2.Origin and history

I think that this report will explain the history of soft tennis.

It was presupposed that tennis was mainly born by the religious event of Egypt, and it was performed as indoor athletics at first. Then, tennis spread all over the world including the Roman Empire.  Lawn tennis was produced in Britain late in the 1800s. Lawn tennis was a sport for an upper class. Lawn tennis has been crossed to Meiji Era in Japan. Since the value of yen was a very low time then, it was difficult to buy the ball of hard tennis. Since it had to import from the United States or Britain whenever it lost the tennis ball or exhausted, only the person of the upper class who can pay the expense was able to play tennis. Gendo Tsuboi who is a father of a Japanese athletic club having thought around 1884 was playing tennis with the rubber ball of the German import. It is said that this was obtained comparatively freely at one sixth of prices compared with the hard ball.

Soft tennis spread because the teachers to whom it is the Tokyo higher normal school (next University of Tsukuba) which mainly performs gymnastics in Tokyo, and rubber ball tennis came out of fashion and a school spread in each school. And Mr. Tsuboi made the Japanese contractor make a rubber ball in 1890.

Although soft tennis began to be in fashion from these days, it was a form of a back's members of parallel at first. Since the rally was important, soft tennis was performed for the pleasure which carries out a rally. It is said that the rally might say that no less than 100 balls continued since the victory or defeat of the game were not so important. It is said that the tennis player of those days has often connected out with no bound. When ten year has passed from this, the player who does a volley and a smash began to appear. The game of soft tennis comes to think victory or defeat as important, and the confrontation game between schools also came to be held briskly.

The player of soft tennis won the silver medal in tennis for the first time in Japan in the Olympic Games then. Why could the soft tennis player leave results like this at the Olympic Games then? The player of this Europe of those days hardly used a drive ball.

I hear that the foreign player was bewildered very much by the drive ball which it lets out from a soft tennis player's western grip.

Reference: ｗｉｋｉｐｅｄｉａ, "ソフトテニスの歴史" http://www.mutayama.kurume.ed.jp/bukatu/tenis-boy/rekisi.htm