This paper deals with a profound irony at the heart of modern sports: that sports, for almost all of us almost all of the time, are about losing, not winning-about facing failure, not savoring success. The disappointment of defeat, not the satisfaction of victory, is the common condition of playing and watching.
I distinguish here between three broad types of losing: routine failure, the continual necessary production of losers; radical failure, which is failure so complete that it causes dismissal, release, resignation; and, somewhere between the routine and the radical, are those per during losses that constitute repetitive failure. Repetitive failure is the hardest to accept and to explain.
Using the case of the Hanshin Tigers, an Osaka professional baseball team of immense regional popularity but perpetual poor showing, I enumerate several different kinds of factors by which players and fans address, adjust, and accept repetitive failure. These include factors common to many sports, elements distinctive to baseball as a sport, factors distinctive to Japanese baseball, and those rationalizations peculiar to the Hanshin Tigers. I argue that we must identify sets of structural patterns and culturally-inflected rationalizations that keep people playing and watching despite persistent outcomes of defeat. It is a composite model rather than a single “logic of failure” that explains this and other such cases.

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This paper gives a report on project research pertaining to “The Body and Sports”, which was established as a theme in this academic society for the two-year period of 2001 to 2002.
Up until the 1980's, the Japan Society of Sports Sociology oddly enough did not pay much attention to the body, which should be the very focus of its debates and discussions. To say that the society prioritized research focusing on institutional, economic and cultural aspects and left issues pertaining to the body mainly to philosophers is surely acceptable. However, in the 1980's conditions changed. Issues pertaining to the body have involved variegated concepts and views. This paper probes deeply and critically into the positions of theories pertaining to the body to date by introducing a new perspective rather than following theory trends.
Ikei, one of the project members, has stated, “Theories pertaining to the body to date have not addressed the animal aspects of the physical body”. In other words, theories pertaining to the body to date have perceived the body as a “human thing”. This may be considered an ideology or a formed habit. This misapprehension is the central problem.
There is another important point when we discuss theory of the body. The point is biological as well as anthropological. In chapter 3, we point out that a human being belongs to the family of living species, and it is naturally under the influence of the evolution. Also, we take into consideration the brain system in actually creating affection and action. Unlike Descartes' doctrine of duality, we conclude that it is erroneous to pursue a human being as separating spirit from body.
In this way our project has just begun making a challenge for a new theory of the body.

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The purpose of this paper is to make an interim report of the research, “The World Cup Korea-Japan and Media”, organized as a research project by Japan Society of Sport Sociology. This paper focuses on the identity politics developed and negotiated by the representations of Japan and Korea in the media during The World Cup event.
The argument is constructed mainly by the reference of the researches by HWANG Seongbin and MORITSU Chihiro who are members of the project.
1. The world cup event shifts the implication from “Sport Festival” to “Mega media-event” in the globalization of media industry.
2. The media in Japan tended to represent Korea, Korean people and Korea's team as nationalistic, fanatic and non-sophisticated, while the media represented Japan, Japanese people and Japan's team as naturalized, friendly and well-trained.
3. Korean government regarded the World Cup as a good opportunity to make western countries recognize Korea as full-developed country, and developed the semi-official civic-movement aimed to improve Korean way of welcoming foreign visitors, which was promoted by the TV program series.

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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.

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“Tribe” cultures of the young men that have gushed into the urban space of our country have been the object of controlling or exclusion. To use urban space the young men have been restricted their practice by eyes of local residents or controlling of policemen and security guards.
In this paper I devoted skateboarders on the streets. I did skateboard myself and joined the young skateboarders at Tsuchiura station West Park where opened on May 27, 2001. Furthermore, I gathered voices of various actors.
On the opening of this station park, skateboarders teamed up with a manager of a local skateboard shop and collected signatures to move the city council. Although their activity was to gain that space, they were enclosed at the same time.
And in this activity they keep their ordinary practice; they recreated the space into the one enjoyable for them and also were attracted by “street” again to go back to there. They quest between edges of urban space as they dodging the control and exclusion.
So their activity cannot be described as the “resistance” to the enclosure by local governments or police. Young skateboarders do not make just resistance, but accept those pressures in some ways.
Through this paper, I described out those skateboarders' way of life in everyday practice that never been realized by using previous models of “counter” or “resistance”. They have their “artful and pliable practice” that could invalidate the power of “dominance”, and I found there is much possibility to alternative “solidarity”.

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The purpose of this study is focusing on the park in the modern Japan and clarifying about the relation between the city and the body. It focuses on the park because the Meiji government thinks that the park was caught with the formation equipment of the body in the city. And while clarifying an analysis viewpoint fundamental about the between the city and the body, the end of the various aspects is developed in introduction.
Especially the park improved with city planning at the Meiji and Taisho term will give the following viewpoints about the relation between the city and the body. People do the regular motion, when using the playground and gymnastics instrument of a park. And when always watched by others, the way of moving is determined.

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This research aims at considering the process of production and reproduction of the gender in a sport seen from a viewpoint of generation of a norm, in the Meiji and Taisho term where the sport was introduced.
In that case, not dualism-thinking (sex/gender) but generation of the category itself is regarded as a historical and political occurrence, and it considers as the object of analysis of the situation and the effect that it occurred. And first of all distinction of a man and a woman is considered to have been educated by the others in the form of being appropriate or un-appropriate. About the generation process of a norm, it is based on Osawa's theory.
The result, it is thought that gender was produced when the necessity of differentiating man and woman when controlling the deviation nature of a sport increases. Moreover, since it becomes easy to make the validity of an act in agreement, performing a sport educationally can consider becoming an effective means to reproduce gender.

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The purpose of this paper is to examine the negative factors influencing regular sport participation of middle-aged women. A case study was conducted by using face-to-face interviews in 1999 to 21 middle-aged married women, living in the Kansai District, and used 15 samples for this study. An integrative model that accounts for negative factors influencing sport participation of these women is applied to analyze the information obtained by interviews. The negative influences to the sport socialization was checked by focusing on three factors, such as 1) time factor, 2) gender-role and 3) pleasant and unpleasant experience and sport attitude which was formed through the experience. All cases are divided into two groups by the obtained information, persons who want to participate but cannot (we call them “the latents”) and persons who have no will or no interest on sport participation (we call them “the refusals”).
As a result, the following points were clarified.
First, the time factor influences the latents, but not the refusals.
Secondly, the influence of gender role was noticed on both groups. However there was no direct prohibition, indirect factors are strongly influential in sport-participation.
Thirdly, the difference between the latents and the refusals on pleasant and unpleasant experience and sport attitude which was formed through the experience became clear. The refusals had few positive experiences during school and latter life, and the negative experiences still have influence upon them.

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The purpose of this study was to examine the gender differences in characteristics of Japanese walkers through comparison with sports participants and to interpret such differences from the perspective of the gender ideology. Comparisons were based on several factors including attitude toward physical education, past participation in sport and so on. A survey was conducted by questionnaires mailed out to 1, 535 Japanese adults in 1998, of whom 1, 047 persons replied. Of those who responded, 369 persons (163 females and 206 males) were used in the analysis. Walkers and sport participants were compared by the logistic regression analysis in each sex. Moreover, the results of logistic regression analysis in males and in females were compared. Among females, the persons, who has negative attitude toward physical education and had not participated in sport activity after graduation from high school, have a tendency to conduct walking. The trend of participation in walking by the person with such characteristics was interpreted by the male dominated principles such as “competitiveness”, “skill”, and “rule” peculiar to the modem sport. It was argued that these male dominated principles had excluded the females from participation in sport, and walking is conducted easily by females because it doesn't possess such principles.

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“Baseball Canker Controversy (1911)” was developed in newspapers and many educators and intellectuals involved in the argument at the end of the Meiji Era. Even though former studies of the controversy treated it as a notable event in the history of Japanese baseball, the attempt of this study is to clarify the crucial impact of the controversy on educational system, especially focusing on the development and expansion of educational credentialism.
First, I argue the background of the controversy that was connected with the institutional expansion of the educational system of those days. At that time, there were educational difficulties for adolescents; such as not so many students allowed to enter a high school and schools emphasized on the pursuit of intellectualism. Then, many considered playing a sport as a burden for students in relation with studying. This study represents how baseball became controlled in schools under this circumstance.
Second, the controversy created conflicts between public and private schools. In order to criticize up-coming waves of private schools, educators of public schools targeted at baseball that was increasingly razing in popularity. On the other hand, private schools considered baseball as a distinctive cultural practice to confront with their criticism in the institutional formation of educational credentialism.
Finally, this study clarifies the controversy that was an “educational controversy” as symbolic struggle for a cultural “legitimacy” by using cultural reproduction theory.

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In recent years, a new trend has appeared in sports sociology. Macro-theoretical problems are examined through case studies of sports. However, most of these studies are based on historical texts, not ethnography.
In this regard, J. Sugden's boxing studies provide a valuable, example of ethnography as a link between micro and macro-theoretical points of view. Analyzing his main book, Boxing and Society: An International Analysis, this paper develops a methodology for the micro-macro link in sport sociology.
This paper makes the following points. The first ethnography in Sugden's book, of a professional boxing club in a US ghetto, appropriately addresses important questions about reproduction of exploitative relation between managers and professional boxers in the research of boxing at that time. Second, this paper argues that the second ethnography in his book, of an amateur boxing club in Northern Ireland, a land of sectarian conflict, appropriately answers his macro-theoretical question about the maintenance of social order in a stateless society, although Sugden did not explicitly recognize the macro-micro link examination in his work. These two cases show that by combining diverse sports ethnography with macro-theoretical interests, a model for achieving a macro-micro link in sports sociology can be achieved.

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