TY - JOUR
AU - MANZENREITER, Wolfram
AB - More than any other sport, baseball has received special attention in popular accounts of Japanese culture and society. Foreign writers, as well as Japanese authors, frequently used the sport as magnifying glass to portray the particularities, and sometimes peculiarities, of Japan. Images like samurai baseball, or the Way of Baseball, appeared as keywords in tractates of either cultural colonialization or nativist soul-searching. William W. Kelly has been among the most outspoken critics of the follies of culturalist reductionism ever since he developed an interest in what baseball has meant for being modern in Japan. His long-awaited exploration of The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers barely addresses the controversy. But his objection against the essentialism of a debate that confuses adaptation with adulteration and variation with aberration provides the bass line, or baseline, as the review editor suggests, of his study. Rather than disqualifying the reference to culture as utterly wrong, Kelly’s approach to baseball in Japan—or more to the point of the study, the causes of the immense popularity that the Kansai-based perennial underdog of Japanese professional baseball has enjoyed within and beyond the Greater Osaka area—accentuates the spatial and temporal situatedness of ‘cultures’ in contexts and scales below and beyond the nation-state container. In a nutshell, Kelly’s immensely dense and rich account of the Hanshin Tigers sportsworld unravels the cast, plots and screenplay of a ‘soap opera’ built around workplace struggles and second-city anxieties. ‘Sportsworld’ is Kelly’s own contribution to the anthropological glossary of sports studies. Borrowed from Howard Becker’s approach to arts as a social world, the term alludes to the vast stretch of the ethnographic space the author explored over 13 months of fieldwork between 1996 and 2003. Kelly visited some hundred baseball games in a dozen stadiums, met with players and club officials, spoke to fans and reporters to grasp how the action at playing fields and in grandstands, as well as in corporate offices, locker rooms, and sport bars, and on radio broadcasts, TV screens and newspaper pages fabricate and proliferate ‘the narrative fabric and affective identity of the Hanshin Tigers’ (15). The sportsworld he presents is not representative. But it is more than generic insofar as it diagnoses the structures of actions and affects shaping all its inhabitants’ engagement. Truly eye-opening is Kelly’s take on the cumulative effect of the sportsworld meshwork as analogy of the essentials of the soap opera. The connection between spectator sports and television soap operas has been made before but to my knowledge never teased out in book length. I myself completely underrated the simile when I first heard Bill Kelly use it during a private conversation in 2008. But having read the book, I find myself more than convinced of its heuristic value. Many popular spectator sports thrive on narrative conventions that attribute larger-than-life significance to antagonist rivalries, interpersonal struggles, and last-minute salvation; so do soap operas. Both genres also find common ground in complex, multiple and non-episodic plots presenting the ups and downs of familiar characters in a melodramatic tone. Last but not least, they share a strong propensity for emotionally charged moments, sudden conversions, missed opportunities, epic comebacks, and incomplete endings. Six of the nine chapters after the introduction to Kelly’s interpretative framework immediately draw on findings from fieldwork. Accompanying the reader to the ballpark and throughout the season, Kelly disentangles the space-time complexities of the Hanshin sportsworld. Geographically this world expands from its center at Kōshien, the stadium just west of Osaka that has been the home of the Tigers ever since the club was founded in 1935, toward training facilities close-by and further away at the ‘Tiger Den’, where the farm team practices and plays, and to Tiger Town on Shikoku Island, where pre-season training camps are held. The rhythm of baseball is similarly multi-layered, as the oscillating intervals of a match are part of the cyclical calendar of the league year and the linearity of baseball history. New rhythms and temporalities surface in the sports media that deliver the game experience to millions of people in their homes, at sport bars or on trains and buses. Whether live and uncut, or in retrospective and newly arranged, their praise of the ‘fierce Tigers’ and blame of the ‘no-good Tigers’ relate the happenings on and beyond playing fields to past events and future possibilities. Five chapters portray the cast of actors and protagonists of the sportsworld: players on the field; general managers and coaches in the dug-out; staff workers at the front; fans in the bleachers; and the sports press in the media box and their seminal role in framing what Hanshin baseball is about. While the ethnographic account analyses the structural features of the Hanshin sportsworld, the historiographic coda positions its foundation, consolidation and nascent disintegration within the wider context of contemporary history. During the first half of the 20th century, baseball emerged as ‘Japan’s quintessential “edutainment”’ (181), driven by commercial interests and framed by moralizing discourses. Newspapers like Osaka-based Asahi Shinbun and intraregional commuter railroad companies like Hanshin designed baseball as a promotional weapon for their own business interests. By the time the Tigers were founded to join the first professional league in 1936, baseball was deeply enmeshed with the ‘banal modernity’ of metropolitan living, mass entertainment, and urban consumerism. The characteristics of the Hanshin sportsworld evolved in the latter half of the 20th century, accentuated by wider societal shifts including white-collar workplace organization, the rise of Tokyo as Japan’s undisputed center, and ever more powerful media. At the same time as the Kantō-based Yomiuri Giants started to dominate the game, all hopes in the greater Osaka metropolitan area for retaliation, if not redress, were set on the Tigers, even though they continuously failed to deliver for their fans. Kelly argues that the media fixation on the struggles and troubles the Tigers went through frontstage at games and backstage in operations reflect these transformations. According to Kelly, for the Kansai-based media the Tigers were a godsend, as their rare fortunes and more frequent misfortunes alike sustained interest in their products. Even though the region was home to other teams of even greater success, no other team made more headlines or frontpages. Comparing and contrasting the work and background of sports reporters, radio announcers and TV producers, Kelly demonstrates how their respective styles of presentation and communication differed in regard to purpose and tasks to accomplish. Print, airwaves and television together framed what Hanshin baseball was about, and this was not always to the liking of the club, which had no media company within its corporate network. Kelly pays particular attention to the tabloid journalism of the daily sports papers that circulate in high numbers. Characterized by colorful language, paired with flamboyant graphics and an insatiable appetite for scandals, speculation and gossiping, these represent the media center of the Hanshin sportsworld. A great service to the reader is Kelly’s expert explanation of the box score, a typical feature on sports pages which summarizes the time-action of an entire game in a compact table packed with numerical indicators and statistics (168). A central pillar of Kelly’s analysis of the Hanshin Tigers melodrama is based on the recognition that baseball teams are workplaces, ‘socially constructed of work relations and ideologically of work authority claims’ (109). Players and managers, as well as the white-collar staff running the club and the sports reporters, thus are presented as ‘men at work’. Readers will learn a great deal about recruitment strategies, contracts, labor mobility, division of labor, salaries, organizational procedures, networks and hierarchies, assessment tools, and second career pathways. To understand what it means to be a company man in baseball, Kelly carefully maps out similarities and differences with other work environments. The organizational chart of the front office, which actually operates in the background and is literally placed in the back of the stadium, reveals workplace structures and procedures not much different from other mid-sized companies. But careers in baseball usually are short-lived and very unpredictable. Access to the labor market of highly skilled but narrowly specialized workers is limited and competition remains high throughout the period of hire. Players are permanently under scrutiny—by coaches, management of owner companies, fans, and the media, who grade and rate their performance according to a complex grid of statistical indicators. Assessment results, however, are debatable and debated indeed. The Hanshin Tigers differed from other clubs primarily in their propensity for selecting their managers from among their own ex-players. In marked contrast to the generalized account of players’ career trajectories, the analysis of how a general manager copes with the role conflicts of being field general, public face of the team, and mid-level executive in persona, is based on the fates of the four managers Kelly saw come and go during his years of fieldwork. Different perceptions of accountability and authority are also a burden to the staff workers sandwiched between the team they run and the parent company that owns the club. Multiple tensions rose from the incongruency of economic profitability and status acknowledgment of the club within the multi-layered corporate network of the Hanshin group. Conflicts resulting from discrepancies among hierarchies of power were most pronounced in the tug-of-war over discretionary power in business decisions between ‘uniforms’ and ‘suits’, factionalism and the working of informal alliances across institutional divisions. Kelly argues that workplace dynamics of this kind are familiar to the Tigers’ boisterous fans, whose loyalty is the club’s greatest asset. In exchange for their festive mood-making and colorful choreographies of songs and marches that layer the rhythms of the game, club management ceded much of stadium space and crowd control to independent fan associations. Preserving autonomy from club management was essential for maintaining a distinctive Kansai identity in Tiger fandom. Yet the private associations, which were founded only in the 1970s for the purpose of self-policing violent fan behavior and pushing petty crime out of the ballpark, recently lost much of their independence and privileges. This is only one among several drastic changes that include the renovation of the stadium, the takeover of the parent company by its century-long rival Hankyū Railways, the steep decline of sports dailies circulation, and the growing popularity of alternative spectator sports at home and abroad. Probably more consequential for the sportsworld, however, are societal transformations like the massive casualization of labor and the hollowing-out of manufacturing in the Kansai area. As employment is becoming precarious in an increasingly neo-liberal environment, concerns about social relations at the workplace are being replaced by anxieties about job security, threatening to erode the prior fascinations with the aforementioned analogies of the Tigers world. That the book is written in past tense, or what Kelly calls the ‘ethnographic past’ (281), acknowledges the uncertain outcome of these developments on the future of the Hanshin Tigers sportsworld. Using past tense in ethnographic writing is not a matter of taste but of theoretical significance. In the case of Kelly’s historical anthropology of Japanese baseball, even the syntax supports his claim that the appeal of a sportsworld is as much a resonance of the specific historicity in which it is embedded as are its constitutive features and structures. Written in beautiful prose and clear analytical language, Kelly’s book is a must-read for anyone interested in the anthropology of sport, the fault lines of modernity in late 20th century Japan, or what it takes to excel in academic writing. As an ethnographical account, The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers is incredibly rich in detail and deep in insight. It is remarkable that a study taking so much effort and care to disentangle the complex structures and dynamics behind Hanshin Tigers exceptionalism as a case suis generis is able to invigorate a solid understanding of the game within the structural and historical conditions of modernity. Kelly deserves praise for this exercise of excellence in case-study research design, thick description and innovative conceptual work. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press in conjunction with the University of Tokyo. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers: Professional Baseball in Modern Japan
JO - Social Science Japan Journal
DO - 10.1093/ssjj/jyab018
DA - 2021-05-13
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-sportsworld-of-the-hanshin-tigers-professional-baseball-in-modern-sdKNPa61uf
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -