Basketball in Japan

Last week, I read an article on an online Japanese newspaper that titled “6 Works Teams Will Not Join the New Basketball League”. This article disappointed me because I had strongly believed that we would have a new basketball league in order to encourage the basketball industry in Japan.

As discussed on the previous blog post, two professional basketball leagues exist in Japan. One league is named Japan Basketball League (JBL) that is formed by 8 works teams. Another league is Basketball Japan League (bj League) that includes 19 teams. Usually, each country has one top league, but Japan has two top leagues. As the result, there are a lot of arguments that this strange situation in Japan has made obstacles to develop basketball in Japan.

What We Can See from the MLB's Opening Games in Japan

Photo From: Nikkei.com

Prior to the regular season of the Major League Baseball (MLB) starts in the United States tonight, the opening games of the Oakland Athletics and the Seattle Mariners were taken place in Japan on March 28^th and 29^th (in Japan Time).  A lot of Japanese baseball fans enjoyed watching the playing of Ichiro Suzuki, the most popular Japanese MLB player.

Collage Sports

In Japan, we don’t have any popular collage sports event like the NCAA basketball tournament in the United States. We have a popular high school baseball tournament because baseball was almost the only sports to watch long tome ago. These days, Japanese people watch and play more different sports, such as soccer and basketball, but there are no professional or amateur sporting event, which has nation-wide popularity besides international match of the Japanese soccer team. So, I became to dream to develop collage sports events as a business in Japan like the NCAA basketball tournament in order to enhance more people to get interested in sports, develop more young talented players, and encourage local economy.  Therefore, I was looking for the pros and cons about the NCAA basketball tournament and found some interesting articles.

Toshihiro Nakatsuka: A Japanese Basketball Player

Toshihiro Nakatsuka is a professional Japanese basketball player for the Japan Basket League (JBL) and is signed to the Panasonic Trians (2009 – Present). The JBL is a professional basketball league in Japan in which the teams are company sponsored. The JBL is ranked just below in popularity to the Basketball Japan League (bj League), a league that is state owned. The two leagues are in fact one in the same but due to a conflict of interest during merger negotiations both leagues remained independent and now competing against each other in ticket sales.