Modern lifestyles are conspiring against youth in Japan. It's simply too easy for them to spend too much time in front of the TV or sitting for hours playing video games. Add to this a limited amount of outdoor playing space in most of Japan, plus unhealthy snacking habits, and it's easy to see why there is an emerging epidemic of overweight children in Japan.

To counter this alarming trend, children must be introduced to a fun, challenging, and competitive individual sport like tennis, and encouraged to embrace it as a lifelong form of physical education and mental discipline.

Kids Want More Physical Activity

The average time that kids in Japan spend playing outdoors is 1 hour and 47 minutes per day, but statistics reveal that they would rather spend 2 hours and 35 minutes playing. As the chart below shows, this gap between actual time and desired time is greater than that of any other activity such as playing games, watching TV or reading books.

Daily Activity	Actual Time	Desired Time
Playing outside	1h47min	2h35min
Watching TV	2h19min	2h37min
Listening to music	46min	58min
Reading books	44min	56min
Playing games / using e-mail	1h14min	1h44min

The average time that children spend playing sports is 5 hours and 16 minutes per week, but they desire to spend as much as 6 hours and 2 minutes. This gap is greater than that of any other activity, such as studying at “juku” (cram schools) or generally just taking lessons indoors.

Weekly Activity	Actual Time	Desired Time
Studying at “juku” (cram school)	4h44min	4h12min
Taking lessons indoors	2h35min	3h1min
Playing sports	5h16min	6h2min

Kids Want to Excel at Some Type of Sport

According to data generated by a Hakuhodo project designed to identify new children's markets, 59.8% of children wish to acquire a skill in some kind of sport for the sake of their future development. This percentage is higher than learning to cook (56.8%), using a PC (54.0%), studying English (47.3%) or anything else. Moreover, 89.5% of children would like to develop some special skill over and above their peers, of which 70.7% expect to work especially hard to acquire such skills.