When I think of Japanese sports, I generally think baseball, and maybe soccer, but these are Western imports of the past century and a half or so. So that got me wondering what kind of sporting activities those have replaced.
So main question is, as stated, what kind of sports were played during that period, but also, how class conscious was sporting? Were there games reserved exclusively from the Samurai classes, assuming they even played them? Or likewise, sports which were considered only playable by the peasants?
Sorry it has taken me so long to respond to this great question. It has been a busy week of teaching.
The first and most obvious response is sumo wrestling. During the Edo Period (1603-1868), samurai who either had lost their official positions serving a particular lord or who needed additional work and income participated in wrestling matches that gradually become more professionalized. What had started as a ritual performance to please the gods at Shinto shrines and Buddhist temple complexes became an organized sport where the samurai class, as well as wealthy urban commoners, could celebrate martial competition in an otherwise largely peaceful society.
Another semi-public performance that could be considered a sport was archery, particularly mounted archery. Yabusame, for example, which can still be seen at Shinto shrines in Japan today, involved a mounted archer riding down a track and shooting at three stationary targets along the way. Kasagake, by contrast, involved contestants navigating a course in which targets had been placed in various locations and shooting them under various constraints. The last form of mounted archery, inuĊmono, is never seen in modern Japan for obvious reasons. It involved mounted archers shooting at dogs that had been released in a ringed pen or in a large rectangular enclosure. Although blunted arrows were used, even in the Edo Period there was criticism of what was obviously a cruel sport from the dog's point of view.
Members of the imperial court were experts in a ritual sport called kemari, a kind of performative kickball that people sometimes compare to hackey-sack. Some aristocratic families had been practicing kemari for centuries and passed down secret texts with family traditions for mastering the game. In the medieval period many elite warriors studied kemari under aristocratic tutors, but I haven't seen references to actual public performances under Tokugawa rule. It is mentioned in Edo-period novels and appears in some paintings, though, so clearly there was a widespread awareness of the sport.