Abstract
The right to enjoy sport is specified in the Basic Act on Sport enacted in 2011, but there is no guarantee that this right will always be recognized. In this paper, a lawsuit is studied from the viewpoint of the right of spectators to enjoy sport. The purpose of this study is to discuss the legal judgment in relation to the concept of ‘publicness’ and to focus on the regulation and control exercised in the stadium during professional baseball games by describing the background to excluding cheering clubs and forbidding collective cheering.
In March, 2008, the Professional Baseball Organized Crime Exclusion Measures Conference decided to issue an exclusion order for 26 members of a private cheering club and to not issue a special cheering permit to an association that consisted of seven private cheering clubs. In the same year, the cheering clubs sued Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) and its 12 professional baseball teams in Nagoya District Court for refusing to sell them tickets and refusing to issue special cheering permits.
The plaintiffs claimed they had the right as sport spectators because of professional baseball’s ‘publicness’, but the court denied their claim on the grounds that professional baseball is an area in which freedom of contract applies. The relation of the defendants to the cheering clubs should be open to criticism from the standpoint of ‘civic publicness’, which means to be free to discuss and to be open to watch (Habermas). The case described in this study revealed that NPB and its baseball teams have, as entrepreneurs, enclosed private cheering clubs as ‘prosumers’ by controlling them based on database information and self-discipline.
