In a sentence

He has been studied as “China’s biggest threat” since his teens — and that fact alone is the highest kind of praise.

Playing style

  • Fast, early forehand loop with a powerful close-to-table initiation
  • Sharp line changes on the backhand side, the hardest attacking point to handle outside the Chinese team
  • An intense match presence, using shouts to fire himself up

Career and key moments

In 2016, at 13, he won the World Junior Championships; in 2018, at 15, he won the World Tour Grand Finals men’s singles, becoming the youngest champion in the event’s history. In 2022 he won the Asian Cup men’s singles; in 2025 he took the WTT Yokohama Champions men’s singles title and was runner-up at the Hong Kong Finals; in 2026 he was men’s singles runner-up at the WTT Europe Grand Smash in Sweden. For years he has been Japan’s No. 1 in men’s table tennis, long ranked inside the world’s top five.

What he left the game

He and his sister Miwa Harimoto give Japanese table tennis, for the first time, a brother-and-sister pairing both at world-class level. For the Chinese team he has been the most frequently recurring exam of the past decade.

In a sentence: To be studied as the biggest threat is a tough kind of recognition in competitive sport.