ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the 21st century, sport has been assigned special importance to counterbalance the widening gap between urban centres and rural peripheries in Japan. The new roles of sport include enhancing quality of life for those living in the regions, boosting their attractiveness for newcomers and financial investors and reducing the financial burden of an aging society in which responsibility for health and fitness is shifted from the public sector to private initiatives. Especially the Basic Plan for the Promotion of Sports (Supōtsu Shinkō Kihon Keikaku), issued in 2000 by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Monbukagakushō, MEXT), the establishment of Japan's first professional football league in the early 1990s (Ubukata 1994; Hirose 2004a) and the hosting of half the 2002 Football World Cup Korea/Japan (Horne and Manzenreiter 2002a) have contributed to a policy shift towards public-private partnerships as the core of sport for all opportunities. On a very practical level, the implementation of the basic sport plan related to the new policy aims has to face two impediments. Particularly since the collapse of the asset-inflated economy, industrial corporations stopped doling out money to sports that do not generate profits. At the same time, local governments saw their budgets tightened by decreasing income revenues and mounting debt burdens. But private sector initiatives were badly needed to assist the politicians' visions, as hardly any case study on sport-centred development initiatives provides evidence of the profitable and efficient use of public money. Drawing on major recent trends, with particular reference to the professional football league and field visits in southwest Japan, I will outline the changing role of sport policy and some new faces of public-private partnerships in Japan.
