Japanese Sports

9. New Directions

9 New Directions J apan’s political, economic, social, and cultural institutions are by definition unique, but it is undeniable that they have become increasingly similar to those of the United States and Western Europe. This similarity has provoked a reaction from a small army of writers busy with the production of Nihonjinron (theories about Japanese uniqueness ). The content of these theories—for instance, that Japanese brains are constructed differently from American and European brains1—is less significant than what they tell us about the feeling, widespread among traditionalists, that Japanese society is under siege, threatened by an invasion from overseas. Although traditionalists often speak as if modern Japan were simply the result of “Americanization” or “Westernization,” such terms obscure Japan’s own innumerable contributions to modernity at home and abroad. The global diffusion of ideas, institutions, and material products has never been unidirectional. Even in the early Meiji period, when the Japanese were busily importing everything Western, from locomotives to ballet slippers, there were American and European artists—Whistler and Van Gogh, for instance—who were strongly influenced by Japanese woodblock prints. Today, Japanese automobiles, electronic equipment, sushi bars, and shiatsu specialists can be found in every modern city. There are martial arts centers, too, like Cologne’s Budōkan, and the distinctively Japanese sport of kendō is now promoted by an International KendōFederation (founded in 1970) that claims over a quarter of a million non-Japanese members. Nonetheless, when we examine the balance of trade in sports, we find that the Japanese continue to import much more than they export. Among the most striking recent examples of this is the vogue of golf, skiing, soccer, and a miscellany of activities 211 whose most obvious common characteristic is that they seem all to have arrived from California. GOLF As we have seen, the game was known in the late nineteenth century, when British consular officials and businessmen played it in Kobe and Yokohama, but it did not become popular until the 1960s. By the early 1990s, golf had moved from the margins to the center of Japanese sports. Today, corporate executives and even the ordinary sararı mman (“salary man,” i.e., white-collar employee) are said to have become “golf crazy,” and it is a boardroom commonplace that a modicum of ability with driver and putter is essential for advancement in the corporate hierarchy. In 1990, Japan had 1,718 golf courses, some 300 more were under construction , and 955 were planned. Although some 1.25 percent of the nation’s land is used for golf courses, it seems impossible for the supply to keep up with the demand generated by an estimated 12 million golfers.2 Although the corporate executive and the sararımman whom he employs are the stereotypical golfers, women too have taken to driving and putting. If it is true—as some have alleged—that 15 percent of Japan’s golfers are female, then some 1,800,000 women participate in this expensive and prestigious sport.3 In 1995, the Japanese Golf Association estimated that 23.6 percent of all Japanese men and 2.6 percent of all women, some 13 million in all, played the game. Even by this more modest calculation, nearly 1,600,000 women have taken to golf.4 The boom in golf has come despite the fact that Japan’s mountainous terrain has always limited the space available for agriculture, urban development , and recreation. Golf courses require extensive tracts of level or moderately hilly land and the supply-demand equation makes the acquisition of such land extremely expensive (as well as environmentally destructive). Ironically, the scarcity of usable land in Japan makes golf especially attractive to those who can afford to play the game because “the sheer physical size of the space this sport occupies may be seen as a measure of the social space occupied by its players.”5 Confronted by this shortage of suitable space, golf clubs scramble to rent or buy space wherever they can. On the northwest edge of Kyoto, monks in their kesa and geta (Buddhist robes and wooden sandals) share the temple grounds of Shōdenji with businessmen nattily attired in their imported golfing togs. (The space has also been shared with occasional joggers from Amherst, 212 | Postwar Sports Massachusetts.) Another solution to the lack of space has been to purchase or construct golf courses in...