Alternative Sport and Publicness : A Case Study of a Movement to Build a Skateboarding Court

Japanese sport model that is characterized by strong cohesiveness, victory orientation, devotional commitment and so on, has been generated in school sport clubs. In recent years, however, the number of teenagers who do not like to be involved in such traditional sports are increasing. In this state of youth sport, a skateboarding, which is a kind of street sports, is enjoyed among young people as an alternative sport that differs from traditional and mainstream sport model in Japan. In this paper, we deal with a movement to build a skateboarding court, in which several teenage boys collected signatures-more precisely, they began campaign and delivered the petition of building a skateboarding court to the prefectural assembly and the town assembly with more than one thousand signatures collected by them. The purpose of this paper is to describe those young men's involvement with skateboarding as a form of their subculture. We also clarify the circumstances of the signature-collecting campaign and the negotiations between the skate-boarders and the town hall. Then publicness of alternative sport shall be discussed by applying Kato's theory of publicness and Kiku's idea of sport publicness to this case. What drove the skateboarders to begin the movement for building a skateboarding court was their craving for skateboarding. So far sport promotion by a local government has been justified by the conception 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, which is a kind of self-greed in Kato's term, '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