Anthropology 254 lecture outlines
Part Four: FURTHER DIMENSIONS OF METROPOLITAN MODERNITY
(4.4) Japanese sportscapes (1): Professional baseball
I. Is sport metonymic of national character?
"Baseball in Japan" documentary (Howard 1994): "Because of its slow pace, baseball fits the Japanese character perfectly. The conservative play mirrors the Japanese conservative and deliberate approach to life. Managers and coaches view baseball as a tool to teach loyalty and moral discipline--the same type of loyalty and discipline feudal Japanese lords expected from their soldiers and subjects. This samurai discipline requires endless hours of training, self-denial, and an emphasis on spirituality. So goes the Japanese approach to baseball."
II. Baseball as Japan's pastime
III. "Samurai baseball": the alleged national character of Japanese baseball
an obsession with form--standing in front of a mirror and taking hundreds of practice swings every day for years
an intense commitment to hard work, sacrifice, and fanatical training--unlike the careful pacing of US players, pitching on 4-5 day rotations, with light workouts between. Japan is infamous for the 1000 fungo drill.
an abiding loyalty to the team and absolute obedience to managers and coaches unlike the colorful, individualist US players
a propensity for playing it safe in games, going for ties so as to save face and preserve the harmony the game--unlike the US game strategies of bold, creative play;
IV. Bass-ball: Why was Randy Bass walked on October 25, 1985?
A. Clyde Haberman's report for the New York Times
B. the two teams and the individuals involved: the Yomiuri Giants, the Hanshin Tigers, and Sadaharu Oh
C. postscripts: Tuffy Rhodes in 2001 and Alex Cabrera in 2002
V. Rethinking the significance of baseball in Japan?
A. Like its American counterpart, Japanese baseball embodies a history; it too has a very consequential institutional structure, and it is full of power struggles and divided interests and paradoxical star players. As we have seen in this course, there is great concern in Japan today about ethnicity, about the aims of education in a competitive age, about dangerous corporate concentrations, and about limiting of demands of the group on the individual. Baseball is not a window onto a homogenous and unchanging national character, but it is a fascinating site for seeing how these national debates and concerns play out—just as it is in the United States.
B. Some Japanese professional baseball is about sacrifice, about self-effacement, about long and disciplined over-practice, and about cautious and tenacious strategies—not entirely, not convincingly, not uniquely, but enough to feed the press mills and the front offices and the television analysts. And this is a crucial fact. That is, it is too easy to say there is the myth and here is the reality. It is not so simple as peeling an onion, of debunking stereotypes in order to get to the actual practices and structures of baseball that lie obscured by the fog machines of commentary. The myths are essential to the reality, the stereotypes are as constitutive of baseball as the statistics it also produces. Our task is not simply to dismiss the commentary as misguided (though much of it clearly is). Rather, we must situate it within the production of baseball—as a game, as a commercialized sport, as mass-mediated popular culture. Why these stereotypes and not others, one must ask. Who is putting them about? Who is believing them, or at least claiming to believe them, for what possible reasons? The analyst of baseball must be as adept at getting out ahead of the spin of the commentary as a batter must master the spin of the pitch. We must realize that commentary about baseball-by mass media, by academics, by fans, and by politicians--is embedded in the sport and must be part of any theorizing about mass mediated-popular culture. The sport, the spectating, and the talk about the sport are inseparable—and are mutually implicating.