License to Play: The Ludic in Japanese Culture by Michal Daliot-Bul, and: Marathon Japan: Distance Racing and Civic Culture by Thomas R. H. Havens (review)

License to Play: The Ludic in Japanese Culture. By Michal Daliot-Bul. University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2014. xii, 186 pages. $45.00, cloth.

Marathon Japan: Distance Racing and Civic Culture. By Thomas R. H. Havens. University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2015. xii, 227 pages. $47.00, cloth.

These two recent volumes are parallel investigations into ludic realms of Japanese life. Michal Daliot-Bul presents a theoretically ambitious cultural history of play (asobi) in Japan and Thomas Havens has written a social history of sport, in particular, the two major forms of distance running in modern Japan, the marathon and the ekiden. What both demonstrate with fascinating scholarship is the significant imbrication of play and the more sober realities of politics and economy and the everyday routines of social life.

Play is a human universal, a space of imaginative release and a symbolic reframing of ordinary reality. “Autotelic” is a term that several play theorists use, meaning that play is just play, with no greater purpose than itself. To many, play is hardwired into humans; Daliot-Bul accepts this, but she is wisely more focused on its variable cultural forms and manifold significance across societies and times. What are the ways, she asks, in which both institutions and ideologies have fashioned forms of play in Japan, and, conversely, how have these variable forms of play alternately supported and subverted societal conventions?

Thus, hers is a study of “asobi,” a Japanese rubric of play that has been in the language for over a millennium but which has been a linguistic shapeshifter, capacious in its meanings, responsive to changing times, and itself consequential in its impact on the sober realities of historical eras.

In tracing the cultural history of asobi, Daliot-Bul gives particular emphasis to three of these epochs. It was the imperial court aristocrats of the Heian period, Japan’s first leisured class, who both secularized and aestheticized certain refined pursuits in more playful yet still elegant manners. She then considers the vibrant play cultures of the urban commoners of the Tokugawa centuries, when literati salons, theaters, teahouses, temple marketplaces, and other entertainment and artistic spaces attracted a wide range of commoner townspeople. Finally, she considers the even broader nationalization of entertainment and leisure practices across twentieth-century Japan.

In each epoch, she argues, play created spaces of release and relief for the less well positioned—the aristocratic ladies of the male-dominated Heian court, the wealthy but low-status merchants of Edo and Osaka, and the disaffiliated youth in the 1970s. At the same time, though, play did not erase social distinctions but rather transposed them to a ludic register, allowing the “players” opportunities to excel and exclude.

Daliot-Bul points persuasively to important continuities across these epochs, but the book’s real focus is on the recent decades, and the resonances between the serious world of work and school and the ludic realm of play and leisure in late modern Japan. Two features of mainstream society are particularly crucial to her analysis: the disciplines of the highly corporatized workplaces and the information-rich consumer culture. Both have profoundly shaped the ways of play in those decades—for example, the structuring of play as school clubs, the proliferating publications on how and where to play, and the commodification of even the most everyday of leisure pursuits. They also influenced standards of the “best players,” whom Daliot-Bul finds to be not those who are the innovators or creators but rather “those who best embody the prescribed play aesthetics and its rules” (p. 98).

What distinguishes play in the contemporary moment (which she characterizes as “post-modern”) is that it now exceeds its previous boundaries as the space beyond the everyday; it increasingly inserts itself into the structures of our regular lives. She writes of a “gamification of nonplay technologies” (p. 138) because playfulness is the most appropriate modality “for dealing with the prime issues of our time: the obsession with change; the constantly...