In Japan, baseball is definitely the top three popular sports. The enthusiasm of the whole country for baseball and the love of people for the characters in the two-dimensional world can be said to be indistinguishable.
Because of this, their popular 12 baseball teams have their own characters for their own teams to support and represent themselves. These cute characters with strong personal team colors often appear in the starting ceremony of various competitions, boost morale and cheer for the athletes.
However, these characters will use their interesting behaviors, and funny actions, bringing some different atmosphere to the exciting competitions. And at the same time, their interaction with popular players also makes the whole play more lively.
But those funny and cute characters in the competitions do not satisfy to the Japanese who love the characters in popular anime more and more. So, they would like to do a collaboration with using the national popular characters to bring more crazy heat to the baseball competitions. Therefore, they collaborated with the Rirakuma, Mr. Osomatsu, and Kanaheis Small Animals Piske & Usagisold and so on. The variety of collaborations goods, which make a fundamental contribution to promote baseball competitions more popular to much more people.
This kind of characters collaboration is one of the pillars of the whole sports market. But of course, not just only in Japan, but the huge market has also extended to overseas. And this trend has gradually hanged to other cities near Japan in Asia, who loves baseball as same as Japan, is Taiwan.
Taiwan’s professional baseball competitions is also a lively and big event. These popular anime characters have collaborated with the Taiwan baseball teams, and various kinds of collaboration products have been released, to attract everyone’s attention, to make the atmosphere of the exciting baseball competitions cute and relax.
Besides the popular sport baseball, the soccer and the rugby also received more energy and attention from different age groups due to the collaboration with anime characters, such as drawing famous soccer player into the popular comic Conan and playing them on TV, or let the Hello kitty wear the uniform of Japanese rugby to get attention.
The various collaboration between sports and characters have greatly increased the fun of sports in Japan. We also hope to see other interesting collaboration between anime characters not only baseball but also soccer and so on in other countries or cities in Asia.
References
http://www.japan-baseball.jp/jp/news/press/20160216_2.html
https://www.sa-shop.jp/bettybaseballrelease-2/
https://www.setn.com/News.aspx?NewsID=517678
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