Etsuko Inada

Etsuko Inada received skating lessons from the age of eight and won the very first women’s skating event at the 1935 All Japan Championships. This earned her a place on the Japanese team for the 1936 Winter Olympics. During the trip to Europe, Inada also competed in the European Championships held in Berlin prior to the Olympics, placing ninth. To participate in the Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen at the age of 12, not only made her the youngest Japanese Olympian (as of 2020), but also the only female athlete representing Japan in pre-World War II Winter Olympics. Inada’s 10th place at the Olympics and the subsequent World Championships made her a rising star. Even women’s figure skating first superstar Sonja Henie predicted her a great future. She was expected to be one of the favorites for the then cancelled 1940 Winter Olympics in Sapporo.

Domestically, Inada won five consecutive national titles from 1937-41 before the competitions had to be adjourned due to the Pacific War. After graduating from Umehana High School, she studied English at a vocational school and moved to Manchuria, where she continued to skate on frozen rivers. Inada lived to see the end of the war in 1945 in the Nara prefecture, and one year later she married. She worked towards a comeback but soon got divorced and did not win her seventh and final national championship before 1951. In the same year, she took part in the World Championships for the first time, after a break of 15 years. But figure skating in Japan had lost contact to the world-wide trends and Inada ended up ranking 21st out of 23.

In 1952, Inada retired from competition to became a coach. She not only trained several Olympians including Miwa Fukuhara, she also taught figure skating to the imperial family. In addition, Inada opened a boutique in Tokyo’s wealthy neighborhood Aoyama. She eventually died from stomach cancer. Inada was the role model of a figure skating coach in a novel and a 2003 TV series.