October 2013
Ichiro Higashiyama
“Oral History of Broadcasting” is a study on broadcasting history using oral testimonies of people related to the broadcasting industry.
After World War II, just as the Japanese businesses and society became internationalized, Japan’s “broadcasting” also made progress in internationalization on various aspects including the recommencement of international broadcasting service in1952. This report series features different aspects of “internationalization of broadcasting” that encompasses diverse phenomena, using the oral history of various people who worked at the frontline of broadcasting, with the aim of elucidating the reality of this industry that cannot be easily revealed only by written materials.
The second part of the series focuses on the “internationalization of sports broadcasting” that started developing in the mid-1970s, which is regarded as the dawn of the sports business; based on the interviews with three people involved in sports broadcasts, the author describes how the internationalization was brought about and further expanded. These interviews allow us to take a glimpse of the sporting world, such as Japanese agents and advertising companies who eagerly explored new business opportunities through incoming overseas sports content, much of which had not been available in Japan before, and agents that developed sports business at the global level. Along with these little known activities of agents, we can also learn about the relationship between sports, television, and sponsors, as well as the atmosphere of the frontline of sports broadcasting amid internationalization.