Issue link: http://itf.uberflip.com/i/366594
4 ITFWORLD SUMMER 2014 INSIDE OUT I Japanese tennis is booming. In May, Kei Nishikori became the first Japanese man to break the Top 10, while in April, Japan made its first-ever appearance in the Davis Cup by BNP Paribas quarterfinals. At Roland Garros both wheelchair singles champions were Japanese. Chris Bowers takes stock of the sport in Japan. T he difference in five years is enormous. In April, 28,000 people passed through the doors of Tokyo's Ariake Coliseum for Japan's first-ever Davis Cup by BNP Paribas quarterfinal, an increase of 8,000 on the attendance for Japan's first round win in the same venue two months earlier. Yet just five years ago when Japan was in the Asia/ Oceania zonal group, it was struggling to get 3,000 over a Davis Cup weekend. The difference is Kei Nishikori. In 2012 he won the Japan Open, the country's leading ATP tournament, an achievement that unleashed massive interest in tennis, with a corresponding increase in coverage in the Japanese media. But it wasn't all because of Nishikori — it would be fairer to say the groundwork had been laid over several decades, and Nishikori was the spark that lit the firework. You could say it started with a love story, although that would be a little too simple. In the mid-1950s, Crown Prince Akihito, one of the world's most eligible bachelors, began dating Michiko Shoda, and legend has it that they met playing tennis; indeed there are many photos of the couple who are now Emperor and Empress of Japan pictured on or at a tennis court. So by the time they married in 1959, they had boosted the profile of the sport in Japan. It would be wrong to say they launched tennis. Japan has a long tennis tradition, it even N had silver medallists in singles and doubles at the 1920 Olympics — Japan's first-ever Olympic medals. But like many European countries, the sport was largely limited to the elite, and only in the 1960s did it begin to filter down the social strata. A big boost came in the early 1990s, when Japan had a golden generation of women players, in fact at one stage it had ten in the women's top 100. That generation was led by Kimiko Date (now Date-Krumm), who finished 1995 ranked fourth and remains Japan's most successful player in terms of rankings. She was accompanied by players such as Mana Endo, Naoko Kijimuta, Kyoko Nagatsuka, Miho Saeki, and Naoko Sawamatsu, all of whom were ranked in the top 50 in the 1990s. Although Japan's male players weren't in the same league as the women, they did have their moment in 1995, when Shuzo Matsuoka, known as 'the giant' because at 6 feet 2 inches or 1.88 metres he was well above the average height of Japan's men, reached the Wimbledon quarterfinals. It generated great interest in Japan, but that was by far the high water mark of Matsuoka's career — he never got beyond the second round of any other major, and his ranking peaked at 46. Although Japan's women had a second wind in the early 2000s with Ai Sugiyama, Akiko Morigami and Aiko Nakamura, there was a noticeable drop-off of interest. Hiro Yoshimatsu has been covering tennis for Japan's sports daily Nikkan Sports since 1987 and is Japan's leading tennis journalist. At one stage he missed six French Opens because his paper wouldn't send him, but he's back doing all four majors, and he has had four tennis front page stories this year. "Matsuoka's run to the Wimbledon quarterfinals was big," Yoshimatsu says, "but he was rare, he was very tall. Nishikori is more the same height as other Japanese people and is much more consistent. Nishikori is a better example for promoting tennis in Japan than Matsuoka was. Date and Sugiyama were also big names, but women's sport hasn't had the same resonance as men's." Another Japanese journalist to have travelled more widely thanks to Nishikori's success is Akatsuki Uchida. Four years ago she found it viable to attend all four majors. "It's easier to sell stories since Kei became prominent," she says, "but Date's comeback has also been big — she is popular as a role model to women in their 30s and 40s." Despite this boom, Nishikori is pushing up against several barriers. Tennis falls a long way behind Japan's most popular sports: football (soccer), baseball and sumo. And tennis competes with 'soft tennis', a sport with a long tradition in Japan (the Japanese player Shinobu Asagoe started in soft tennis and switched to tennis). S I D E O U T N A P A J