Even a strong high school that has participated in 12 Koshien tournaments is facing a “rough wave of declining baseball club members.

On March 20, Shohei Ohtani’s Dodgers opened their season in Seoul, South Korea. Tickets were hotly contested, and the game was broadcast daily on Japanese television, indicating the high level of attention.

The spring Senbatsu high school baseball tournament, which ended with Kentai Takasaki’s victory, was also slow at first due to bad weather and unseasonably cold temperatures, but the final game held on Sunday drew a decent crowd of 34,200, partly due to the presence of Houtoku Gakuen, a popular local school.

This situation reminds us of the influence and presence of the sport of “baseball” in Japan. However, the population of the sport is still very small.

For example, it is not unusual for many teams, with the exception of strong schools with large numbers of players, to have less than the maximum number of players on the bench for official fall games played by first- and second-year players. And this predicament is not unrelated to the once-strong teams.

Nowadays, if you have 10 new students coming in the spring, you might be surprised,” says a teacher and administrator.

Masao Kawaguchi, 60, has been leading his alma mater, Yamaguchi Prefectural Iwakuni High School, for more than 30 years while working for a general company, not as a teacher or administrator.

Iwakuni is one of the leading preparatory schools in Yamaguchi Prefecture, and is a prestigious school, boasting seven spring and five summer appearances in the Koshien (National High School Baseball Championship) Tournament. Most recently, in 2002, the team made consecutive appearances in the spring and summer.

Ten years have passed since then. Although two students withdrew from the team, in the summer of 2011, there was only one third-year student on the team.

Two quit in the winter of their sophomore year, one because he wanted to concentrate on his studies. The other said, ‘I don’t know if the first-year students will join next year, so I can’t stay motivated. Kawaguchi says , “ We consistently competed in the Koshien Tournament.

Even in the days when we were consistently participating in the Koshien Tournament, we rarely had 60 members in three grades, and even when we did, we often had the lowest number of members among the participating schools,” he says.

Although the phrase “a decade ago” is often used, the reality is that the teams that made it to the Koshien in spring and summer only 10 years ago are now struggling to recruit new members. Another factor is the reality that there are too many schools for the number of children.

There are currently six schools in Iwakuni City, including ours. For example, if there were 50 junior high school students playing baseball in the city, there would be 10 students in each school. But not all of them will play baseball in high school, so the number will decrease even more.”

Furthermore, there is the difficulty of recruiting players because the school is a preparatory school.

In the case of Iwakuni High School, however, the number of applicants is not always the same. I think it’s because it’s hard to get in. I think it was 2 years ago that I heard some people say, “I definitely want to enter Iwakuni High School and play baseball! and “I definitely don’t want to play baseball.” The one who definitely didn’t want to play baseball passed the entrance exam and the one who definitely wanted to play baseball failed (laugh). (Laughs.) There was a case like that. That child was not accepted, so he entered another public school for the second round of recruitment. It depends on the year, but you have to have a certain level of grades.

Another negative factor is the attitude that is deeply rooted in the locality.

Not only in Yamaguchi, but in all rural areas, many families feel guilty about going to a private school after failing a public school. It is not that private schools are bad at all, and I think it is normal to enter a private school’s preparatory class if you are in the city. There are many cases where students switch to other public schools at the entrance exam stage because they don’t want to fail Iwakuni.”