can take part on the same terms as residents. You buy tickets at the track or at an off-course ticket shop, and you need no membership to place a bet. If you would rather not bet at all, you can still go: the operator states plainly that you can come to any Boat Race venue in Japan to watch the races, enjoy the food, check out the other attractions, and not place a single bet⁵. That makes Marugame a reasonable stop even for someone traveling with people who have no interest in gambling.

The one thing to keep in mind is that the authorized channels are the physical ones. Betting through anything other than the methods the public racing law sets out is a gambling offense, and the National Tax Agency's own research paper on the subject notes that betting by methods other than those prescribed constitutes the crime of gambling¹⁷. In plain terms: play at the track or through the official off-course network, not through an unlicensed operator.

For the wider picture of what is and is not allowed in the country, see Can I Gamble in Japan?. If boat racing turns out to be your thing, the dedicated guide to Betting on Boat Racing (Kyotei) in Japan goes deeper on the sport itself, and Off-Course Betting in Japan explains the WINS and J-PLACE network where you can bet on races without traveling to a track.

What is changing at Marugame

Marugame has been building a new off-site ticket sales office. The plan is for a facility about 3.5 times the size of the current one, with a planned capacity of around 570 people, and it will include reserved seats and shops designed to be more comfortable than what came before¹⁸.

The construction was scheduled for completion at the end of fiscal year 2025, with the aim of opening for business at the start of fiscal year 2026¹⁸. The purpose is to give Marugame a new base for selling boat tickets away from the track itself¹⁸.

If you are planning a trip specifically around that new facility, confirm it is open before you go. Planned opening dates at Japanese tracks do move, and the practical details you need, such as opening hours and which races are sold there, will only be published once it is running.