The Sportsworld Of The Hanshin Tigers

Baseball has been Japan's most popular sport for over a century. The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers analyzes Japanese baseball ethnographically by focusing on a single professional team, the Hanshin Tigers. For over fifty years, the Tigers have been the one of the country’s most watched and talked-about professional baseball teams, second only to their powerful rivals, the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants. Despite a largely losing record, perennial frustration, and infighting among players, the Tigers remain overwhelming sentimental favorites in many parts of the country. This book analyzes the Hanshin Tiger phenomenon, and offers an account of why it has long been so compelling and instructive. Author William Kelly argues that the Tigers represent what he calls a sportsworld —a collective product of the actions of players, coaching staff, management, media, and millions of passionate fans. The team has come to symbolize a powerful counter-narrative to idealized notions of Japanese workplace relations. The Tigers are savored as a melodramatic representation of real corporate life, rife with rivalries and office politics familiar to every Japanese worker. And playing in a historic stadium on the edge of Osaka, they carry the hopes and frustrations of Japan’s second city against the all-powerful capital.

At the intersection of sport, entertainment and performance, wrestling occupies a unique position in British popular culture. This is the first book to offer a detailed historical and cultural analysis of British professional wrestling, exploring the shifting popularity of the sport as well as its wider social significance. Arguing that the history of professional wrestling can help us understand key themes in sport, culture and performance that span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it addresses topics such as: attitudes towards violence, representations of masculinity, the media and celebrity culture, consumerism and globalisation. By drawing on a variety of intellectual traditions and disciplines, the book explores the role of power in the development of popular cultural forms, the ways in which history structures the present, and the manner in which audiences construct identity and meaning through sport. Wrestling in Britain: Sporting Entertainments, Celebrity and Audiences is fascinating reading for all students and researchers with an interest in media and cultural studies, histories and sociologies of sport, or performance studies.

In Waste, Eiko Maruko Siniawer innovatively explores the many ways in which the Japanese have thought about waste—in terms of time, stuff, money, possessions, and resources—from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the present. She shows how questions about waste were deeply embedded in the decisions of everyday life, reflecting the priorities and aspirations of the historical moment, and revealing people’s ever-changing concerns and hopes. Over the course of the long postwar, Japanese society understood waste variously as backward and retrogressive, an impediment to progress, a pervasive outgrowth of mass consumption, incontrovertible proof of societal excess, the embodiment of resources squandered, and a hazard to the environment. Siniawer also shows how an encouragement of waste consciousness served as a civilizing and modernizing imperative, a moral good, an instrument for advancement, a path to self-satisfaction, an environmental commitment, an expression of identity, and more. From the late 1950s onward, a defining element of Japan’s postwar experience emerged: the tension between the desire for the privileges of middle-class lifestyles made possible by affluence and dissatisfaction with the logics, costs, and consequences of that very prosperity. This tension complicated the persistent search for what might be called well-being, a good life, or a life well lived. Waste is an elegant history of how people lived—how they made sense of, gave meaning to, and found value in the acts of the everyday.

As much as dogs, cats, or any domestic animal, horses exemplify the vast range of human-animal interactions. Horses have long been deployed to help with a variety of human activities—from racing and riding to police work, farming, warfare, and therapy—and have figured heavily in the history of natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. Most accounts of the equine-human relationship, however, fail to address the last few centuries of Western history, focusing instead on pre-1700 interactions. Equestrian Cultures fills in the gap, telling the story of how prominently horses continue to figure in our lives, up to the present day. ​ Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld place the modern period front and center in this collection, illuminating the largely untold story of how the horse has responded to the accelerated pace of modernity. The book’s contributors explore equine cultures across the globe, drawing from numerous interdisciplinary sources to show how horses have unexpectedly influenced such distinctively modern fields as photography, anthropology, and feminist theory. Equestrian Cultures boldly steps forward to redefine our view of the most recent developments in our long history of equine partnership and sets the course for future examinations of this still-strong bond.

This book explores the transformation of cultural and national identity of global sports fans in South Korea, which has undergone extensive cultural and economic globalization since the 1990s. Through ethnographic research of Korean Major League Baseball fans and their online community, this book demonstrates how a postcolonial nation and its people are developing long-distance affiliation with American sports accompanied by nationalist sentiments and regional rivalry. Becoming an MLB fan in South Korea does not simply lead one to nurturing a cosmopolitan identity, but to reconstituting one’s national imaginations. Younghan Cho suggests individuated nationalism as the changing nature of the national among the Korean MLB fandom in which the national is articulated by personal choices, consumer rights and free market principles. The analysis of the Korean MLB fandom illuminates the complicated and even contradictory procedures of decentering and fragmenting nationalism in South Korea, which have been balanced by recalling nationalism in combination with neoliberal governmentality.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with animation professionals, field research, and a wide-scale market survey, The Anime Boom in the United States investigates the Japanese export of anime television and film to the United States. This story carries broad significance for those interested in understanding the cultural and media globalization.

'If you're looking to ease yourself back into normality after lockdown, Born to be Mild should be top of your reading list' Mail Online A funny, life-affirming memoir from the creator of social media empire Very British Problems, about how to start again when everything's gone wrong. By the time Rob Temple hit his thirties, he had become so afraid of the world that he couldn't leave the house. Depressed and anxious, he found himself drifting deeper into solitude. So Rob decided to make a plan - to embark on fifty 'mild' adventures, to be a little less Pooh Bear and a little more Bear Grylls. On a gentle journey that takes him beekeeping, bowling, and to a service station just off the M25, Rob starts to settle on a better balance - and soon discovers the joys of a life well lived. In this raw and honest memoir, Rob shares his year of gentle adventure and the lessons learnt along the way. Quiet and comforting, with a generous helping of British humour, Born to be Mild is a guide to living life unencumbered by mental illness, and a reminder to slow down and embrace your mild side.