ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the historical shifts of the political regimes and ideological backgrounds that impacted on the relationship between sport and social class from the 1860s to the present day in Japan. Sport as a modern invention and Western import was adopted early by the shizoku, an elite class under the Tokugawa shogunate, and largely incorporated into schools and large corporations around the turn of the twentieth century. After World War II, a base of sport participation was further widened and supported for, yet still restricted to, those in schools and large corporations. The 1970s and 1980s saw an increasing role for the public sector to realise ‘sport for all’ through the provision of community sport facilities and services. School sport, and community sport since the 1970s, has played a crucial role in providing a certain level of equitability in access to sport and recreation from the Meiji era to the present. With the economic recession in the 1990s and the government’s subsequent responses through neoliberalisation, the role of corporations and the private sector was substantially diminished, resulting in fewer opportunities for those in the working class and lower middle class to engage in sport and recreation.
