Abstract
This paper attempts to illustrate meanings and possible effects of sporting narratives in the Japanese media after the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011.
The earthquake is one of the biggest disasters in Japanese history. Responses of top athletes to the national tragedy were swift and, probably, much more visible than those in other cultural areas such as literature, movies or music. Top athletes, including professional baseball players and J-League footballers, held charity matches, had voluntary money-making, or held events to communicate with refugees who lost their family and house.
True, their activities are encouraging. But the media narratives to deal with these events are too uniform and worked to discursively construct national unity after 3.11. Especially on the winning of the World Cup of the Japanese national women football team, known by their nickname “Nadeshiko Japan”, the media’s uniform narratives discursively construct national unity or kizuna (bond), a buzzword in post-3.11 Japan. They also uniformly portrayed “Nadeshiko Japan” as being “resilient”, which is supposed to mirror Japanese national identity and, at the same time, the national characteristic the nation needs most after this historic disaster.
When the media narrate that sports or their winnings give us a kizuna, those narratives could, even unconsciously, hide the possible division that does exist in Japan after 3.11 – that is disjunction between quakehit area and others.
