Wolfram Manzenreiter

An introduction to the sociology of sports mega-events†

Acknowledgements. 1. An introduction to the sociology of sports mega-events: John Horne (University of Edinburgh, UK) and Wolfram Manzenreiter (University of Vienna, Austria). Part 1: Sports mega-events, modernity and capitalist economies. 2. Mega-events and modernity revisited: Maurice Roche (University of Sheffield, UK). 3. The Economic Impact of Major Sport Events: Chris Gratton, Simon Shibli, and Richard Coleman (Sport Industry Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University, UK). 4. Urban entrepreneurship, corporate interests and sports mega-events: C. Michael Hall (University of Otago, New Zealand). Part 2: The Glocal Politics of Sports Mega-events. 5. Underestimated costs and overestimated benefits? Comparing the outcomes of sports mega-events in Canada and Japan: David Whitson (University of Alberta, at Edmonton, Canada) and John Horne (University of Edinburgh). 6. Modernizing China in the Olympic spotlight: Chinas national identity and the 2008 Beijing Olympiad: Xin Xu (Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan). 7. The 2010 Football World Cup as a political construct: the challenge of making good on an African promise: Scarlett Cornelissen (University of Stellenbosch, South Africa) and Kamilla Swart (Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town, South Africa). Part 3: Power, spectacle and the city. 8. UEFA Euro 2004 Portugal: The social construction of a sports mega- event and spectacle: Salome Marivoet (University of Coimbra, Portugal). 9. Sports spectacles, uniformities and the search for identity in late modern Japan: Wolfram Manzenreiter (Vienna University). 10. Deep play: Sports mega-events and urban social conditions in the U.S.A: Kimberly Schimmel (Kent State University, U.S.A.). 11. Olympic Urbanism and Olympic Villages: Planning strategies in olympic host cities, London 1908 - London 2012: Francesc Munoz (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain). Notes on contributors. Index.

Accounting for mega-events - forecast and actual impacts of the 2002 Football World Cup Finals on the host countries Japan/Korea.

The 2002 FIFA World Cup Korea/Japan was the first football World Cup Finals ever to take place in Asia and be co-hosted by two countries. Drawing on data provided by the national and local organizing committees, football’s world governing institution, local and international media accounts and first-hand observations made before, during and after the event, the article discusses the contrast between discourses that forecast and described the actual impacts of the 2002 World Cup on its host societies. In particular three aspects are discussed: the specific regional political economy of the 2002 World Cup; the role of sports mega-events in identity construction and promotion; and how such events are both constituted by and constitutive of globalization. While a largely sceptical view of the economic impact informs our article, our conclusion explains the gap between forecast and actual impacts as indicative of the power struggle for determining the meaning of mega-events between different agents.

The Beijing Games in the Western Imagination of China: The Weak Power of Soft Power

Mega events focus the world’s attention on a particular place and a nation and the success thereof, in either hosting or performing well in the event. Throughout the world, expectations were running high that China would make use of hosting the Beijing Games to promote a positive image to the world. This article takes a critical look at the discourse on the Beijing Games as a public diplomacy tool. Empirical data from global opinion polls are analyzed to demonstrate the weak impact of even the world’s largest sport mega event on altering global perceptions. Two main propositions will be advanced: First, expectations that a sports event can improve the image of a country are overrated; second, having been locked in the Olympic “double-bind,” a system of contradictory messages to which the host is simultaneously obliged, China had no chance in the contest for meaning-making which the Western media won hands down.

Playing the Post‐Fordist Game in/to the Far East: The Footballisation of China, Japan and South Korea

This essay explores the global dimensions, national aspirations, and local preconditions of the rise of football in China, Japan and Korea. The burgeoning popularity of football in the world’s most vital growth region (in terms of production and consumption power) indicates both the successful integration of the ‘football periphery’ into global commodity markets, as well as changing relations of consumption in areas where football previously was close to non‐existent. Local conditions are deeply tainted by the traditional arrangement of sport and entertainment, the way these are linked to local identity and inter‐city competition. While national ambitions seem to be more to the front throughout East Asia, football as national project stands out in modernizing China and Korea.

Japanese football and world sports: raising the global game in a local setting

Professional football in Japan, as elsewhere, has increasingly become linked to agents, structures, and processes of global capitalism. However, football is as much about culture as it is about business. Placing Japanese football into the context of world sports seems to be a promising endeavour to get fresh insight into the dialectics of the global and the local in transnational cultural flows and the processes underlying the globalization of sports. By analysing the institutional arrangements, vested interests, and power relationships of parties involved in the production, practice, and consumption of ‘the people’s game’ in Japan, this study explores a recent showcase for the globalization of sports. It also addresses the question of whether the culture of sports may be considered a political agent that affects political choices, for example in regional development planning, local economic policy, or public health policy. As popular interests and domestic politics have shaped and continue to shape football in Japan, it is argued that globalization cannot be regarded as a commercially driven process aiming at the creation of a global market for products whose popular consumption leads to the standardization of cultures that were once distinctive.

Public Policy, Sports Investments and Regional Development Initiatives in Japan

Japan is the world’s greatest repository of wealth, its ‘high savings and under-consumption’ has supported ‘the US’s low-savings, high-debt regime’ for the past decade and more (McCormack, 2002: 5). Yet, since the beginning of the 1990s, the Japanese economy has been stuck in the doldrums. A loose monetary policy, delayed reorientation of the production and service sectors, and over-generous spending by central government has generated a heavy burden on Japanese corporations, small and medium-sized businesses, municipalities and individuals throughout the country. Far from being evenly balanced, the distributional patterns of the crisis are strongly bound to long-established regional disparities of productivity and prosperity. Towns, cities and rural districts of the Northeast, the South and other localities of the Japanese peripheries that always struggled to keep pace with the move towards an information- and services-based, post-Fordist, society have continued to fall behind the metropolitan areas and industrial zones of Central Honshū. Gradual industrial decline and steady population migration into the over-crowded capital and major cities have inflicted severe repercussions on the vitality of regions confronted with a rapidly aging population and a diminishing income tax base. Within this scenario, sport and leisure have been recently assigned special importance to counterbalance the widening gap between the centre and peripheries in Japan.

Football diplomacy, post-colonialism and Japan's quest for normal state status

The peripheral status of Asian football in the worlds global order is rooted in the historical experience of military, political and economic dominance of the West. Since football reached the Far East at a time when European colonialism was giving way to growing US American influence in the region, it never acquired significant meaning in the relationship between the West and the East. However, within the post-colonial world of the North Pacific, football has become a powerful cultural resource for the purpose of representation over the past decades. This essay examines the way in which football has been appropriated by Japan, as well as by its former colonies Korea and China, to express and negotiate ideas of identity, power, status and global norms in international relations. Particular attention will be given to the Japan/Korea World Cup 2002 and other regional tournaments, the emerging media discourses, and new political formations initiated by parliamentarians and bureaucrats from the North Pacific.

Football in the reconstruction of the gender order in Japan

This essay addresses the conjunctions of football, masculinity and gender relations in Japanese society. Football has been identified as a major domain of masculinity in modern societies. However, in Japan, where football has emerged as a major cultural force only over the past one or two decades, women are much more present in the football stadia than in the traditional core cultures of football support. Despite the apparent de‐gendering of football, in some subcultures football has been rebuilt as part of the male world. By looking at the way football is packaged, played and supported in Japan, I will show how both a crisis of hegemonic masculinity and the commodification of the game have changed the relations between football and gender in a specific cultural context.

Sport spectacles, uniformities and the search for identity in late modern Japan.

The public display of team colours as an expression of loyalty has become a characteristic trait of sport fandom all over the world. Replica shirts, which had been initially conceived of (and marketed) as kids’ stuff, spilled over from the football pitch into the grandstands in the early 1980s. A decade later, they were turning into an ‘essential part of the lingua franca of football supporters’ (Fawbert, 2004:134). Since the spectacularization of sport seems to have originated in North American sport culture (Kutcher, 1983), it is hardly surprising that face painting, stylish masquerades and the variegated prop stock of a burgeoning sport paraphernalia industry have also changed the way football is followed and supported at international tournaments around the world since the United States hosted the World Cup in 1994. When Japan and Korea co-hosted football’s mega-event in 2002, spectators in the stadia as well as television audiences worldwide could observe entire grandstands soaked in blue and red, the colours of the respective hosts’ national teams. Samba drums and marching bands in Japanese stadia, bare-chested youngsters intoning the Korean supporters song based on the melody of ‘Go West’, and carefully planned and rehearsed presentations from the stands in the fashion of Italian ultras, suggested to the observer the successful appropriation, or even domestication, of a transnational football fan culture. The ‘Blue Heaven’, as one creative genius from Ultra Nippon, the core organization of fans of the national team, named the stadia filled with Japan’s supporters, and perhaps, even more, the ‘Sea of Red’ that flooded the streets of most major South Korean cities, remained in the public memory as two lasting impressions of the ‘Hollywood World Cup’ (Hirose, 2002). The ubiquitous and unconstrained mass display of the hinomaru, Japan’s long-time contested national flag, and the taegeukgi, Korea’s ‘national flag of emotion’ (Whang, 2004:158) in stadia and streets, on bodies and buildings were spectacular aspects, albeit more visible than any others, that differentiated the 2002 World Cup from previous sports mega-events hosted in these countries.

Monitoring Health and the Body: Anthropometry, Lifestyle Risks, and the Japanese Obesity Crisis

The 2008 introduction of the special health checkup (tokutei kenkō shinsa) signaled a major shift in Japan’s health policy away from a high-risk approach toward a population approach based on the epidemiological probability of contracting a disease. This article places the government’s concern with mapping obesity within its longstanding interest in surveying the national physique and sociological debates on risk in late modernity. The empirical case study outlines the making of the obesity crisis, its main actors, and their interests. Far from being an objective risk, obesity emerges as a social construct and a major apparatus of neoliberal politics through which individuals are encouraged to engage in self-regulation.