Abstract
This paper surveys the ways in which cultural studies of football have considered the relationships between football and collective identities, and tries to argue that they provide a crucial viewpoint to analyze not just Western football culture but also that of Japanese, especially in terms of national team. After the controversy with Leicester school, cultural studies of football have tried to see football as a kind of medium through which football fans, especially working class male, articulate their cultural identities.
They emphasize that football gives those fans a temporal carnivalesque and that the culture fostered in the stadium can be counter-hegemonic against capitalistic, ordered society. It is the concept of ‘collective imaginary’ by C. Bromberger et al. that has a great influence to them to explain the way of identification of football fans, which means a sort of mentality of ‘our team’ constructed by a particular stereotyped image of playing style which fans have in mind and identify with. However, such identification with ‘our team’ should be at the same time recognized as a complex articulation which contains the process of inclusion and exclusion in terms of race and nationhood. In other words, a specific racial frame and nationhood is already inscribed on the ‘collective imaginary’. If we appropriate this viewpoint to analyze the Japanese situation, we could see the discourses on World Cup 2002 which represented national teams with stereotypical images as constructing a particular kind of ‘collective imaginary’ which specifies and fixes the racial and bodily schema of Japanese-ness.
