Japan, Sport and Society: Tradition and Change in a Globalizing World (review)

Critical studies of Japan's sports and body cultures have flourished in recent years, and this volume is especially welcome because its 11 chapters introduce the research of 10 Japanese sports scholars whose work has not been previously available in English. Because it appears in one of the most important series of critical sports studies, Routledge's "Sport in the Global Society," and is coedited by a prominent British sociologist of sport, it will gain an audience for a field of scholarship in Japan that is increasingly vibrant and important.

Most of the authors are sport sociologists, and as with their British counterparts, whose work has heavily influenced them, they emphasize historical research as much as contemporary analysis. Most of the chapters here are framed by rather narrow topics (and several condense a series of works by the author), but they are contextualized by the three themes that organize the volume: the emergence of sport in modern Japan, dimensions of contemporary sports participation (economy, environment, fanship, and gender), and Japanese sport in a global sportscape.

Underlying much of the debate about the history of sport in modern Japan has been the understanding that two processes were occurring in tandem in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the one hand, certain indigenous practices (especially sumo and martial exercises) were reshaped into rule-governed physical competitions; at the same time, new Western sports introduced during the Meiji period (especially baseball) were spiritualized with newly articulated Japanese values. Sportification and spiritualization went hand in hand. In an important sense, this is merely the sports version of wakon yōsai, the selective adaptation of Western practices and their ideological domestication with Japanese "spirit." But lest it be dismissed as yet another instance of Japanese particularism, it is worth remembering that the same tensions were evident in England and America, where folk games and gambling contests became regularized and regulated physical competitions appealing to new national populations, and, when they were located in schools, often imbued with a moralizing ethos of personal character. Muscular Christianity and muscular Confucianism shared much, including being equally unsettled by the competitive pressures (and pleasures) that were enabled by the new sporting practices themselves.

The first three chapters of this collection detail aspects of these twin processes. Hamaguchi Yoshinobu's opening chapter on innovation in martial arts tells the familiar historical narrative of how judo was fashioned by Kanō Jigorō, who surveyed many of the 700 schools of jujitsu that existed in the nineteenth century. He amalgamated elements from many of the schools into a composite set of curricular practices and used his class background to become an elite educator. He codified martial skills in a Martial Way, which was then sportified and diffused to many other parts of the world.

For Kanō, judo was about control; it trained practitioners in the efficient and rational use of energy. One of the most interesting issues in the early twentieth-century transformation of these physical activities was the place of competition and how to handle winning and losing. Kanō recognized a place for winning and losing in judo—not as its own objective but rather as training for life and for character building. This was his inspiration for the key innovation of randori or "free practice." Kanō's randori was scrimmage, paired practices that were supposed to offer the experience of contest without the formality of competitions.

Some of Hamaguchi's themes are taken up in the next chapter by Kusaka Yuko on the emergence of school sport. As physical activities developed in the new schools from exercise and recreation to formal sports clubs and interscholastic competition, there were efforts to temper the emphasis on winning and the shame of losing with the cultivation of a bushidō ethic of character, but this Meiji ethic did little to blunt the competitive edge. The third chapter, by Kiku Kōichi, one...