Welcome to the sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers. I mean that in two ways. First, this book introduces you to that world, providing you with knowledge, information, and insight. But the concept of the “sportsworld” has further implications. By reading this book you become part of that world; you are drawn, however slightly, into the drama of this team. You become one of the “much wider range of participants” who make meaning, create memory and negotiate the values that construct that world (14).
Many of the readers of this journal will be familiar with anthropologist William Kelly’s work in the field of sport in Japan in general and the Hanshin Tigers in particular. This is not just a collection of those papers, talks, and book chapters, dressed up in a single volume, however. Bringing all that work together has given Kelly the opportunity to develop a new perspective on this extensive research.
The monograph itself can be read from a variety of perspectives. At its most basic it is detailed reportage. The bulk of the book is a dense and deep look at the world of the Hanshin Tigers: the players themselves; the team, the club, and the parent company–the Hanshin Electric Railroad Corporation; and the media, which “fabricate” the narratives that engage the fans and provide much of the material for this book. As reportage, this book will be essential to readers who seek to learn more about the Tigers, and baseball and sport in Japan.
But the book goes beyond mere reportage to weave those elements into a larger analysis of the history, culture, and society of Japan, and for this reason will be of interest to readers who are not necessarily curious about sport, baseball, or the Hanshin Tigers per se. Since many of the readers of this journal very likely fall into this category, one task of this review is to demonstrate the relevance of the book to the study of (contemporary) Japan. (If I were reviewing the book for a journal of sport history or sociology I would have a different task.) The important point Kelly makes in this regard is that the Hanshin sportsworld does not merely reflect a certain moment in the history of a certain area of Japan, but it also helped to construct that moment and place (209).
Kelly goes even further, and perhaps this is where the delay in publication has made a positive contribution. His prolonged and periodic fieldwork presented him with a problem: after spending several years becoming familiar with this sportsworld but before getting around to writing it up, it seemed to change before his very eyes. How to handle this? It became the basis for a more profound insight. The delay enabled him to consider the nature of his work, or the sociological/anthropological endeavor, and his reflections on this topic are relevant for those working in the field even outside of Japan.
One manifestation of this is the choice of verb tense. The delay turned what was an “ethnographic present” into an “ethnographic past” (28). As he writes in the Appendix, “A Note on the Research and Writing,” the book is written in past tense, rather than the usual practice of writing in the “ethnographic present,” to acknowledge the “consequential changes” that have taken place in baseball in Japan since the years described in this book (281).
In the first chapter Kelly explains how he got started on this research, introduces us to the team, and outlines the rest of the book. He presents the concept of the “sportsworld,” which he adopts from the concept of the “social world” proposed by Howard S Becker (13). He conducted his main fieldwork between 1996 and 2003, when the Hanshin Tigers were in the midst of a 20-year slump, consistently finishing at or near the bottom of the six-team Central League of Nippon Professional Baseball. He was originally intrigued with the question of why the Tigers, one of three professional baseball teams in the Kansai area, consistently garnered the lion’s share of media attention despite their equally consistent underperformance. (One of the two other teams, the Orix Blue Wave, won the Japan Series in 1996.)
The second chapter describes the “space-time grid” (31) of the Hanshin Tigers world. Their home ground is the fabled Kōshien stadium, constructed in 1924. He describes a typical game day, the baseball season, and the annual cycle as well: since throughout most of the 20th century baseball was the dominant professional sport in Japan, it is the focus of media attention throughout the year. He makes a perceptive point about the cyclical nature of baseball, both within a single game, and over a season. Individual players come up to bat, confront a series of balls and strikes, resulting in an out or an on-base, and then the next batter is up and the cycle begins again, until there are three outs and the two teams exchange positions on the field and the opponents begin their cycle at bat. The cycle of offence and defense continues until the end of the game, and the next game begins another cycle. The games are played in small series of three, and the results build up over the season to produce a champion, but then the cycle of the season starts again the next year. “The manifold times of baseball kept everyone in the game, building suspense while deflecting frustration … ” (64). Even after success has been thwarted on the larger stage of the season, or even the game, there is always the next batter at the plate.
The third chapter introduces the players themselves: how they are recruited, how they negotiate their contracts, their lives as professional athletes and after retirement, and the ambivalent status of the foreign players. Baseball generates a plethora of statistics that are used to evaluate the performance of the individual players, but in spite of these statistics it is difficult if not impossible to completely isolate the performance of one player from that of the team (87). Kelly points out that many fans see themselves in the same predicament, since they themselves are subject to periodic assessments of their work performance, assessments that they may not feel accurately reflect their contribution to the company. This connects with one of his main themes: the team (or its coverage in the media) as a melodrama of the workplace.
Chapter 4 introduces us to the manager and coaches, in particular the ones active during the author’s fieldwork. The Tigers had five managers in the eight years of fieldwork, a fairly high turnover rate. The manager of course manages the team and directs strategy during the game, but he is also a “midlevel executive in a corporate hierarchy,” and in addition serves a PR role as “the public face of the Hanshin brand” (93). The manager is thus at the center of much of the melodrama surrounding the team.
Chapter 5 makes the distinction between the team and the front office. Japanese baseball teams are owned by companies whose main business is in another industry, and the team usually runs a deficit that the parent company writes off as a “public relations loss leader” (107). There are about 100 players, coaches, trainers and others associated with the team, including those on the farm team. On the other hand, there are about 90 working in the front office and the parent company. Kelly provides an organizational chart of the front office (111), and writes of a division between what he calls the “suits” and the “uniforms,” noting that “every decision about a salary offer, a trade, or a draft was both a ‘baseball’ decision and a ‘business’ decision … ” (124).
Chapter 6 is about the fans. Anyone who has been to a game or watched one on TV has probably been struck by the organized, orderly and incessant cheering. Kelly describes in some detail how this was organized during his fieldwork, and a little of the history as well, focusing on the Private Alliance of Hanshin Tiger Fan Clubs (Hanshin Taigāsu shisetsu ōendan). The key words are “festival, soap opera, and melodrama” (128). These fan clubs are independent of the team, but are tolerated because they serve to regulate fan behavior, and for the ambience they provide at the stadium and for the television and radio broadcasts.
Which brings us to the media. In Chapter 7, Kelly points out that the media not only report Tigers baseball, but also construct it. “They made Hanshin baseball meaningful” (152). The daily sports newspapers took the central role in this construction, rather than the obvious suspect, television. Kelly takes us through the nuts and bolts of how the print media, radio and television cover the team. Unlike the Yomiuri Giants and the Chunichi Dragons, Hanshin was not a media company, which gave the team less leverage in dealing with the media (175). Even so, the sports newspapers in the Kansai area devoted most of their coverage to the team.
Chapter 8 steps back to look at the history of baseball in Japan, focusing on its development as entertainment and also as a perceived means of education. Sports were first introduced in Japan through the schools. In this chapter Kelly expands on the idea that newspaper and railroad companies seized on sports in general, and baseball in particular, as part of their business plan, to attract readers and riders. He also discusses at some length the history, development, and validity of the concept of “samurai baseball.” While recognizing the influence of the concept, he notes that it is “only part of the story.” That is, “baseball in Japan cannot usefully be reduced to and explained as ‘Japanese’ baseball” (205).
Chapter 9 uses the material introduced in chapters 2 through 8 to more explicitly relate baseball in general and the Hanshin Tigers in particular to Japanese society as a whole and changes the society has undergone. The two main features of this transformation were the development of “Japanese-style corporatism as a powerful business ideology,” and “the consolidation of Tokyo as the national center” (209). Kelly writes that “(b)aseball was not merely a reflection of these societal changes; it contributed importantly to bringing them about” (209). The Hanshin Tigers enacted for their fans (and for anyone residing in Kansai at the time, since it was hard to avoid being at least minimally informed of their escapades) “the two compelling themes of workplace melodrama and second-city complex” (209).
The final chapter brings us up to date, with the revelation that the sportsworld described in this book no longer exists. The Hanshin Electric Railroad Company was bought out by its rival, the Hankyū Railroad Company, in 2006. Baseball itself has declined in popularity, at least in relation to association football. The sports media, and sports newspapers in particular, have suffered from the growth of digital media. The percentage of full-time, permanent workers with benefits has declined drastically, so that “anxiety about work and job security have now replaced concern for workplace dynamics for many Kansai residents” (253). And Osaka’s role as the second most important city has also eroded.
So the world described in this book is a world that was, and remains to an extent in memory. The sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers thus is not representative of baseball in Japan, but, says the author, it is a diagnostic case, “presenting us with such an instructive instance of the social grounding of modern sports” (256).Footnote1
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Notes on contributors
Lee Thompson
Lee Thompson received his degree in sociology from the Graduate School of Human Sciences at Osaka University, Japan. He has written on the history of sports in Japan, especially sumo and professional wrestling, with a focus on the media.
Notes
1 Full disclosure (and subtle acknowledgement): I moved to the Kansai area in 1981, and lived there until 2003, the last year of the author’s fieldwork. So while I recognize the events described in the book, my strongest memories are of the years surrounding Hanshin’s victory in the Japan Series of 1985, and the triumph and tribulations of the so-called suketto Randy Bass. These events are summarized on pp. 228–229.
I met Professor Kelly in Osaka in the 1990s, when he was doing fieldwork for this book. He had read something I had written on sports in Japan and contacted me. It was a great encouragement to know that other, even established scholars, were interested in this subject; although progress has been made, even now sports are often regarded as frivolous and even disreputable. Professor Kelly also invited me to a symposium that he sponsored and to contribute a chapter to a volume he was editing. I appreciated this support, and I know I am not alone.