The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers – Professional Baseball in Modern Japan Professional Baseball in Modern Japan

" The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers is a long-awaited monograph on baseball in Japan by one of the most highly respected anthropologists of Japan. William Kelly includes wonderful detail and insights, plus fascinating behind-the-scenes accounts and analysis that add to our understanding of modern Japan. This book is obviously a labor of much blood, sweat, tears, and time, and the reader is much the richer for it."—Christine Yano, Professor of Anthropology, University of Hawaii at Manoa “A masterful account of the multiple meanings of baseball in Japan by a master anthropologist. Through vividly rendered vignettes of players, managers and corporate suits, fervent fans and pugnacious media, Kelly offers a compelling interpretation of the sportsworld of Japan’s often hapless but never boring Hanshin Tigers. Moving fluidly backward and forward in time from the two full decades of his field work, Kelly also paints a convincing picture of the wider social and economic transformations of Japan from the 1950s to the present. A must read for anyone interested in Japanese sports or society, present or past.”—Andrew Gordon, Professor of History, Harvard University


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.