ABSTRACT
As in every other advanced modern society, sport has come to occupy a prominent position in the everyday life of the Japanese. Actively participating in sport (suru supōtsu), as well as watching others excelling in sport (miru supōtsu), consumes substantial proportions of free time and consumption spending of many contemporary Japanese. For others, doing precisely the same act of performing and observing others' sport performance is a major source of their income, that is a profession or a business. Sport is a major generator of communication among many Japanese, as it provides an endless stream of news and numbers, of stories and gossip that account for a remarkable share of media content delivered by Japan's daily newspapers, sport journals, television and radio broadcasters, and other media such as the internet. Sport is also a central topic of unmediated communication, as it composes rich content for face-to-face interactions all over the country. Anyone observing informal conversations between inhabitants of a farmer village on Hokkaidō in Japan's upper north, town and city dwellers of the metropolitan areas in Kantō or Kansai in the centre of mainland Japan or the members of a fishing community in Japan's subtropical south of Okinawa, is very likely to listen to similar conversations about baseball teams, soccer players and sumo bouts, which are the most popular professional sports attracting nationwide attention. Apart from differences resulting from regional and seasonal climate change and from functional as well as social demands, many Japanese regularly dress in sport clothes or casual wear fashioned as sport clothes. A sportive outfit, including domestically produced apparel and internationally well-known brand names, is widely accepted nowadays in many social situations beyond the realms of physical exercise and leisure. Health, fitness and body consciousness are not only highly fashionable; they signify an active lifestyle. To be interested in sport, and much more to be active in sport, has almost become a normative marker of cultural citizenship in contemporary Japan. As this study shows, this has not always been the case, but rather is related to more general trends of society in a globalized world.
