By Junko Kaneko

Asashoryu, a sumo wrestler from Mongolia, was promoted to the highest rank in this year's first sumo tournament, and ten different countries, including Mongolia, were listed in the tournament's rankings. These facts makes us expect remarkable play by foreign-born sumo wrestlers in the future. On the other hand, the number of Japanese sports players in foreign countries has been increasing. After announcing his free agency last year, Hideki Matsui entered the major leagues. Hidetoshi Nakata and Shunsuke Nakamura have been playing in Italian soccer "Serie A," and other players also are now in European countries.

As mentioned above, the internationalization of sports has been progressing remarkably through the import and export of foreign-born and Japanese players. However, the more outstanding foreign players enter Japanese sports, the louder the argument to limit their numbers increases. Some say that the limit should be broadened, and others say that the limit itself should be abolished, which is rather radical. This report is my view on limiting the number of foreign-born players.

In my opinion, it is good to have a limit, because Japanese players would not be able to play in games and the character of the team and even country will fade away if the number of foreign-born players is not limited. What should be noticed here, however, is that the current limit is too strict in many sports. In sumo, for example, the limit which is being revised in February this year, is now one foreign player per stable. The former regulation of two per stable and 40 at the maximum as a whole was considered to be unsuitable as a total for the 52 stables, and this caused the revision. But the reformed regulation of one in a stable seems to be too narrow. Indeed, it would be debatable if almost all the wrestlers in the world of sumo were foreign-born, but powerful wrestlers of large build from Hawaii and Mongolia trained at Mongolian sumo, like Asashoryu, certainly have a positive effect as rivals of Japanese wrestlers. Moreover, the wrestlers who become stronger and stronger, improving together in that environment, will surely attract at audience.

And in Japan, it can not be denied that the limit tends to be emotionally regulated simply because the players are from a foreign country. Sumo is Japan's national sport, which might make many Japanese especially sensitive about it and criticize it for having non-Japanese players wrestle in the ring. On the other hand, turning our eyes overseas, for example to America, in the first place we find that they seldom use the generic word "foreigner," but generally use the name of the country or place a player comes from, directions such as west or east, or a player's nickname like "godzilla" for Matsui. Without thinking about whether the player is U.S. born or foreign-born, they consider the personal ability as an athlete to be important when ascertaining a player. Japanese sports does not have to do everything like America does, but there must be something Japan could learn from this.

Now, some problems of the limit for foreign-born players are sometimes pointed out not only in sumo, but also in baseball, ice hockey and so on. For soccer, however, although the foreign-born players in the beginning of J-league were sometimes criticized, having-first-rate foreign athletes helped some teams to gain higher skills and strategies. The regulation of three foreign players per team seems not to be a problem now. The limit of foreign-born players can not be treated sweepingly, saying that it should be abolished or its limit should be much broadened over time, but it may need to be reconsidered depending on the situation from now on. Also, it should be watched how individual sports, such as boxing and judo, having no regulations now, turn out in the future.