Japan's Embrace of Soccer: Mutable Ethnic Players and Flexible Soccer Citizenship in the New East Asian Sports Order

Abstract

Baseball and sumo were Japan's twentieth-century centre sports, but soccer is likely to replace them in the new century. This article outlines several reasons for Japan's embrace of the sport, focusing on how ethnicity and nationality are expressed and confirmed in the world of soccer. It proposes that the Japanese sports world has moved through three eras of ‘sports citizenship’ over the last century. The first four decades of the twentieth century constituted an era of ‘imperial athletes’, a coercively inclusive and hierarchical order of belonging as ‘athletes of Greater Japan’. The post-World War II decades reconfigured sports citizenship around ethnic alterity, establishing a cultural-essentialist binary between Japanese ‘athletes’ and ‘foreign athletes’. What we see now, in and through soccer, is an emerging third era of mobile athletes, mutable ethnicity and flexible sports citizenship, determined in the case of soccer by supra-governmental FIFA eligibility standards and sports federation rules rather than by nation-state laws. Soccer is demonstrating a broader sense of national belonging in and for twenty-first-century Japan than was the case with the more rigid distinctions that characterised the twentieth-century centre sports of baseball and soccer, and this has both domestic and regional consequences.