Japan Championship returns after seven years with blindfolded wins in Osaka

Japan’s first national championship in seven years closed with familiar names on top of the blindfolded events in Daito, Osaka, where the Japan Championship 2026 ran July 18-19 at Daito Citizen Hall. The WCA schedule carved out a blindfolded final from 17:30 to 18:30, and the results that came out of that slot showed how firmly Japan’s hardest events still sit in the hands of its established specialists.

Shiori Yanai won 3x3x3 multi-blind with 33/40 in 56:48, a result that reads as a strong championship-performance rather than a record-chasing outlier. Yanai’s own recent Japanese benchmark is much higher, a 39/40 57:59 run at Tokyo BLD Winter 2026, and recent global-level multi-blind scores have been landing in the same rarefied zone, including Maxime Madrzyk’s 41/46 58:17. Against that backdrop, Yanai’s Osaka win looks less like a new ceiling and more like proof that Japan’s top blindfolded solvers can still convert under national-title pressure even when they are not at peak-record pace.

Keita Hayakawa added another clear signal that the elite core remains intact by taking both the 4x4x4 blind and 5x5x5 blind singles titles. Hayakawa already holds Japan’s current blindfolded 3x3 record at 15.25, so the double win in Osaka did not come from a surprise breakout run. It reinforced a familiar pattern: when the stage gets harder, Hayakawa is still one of the names that keeps appearing at the top.

The structure of the meet backed that up. Speedcubing Japan said Japan Championship 2026 included all official WCA events except FMC, while the WCA competition page and live-results platform confirmed the national championship setting in Daito. For readers tracking the blind scene, that means the immediate story is not a sudden shuffle of the leaderboard but a concentrated field where the same small group is still producing the results that matter most.

After a seven-year gap, Osaka did not just bring back Japan’s national championship. It also gave the blindfolded events a clean read on the current hierarchy, with Yanai and Hayakawa still setting the pace.