English Speaking Broadcasters in Japan

- I am wondering how many games are broadcast in English and if there is a demand for English speaking broadcasters for games.

There hasn't been any games broadcaste in English to my knowledge since Yomiuri broadcast 12-15 games a year from 1982 to 1992.

Though switching to an English demand, I vouch there isn't no interest in English language broadcasts. You have to remember that the NPB website is completely in Japanese and none of the teams have any demand either for an English language website. Seeing as there isn't a demand to reach out to English speaking fans, I doubt there's any demand for English speaking broadcasters.

I remember some broadcasts on NTV (Yomiuri's channel) with some annoying English speaking DJ (Chris Pepler?) back in the 1990s. He did all kinds of sound effects and didn't really call the game. It was more of an annoyance than anything else, and I quickly switched to the Japanese language audio channel every time.

Because NPB doesn't do anything in English, I've been doing English language broadcasts over the Internet for the past few years. In fact, I'll be doing doing one tonight. I'm not trained as a broadcaster (I'm a computer programmer) and I can't stand the sound of my voice - but it looks like people take what they can get.

As for demand, one could argue that this site has one of the larger English fan bases around. When I do my broadcasts, I get from 2-5 people tuning in live and 20-30 people download the MP3 audio of the game during the first week. As Books-san says, the demand isn't zero, but it's not enough to justify paying somebody to do it either. (I do it as a hobby and service to the limited Pro Yakyu community I serve.)

The avenue you probably want to pursue is contacting radio stations in Japan and present your resume as a DJ, then trying to work your way into the system from there. There's a slim chance that contacting the sports networks like JSports, GAORA, or SkyA might work, but they tend to broadcast feeds from other providers rather than produce their own.

I wouldn't say that there's no chance of getting something going, as I'm sure that there are a number of forward thinking executives willing to try something despite what it looks like against the bottom line. But I don't know of any such contacts. All I can say is gambatte.