William W. Kelly

Handbook of Japanese popular culture

Introduction by Richard Gid Powers Lifestyles and Popular Culture in Urban Japan by Theodore C. Bestor Popular Architecture by Renato A. Pirotta Japanese New Religions by H. Byron Earhart Popular Performing Arts: Manzai and Rakudo by Muneo Jay Yoshikawa Popular Film by Keiko I. McDonald Japanese Television by Bruce Stronach Sports by William R. May Popular Music by Linda Fujie Japanese Comics by John A. Lent Science Fiction by Elizabeth Anne Hull and Mark Siegel Japanese Mystery Literature by Kazuo Yoshida Japanese Popular Culture Reconsidered by Hidetoshi Kato Bibliography (Japanese Titles in Bibliography are also written in Japanese characters) Index

Samurai Baseball: The Vicissitudes of a National Sporting Style

The conventional view of Japans national pastime, baseball, is that it is a sport misshapen from an original exuberant American game by a Japanese national propensity to slavish loyalty and uncritical adherence to form. This substantially misrepresents the trajectory of baseball in Japan by substituting an illusory appeal to national character stereotypes for a serious historical sociology of sport. Abe and Mangan, among others, have already uncovered the complex influences of British athleticism and sportsmanship on early Japanese sport philosophies. This article depicts the subsequent history of Japanese baseball as a complex interplay of nationalized sporting style, educational pedagogy, urban entertainment, media creation, local identity and the realities of sports practices.

Asia pride, China fear, Tokyo anxiety: Japan looks back at Beijing 2008 and forward to London 2012 and Tokyo 2016.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) bidding process has become a long, expensive, bureaucratically complex process among rival cities. However rather than tracing the narrative of competition for the 2016 Summer Games among the four candidate cities – Tokyo, Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, and Madrid, I emphasize here the embeddedness of the Tokyo 2016 bid in East Asian regional politics and in the more subtle if equally contentious jockeying for global city pre-eminence. There was a contentious debate within Japan about the wisdom of Tokyos bid, which sharply divided the political leadership and the opinion of its citizens. In 1964, Tokyos hosting of the Games consolidated its place as the single national political, economic and media capital of the country, reducing Osaka to second-city status. To the controversial Tokyo governor and his supporters, the 2016 bid had much less to do with domestic prominence and much more about international prestige, as an effort to preserve Tokyos status as a global city, a view that was only reinforced by the Beijing Games and by the upcoming 2012 Games in London, Tokyos rival. If the 1964 Games were Japans national games, properly held in its capital, I argue that the 2016 Games were to be Tokyos mega-event, still the national capital but looking beyond to re-assert its status as one of the worlds truly global cities.

Adversity, acceptance, and accomplishment: female athletes in Japan's modern sportsworld

In Japan as elsewhere, sport is strongly coded as a masculine field. Nonetheless, women have long played sports at elite and popular levels despite considerable, continuing disadvantages in material resources, media attention and ideological support. I propose four reasons for the surprising profile of Japanese sporting women over the past century. Japan has long placed importance on its success in the Olympic Games; as the Games were opened up to female events, national ambition motivated Japan to improve opportunities for elite female athletes and celebrate their success. A second factor is extensive corporate sponsorship of a range of individual and team sports at elite levels for both male and female employees, which opened up opportunities to women for intensive training and national and even international participation. Moreover, sporting accomplishment more generally in Japan has foregrounded trained effort and focused on commitment rather than ‘natural’ ability or brute strength. And mainstream notions of Japanese personhood are sociocentric, not individuated. Sociality is as much a norm of masculine conduct as of feminine conduct, and gender dichotomies are more relational than absolute. Together, these factors offer a compelling rationale for female sporting performance in Japans modern century and some optimism for further gains in the future.

Kōshien Stadium: performing national virtues and regional rivalries in a ‘theatre of sport’

How do sports make memories for modern societies, and what memories do sports make? This article analyzes the most resonant sports place in all of Japan, Kōshien Stadium, a massive ivy-walled baseball field on the western edge of Osaka, Japans second city. Kōshiens special place in the national sportscape comes from its unique double role. It is both the site of the annual summer national high school baseball tournament, the most popular amateur sports event in Japan, and it is the home ground of a passionately-followed professional team, the Hanshin Tigers, whose longstanding rivalry with the Tokyo-based Yomiuri Giants, has been a vehicle and an idiom of the key regional rivalry in modern Japan. For over 80 years, to much of the Japanese population, the single word, ‘Kōshien’, has stood for the poignant though flawed display of idealized virtues by the nations male adolescents and for the noble challenges but inevitable failure of the regions to contest the dominant power of the national center.

East Asian Olympics, Beijing 2008, and the globalisation of sport

The IOC bidding process has become a long, expensive, bureaucratically complex process among competing cities. However rather than tracing this ongoing narrative among what is, in 2009, four anointed candidate cities – Tokyo, Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, and Madrid, I emphasise here the embeddedness of the Tokyo 2016 bid in East Asian regional politics and in the more subtle if equally contentious jockeying for global city pre-eminence. There is a contentious debate within Japan about the wisdom of Tokyos bid, which sharply divides the political leadership and citizen opinion. In 1964, Tokyos hosting of the Games consolidated its place as the single national political, economic, and media capital of the country, reducing Osaka to second-city status. Now, to the controversial Tokyo governor and his supporters, the 2016 bid has much less to do with domestic prominence and much more about international prestige, as an effort to preserve Tokyos status as a global city, a view that was only reinforced by the Beijing Games and by the upcoming 2012 Games in London, Tokyos rival. If the 1964 Games were Japans national games, properly held in its capital, I argue that the 2016 Games would be Tokyos mega-event, still the national capital but looking beyond to re-assert its status as one of the worlds truly global cities.

Japan's Embrace of Soccer: Mutable Ethnic Players and Flexible Soccer Citizenship in the New East Asian Sports Order

Baseball and sumo were Japans twentieth-century centre sports, but soccer is likely to replace them in the new century. This article outlines several reasons for Japans embrace of the sport, focusing on how ethnicity and nationality are expressed and confirmed in the world of soccer. It proposes that the Japanese sports world has moved through three eras of ‘sports citizenship’ over the last century. The first four decades of the twentieth century constituted an era of ‘imperial athletes’, a coercively inclusive and hierarchical order of belonging as ‘athletes of Greater Japan’. The post-World War II decades reconfigured sports citizenship around ethnic alterity, establishing a cultural-essentialist binary between Japanese ‘athletes’ and ‘foreign athletes’. What we see now, in and through soccer, is an emerging third era of mobile athletes, mutable ethnicity and flexible sports citizenship, determined in the case of soccer by supra-governmental FIFA eligibility standards and sports federation rules rather than by nation-state laws. Soccer is demonstrating a broader sense of national belonging in and for twenty-first-century Japan than was the case with the more rigid distinctions that characterised the twentieth-century centre sports of baseball and soccer, and this has both domestic and regional consequences.

The ubiquitous baseball cap: Identity, style, and comfort in late modern times:

The baseball cap completes the T-shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers as the common kit of late modern life, the recent decades when consumption, as acquisition, display, and deployment, has become preeminent in asserting self-identity and negotiating social placement. This essay traces the codification and commercialization of the baseball cap within that sport and its adoption by other sports and spectators. It argues that for fans the cap within the stadium is more than passive allegiance but rather a material performative. The essay then follows the cap into everyday life, where it has become the dominant headwear because its material qualities can enable affiliation, fashion, and comfort. Although the baseball cap is ubiquitous at the present moment, its frequency is variable, as evidenced by timed counts in public spaces in the three baseball nations of United States, Japan, and Cuba. The article concludes by suggesting some factors that may explain the cap’s transgressive motility across sport, work and everyday life, across fashion codes, and across gender and class divides.

Bodies in Motion: An Epilogue

The bodies in motion in this special set of articles are those of athletes in stadiums, ballet dancers on stage, and chefs in restaurant kitchens. The articles are first concerned with how such bodies are molded through strenuous and structured training to achieve expert and elite levels of performance and competition. Deploying such concepts as assemblage, situated learning, kata (‘patterned form’, as per Christensen), and contagion, they demonstrate just how contingent the shaping of elite performance is upon the specific material and institutional nexus through which a body moves and within which it must coordinate and compete with other bodies. At the same time, these sports and arts are all enmeshed in wider fields of discourse and transational flows of actors that can instigate consequential ethno-nationalist codings and other claims about the training regimes. The second major concern of the articles, then, is to reveal the variable circumstances by which such codings are either reinforced or diluted by transnational mobilities. Reflecting on these papers recalled an ethnographicmoment ofmy own in how bodies can be trained for elite performance. A number of years ago, while doing fieldwork with professional baseball teams in Kansai, I had the opportunity to spend a few days with a stable of sumo wrestlers. It was in March, the month that the second of the six annual two-week national sumo tournaments is held in Osaka. The 800 or so wrestlers who make up the professional sumoworld in Japan are organized into about 50 stables that combine dormitory and a training facility as a small closed sports space run by the stable master (an ex-wrestler) and his wife and a stable coach. These Tokyo-based stables decamp toOsaka for themonth of March, and a wealthy supporter had built a version of the home facilities in a working-class neighborhood in southeast Osaka for one of the larger stables. The 25 wrestlers in this stable were arranged in a strict hierarchy of age and accomplishment, and the youngest novices began their daily training (keiko) in the dirt practice ring at 5 a.m. More senior wrestlers came in at half-hour intervals, and by 7 a.m. the most senior wrestler, Musashimaru, who then held the highest rank of Grand Champion, had arrived. After warm-ups with his fellow stablemates, he spent about 30 minutes moving in and out of the ring, sparring with the more junior wrestlers, who had to drive him back and forth across the ring (butsukari-geiko), often being thrown to the hard-packed floor. The stable coach sat on a slightly elevated platform to the side, barking occasional criticisms and grunting a few suggestions, but the training and the learning primarily took place through the perpetual motion of bodies doing the three traditional exercises in between practice bouts with one another within the marked ring in various intensities of combat.

License to Play: The Ludic in Japanese Culture by Michal Daliot-Bul, and: Marathon Japan: Distance Racing and Civic Culture by Thomas R. H. Havens (review)

to drink is particularly noteworthy, as the impossibility of such actions has marked previous scholarly observations.” Christensen contended that the “confl ating of work and its ancillary after-work drinking with the conceptualization of a proper and dominant masculinity is becoming increasingly problematic. That is, in many ways, in an essay published two or three years before his book, Christensen tells us that much of his own discourse in Japan, Alcoholism, and Masculinity is outdated and in need of more nuance and complexity!