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Wolfram MANZENREITER, The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers: Professional Baseball in Modern Japan, Social Science Japan Journal, Volume 24, Issue 2, Summer 2021, Pages 449–452, https://doi.org/10.1093/ssjj/jyab018
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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.
