The Imperial Sportive: Sporting Lives in the Service of Modern Japan

Abstract

Modern Japan has a long history of sports literature. After the successful diffusion of Western sport through the school system, sport literature became popular with the advent of mass culture in 1920s Japan. In order to encourage ‘proper’ moral associations to be made between Western sport and masculinity in Japanese youth, literature about sport was actively published by Japanese media and focused primarily on schoolboys. Serialised magazines stories and short novels focused on sports and athletes as the embodiment of vitality and values requisite of an expanding imperial nation. Athletes and various Western sports were glorified for Japanese youth and enabled a generation to deepen their appreciation of how hard work, industry and athletic masculinity could be trained through sport. With the sensational performance by Japanese Olympic athletes in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games, Tanaka Hidemitsu wrote the short novel, Orinposu no kajitsu (‘The Fruits of Olympus’) which became an instant best-seller in inter-war Japan. Written during the escalated Japanese war efforts in China, however, the short story showcases an anti-hero in detailing the physical and psychological Olympic journey of Japanese athletes to America. More recently various supotsu manga (sport comics) have appeared that feature sport heroes. These visual narratives function as more popular forums of sport literature for contemporary Japanese youth. This essay will briefly outline the emergence of pre-war Japanese sport literature and post-war sports comics. The enduring relationships among moral instruction, sports heroes and the Japanese state will also preliminarily be explored in terms of how sports literature and comics glorify the idealised athletic sports hero who embodies values promoted by the Japanese state for Japanese youth.