Abstract
The Master Plan for the Promotion of Sports of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology is the national strategy for sport in Japan. This strategy aims to get more people involved in sport more often, to achieve a society that practices lifelong sport by upraising the levels of regular involvement in sports to the point where more than 50% of adults play at least once a week. In this context, recent political concerns with the strategy have raised much debate regarding how to set up new type of sport clubs (comprehensive community sports club) within every district. This article explores how the sport policy is developed and how its implementation impacts various stakeholders. Through analysis of official policy documents, interviews with the taskforce members and empirical data gathered from observations, this paper demonstrates the dominant voices in policy communities and networks help shape the conceptualization of an issue, the discourse surrounding the issue. While the national strategy uphold comprehensive community sports club as a vital part of the fabric of healthy life, this paper concludes that it is not clear what contribution those sports clubs can play in this agenda.
