Mai Yamaguchi

There's something genuinely cinematic about a 176 cm kid growing up in Shima, Mie — that rugged Ise-Shima coastline where the sea wind never really lets up — and ending up competing on sand courts under open skies. Mai Yamaguchi made that leap from indoor volleyball to beach volleyball, which is a harder transition than most people realize: the footing is terrible, the elements are unpredictable, and you're essentially playing a full team sport with just one other person. Born in 1983, she won an Olympic bronze medal at London 2012 and kept playing at the top level until she retired in 2019, which tells you everything about her durability and commitment. The sheer physicality of sustaining volleyball at that level for that long earns real respect from me. I keep imagining her reading the ocean wind better than anyone else on the court — hometown advantage, basically.

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.

Mai Yamaguchi (born July 3, 1983) is a Japanese former volleyball player from Shima, Mie Prefecture, who won a bronze medal with Japan at the 2012 London Olympics. Standing 176 cm tall, she played for the Okayama Seagulls until retiring in 2019. She was born in the coastal Ise-Shima region of Mie Prefecture, Japan.

Name (English)

Mai Yamaguchi

Name (Japanese)

山口舞

Reading

やまぐち まい

Born

July 3, 1983 (age 43)

Origin

Shima, Mie Prefecture, Japan

Height

176 cm

Occupation

Volleyball Player / Beach Volleyball Player

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Cancer / Boar

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B1%B1%E5%8F%A3%E8%88%9E
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q268853

Tags

• From Mie Prefecture
• Volleyball Player
• Beach Volleyball Player

Last updated

November 2, 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.