The Americanization of Daisuke Matsuzaka: a textual analysis of sports media discourse

Abstract

In 2007, the Boston Red Sox baseball team acquired a popular Japanese pitcher, Daisuke Matsuzaka, amid a flurry of media hype in sports news publications. A long-term documentation and textual analysis of newspaper articles, online postings, televised sports shows, web and magazine reports before and after the acquisition reveal how transnational ideologies were contextually managed to Americanize ‘Dice-K' into the world of US sports. Although there are numerous foreign players in professional baseball, this sport is regarded as a distinctly American institution infused with societal attitudes concerning, e.g., nativeness/non-nativeness (‘Why can't he speak English?'). Situated within a critical discourse analytical framework, this study draws especially on Van Dijk's (2001a) notion of how micro-level textual features of a particular genre entail broader contextualization to arrive at a credible explanation of how the discourse is likely to be interpreted by readers and listeners. The study's findings contribute to understandings of how the media functions to popularize cultural stereotypes that both depend on and influence ideological constructions of race and national identity.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank George Simon for supplying me with an abundance of Red Sox data. Two journal reviewers provided insightful and encouraging remarks on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

^1. It is beyond the scope of this paper to present an exposition of racism in the USA. The term ‘racism' itself has contested meanings inflected by, e.g., gender, class, and ethnic and national affiliations that defy definitive categorization. Germane to the current study is the notion put forth by critical race theorists in the field of applied linguistics who note that racist assumptions about a language minority member's proficiency level are frequently based on characteristics (skin colour, national origin) that may not be accorded prestige in a particular sociocultural milieu (Kubota and Lin 2006).

^2. The author acknowledges that there are numerous and oftentimes conflicting definitions of ‘nativeness/non-nativeness', not to mention ‘fluency'. From a postmodernist perspective, appropriate language use is only one tool in an L2 (second language) speaker's ‘identity kit' (Gee 1996) that includes non-linguistic behaviour as well. Additionally, how a non-native individual obtains access (or not) to a dominant (racial, ethnic, religious) group depends on myriad factors that evolve over time through different social interactions.

^3. There have been ongoing debates about the methodological and epistemological implications of using software programs for analysing qualitative data (see Humble 2012). The author found the code-and-retrieve and categorizing capabilities of NVivo to be beneficial for organizing the data. At the same time, however, I believe that theory building ultimately depends on the ‘researcher's agency' (Humble 2012, 125) in constructing a plausible interpretation of the situation being investigated.

^4. In critical qualitative reports such as the current study, the term ‘trustworthiness' is often used in lieu of ‘validity' or ‘reliability' – concepts typically associated with statistical analyses. ‘It [trustworthiness] is helpful because it signifies a different set of assumptions about research purposes … Critical researchers reject the notion of internal validity that is based on the assumption that a tangible, knowable, cause-and-effect reality exists and that research descriptions are able to portray that reality accurately' (Kincheloe and McLaren 1994, 151).

^5. As part of the colonialist discourse of ‘orientalism' (Said 1978), a distinction is made between the West presumed as being ordered and rational and the Orient as being irrational and mysterious.

^6.Hachimaki is the Japanese word for a strip of typically white cloth with kanji written on it worn around the head usually when one is engaged in some strenuous or challenging endeavour.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrea Simon-Maeda

Andrea Simon-Maeda is an Associate Professor in the Department of Early Childhood Education at Nagoya Keizai University where she teaches English as a foreign language. She has published articles in TESOL Quarterly and the International Multilingual Research Journal and served as a coordinator and editor for the Gender Awareness in Language Education Special Interest Group of the Japan Association for Language Teaching. Her last monograph is Being and Becoming a Speaker of Japanese: An Autoethnographic Account (Multilingual Matters, 2011), and her main research interests are bi/multilingualism and gender issues in societal and educational contexts.