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Kyodo via Yahoo: Declining birth rate is having impact on sports
Yukio Kasaya and his fellow skiers caused great excitement among the Japanese public when they dominated the 1972 Winter Olympic Games in Sapporo...Nearly 90 children joined boys' ski jump club in 1973, but the present membership is down to 10...The declining number of Japanese children is taking its toll on sports, according to some experts. They pointed to the Kyushu students' athletic event of 2000 at which the final for the women's 400-meter race was held without preliminaries because there were not enough participants. An official of the All Japan High School Athletic Federation said about 1,566,000 high school students were active in sports in 1995 but the number dropped 18.8 percent to 1,272,000 last year.