Interest in recreational and leisure activities continues to rise in Japan. Although Japan has a well-earned reputation for hard-work and long hours, there are increasingly more opportunities for the individual to take time out and to relax.
One important source of participants in the leisure area, and one that is absolutely guaranteed to grow, year-on-year, is the retired worker. As Japan’s population grows older, lives longer, and produces less children, the number of pensioners becomes proportionally ever larger. They also have more time to spend on their own, as the extended family system slowly breaks down. As Japanese consumers have the world’s highest level of personal savings, there is a trend towards starting to use more and more of that money for personal entertainment
Baseball has been a popular sport in Japan for over a century since its introduction in 1872. (It is called basubaru or sometimes yakyū in Japanese -the latter combining the characters for field and ball.)
Traditional martial arts, incuding sumo are still popular and ’soccer’ is becoming increasingly popular since the introduction of the J-League.
