Sociology of Sport Journal, 2012, 29, 559-562
© 2012 Human Kinetics, Inc.
Official Journal of NASSS
www.SSJ-Journal.com
BOOK REVIEW
Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture
in Modern Japan
By Dennis J. Frost. Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2010, Cambridge, MA.
Reviewed by: R. Kenji Tierney, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY.
In the year 1928, the legendary sumo grand champion Hitachiyama’s dissected
heart took a short leave from the medical laboratories of Keio University—where
it had been left to science—to make a dreamtime visit to a small boy to teach him
about “the circulatory system and about what he needs to do to make sure that
he, too, can develop a large, healthy heart” (Frost 2010, p. 91). This is one of the
many fascinating stories that Dennis J. Frost examines to explore how Japanese
sports stars and their stories have been used for purposes that have only a tangential
relationship to their athletic accomplishments.
Seeing Stars is an ambitious book about the place of a small constellation of
sports stars within Japanese celebrity culture during the last three centuries. Frost
examines individual sports champions, the eras they thrived in, and how their “stories” have been written and rewritten for their eras and subsequent ones. Drawing
on diverse sources including biographies, diaries, newspaper articles, personal
interviews, fan magazines, and films, Frost unpacks the complicated topic of how
sports stars are both made and understood beyond the record book. Frost makes a
fine contribution to the growing corpus of writing on sports in Japan. His analysis
of individual sports stars is a welcomed contrast to the more general histories
(Guttmann and Thompson 2001), analyses of individual sports (e.g. Spielvogel
2003 and Kelly 1998, 2000, 2004), events such as the Olympics or World Cup
(Collins 2008, Horne and Manzenreiter 2002), and more popular writings on or
by individual sports stars (Whiting 2005, Cromartie 1992, Takamiyama 1973).
Although much has been written about Western sports stars, Frost is the first to
engage Japanese ones in a systematic and scholarly fashion. His work allows the
non-Japanese reader a peek into the fervent culture of sports star adulation that
exists in Japan. As sports stars are never merely champions, but heroes and role
models whose “stories” have captured the public’s imagination, the details of their
(narrated) lives offer interesting insights into Japan, the world, and sports in general.
The book’s first half, divided into two chapters, deals with sumo. The first
chapter is a detailed history of sumo from the 1700s to the beginning of the 20th
century focused on developments in sumo as especially related to celebrity culture.
The second chapter examines the famous wrestler, Taniemon Hitachiyama (active
career 1890-1914), who radically changed sumo’s place in Japan and the world. In
the second half of the book, Frost devotes chapters to the track and field star Hitomi
Kinue (active career 1923-1931), the baseball player Eiji Sawamura (1934-1943),
and the boxer Yoko Gushiken (1974-1981). He concludes with an epilogue about
the famous baseball star Ichiro Suzuki.
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560 Book Review
Using the ideas of film theorist Richard Dyer, Frost argues that seeing a star is
not seeing the “real person,” but merely the constructed image. Thus, his chapters
are not meant to “document the ‘true’ people behind the sports-celebrity images,
but rather to examine how these images themselves have been constructed at
different times and how they affect the production of future celebrity representations” (Frost, 2010, p.15). As he is examining some of the most storied athletes in
Japanese history, Frost’s task is exceedingly complex. By looking at the narration
of stars’ lives, he constantly has to distinguish between 1) the “true” story of an
athlete’s life; 2) the narrations that circulated during the athlete’s life; and 3) the
revelations within the dozens of biographical books, articles, and movies that have
come out since. Because he’s dealing with so many rich and varied sources, it can
get confusing as to when and how “facts” of an athlete’s life circulated. Nonetheless, Frost is effective in showing how each era’s political and cultural concerns
(WWII, women’s liberation, etc.) shape or demand the ways that its celebrities are
understood. Examining different stars, in different sports, and in different historical
eras allows the author to engage a variety of topics including nationalism, cultural
imperialism, body culture, gender, and ethnicity.
To many readers, these names, except Ichiro, will be unfamiliar or only vaguely
known. Although they all gained their fame within a global context (sport, event, or
travels abroad), they were, and remain, most famous in Japan. Nonetheless, the arcs
of their “stories” are strikingly familiar—the noble athlete who saves his floundering sport (Hitachiyama), the woman who overcomes gender discrimination and
questions of her sexuality to break world records (Kinue), the star athlete who dies
serving his country (Sawamura), and the minority athlete from the hinterlands who
overcomes poverty to become a world champion (Gushiken). One of the fascinating
aspects of sports is that while all stars are understood as unique individuals, there
are deep similarities in the narratives constructed about them. This is not merely an
accident, but a global process. Frost argues that there is a “sports-star paradigm [as]
a pattern or model shaping how sports stars have been conceptualized, depicted,
and interpreted”; it relies on the athlete’s “exceptional skills, bodies, and character
to explain their rise to sports stardom” (Frost, 2010, p.10).
Frost focuses the start of this paradigm in his discussion of Hitachiyama’s rise
to prominence. Citing Earl Kinmonth, Frost shows how influential Samuel Smiles’
book, Self-Help (1859) was in Japan, creating a generation of “self-made” politicians, businessmen, and, of course, athletes (Frost, 2010, p.102-6). This idea of
the “self-made man” combined with native ideas, such as bushido (the way of the
samurai), has continued to shape the ways commentators “make sense” of athletes
in Japan. Examples of this abound, such as Robert Whiting’s recent offerings on
“samurai baseball.”
In Frost’s terminology (adapted from Dyer), he draws on the notion of “star
systems” as “the process by which sports stars are constructed in relation to, and
frequently in opposition to, other stars” (Frost, 2010, p.8). While he thoughtfully
engages this notion in his introduction, it could have been highlighted more in the
chapters on individual sports stars to show their places within the constellation of
Japan’s elaborate celebrity culture. This effort could have served as the basis for
a useful discussion on the differences between “sports stars” and on the related,
yet different, terms such as “celebrity,” “great,” “famous,” and “champion” which
Frost tends to use interchangeably throughout his book. A similar discussion of
Book Review 561
what “sports” means in Japan, especially in different historical eras, would also
have helped his project, for instance, in discussions of sumo, which is first said to
have emerged as a spectator sport in the early 1600s but later is said to have been
subjected to “sportification.”
Frost’s decision to devote the second half of the book to chapters featuring
different sports stars allows the reader to consider the individual in his or her
own context. For example, the chapter on how Kinue became an unforeseen star,
appearing on the global stage as it was literally being built for women, is a very
interesting read. Her natural talents and work ethic earned her a silver medal in the
1928 Amsterdam Olympics, forcing her fellow citizens to interpret Japan’s new
image as a producer of female athletes. Frost’s decision to focus chapters on specific
individuals a coherence to each chapter (and also makes it easier for instructors to
assign individual chapters as course readings) but the book as whole seems less
integrated. With the first half of the book being devoted to sumo, the text overall
ends up feeling slightly unbalanced. The detailed history offered of sumo serves
the reader well in making sense of Hitachiyama’s ascension and impact on sumo,
but similar chapters (or sections) giving both the historical and cultural contexts
of the other sports would have helped to explain the “sports system” in Japan. All
nations have different sports constellations (to extend the metaphor) with each sport
occupying different cultural roles that are understood in relation to each other. Thus,
for instance, an explanation of the place of track and field or boxing in Japanese
culture and history (who introduced it, who participates, who watches, etc.) would
help the reader to understand the place of these sports and thus the “greatness” of
each of the athletes Frost profiles.
The book’s structure provokes one to thinks about how previous stars served
to frame succeeding one. While some chapters do refer back to Hitachiyama, the
reader is left to wonder whether or how Kinue’s successes on the track framed
Sawamura’s exploits on the baseball diamond, or how Ichiro’s rise was shaped by
Gushiken’s boxing exploits. Did the Okinawan boxer lay the groundwork for the
successes of the Okinawan pop star Namie Amuro, or did it prime Japanese youth
to be receptive to the tremendously popular (and recently translated into English)
boxing manga called “Fighting Spirit”(Hajime no Ippo)?
The book ends with Ichiro. Ichiro is famous not just for his amazing baseball
skills and stretching routine; one of the top Google results in a search on his name
is a video of Ichiro discussing his favorite American expression about rats copulating in a wool sock. I suspect that the video is popular, not just for the bawdy
nature of it, but precisely because it’s a glimpse behind the carefully constructed
narrative of the global star athlete. Frost deconstructs these stories and shows the
processes behind the production of stars, making his book of interest to scholars
of both sports and East Asia.
References
Collins, S. (2008). The 1940 Tokyo Games, The missing Olympics: Japan, the Asian Olympics
and the Olympic movement. New York: Routledge.
Cromartie, W. and Whiting, R. (1991). Slugging it out in Japan. Tokyo and New York:
Kodansha.
Guttmann, A. and Thompson, L. (2001). Japanese sports: A history. Honolulu: University
of Hawai‘i Press.
562 Book Review
Kelly, W. (1998) Blood and guts in Japanese professional baseball, in The culture of Japan
as seen through its leisure, S. Linhart, and S. Frühstück, eds. Albany: SUNY Press.
(2000) The spirit and spectacle of school baseball—Mass media, statemaking, and “edutainment” in Japan, 1905-1935”. Senri Ethnographic Studies. 52: 105-115.
Horne, J. and Manzenreiter, W. (2002) Japan, Korea and the 2002 World Cup. New York:
Routledge.
Spielvogel, L. (2003). Working out in Japan: Shaping the female body in Tokyo fitness clubs.
Durham: Duke— University Press.
Kuhaulua, J. (1973). Takamiyama: The world of sumo. New York: Kodansha.
Whiting, R. (2005). The Samurai way of baseball: The impact of Ichiro and the new wave
from Japan. New York: Grand Central Publishing.