Yuki Kurihara is an 11-year-old fifth-grader with a signature asymmetric haircut, a summer schedule dominated by cram school and a dream of becoming a train conductor.
He also happens to be an esports player, and the youngest athlete ever selected to compete for Team Japan at the Asian Games.
With competition now underway in Nagoya, Kurihara will don his national team uniform — not to run a race or kick a ball, but to sit before the glow of a screen for a match of Puyo Puyo, Sega’s classic falling-block puzzle game.
The occasion marks a historic milestone for the iconic franchise, which joins the Asian Games’ esports lineup as one of 13 titles contested across 11 medal events.
Japan is sending 25 players to the Asiad as esports returns to the Asian Games following its debut as an official medal event at the previous competition in Hangzhou, China. Among them is Kurihara, who competes as “Yuuki” and secured his place on the team at just 10 years old.
“I was thrilled when I qualified,” Kurihara said, noting how surprised his friends were when his face appeared on the evening news. “I had to beat some strong players to earn this spot. Now I just want Puyo Puyo to take off around the world so I can find new rivals.”
Long before he became an international esports sensation, Kurihara’s childhood was shaped by a wide range of interests — from juggling and trains to the Nintendo shooter Splatoon and the mining sandbox adventure Core Keeper. Yet, it was a copy of Puyo Puyo that he received for Christmas while in kindergarten that truly took hold.
To master the game’s relentless pace, Kurihara did not just play — he studied, using streams from top community figures like Tom, a Japanese pro player who competes under the handle tom_nadja.
That study paid off at unprecedented speed. Kurihara rose to national prominence around age 7, scaling the ranks to become 91AV原创 top-ranked player in roughly three years — a meteoric rise that left veterans like Tom in awe.
“In all 35 years of Puyo Puyo history, no one else has ever grown this fast,” Tom said. “His free-thinking, unconventional style is always showing the players around him a whole new world and energizing the entire community.”
The engine driving that historic rise sits on a simple futon in the bedroom Kurihara shares with his mother.
From that futon, his mother watches him pour immense mental focus into the screen — a concentration process she compares to a high-calorie workout. She is not worried about his screen time, and views the matches, which also feature voice chat, as a vital social outlet — one that has helped him build a supportive circle of friends outside his school.
That time practicing at home quickly yielded elite results.
In January, Kurihara swept both the Under-18 and Mind Game Player of the Year honors at the Japan eSports Awards. A month later, he defeated an adult professional to win SEGA’s Puyo Puyo Grand Prix Final, a victory that paved the way for him to officially turn pro in April — two months before his 11th birthday.
Now, he is representing Japan on home soil in a game born in Hiroshima 35 years ago, taking on the best players in Asia.
To the uninitiated, Puyo Puyo resembles Tetris: players stack falling, colored blobs into groups of four, triggering chain reactions (rensa) that send garbage blocks onto an opponent’s screen. The longer the chain, the more powerful the attack, with top players building massive dairensa chains capable of overwhelming an opponent.
The simple but frantic gameplay helped make Puyo Puyo a sensation in arcades and on consoles across Japan in the 1990s, before the series’ official competitive esports circuit was launched in 2018.
At the highest level, execution relies on split-second reflexes, rapid spatial math, and gyoshi — the ability to continuously scan the opponent’s grid alongside one’s own, tracking their chain setup in real time before triggering a game-ending dairensa.
While Japan remains the spiritual heartland of Puyo Puyo, the global rankings reflect the game’s international reach, with players from Australia, Brazil, Taiwan, France and the United States competing among the higher ranks.
As esports has gained wider recognition, so too have calls to include video game competitions in the Olympics.
Yet for all the stakes of competing at the Asian Games, Kurihara’s preparation sounds almost disarmingly ordinary.
Apart from his practice sessions at the National Training Center, Kurihara says his life is not much different from that of any other Japanese schoolboy. He attends cram school, plays soccer in the park, watches YouTube and strictly limits his gaming time to no more than an hour a day.
Still, the international stage brings pretournament anxiety about being confronted with the unfamiliar strategies of foreign players.
“Foreign players play differently — so many of them try to disrupt you midgame, which is something I struggle with,” Kurihara admitted. “I’m a little worried about how I’ll handle it, but as a Japanese player, I just want everyone to see a great dairensa.”
That contrast in strategy is precisely where Tom sees the true test for the young prodigy.
“Overseas players tend to be much more aggressive than Japanese players, so the biggest test for Yuki will be whether he can fend off those early attacks to build his signature big chains,” Tom said. “First-time viewers should watch closely to see if he can weather his opponents’ quick harrying strikes and still pull off a massive dairensa.”
Handling those emotional ups and downs is an ongoing learning curve for the preteen.
“The best feeling in the world is winning,” Kurihara said with a grin that made him look his age. “When I lose, I cry and try not to think about it too much. When the play doesn’t go well it’s not fun, so I want to quit. But I always come back.”
He will get his chance to test that resilience starting Thursday in the group stage at?Aichi Sky Expo, with the knockout stage and final following on Saturday.
For Kurihara, the Asian Games are a chance to share his passion on the biggest stage yet.
“I hope people get to see me hit the dairensa — that’s my main specialty,” Kurihara said, his eyes lighting up. “I hope to win a gold medal for Japan.”
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