A Historical Study on the Popularization of Modern Sports with Special Reference to Sporting Equipment Sales

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This study shows the process of the promotion of sports equipment sales and popularization of sports in Kochi during the Taisho era by examining advertisements that appeared in the Kochi Newspaper and Kochi Kyoiku (Education in Kochi), a local journal published by the Kochi Association of Education. Sales of sports equipment can be traced back to the 1910s, and during the 1920s they grew strongly. As far as this period is concerned, it was ordinary shops and teaching aid/material retailers that started to place advertisements for sports equipment. As sales grew, their advertisements were taken over by those of particular dealers of sports apparatus. Among them are dealers that not only sold sports equipment produced in other prefectures or imported from abroad but also set out to sell their own products, with their emphasis on producing gym suits. The collected advertisements show that in Kochi Prefecture baseball and tennis played the central role in sports through the 1910s and then … More athletics, swimming, table tennis, soccer, and mountain climbing gained in popularity around 1920, followed by the addition of volleyball, basketball and indoor baseball in the following year. It is also shown that these sports were played at schools, military bases, government and public offices, newspaper offices and hospitals.It was only during a short period of time, however, that the Kochi Kyoiku had advertisements, and already in the early stage of the Showa era, commercial messages had disappeared from this journal. This suggests that sporting equipment agents were in an intense promotional competition at first and that they became successful in locking customers into their business by early Showa.Further studies should aim at clarifying the business agents role in promoting sports in local areas during the postwar economic rehabilitation period, which is defined as the second phase of popularization of modem sports, drawing data from published materials such as local newspapers and educational periodicals as well as from interviews. Less