User:Spitzmauskc/Women's ice hockey in Japan

Women's ice hockey in Japan
The first women's ice hockey team in Japan, Isetan (伊勢丹), was founded by Etsuko Iwamoto in Tokyo in 1973. By 1978, an unofficial women's ice hockey national championship had been independently created by a small group of women’s teams from the Tokyo Metropolis and Hokkaido. In 1982, the Japan Ice Hockey Federation sanctioned the tournament for the first time and it has been played as the official All-Japan Women’s Ice Hockey Championship ever since.

For the following three decades, the All-Japan Championship was the only top level women’s ice hockey tournament in Japan. In practice, this meant teams played just three or four games of record during the three day tournament each season and generally played less than ten games in total, including friendlies organized between the teams or with teams outside of Japan. Despite the small number of competitive games, teams conducted three to five practices per week and the caliber of play in Japan remained high, as reflected by the success of the national ice hockey team, which has never ranked lower than eleventh on the IIHF World Ranking and has always sported a substantial majority of players from Japanese women’s teams.

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