Abstract
The Japanese Professional Football League (JPFL) was established in 1993 in an attempt to enhance social interaction within teams’ home cities through football. In contrast, the Japan Professional Baseball League (JPBL) was created prior to World War II and has been supported mainly by corporate sponsorship. Using individual-level data from 1996, this paper contains over 250,000 observations to investigate how the JPFL enhanced social capital formation in comparison with the JPBL. A bivariate probit estimation showed that in those areas in which a JPFL team home city was located, people were more likely to play football with their neighbors. In contrast, the presence of a JPBL team did not lead people to play baseball with their neighbors.
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Notes
- 1.
Before the launching of the JPFL in 1993, the Japanese national football team consisted of amateur players. Its performance was far below the level required to advance to the FIFA World Cup, and accordingly, Japan had never won any preliminary matches to obtain entry. It was at the 1998 FIFA World Cup in France that Japan won its first preliminary matches and qualified for the final stage of FIFA World Cup.
- 2.
With the exception of the Giants, JPBL teams are not well supported, even by hometown fans. For instance, the home city of the Yakult Swallows is also Tokyo. Haruki Murakami, the world-renowned Japanese novelist, is a zealous Swallows fan. At a Swallows game attended by Murakami in the home stadium, Jingu Kyujo, visiting-team fans outnumbered Swallows fans. Murakami was disgusted at the situation and described it as unnatural, unpleasant and inadmissible (Nishi Nihon Shimbun, September 3, 2013).
- 3.
After 1996, the number of JPFL teams increased and were established in more cities throughout Japan. With respect to the JPBL, in 2004, the Fighters relocated its home from Tokyo to Sapporo, located in the northern island of Japan. The Buffaloes, whose home is Osaka, then merged with the Blue Wave in 2004. The Eagles is a new JPBL team established in 2005, and its home city is Sendai, northeast Japan. Hence, there appears to be a trend in the JPBL where teams are relocated from larger urban areas to smaller local cities. In summary, the shift from urban to local cities has been observed not only for JPFL teams but also for JPBL teams; however, this trend is more obvious in the JPFL than in the JPBL. No JPFL team has been relocated from an urban to a smaller city. In 1999, JPFL created a second division (J2). Therefore, there is now an upper division (J1) and the J2. Many teams were started in the JPFL, especially when the J2 was established; the number of JPFL team increased from 16 in 2004 to 37 in 2013. Of the 37 teams, 18 are a part of J1 and 19 are a part of J2. Most of the new JPFL teams are located within the city that they are a part of. Consequently, there are cities that have a JPFL team in most parts of Japan.
- 4.
A Japanese prefecture is equivalent to a state in the USA or a province in Canada. There are 47 prefectures in Japan.
- 5.
The FlĂĽgels and Marinos merged in 1999 and formed the F-Marinos.
- 6.
In 1999, FC Tokyo entered the JPFL. FC Tokyo was the first team to choose Tokyo as its home city. Verdy then followed, relocating from Kawasaki to Tokyo in 2001.
- 7.
This is actually the social behavior of people currently living in Japan, not Japanese people as a whole.
- 8.
Questionnaires vary slightly according to the year. Therefore, some questions were not asked in following years. This question was only included in 1996.
- 9.
People are likely to behave similarly under the same institutional condition. For instance, institutions differ between residents’ prefectures. Hence, it is reasonable to assume that the observations may be spatially correlated within a prefecture, as the preference of one agent may well relate to the preference of another in the same prefecture. To consider such spatial correlation in line with this assumption, the Stata cluster command was used and z-statistics were calculated using robust standard errors. The advantage of this approach is that the magnitude of spatial correlation can be unique to each prefecture.
- 10.
The Orions relocated from Kawasaki to Chiba in 1992. The Eagles relocated from Osaka to Fukuoka in 1989. After their move they then began to increase their local ties.
- 11.
For example, the Matsumoto Sanga team was created when some young locals met in a café and formed a non-professional football club; the team was later promoted into the JPFL (Kurata 2013). In addition to the JPFL and JPBL, other community-based professional sports teams have gone on to enter Japan’s professional basketball league (Kimura 2009) or as independent baseball teams (Murayama 2011).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Statistics Bureau, Director-General for Policy Planning & Statistical Research and the Training Institute for providing me with the micro-level data used in this study. I processed the raw data provided for this analysis. In addition, I gratefully acknowledge the financial support received in the form of research grants from the Japan Center for Economic Research as well as the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (Foundation (C) 22530294) and (Foundation (C) 20368971).
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Yamamura, E. (2015). Effect of Professional Sports Teams on Social Capital Formation: Comparison Between Football and Baseball in Japan. In: Lee, Y., Fort, R. (eds) The Sports Business in The Pacific Rim. Sports Economics, Management and Policy, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10037-1_19
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