I think because he needs to defend his raking point as champion at SGP Open. In MAS and INA Open last year, he was dropped only in second round. No need to play for point protection.
Plausible reason but S750 & S1000 are mandatory BWF World Tour for top players. The info about Momota absence for upcoming tourneys is taken from one of BC moderators twitter :
he can get an injury waiver and protected ranking status if needed. defending points is the least of his concerns. have you seen the gap between him and #2?
Here is a table of Bird Japan's entries in upcoming tournaments, as based on information provided by the NBA and BWF. The cancellation of the Lingshui China Masters hardly comes as a surprise, but Japan may have been hoping for a re-location rather than an outright postponement; close to the entire B Team had been entered for the tournament. The first table shows the singles players: And here comes the doubles:
For a quick review of the world ranking trends of Team Japan, let me attach a couple of tables that show the status of MS and WS players. First, men's singles: Momota is already down to 16 tournaments, although this will have no impact on his overall ranking for the time being. Beneath him, Nishimoto has managed to close in on Tsuneyama, leaving the second slot to Tokyo up for grabs. Further down the table, Naraoka (Team B), is nestled up right behind Watanabe (Team A), with the rest of Team B continuing to languish around the WR 100 mark.
And, here we have the WS: Unlike the MS, there is an obvious gap between Team A and B here, although Nidaira has managed to close in a little, helped by consecutive wins at the Estonian and Sweden IS tournaments last month. Oie and Gunji, too, are making perceptible progress. One conspicuous difference between MS and WS lies in the number of tournaments that players are being entered for. None of the Team B women's singles players have managed to accumulate points for ten tournaments over the last twelve months, in marked contrast to the men.
I think the reason Momota's skipping Malaysia and India but not Singapore is more so to be safe just in case... Singapore is a lot safer than the two aforementioned.
I am not quite sure where to post this very good 20-minute long video profile/interview (in English! ) of Park Joo Bong from BWF Badminton Unlimited but since he is so strongly involved and associated with Japanese players at the moment I guess it will be interesting for people following this thread. Starting at 7:20 through the end of the video.
Sakai is playing well he should be at least in b team https://www.hotstar.com/in/sports/badminton/highlights-praneeth-falls-in-semis/1260020482
Two snippets of news: 1. After a lengthy absence due to injury, WD Tanaka/Yonemoto are likely to stage their comeback match at the Malaysia Open next month. 2. As rumoured amongst various SNS platforms, Naraoka Kodai will enter Nihon University as of this April. According to Naraoka, the head of the university badminton team is very supportive (both in terms of budget and time) of Naraoka's plans to enter as many international tournaments as possible. Incidentally, according to the same SNS rumours, Naraoka had initially wanted to enter NTT-East (Momota's affiliation), but was turned down by the company due to attitude problems [??].
As per the current rankings, Japan has 4 pairs in the top 10 of the Women's Doubles. Not the top 3 as they did not that far back, but still doing quite well. Hopefully they will have a better 2020 than they did by the end of 2019, felt like they were losing quite a bit more than I thought they would. Or perhaps it was simply that the Korean and Chinese WD pairs were playing very well to end the year.
The All Japan Selected High School Championships, scheduled to take place in Kagoshima from March 25 - 29 have been cancelled due to the influence of COVID-19. I have bought tickets for the Osaka International Challenge, scheduled to take place shortly afterwards on April 1 - 5. ... It is not going to happen.
Strictly speaking, Hokuto Bank should be picking up the tab here. ... However, they are on the list of players to be despatched by the NBA (there is no self-financed list this time around), which means that the NBA is funding them.
Regarding COVID-19... In response to the growing number of countries expected to enforce restrictions upon the entry of Japanese passport holders, Bird Japan is not expected to return home after the All England. Instead, in order to guarantee full participation in upcoming tournaments, such as the India OP, Malaysia OP, Singapore OP, and Badminton Asia Championships, the team is planning to use England and Malaysia as training grounds.