This year Australia’s premier horse-racing event, the Melbourne Cup, featured a line-up of overseas talent including two star Japanese fillies, Delta Blues and Pop Rock. Last year another Japanese horse, complete with bizarre black face mask, ‘Eye-popper’, was one of the favourites and the first Japanese horse to enter the competition.

As some may know the Japanese horse racing, breeding, and training industry has taken off over the last decade or so and has been dominated by the ubiquitous Yoshida brothers. Both Delta Blues and Pop Rock are linked to stables owned by the Yoshidas who recently outbid an Arab Sheik to secure a promising filly for the record price of $US5.2 million.

It wasn’t the mere fact that two Japanese horses would be present in Australia’s most famous race, it was more the fact that they took out first and second place (Delta Blues and Pop Rock respectively) that sends a signal to the horse-racing world about the strength of Japan’s racing industry.

Unfortunately, while Japan’s horses and trainers are enjoying phenomenal success abroad, not only in Australia but in North America and Europe too, foreign trainers have an extremely hard time getting a piece of the action in Japan. The Yoshidas seem unwilling to share their turf with gai-ba (foreign horses)!