Roller Sports in Japan ~ the past, the present and the future

Greetings from Tokyo. Those of you who know me know that I am a lover of many aspects of Japan, especially where it comes to popular culture and for several years, I have been advocating the expansion of DIY roller derby into Japan.

This is my first time in Japan and with my involvement with J1 Radio (j1fm.com), I have been using this trip to learn more about Japanese pop culture and Japanese media. On Monday, I had a derbyish day in Japan. In the morning, I took a one hour train ride out to the Kanagawa Prefecture to meet up with representatives from the Yokosuka Sushi Rollers. The Sushi Rollers is one of three DIY leagues that are currently active in Japan. These leagues are centered around the various military bases and most of the skaters are military dependents. The Sushi Rollers are based out of the Yokosuka Naval Station, located at the mouth of Tokyo Bay. In addition, Japan also has the Kokeshi Roller Dolls and Devil Dog Roller Derby in southern Japan on the island of Okinawa. There is also a fourth league in formation around the Yokota Air Base near Tokyo.

The Sushi Rollers was the first of this new wave of “base leagues” to sprout up in Japan. For the past year, they have been actively practicing and they have received a lot of derby love from stateside leagues and merchants. The Sushi Rollers had experienced a major setback in the aftermath of the Great Tohoku earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011. As a result of the subsequent damage at the Fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant, all of the dependents who were attached to the Tokyo area bases (such as Yokosuka, Yokota and Atsugi) were ordered to evacuate Japan thus bringing the Sushi Rollers to the ultimate knee-drop. Meanwhile, because Okinawa is located in the most southern part of Japan, it was not affected by the evacuation order. As a result, the Kokeshi Roller Dolls were able to proceed forward with the development of their league and on May 14, 2011, Kokeshi held “Spring Roll”, their first full bout and the first bout in Japan for the new DIY leagues.

In Japan, roller skating rinks like we know them in the states are virtually non-existent. This may create issues with leagues as they may be limited to doing practices and bouts on the base. The Sushi Rollers were telling me about the primary issue that they encounter operating on base, something you and I would call military red tape. One of the big issues that they have is around fundraising. While on the base, they are extremely limited on what they can do to raise funds for the league. They can accept donations but they technically can not solicit them. Kokeshi is in a different situation. Because there are multiple bases in Okinawa, their league pools skaters from the different bases and they were able to obtain a venue location off-base. Because of the lack of reasonable venues off-base in Japan, Yokosuka and perhaps, future leagues in Japan will experience similar issues.

One of the bigger issues that a base league will encounter is skater turn-around. As military personnel are moved around, they may be required to leave Japan resulting in their dependents leaving the country. Yokosuka has been also trying to recruit local Japanese women and get them interested in the sport. Even though people roller skate in Japan, the lack of venues creates a challenge to build a pool of Japanese skaters and develop leagues at the proportions of our DIY leagues in America. Therefore, the overall survival of the leagues is dependent on obtaining a base of local skating talent.

A big supporter of the Yokosuka Sushi Rollers in Japan is Hiroshi Koizumi. I had the privilege to sit down with him at his office at the Tokyo Dome complex and talk about the past, present and future of roller sports in Japan.

Hiroshi is what you could call in a way, the Jerry Seltzer of Japanese roller sports from a promotions standpoint. In the 1970s, he was a skater with the Tokyo Bombers professional roller game league. Up until the early 1990s, Koizumi had been involved in the organization of “Japan vs. USA” games featuring professional skaters from the US roller derby scene at the time.

The Japanese adaptation of roller derby is called “Roller Game” ローラーゲーム (not to be confused with David Sams’ 1980s TV series “Roller Games” featuring a figure-8 track and an alligator pit). Roller Game has a totally different structure than what we are used to in today’s derby or even in professional roller derby in the USA at that time. In the Japanese game, each team sends out 4 blockers but only one team sends out a jammer. Jams are played like innings in a baseball game where the jammer alternates between jams. In theory, this makes for an easier game to manage from a fan and media perspective as there is only one offensive point scorer to watch at one time. This is not much different than sports like football and basketball where only one team “has the ball” at a certain time. The other key difference is that periods are treated like “sets” in sports such as tennis. In a period, the team that scores the most wins the set. Japanese roller game played the best of five sets therefore, a team that won three sets won the game.

Today, Koizumi is involved in the promotion of roller skating in Japan and serves as a skating coach with professional clients such as Tokyo Disneyland and Universal Studios Japan. He also recently worked with Japanese male idol music group SMAP to develop an on-skates dance routine for upcoming performances related to the group’s 20th anniversary. Koizumi has also been helping out Yokosuka Sushi Rollers and has recently been stateside to work with the OSDA professional program that is currently developing. Koizumi also operates the X-DOME, an indoor skate park for skateboarding and inline.

Japanese culture is very different than American culture in many ways. With more of a focus on science, music and the arts and less on athletics, I asked Hiroshi if there are Japanese girls and women who may be interested in skating roller derby or roller game. He definitely feels that there are many Japanese women who are interested in not just skating, but skating a contact sport like derby. Speed skating is a fairly popular participation sport in Japan. In addition, there is a considerable roller disco scene in the clubs in Tokyo (and yes, Hiroshi is promoting those too).

With the lack of venues outside of the military bases in Japan and the lack of Japanese language media (print, television, etc.) covering the sport, I feel that there are many challenges that will limit DIY league expansion in Japan but with publicity and appropriate marketing, we could see DIY leagues someday pop up, either with a WFTDA or a traditional Japanese roller game structure. But Hiroshi told me he has skaters that he is working with right now which gives me the feeling that if roller derby ever gets added as an Olympic sport, there will be a definitely be a Team Japan and they would have been trained by one of the sport’s best.

(This was originally written on September 10, 2011)