March 14, 2018
The Japan Times Mar 12, 2018 – Implementing change is often a painful procedure. That is apparently the case for the leaders working to revamp the landscape of college sports in Japan.
It has been a couple of years since discussions aimed at forming a Japanese organization similar to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which oversees college athletics in the U.S., and establishing athletic departments at universities began. These reform measures are intended to give more legitimacy and governance to college sports in Japan.
Sports teams at Japanese universities are given access to school facilities and some subsidies, but are not formally recognized as belonging to the school. In order to change this, a joint project between the University of Tsukuba, Temple University and Dome Corporation has carried out research on collegiate sports in the United States to examine what would work in Japan.
The project is divided into three phases, with Tsukuba as the test case. The project has recently completed its second phase, which was devoted to preparing an athletic department with a “transitional athletic director” at the Ibaraki Prefecture-based national institute.
Tsukuba was originally scheduled to start up its athletic department in April, after this past year’s transitional period. Shinzo Yamada, one of the sports administrators at Tsukuba, said his team pushed back the launch to give the transitional team another year of preparation. Tsukuba has more than 40 sports teams but their reactions to the formation of the athletic department, which is a step into the unknown for them, has been muted. In fact, only three teams — the baseball team and the men’s and women’s handball teams — have agreed to act under the umbrella of the athletic department. The men’s and women’s volleyball teams have agreed to take part as associate members.
Yuhei Inoue, an assistant professor in sports management at the University of Minnesota who has also been a key member on the research project, insisted that developing relationships is highly important in Japan when you attempt to modify something. “So whatever model you try to bring over here, how you explain it to people like coaches and school officials is important,” Inoue said. “I think that it is really significant to communicate with them well and earn cooperation from them.” The project will next go into the third and final phase, in which Tsukuba will designate its director and vice director of athletics and prepare to actually run its athletics department.
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