The puzzle of transplanting sports: Western sports in the Asia Pacific (original) (raw)
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This study investigates the multiplicity of South Korean Major League Baseball fans, with a focus on the tensions that they experience under the nationalistic aura surrounding MLB fandom while pursuing their individual hobby. For this purpose, it employs the idea of “post-Westernization” to interpret baseball as a global sport and examine its recent popularity in South Korea. By exploring the activities and voices of an online community among Korean fans, it demonstrates how national desires were complicated when they collided with a global strategy during the first World Baseball Classic in 2006. Analysis of Korean MLB fans during the WBC indicates both the possibilities and the limits of global baseball as a case of post-Westernization. The study shows that becoming an MLB fan in South Korea is at the intersection of national identity (nationalist fervor for MLB), regional rivalry (against Japan, the former colonizer) and global sensibilities (American sport fandom). Korean fans’ responses can be summarized as the national-regional-global nexus in which they perceive the existence of regional and global hierarchies, but they also routinely contest their own and each others’ perceptions. Finally, it suggests that fans’ articulation of the national, regional, and global are far from being fixed or unidirectional: they are constantly under construction.
Glocalization and Sports in Asia
Sociology of Sport Journal, 2012
Asia’s sports-mediascapes are increasingly globalized and regionalized, as are the roles played specifically by global sports in the processes of reconstituting national imaginaries among local populations as they undergo the larger experience of globalization. As such, the thesis of “glocalization” developed by Roland Robertson informs the essays in this special issue that tackle recent trends in sports culture in Asian localities, engaged in a global arena. As Asian locales host mega sporting events and new mediscapes for the glocal sports industry, glocal sports fan, and the glocal athlete, the essays in this special issue propose crucial concerns for the discipline of sports studies.
The World Baseball Classic: The Production and Politics of a New Global Sport Spectacle
This chapter examines the contexts and conflicts involved in the production of the world’s newest global sport spectacle, the World Baseball Classic (WBC). First held in 2006, this unusual spectacle takes place simultaneously in four different countries before culminating in a final contest in the United States. What makes this particular spectacle unique is that it is not organized and run by an International Sport Federation (ISF) (global governing body), or an international non-governmental organization (INGO), such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC); instead it is the product of a transnational corporation. The circumstances of the WBC’s conception, its initial production, and the international politics between its organizer, a transnational corporation, and various governments raises a series of questions regarding the sovereignty of states, the power of corporations, and the ethos behind the production of global sport. The struggles in the production of this international tournament involved competing worldviews regarding the value and ethos of baseball, inter-corporate struggles, and governmental controls over citizenship and mobility. By focusing on the negotiations between these various agents, this chapter considers the ebb and flow of power within global sport. In particular it examines the apparent conflict of interests over the participation of a ‘Cuban national team’ in the WBC from different perspectives, including the American government, the Cuban government, the International Olympic Committee, and the Creators of the WBC itself, Major League Baseball International, Inc. While not the only complicated international negotiations conducted in order to organize such a tournament, the complicated international politics between the US and Cuba illustrates the multiple levels of diplomacy, discourse, and discord underpinning any global sport spectacle involving governments and corporations.
Double Binding of Japanese Colonialism: Trajectories of Baseball in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea
This study explores the historic implications of baseball within the larger processes of constructing modernity under Japanese colonialism by examining the game’s regional trajectory, with a focus on its introduction and proliferation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although baseball was initially introduced into the region as a symbol of American modernity, it was spread and popularized by Imperial Japan. By examining the ways that baseball was received and appropriated in Japan, Taiwan and Korea, this study demonstrates that its trajectory reflects not only colonization by both the U.S. and Japan but resistance that amounted to a double decolonization against both of these entities. The term “double binding” is heuristically used to illustrate both Japanese imperialism and postcolonial consciousness in its (former) colonies, in which the U.S. and Japan functioned as a pair of modernizing/imperial forces and as the objects of decolonization.
Baseball was introduced to Korea by American missionaries in 1905, as a beaming sign of modernity and American hegemony. Yet, the sport was popularized in Korea during the Japanese Occupation (1910-1945). While there was a general fascination with the sport as experienced by Korean youth, baseball functioned for contradictory purposes. Firstly, Koreans played baseball as a medium of cultural conciliation with the Japanese colonialists. On the other hand, baseball also provided a few opportunities through which the colonized expressed anti-colonial sentiments toward the Japanese rule. According to Cho, baseball in Korea had taken root in relation to both colonizers, i.e. Japan and the U.S. as the sport remained popular in Asian countries, including South Korea, during the Cold War era. To date, the popularity of baseball among Koreans can still be accounted for through the ongoing relations they share with their past colonizers.