Hironobu Tanabe

Hironobu Tanabe is the kind of guy the racing world quietly runs on. He's a Fukushima native who went freelance after starting out at a Miho stable, with no social media circus, and honestly? I respect it. He lets the work do the talking, and the work is this: climbing onto an animal that weighs half a ton, reading its mood, reading the field, and making split-second calls at full gallop that the rest of us would need a slow-motion replay to even register. That's not athletic — that's a skilled trade with a heartbeat. He's pushing into his forties and still in the saddle, and there's something genuinely cool about a guy who just keeps showing up to do a hard, dangerous, unglamorous job with no fanfare. The horse world needs more people like that.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Hironobu Tanabe is a Japanese professional jockey born on February 12, 1984. He competes in horse racing in Japan, where he is known for his work as a rider. From Nihonmatsu, Fukushima Prefecture, he debuted in 2002, has won more than 1,200 JRA races and ten Grade 1 races (three JRA and seven in local racing), and serves as vice-chair of the Kanto branch of the Japan Jockeys Association.

Name (English)

Hironobu Tanabe

Name (Japanese)

田辺裕信

Reading

たなべ ひろのぶ

Born

February 12, 1984 (age 42)

Origin

Nihonmatsu, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan

Height

162 cm

Occupation

Jockey

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Aquarius / Rat

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%94%B0%E8%BE%BA%E8%A3%95%E4%BF%A1
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11577394

Tags

• Jockey

Last updated

October 18, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.