If you've searched for a "turkey bowling anime," you're probably looking for Turkey!, released in English as Turkey! Time to Strike. It's an original TV anime about girls who bowl, and it premiered in July 2025. The title comes from bowling slang: a "turkey" is three strikes in a row.
The basics
- Studio: animation by Bakken Record, with music production by Pony Canyon.
- Director: Susumu Kudo.
- Setting: Chikuma, a city in Nagano Prefecture, which has promoted the show locally, including a themed bus.
- Main cast: Kana Ichinose (Rina Godai), Haruki Iwata (Sayuri Ichinose), Yuki Tenma (Nozomi Mitaka), Ayasa Ito (Nanase Nikaido) and Hana Hishikawa (Mai Otonashi).
Around its premiere, the show surprised viewers by revealing a time-travel element alongside the bowling, so it's not a straightforward sports series.
Bowling in Japan
Bowling had a huge boom in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and it's still a popular pastime, with a strong women's professional scene. That history makes a bowling anime less surprising than it sounds, and sports anime often lead viewers to try the real thing.
The bowling terms in the show
If the anime has you curious about the vocabulary:
- Turkey: three strikes in a row. See where the name comes from.
- Strike and spare: all ten pins with one ball, or with two. See how bowling scoring works.
- Split: pins left standing with a gap between them.
Want to see how hard a turkey is? Try our bowling game or learn to score one by hand with the score trainer.