The Promises and Possibilities of the Pitch: 1990S Ladies League Soccer Players As Fin-De-Siècle Modern Girls
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Butler University Digital Commons @ Butler University Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS College of Liberal Arts & Sciences 2013 The Promises and Possibilities of the Pitch: 1990s Ladies League Soccer Players as Fin-de-Siècle Modern Girls Elise M. Edwards Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/facsch_papers Recommended Citation Edwards, Elise M., "The Promises and Possibilities of the Pitch: 1990s Ladies League Soccer Players as Fin-de-Siècle Modern Girls" Modern Girls on the Go: Gender, Mobility, and Labor in Japan / (2013): 149-165. Available at https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/facsch_papers/1008 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Digital Commons @ Butler University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Butler University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Chapter Eight THE PROMISES AND POSSIBILITIES OF THE PITCH 1990s Ladies League Soccer Players as Fin-de-Siècle Modern Girls Elise Edwards When the Japanese women’s national soccer team, Nadeshiko Japan, bested the greatly favored U.S. team in the World Cup Final on July 17, 2011, in Frankfurt, Germany, it was one of several “firsts” achieved by the skillful and inspiring team. It was the first time Japan had beaten the Americans in twenty-six meet- ings stretching back over two decades. Even more historically significant, how- ever, was that this World Cup Championship was the first for an Asian soccer team, women’s or men’s. The level of interest in the match could be gauged by a new Twitter record set by fans within seconds of Kumagai Saki’s decisive final kick in the penalty shoot-out—a shot heard around the world in the wee hours of the morning in Tokyo. A flurry of7 ,196 tweets per second easily over- whelmed the previous Twitter record.1 Even months after the Japanese women’s historic victory, “Nadeshiko Fever” showed few signs of subsiding. The semi-professional Nadeshiko League—the newest incarnation of what had been dubbed the “L-League” (short for “L adies’ League”) for more than a decade and no more financially secure than its prede- cessor—experienced a dramatic new wave of interest and record-setting match attendances. A new average League match attendance of over 6,500 fans was more than nine times the figure before the World Cup. With well over 20,000 fans filling the stands at games in which national team players appeared, earlier Copyright © 2013. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. Press. All © 2013. Stanford University Copyright records were quickly surpassed and easily rivaled the numbers at men’s J-League (Japan League) contests. “Nadeshiko Japan” was chosen as the top media buzz- word of 2011, as well as the second most important domestic news event, just Freedman, A., Miller, L., & Yano, C. R. (Eds.). (2013). Modern girls on the go : gender, mobility, and labor in japan. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from butler on 2018-12-05 07:33:54. 150 ELISE EDWARDS behind the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, and the subsequent tsunami and nuclear meltdown (Jiyū kokuminsha 2011; Daily Yomiuri 2011a).2 For most of the players, there was a dramatic shift from obscurity to spot- light, with adulatory attention coming from journalists, advertising agents, and even Japan’s prime minister, Naoto Kan. Many of the players—the majority of them veritable unknowns before the quarter-final round of the World Cup three weeks prior—were enthusiastically courted by companies and advertisers to serve as the spokespeople and public faces for a range of products. Several players signed lucrative sponsorship deals, while others pursued second careers as pop stars; the most prominent few appeared regularly on nightly variety shows. Just weeks after the final penalty shot whizzed by the U.S. team’s formi- dable goalkeeper, it was widely reported that the economic vortex set spinning by the team’s success had produced a one trillion yen ($13 billion) windfall, a much-needed emotional and financial boost for Japan’s beleaguered economy (Brasor and Tsubuku 2011). The Nadeshiko team’s masterful play throughout the2011 World Cup, with their signature quick passing and impeccable technique, earned them compari- sons to Lionel Messi’s FC Barcelona squad of the men’s game, touted by many as the best soccer team ever assembled (Times of India 2011). Their consum- mate skill and accolades made it difficult to remember that women’s soccer participation rates had paled in comparison to those in rival countries, and that before the Nadeshiko team’s fourth-place finish at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the sport and its players existed for several decades in almost total obscurity.3 In the span of the few weeks of the 2011 World Cup tournament, Nadeshiko Japan’s players went from relative unknowns to their country’s most celebrated and adored stars; obscurity made way for fame and visibility. Suddenly an image of Japanese femininity—confident, thickly muscled, often short-haired, and undeniably aggressive—overwhelmed the airwaves, intro- ducing the world and the vast majority of Japanese citizens as well to a form of Japanese womanhood previously unseen, let alone imagined. Owing to the relative invisibility of women’s soccer until recently, many journalists both within and outside of Japan treated the Nadeshiko team’s World Cup win as more of a Cinderella story than was warranted, and w omen’s soccer as an anomaly that reflected little understanding of the history of Copyright © 2013. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. Press. All © 2013. Stanford University Copyright women’s soccer, or of women’s sports more generally. While Nadeshiko Japan’s recent successes can be traced to an array of factors, the most significant was the decision by a handful of companies beginning in the late 1980s to aggres- Freedman, A., Miller, L., & Yano, C. R. (Eds.). (2013). Modern girls on the go : gender, mobility, and labor in japan. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from butler on 2018-12-05 07:33:54. LADIES LEAGUE SOCCER PLAYERS 151 sively sponsor women’s soccer teams and to provide the country’s most prom- ising players with employment and places to train. What has become one of the most powerful soccer development systems in the world for women began with the coming together of unlikely “teammates”: athletic young women and industry-leading corporations. The story of the rise of women’s soccer engages directly with issues of mobility, modernity, gender, and labor in contemporary Japanese society, and its telling reveals the multiple axes upon which these ana- lytic frames intersect and co-constitute each other. In this chapter, I describe how female soccer players and the businessmen who sponsored them were captivated and inspired by soccer for reasons that, on the surface, often looked dissimilar, but that at their core were very much alike. Both players and corporate managers involved with women’s teams con- ceptualized soccer as a vehicle for mobility—whether in one’s personal life or in corporate markets—and, in turn, imagined that mobility to be intimately tied to ideas of a reconfigured and more globally focused modern Japan and a new vision of ideal workers, as well as atypical forms of femininity. For both the players and their sponsors, mobility was directly and causally linked with practices and “ways of being” construed as “modern,” which I use here in the spirit of Bruno Latour to designate “a new regime, an acceleration, a rupture, a revolution in time” (1993: 10).4 As Japan stands in the afterglow of the women’s national team’s unforget- table victory, and as we revisit some of the history leading up to that achieve- ment in the stories of some of its earliest teams, we can trace the way that women soccer players came to embody modern notions of change salient in recessionary Japan, and we can see the effects of this arbitrary yet historically significant linkage. Like the modern girls of the 1920s and 1930s who preceded them, Japanese female soccer players were linked—because of their engagement with particu- lar physical practices and forms of presentation—with a broad range of ideas and ideals that stretched far beyond the realities or possibilities of their lives. While image and reality often differed and the progressive experiences afforded by soccer were often as short-lived as the corporate sponsorships, there was a period of time in post-bubble-era Japan when women’s soccer held a sig- nificance that dramatically changed the environment of women’s sports in the Copyright © 2013. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. Press. All © 2013. Stanford University Copyright country and planted the seeds for further successes that have reshaped domes- tic and international perceptions of Japanese women in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. Freedman, A., Miller, L., & Yano, C. R. (Eds.). (2013). Modern girls on the go : gender, mobility, and labor in japan. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from butler on 2018-12-05 07:33:54. 152 ELISE EDWARDS In the 1990s, the image of the L-Leaguer, as constituted by L-League of- ficials, company executives, and the players themselves, represented personal dreams, social concerns, and corporate visions that forged new relationships between modernity, mobility, labor, and gender. L-Leaguers were women on the move—moving not only across soccer fields but also into new spaces of labor and leisure not typically thought of as traditional female domains. For the players, this movement was often personally liberating and life-changing; for companies, it symbolized visions of progress and greater gender equality, and therein, new image-making possibilities.