Shigeki Tanaka

Shigeki Tanaka, born in 1931 and died on 4 October 2022, was a Japanese long-distance runner who won the 1951 Boston Marathon. He was thirteen and living about twenty miles from Hiroshima at the time of the 1945 atomic bombing, and was a first-year student at Nihon University when he ran Boston. He was one of four Japanese runners invited to the 1951 race, only the second post-war athletic competition to invite Japanese athletes, and he became the first Japanese winner of the Boston Marathon in 2:27:45, wearing split-toe shoes made by Onitsuka. His win inspired a lasting enthusiasm for distance running in Japan. He later worked for a Tokyo-area department store and served as a director of the Japanese Amateur Athletics Federation.