Eating 50 hotdogs in 10 minutes, buns and all, requires training. For Takeru “Tsunami” Kobayashi, the so-called godfather of competitive eating, that means drinking a lot of water. He starts by downing five litres in under 90 seconds, then rests, then repeats the process the next day, drinking more, faster. The goal is to increase the capacity of his stomach and the speed at which it expands. The target: 11 litres in 45 seconds. “It’s similar to the idea of building muscle,” he says.
Kobayashi is competitive eating’s first elite athlete. His career has been a procession of broken records and seemingly impossible feats: 9.7kg (21.3lb) of soba noodles in 12 minutes, 9kg of rice balls in 30 minutes, 41 lobster rolls in 10 minutes. Feeling full yet? Kobayashi has set world records in volume (15 and a half pizzas in 12 minutes) and in speed (60 bunless hotdogs in 2min 35sec). How many tacos could you eat in 10 minutes? He did 159 – and yes, that’s another world record.
In normal circumstances, Kobayashi would train for two to three months before a competition. But he is 46; it’s more than two decades since he took to Japanese TV as a fresh-faced 22-year-old and devoured 16 bowls of ramen in one hour. So he has given himself a six-month run-up to his next bout. “It takes me longer to get back into things,” he says via a translator. “And I haven’t competed in a while.”
Five years, to be exact. Kobayashi’s last contest was in 2019, when he won the Gringo Bandito Chronic Tacos Challenge, eating 157 tacos in 10 minutes. A mistranslated interview led to widespread reports that he had retired, but this September he will face off against his fiercest rival, the American Joey Chestnut, for a livestreamed Netflix special called Chestnut vs Kobayashi: Unfinished Beef. They last fought in 2009, when Kobayashi beat Chestnut 93 to 81 in an eight-minute burger contest. In 2010, Kobayashi stopped competing with Major League Eating, which administers all professional contests, after a dispute over contracts.
“I never had a retirement match,” says Kobayashi, on a video call from his home in Kyoto, where he lives with his wife. “I did feel like: is this all there is? It just ends like this? And is that OK? Whether the timing is right for me or not, I did feel like this chance will never come again.”
For someone whose career consists of eating processed food in unfathomable quantities, he looks healthy, with a lithe frame – he says he weighs 68kg and stands 5ft 8in (173cm) tall) – an etched jawline and the muscular forearms you get from going to the gym three times a week.
What you can’t see is the havoc wreaked by his career: arthritis in the jaw from excessive chewing; lower-back problems similar to those experienced by pregnant women; tooth erosion. “I’m putting a lot of stress on my body, like any competitor in any sport,” he says. Kobayashi has always viewed competitive eating as a sport and championed professionalising it. “There’s always a lot of damage done to your body. I know of three of my peers who are competitive eaters who have passed away between the ages of 20 and 50. So it is something that concerns me.”
Still, he has no regrets. “I was always aware of the risk that I could get cancer of the digestive system, whether it’s my stomach or my throat,” he says. “That’s part of the attraction of this sport, I believe: to always be close to danger or to death. I never focused on the negative aspects, because once you do that you step on the brakes and don’t try to test your limits.”
How do you wind up as the global face of competitive eating? Growing up, Kobayashi had an unremarkable relationship with food, although his mother was strict and forbade fizzy drinks and unhealthy snacks. “I remember being quite envious when I visited my friend’s house and they had snacks galore,” he says. He was born in Nagano, central Japan, where he lived with his mother and two older sisters (his father lived separately from them). His favourite dish was his mother’s korokke (potato croquettes), which she would pack with corned beef.
Kobayashi’s fascination with competitive eating blossomed at a young age. He would watch TV contests with his family: “At the time, it was still sort of considered a freak show. People were being made fun of.” He recalls his mother being flabbergasted, almost scared, by the sight. “I just remember the female champion on the show and being very impressed.” He also witnessed one of his sisters participate in a restaurant’s food challenge: “I was quite intrigued.”
Kobayashi started competing in 2000, while he was supposed to be studying economics at Yokkaichi University. First came a challenge at a local curry house, then, after he won that, a couple of televised contests. The prize money was enough to wipe out his debt and convince him to abandon his vague plan to become an accountant.
“I did feel a little bit of the embarrassment of being seen as a freak,” he says. But as television popularised eating contests, attitudes in Japan began to shift.
In 2001, Kobayashi was invited to New York to compete in Nathan’s hotdog eating contest, a Fourth of July centrepiece now watched across the US. He trained fastidiously. Hotdogs could be hard to find in Japan, so he used minced fish sausages encased in sliced bread. He taped his practice sessions and experimented with different chewing and swallowing techniques to find the fastest, before hitting on the “Solomon method”, named after the synonymous king, who, according to the Bible story, threatened to end a dispute between two mothers by splitting a baby in half.
This method involves splitting the hotdog in two and dunking each half in water, thus lubricating the bread to make it easier to eat and eliminating the need to sip water. He also developed the “Kobayashi shake”, a shimmy that compacts food and forces it down faster. In short: Kobayashi stopped wondering how many hotdogs he could eat and focused on how he could eat them faster.
When he arrived at Nathan’s, at 23, the record stood at just over 25 hotdogs in 12 minutes. Kobayashi ate 50. Organisers ran out of signs to indicate how many he had eaten and resorted to writing them by hand.
It’s a pattern that has defined his career. Whatever the contest, Kobayashi has played the innovator, studying the craft and seeking marginal gains with the precision of a Formula One engineer. Between 2001 and 2006, he won six Nathan’s championships in a row, before being supplanted by Chestnut, who now has 16 to his name. At his peak, Kobayashi even took on a kodiak bear in a hotdog-eating contest (he lost convincingly). Such is his success that, for more than 20 years, prize money and appearance fees have been his only source of income.
Are the likes of Kobayashi born, or can they be made? “I think a lot of my fellow food fighters would say that it’s about 90% genetics or inherent talent,” he says. “But I believe it’s more like 50% genes and 50% personal effort.” Otherwise, he says, the person with the biggest stomach would always dominate.
Personal taste rarely factors into performance. He eats so fast that food barely hits the tongue. Kobayashi ends each match exhausted and out of breath, as the amount of food shifts his organs and stops his lungs from expanding. “Right after the match ends is the hardest; you are really suffering,” he says. “Also, because the race is over, you’re relieved, and that sense of relief also makes you feel like your stomach is very, very heavy.” Remarkably, he doesn’t feel sick, but his lower back hurts and his shoulders ache. He avoids sitting or lying down, as this puts pressure on his stomach. He will stand for a few hours, usually doing photos and interviews, despite the brain fog. “You have to smile with your friends and the fans,” he says.
The post-match period is a struggle mentally: “I don’t want to be in the spotlight any more. I don’t want to walk around and see a lot of people.” And yet, by the afternoon of the next day, he will more or less be back to normal.
In the recent Netflix documentary Hack Your Health: Secrets of the Gut, Kobayashi revealed that he no longer feels hunger and will sometimes go without food for three days. After multiple tests, he learned that his gut microbiome seems normal, but that the areas of his brain related to eating – feeling nauseous, feeling full – are constantly firing.
“The benefit of not feeling hunger is that I’m better able to manage my diet,” he says. “I can determine my own schedule and my ritual of how much I eat at which time.” His diet consists of simple foods – grilled chicken, hard-boiled eggs, tofu and yoghurt – with an emphasis on protein.
He also consciously eats slowly: “I’ve found that the best way to do this is by deliberately making it hard to eat, for example by eating with my left hand or using forks and knives to eat things that you would usually eat with chopsticks or hands.” He avoids triggering contexts, such as anywhere proposing a deadline or a challenge, such as an all-you-can-eat buffet.
At Kobayashi’s peak, his exploits made him a household name in Japan: “I couldn’t walk the streets. I had to stay inside. I would find letters in my mailbox without a stamp – people would just come to where I live.”
His family’s reaction was more muted. His mother had always been more conservative, while his father had told him to challenge himself in whatever he did to be the best. When Kobayashi started competitive eating, he suspected he would be met with disapproval by his mother and have his father’s support: “But, contrary to my expectation, he got very angry.”
His father worked as a historian at a temple in Nagano City. “Looking back, I do understand why my father was so against it, because he works in the field of the Buddhist religion. And, in Buddhism, at least in Japan, the school of thought is about not eating a lot, not eating huge amounts, but really treasuring life, giving thanks to food and being quite minimal in living. So I imagine that his peers were very judgmental about what I did.”
He eventually won his father over, though. As for his mother: “Surprisingly, my mother was the one who said: ‘Look, if he’s serious about this, if he found something that made him happy, he should pursue it until the end.’ And she really protected me.”
In 2007, his mother died of uterine cancer. “I remember feeling like she was fighting to live to see another of my birthdays,” he says. “She was the one who really supported me throughout my career and losing her left a big hole in my heart. The only reason I was able to overcome that was that I remember that when she was suffering with her illness, she would tell me that watching me compete was the only thing that made her want to fight back.”
Will September’s bout with Chestnut be Kobayashi’s last? He has to believe it will be. “Unless I think each match is my last one, I will not be able to perform at my peak level.” But he is enjoying the thrill of competing again. “When you do something for a really long time, you start to lose the magic that you felt initially,” he says. “This has really brought back the feeling of how much fun it is to push yourself.”