China Locks Up an All-Chinese Women's Singles Final as Its Men's Doubles Blows a 3–1 Lead

An all-Chinese final is guaranteed at the top of Asian Games table tennis. Sun Yingsha beat Japan's Hina Hayata 4–1 in Saturday's women's singles semifinal — 11-6, 11-7, 9-11, 11-9, 11-5, her 21st career win over the Japanese No. 1 — while Wang Manyu beat Harimoto Miwa by the same score on the other side of the draw. China has the gold and the silver before the final is played.

Both results repeated the team final from earlier in the Games, where Sun beat Hayata and Wang beat Harimoto as China's women took a fifth consecutive team title. For Wang, Saturday was the second meeting with Harimoto in three days, and the outcome never looked in doubt.

"It was a total defeat," Harimoto said afterward, in tears. "She was stronger in every part of the game. My level is still far off — all I can do is keep training." Japanese reporters described her weeping through the interview; her career record against Wang now reads one win and twelve defeats, the lone win a narrow 3–2 escape at May's world team championships. On Weibo the verdict was blunter: the two Chinese women, whom fans call the "seafood sisters" (海产姐妹) — fan lore makes Sun the shark and Wang the eel — have now each beaten Japan's two leading players twice in three days.

The fandom claimed its moment from the semifinals too. When a fan yelled "Sha-sha, jiayou!" across the arena, Sun called back that she had heard it — "both ears heard it!"

The men's doubles semifinal supplied the day's counterweight. Wen Ruibo and Xiang Peng led Harimoto Tomokazu and Shinozuka Hiroto three games to one — a pair that had thrashed the same opponents 11–1 in a single game earlier in the match — and stood at 9–3 in the fifth game before Japan took three straight and the match 4–3. Hou Yingchao, the former national player commentating live, walked out of the commentary box in disgust as the lead dissolved, a moment that trended in its own right. The doubles final sends Lin Shidong and Huang Youzheng against the same Japanese pair; Lin took mixed doubles gold with Kuai Man earlier in the week, but there is no all-Chinese safety net left in the men's draw.

Japan's men had already broken through at these Games, beating China 3–2 in the team final — the first men's team loss at an Asian Games in 36 years. Harimoto Tomokazu then lost his singles quarter-final to Iran's 34-year-old Noshad Alamiyan, ranked 344th in the world, who now awaits Wang Chuqin. The women's game remains a Chinese exhibition; the men's has become a contest, and the next evidence arrives in the doubles final and Wang Chuqin's meeting with the man who ended Harimoto's singles run.