| January
2005 updates IT industry
revolutionalises the professional sports scene in Japan
By
Keisuke Kamimura in Tokyo, Japan, January 2005. Baseball
is one of the most popular sports among the Japanese. Only few of them actually
play it in the field, but for many Japanese it is definitely a major pastime to
watch professional games on television. Although football is gradually catching
on among the younger generation in the last decade, baseball still attracts nearly
25 million people to the field every year, and it dominates the prime hours of
television during the season.
The Japanese professional baseball teams
will shortly start spring training for the coming season in 2005. Usually, the
training itself is more or less an annual event except for some sports journalists
or devout lovers of baseball, but this year, it will be somewhat different.
It is different because Japan's two-top ranking IT companies, Rakuten and
Softbank will be found on the field in the 2005 series. After the 2004 series
was over it was announced, to the surprise of most Japanese, that two of the 12
professional baseball teams would be merged to form a single new team and another
team would be sold. The announcement totally upset and infuriated the baseball
audience in Japan because it sounded too authoritarian and left no room for compromise,
and people felt that they were alienated.
After a series of lengthy debates
and the strike that professional players resorted to, people were relieved to
hear that Rakuten, an operator of one of the biggest retail e-commerce portal,
would establish a new team so that 12 teams would be retained. Soon after Rakuten
joined, another team was sold to Softbank, the emerging telecommunications carrier.
Rakuten was sold for 18 billion yen (US$170 million) in 2003, and its sales has
grown more than twice over 2004. Softbank is an IT-media conglomerate, renowned
for its low-priced ADSL access service, which revolutionalised Japan's broadband
market and now captures more than a third of Japan's 12 million ADSL subscribers.
At a first glance, the change seems to be trivial, but it represents a fundamental
change that may be taking place in Japanese society in the near future. Ownership
of professional sport teams often reflects what industry is the leading edge of
the society. Professional baseball teams were once owned by film, railway, food
manufacturing, newspaper, retail distribution, and finance, each of which they
represented the growth area of the society at their own time. Now, two of the
12 teams are owned by top IT companies. They are not only expected to revolutionise
the Japanese professional sports scene, but they are also considered to be harbingers
of the change that will take in the old regime of Japanese society.
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