ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how the ideology of professional sport is developed from the basic ‘spirit’ of sport that plays an initial role in spiritual and physical education. Sport and economics have been deemed to be systematically related to each other, as a result of the autonomous development of principles and ideologies within sports institutions. The subject of this analysis is baseball, one of the most popular sports in Japan. The internal development of the ideology in professional baseball will be traced from the early Meiji era (late nineteenth century), when baseball was first introduced into Japan, to the early Showa era (early twentieth century), when a professional league was established. Based on the concept of historical sociology, the long chain of autonomic development of the ideology will be examined.
