IngentaConnect Japanese football and world sports: raising the global game in a ...

Author: Manzenreiter W.¹

Source: Japan Forum, Volume 16, Number 2, July, 2004 , pp. 289-313(25)

Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

Abstract:

Professional football in Japan, as elsewhere, has increasingly become linked to agents, structures, and processes of global capitalism. However, football is as much about culture as it is about business. Placing Japanese football into the context of world sports seems to be a promising endeavour to get fresh insight into the dialectics of the global and the local in transnational cultural flows and the processes underlying the globalization of sports. By analysing the institutional arrangements, vested interests, and power relationships of parties involved in the production, practice, and consumption of 'the people's game' in Japan, this study explores a recent showcase for the globalization of sports. It also addresses the question of whether the culture of sports may be considered a political agent that affects political choices, for example in regional development planning, local economic policy, or public health policy. As popular interests and domestic politics have shaped and continue to shape football in Japan, it is argued that globalization cannot be regarded as a commercially driven process aiming at the creation of a global market for products whose popular consumption leads to the standardization of cultures that were once distinctive.

Keywords: Japanese sport; football; globalization; media; regional development planning

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1080/0955580042000222664

Affiliations: 1: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna

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Japanese football and world sports: raising the global game in a local setting