Establishing “Publicness” and the Self-interest of Sport

Abstract

　According to a declaration by the Japanese Cabinet Office, “individuals, citizens’ groups, local organizations, businesses, and governments” can work together to achieve social benefits in the “New Public Commons.” In other words, the “New Public Commons” was established based on the cooperation of the community sector, the private sector (market) and the public sector. The purpose of this paper is to clarify how a sport association can gain support from or work together with these sectors by using a case study method.
　In this paper, we deal with a movement to build a skateboarding court, in which several teenage boys collected signatures - more precisely, they began campaigning and delivered a petition supporting the building of a skateboarding court to the prefectural assembly and the town assembly with more than one thousand signatures they had collected. We describe these young men’s involvement with skateboarding, and the circumstances of the signature-collecting campaign and the negotiations between the skateboarders and the town hall. The “publicness” of sport is discussed using Kato’s theory of publicness and Kiku’s ideas deduced from it that are applicable to this case.
　What drove the skateboarders to begin their movement for building a skateboarding court was their craving for skateboarding. To date, sport promotion by local governments has been justified by the notion that sport activities contribute to public welfare. In this case, however, we can see that those young skateboarders tried to establish sport publicness because of their craving to enjoy skateboarding. This is a kind of self-interest, in Kato’s terms, shiri-shiyoku, though the negotiation with the town hall came to a deadlock mainly because they do not like to be enclosed in association-oriented system. It can be concluded that the sectors’ approval of self-interested sport is a base for establishing sport publicness.