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

Abstract

Baseball and sumo were Japan's twentieth-century centre sports, but soccer is likely to replace them in the new century. This article outlines several reasons for Japan's 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.

Keywords::

• Japan
• ethnicity
• soccer
• citizenship
• East Asia

Notes

^1.Manzenreiter and Horne, Football Goes East; Manzenreiter and Horne, “Playing the Post-Fordist Game.”

^2.Guthrie-Shimizu, Transpacific Field of Dreams.

^3.Kelly, “Is Baseball a Global Sport?”

^4.Weinberg, “‘The Future is Asia’?”

^5. Of course the multi-sport Asia Games have brought the regional nations together every four years since 1950, but they do not provide as regular and as elite a venue as these single-sport competitions. See Hong, Sport, Nationalism and Orientalism.

^6.Horne, “The J.League, Japanese Society”; Horne and Manzenreiter, “Football, Komyuniti and the Japanese.”

^7.Hirose, J-riigu no manejimento.

^8.Kietlinski, Japanese Women and Sport; Osawa, Social Security in Contemporary Japan.

^9.Askew, “The Debate on the ‘Japanese’ Race.”

^10.Tierney, “From Popular Performance to National Sport.”

^11.Guthrie-Shimizu, Transpacific Field of Dreams.

^12. This is not to argue that sports were not deeply nationalised for patriotic purposes during the 15-year Pacific War period; for example, Frost, Seeing Stars, 151–89. However, many sports continued to draw heavily from conquered Asian countries and from Americans of Japanese descent.

^13.Guttmann and Thompson, Japanese Sport, 124–25; Ok, The Transformation of Modern Korean Sport, 235–37.

^14.Thompson, “The Professional Wrestler Rikidōzan.”

^15.Fitts, Wally Yonamine.

^16. Ibid., 98–116.

^17.Kelly, “Blood and Guts.”

^18. Ibid., 101.

^19.Kelly, “Japanology Bashing.”

^20.Nihon Sumō Kyōkai, “Ozumō meikan.”

^21.Ballard, “Bobby Valentine's Super Terrific Happy Hour.”

^22. Exceptionally valuable is Takahashi and Horne, “Japanese Football Players.”

^23.Wikipedia, “J.League Players and Managers.”

^24.Chapman, “The Third Way and Beyond.”

^25.Shin, Sokoku to bokoku to futtobōru, 25–68.

^26. Ibid., 277–318.

^27.Ogasawara, “Back to the Pitch.”

^28.Duerden, “Behind Japan's Soccer Cup Victory.”

^29.Chapman, “The Third Way and Beyond”; Morris-Suzuki, Borderline Japan.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

William W. Kelly

William W. Kelly is a professor of anthropology and the Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies at Yale University.