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"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. Instead, 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"--Provided by publisher.

Baseball --- J6955 --- Base-ball --- Ball games --- Japan: Sports and recreation -- baseball, softball --- Hanshin Taigāsu (Baseball team) --- Hanshin Tigers (Baseball team) --- Taigāsu (Baseball team) --- 阪神タイガース (Baseball team) --- 阪神タイガーズ (Baseball team) --- Hanshin (Baseball team) --- Hanshin Taigāsu (Baseball team).

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Almost right from the introduction of baseball to Japan the sport was regarded as qualitatively different from the original American model. This vision of Japanese baseball associates the sport with steadfast devotion (magokoro) and the values of the samurai class in the code of Bushidō, in which greatness is achieved through hard work under the tutelage of a selfless master.In Contesting the Myths of Samurai Baseball Keaveney analyzes the persistent appeal of such mythologizing, arguing that the sport has been serving as a repository for traditional values, to which the Japanese have returned time and again in epochs of uncertainty and change. Baseball and modern culture emerged and developed side by side in Japan, giving cultural representations of this national pastime special insights into Japanese values and their contortions from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Keaveney explains the origins of the cultural construct "Samurai baseball" and reflects on the recurrences of these essentialist discourses at critical junctures in Japan's modern history. Since the early modern period, writers, filmmakers, and manga artists have alternately affirmed and debunked these popular myths of baseball. This study presents an overview of these cultural products, beginning with Masaoka Shiki's pioneering baseball writings, then moves on to the long history of baseball films and the venerable tradition of baseball fiction, and finally considers the substantial body of baseball manga and anime. Perhaps what is most striking is the continuous relevance of baseball and its values as a point of cultural reference for the Japanese people; their engagement with baseball is a genuine national love affair.

Popular culture --- Bushido --- Baseball in literature --- Baseball films --- Baseball --- Base-ball --- Ball games --- Sports films --- Chivalry --- Ethics --- National characteristics, Japanese --- Samurai --- Culture, Popular --- Mass culture --- Pop culture --- Popular arts --- Communication --- Intellectual life --- Mass society --- Recreation --- Culture --- Study and teaching --- History and criticism. --- Social aspects --- History. --- History and criticism --- History --- E-books --- J6955 --- J4143 --- Japan: Sports and recreation -- baseball, softball --- Japan: Sociology and anthropology -- cultural trends and movements -- popular culture