Will Japan’s baseball fans come back? Author Robert Whiting thinks so
J-League football, video games and other activities are merely short-term distractions for a nation forever married to the sport, says author of You Gotta Have Wa
Baseball has suffered a gradual slump in popularity in Japan in recent years, but the author of four bestselling books on the sport is convinced it remains the nation’s favourite game and believes a new “spike” in its popularity could come as soon as August.
“When I first came to Japan in the 1960s and right up to the 1990s, there was a game on nationwide television in that ‘golden hour’ slot every night. And every night, they would get 25 million viewers,” said author Robert Whiting.
Viewership began to drop off when J-League football began to eat into baseball’s television time. Figures for baseball matches fell from around 25 per cent of total television viewership during games to the 12 per cent mark, said New Jersey-born Whiting, whose first book about Japanese baseball was ‘The Chrysanthemum and the Bat’, released in 1977, but whose most famous book on the subject was 2009’s ‘You Gotta Have Wa’.
Baseball suffered another shock to its system when games moved from regular television to cable, while tennis, ice skating and basketball emerged alongside soccer as rivals to its previous predominance.
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Equally, young people have grown up on a diet of instant gratification from computer games and have shorter attention spans than their parents’ generation.