Introduction

The aim of this collection is to bring the work of Japanese scholars in the area of sport, culture and Japanese society to the attention of a wider audience. Work of this kind is, in fact, not new. In 1967, in the second volume of the International Review of Sport Sociology, the official publication of the recently formed International Committee for Sport Sociology (ICSS), Kyuzo Takenoshita published both a paper on The Social Structure of the Sport Population in Japan’ and a separate overview of ‘The Sociological Research Work of Sport in Japan’. In the latter paper, Takenoshita concluded: ‘sociology of sport in Japan is but at its start, and how to get it developed will be a matter of the future’ (1967: 180). That development has certainly occurred, so much so that the Japanese Society for Sport Sociology, formed in 1991, has its own journal, The Japan Journal of Sport Sociology, and arguably the largest national sociology of sport membership.