Yale University EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale CEAS Occasional Publication Series Council on East Asian Studies 2007 This Sporting Life: Sports and Body Culture in Modern Japan William W. Kelly Yale University Atsuo Sugimoto Kyoto University Follow this and additional works at: http://elischolar.library.yale.edu/ceas_publication_series Part of the Asian History Commons, Asian Studies Commons, Cultural History Commons, Japanese Studies Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, and the Sports Studies Commons Recommended Citation Kelly, William W. and Sugimoto, Atsuo, "This Sporting Life: Sports and Body Culture in Modern Japan" (2007). CEAS Occasional Publication Series. Book 1. http://elischolar.library.yale.edu/ceas_publication_series/1 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Council on East Asian Studies at EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. It has been accepted for inclusion in CEAS Occasional Publication Series by an authorized administrator of EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This Sporting Life Sports and Body Culture in Modern Japan j u % g b Edited by William W. KELLY With SUGIMOTO Atsuo YALE CEAS OCCASIONAL PUBLICATIONS VOLUME 1 This Sporting Life Sports and Body Culture in Modern Japan yale ceas occasional publications volume 1 © 2007 Council on East Asian Studies, Yale University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permis- sion. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. This Sporting Life Sports and Body Culture in Modern Japan Edited by William W. KELLY With SUGIMOTO Atsuo Council on East Asian Studies Yale University New Haven, Connecticut 2007 Table of Contents Foreword vii Introduction: Sports and Sports Studies in Japan 1 William W. KELLY PART ONE Modern Themes 1 Targeting Modernity: Archery and the Modernization of Japan 27 Allen GUTTMANN 2 Bushidō and the Modernization of Japanese Sports 39 KIKU Kōichi 3 Synchronizing Body States: Training the Body at School and Performing the Body in the City 55 SHIMIZU Satoshi 4 From Popular Performance to National Sport: The Nationalization of Sumo 67 R. Kenji TIERNEY 5 Agitation and Restraint: The Dialectic of Emotion in Sports Spectatorship 91 SUGIMOTO Atsuo 6 The Body Politic in the International Arena: Professional Wrestling in Japan 107 Lee Austin THOMPSON 7 The 1998 Nagano Olympics: Japaneseness and Globalism in the Opening Ceremonies 125 YAMASHITA Takayuki v PART TWO Contemporary Cases 8 Moving Mountains: Order and Change in a Sports World 145 Wolfram MANZENREITER 9 Disciplining the Body in a Japanese Fitness Club 167 Laura SPIELVOGEL 10 The Body as Culture: The Case of the Sumo Wrestler 193 WHANG Soon Hee 11 Gender Lessons on the Fields of Contemporary Japan: The Female Athlete in Coaching Discourses 211 Elise Marie EDWARDS 12 The J.League, Japanese Society, and Association Football 229 John HORNE 13 Men at Work or Boys of Summer? The Workplaces of Professional Baseball in Contemporary Japan 247 William W. KELLY 14 The Conviviality of Cheering: An Ethnography of Fan Clubs in Professional Baseball 263 TAKAHASHI Hidesato Contributors to the Volume 281 vi Foreword This volume began over ten years ago with a conversation that I had with Professor Kiku Kōichi, then of Nara Women’s University, when I first began to research Japa- nese baseball. It was he who so kindly introduced me to the scholars and scholar- ship of Japan sport studies and thus began a fruitful, continuing association. I owe a very special debt to Professor Atsuo Sugimoto of Kyoto Univer- sity of Education, who joined me in organizing an international conference on “Sport and Body Culture in Modern Japan” at Yale University on the weekend of March 31-April 2, 2000. Through his energy and his experience, we were able to bring together scholars from Japan, North America, and Europe with active research interests in the topic of the conference. Our aims were to foster closer dialogue between Japanese and foreign scholars of sport in Japan and to broad- en the appreciation of sport’s formative role in contemporary Japan. In this, it was remarkably successful, and much of the credit goes to Professor Sugimoto, who has assisted me with the editing of this volume. The conference itself and the expenses of preparing this volume for publica- tion have been generously borne by Yale’s Council on East Asian Studies and its Sumitomo Japan Research Fund. I thank my Japan colleagues at Yale for many years of support and for their constant encouragement and good humor, and Abbey Newman of the Council for her keen design eye and helpful suggestions. Professor Susan Brownell read a full version of the manuscript and offered some astute commentary about the contributions and their connections to one an- other that has been most helpful in the final product. I also am indebted to Dr. Yuka Suzuki, who assisted me mightily in revising translations of Japanese drafts, and to Allison Alexy, who helped me prepare the volume. Formatting and design of the volume was done at Yale’s Reprographics & Imaging Services, and I particularly thank graphic designer Lynne Reichentahl for shepherding the project through to publication. We are honored that the volume has been chosen to inaugurate a new publi- cations series by the Council on East Asian Studies that will make available such international scholarly collaborations as ours. Professor Mimi Yiengpruksawan, long-serving (and long-suffering) chair of the Council, has been a cheerleader of this project from the start. For Japanese personal names, we follow the Japanese convention of “Family Name First Name.” vii Introduction Sports and Sport Studies in Japan William W. Kelly The organized sports of contemporary life are high public drama and grinding anonymous routine. They are imbued with deep emotion, constant mental calcu- lation, and enormous physical exertion. Sports are watched and played throughout the world with passion and partisanship. They are pursued for profit, patriotism, and personal compulsiveness. They are spontaneous moments of pure action and visceral performance, but they are always embedded in long chains of stories and statistics. And sports are everywhere implicated in structures of power, both per- sonal and collective—the variable powers of an athlete to compel her body with her spirit, of an owner to command a team with his financial clout, of fans to will a victory with their cheers. For any scholar of modern life, they offer splendid conjunctures of embodied actions and institutional forces. This is as true in Japan as in the West. Despite prevalent images of a nation resolutely and exclusively at work, modern Japan has also been a nation at play. And within the worlds of leisure, recreation, and entertainment, sports have loomed large throughout the twentieth century. The broad contemporary sport- ing landscape includes indigenous sports that have been significantly reshaped from premodern practices of village and temple rituals (like sumo wrestling and field day events), from aristocratic pursuits (such as archery), and from mar- tial training (like kendo). Equally prominent in contemporary Japan are sports that have been introduced from the West, sometimes in their original form and sometimes strikingly domesticated and reformed (like bicycle racing, moun- taineering, baseball, and soccer). Sports have long been embedded in community life, the educational sys- tem, the mass media, the corporate structures, and the nationalist sentiments of modern Japan. For over a century, they have been a crucial intersection of school pedagogy, corporate aims, media constructions, gender relations, and patriotic feelings. The chapters in this book highlight a wide range of sports, and together, they offer a significant window on to the ways that the sporting life animates the institutions of modern Japan. The Japanese sportscape National sportscapes can be roughly divided into those few countries in which a number of spectator sports vie more or less equally for attention and pres- William W. KELLY tige and those more numerous countries where a single dominant spectator sport overshadows others of more limited attraction. The United States is an example of the former type, as baseball, basketball, and football rival one an- other as “center sports” for time and resources. Japan is one of the many more numerous nations that have a single dominant sport and a penumbra of sec- ondary sports. For much of the world, this center sport is soccer; occasionally it is cricket (as in South Asia and some Caribbean nations), even more rarely, ice hockey (for Canada). For Japan, like several non-cricket Caribbean nations, the center sport has been baseball for the last sixty years, played at the youth level as Little League and secondary school teams, in universities and in semi-pro industrial leagues, in the Japanese professional leagues, and as adult recreation across the country. In participation, spectatorship, and media attention, then, base- ball has dominated the sportscape as soccer dominates England and Brazil and cricket dominates India. Nonetheless, we must immediately