Japan Journal of Sport Sociology
Online ISSN : 2185-8691
Print ISSN : 0919-2751
ISSN-L : 0919-2751
Volume 3
Displaying 1-6 of 6 articles from this issue
  • Masayuki Uesugi
    1995 Volume 3 Pages 1-11
    Published: March 20, 1995
    Released on J-STAGE: May 30, 2011
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    The productive society valued abstinence and diligence in order to promote wealth. In such a society, sports spectators expected excellent teams and players and desired victory and high records. As a result, players pursued the value of excellence by playing at a high level. Spectator sports gave people the dreams they dreamed. Spectators and players had the same value of excellence.
    But the consumer society values self-expression. In such a society, spectators attach importance to their own actions through the process of watching sports. A stadium is a site for self-expression. They also require a game that completes the process of watching. Therefore, players must pursue the value of not only excellence but of performance requiring a high level of play, in order to offer spectators a site for self-expression. These are games that let spectarors join in the play.
    Spectators in a consumer society want spectator sports that offer them more and longer opportunities of self-expression. To satisfy this demand, spectator sports must attach great significance to performance. A value on performance is born out of a high level of play, and, if a value on performance is to be pursued, the value of excellence will likewise be pursued. This makes a player attempt to surpass one's physical limits at times. Even if a player gets hurt, spectators seet it as just a performance. Spectator sports in a consumer society involve the paradox that the value of excellence which enhances the value placed on performance is destroyed by the pursuit of that value on performance.
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  • Norihito Yamamoto
    1995 Volume 3 Pages 13-25
    Published: March 20, 1995
    Released on J-STAGE: May 30, 2011
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    The purpose of this research is to investigate the relation between the lifestyles of university students and their sports activity preferences. The survey was made by sending out questionnaires to 1, 000 university students, and the following results were obtained.
    1) Factor analysis was applied to 71 items to classify sports activities according to the similarities in preferences. As a result of this analysis, 13 sports activity preference factors were extracted: marine sports, dancing, grappling-type ball games, sky sports, racket sports, outdoor sports, target sports, power competing sports, martial arts, track and field, baseball/softball, endurance sports, and swimming.
    2) To grasp the structure of the lifestyles of the university students, factor analysis was applied to 41 AIO items, and as a result, 10 life-style factors were extracted: fashion-oriented, achievement-oriented, sports-oriented, volunteer-oriented, individuality-oriented, leader-oriented, brand-oriented, success-in-life-oriented, harmony-oriented, and nature-oriented.
    3) By means of a cluster analysis of nine factors of lifestyle-excepting the sports-oriented factor-students were classified into six lifestyle groups, i. e., the type valuing fashion, the type with no purposel in life, the type valuing harmony, the anti-brand-type, the type actively living life, the type valuing success in life.
    4) Through this investigation of the preferences in sports activities of these six lifestyle groups, it turned out that there is a definite relation between the types of life-styles and the preferences in sports activities was recognized. Furthermore, it was clarified that the activity preference patterns were inversely related among the groups that indicated opposing life styles.
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  • The “Hidden Type” of “Yuami (Hot Bath)” Culture
    Yuko Kusaka
    1995 Volume 3 Pages 27-36
    Published: March 20, 1995
    Released on J-STAGE: May 30, 2011
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    “Hot bath” as a traditional Japanese leisure activitiy can not be included in Roger Caillois's four categories of play. Historically, the custom of taking a hot bath has been practiced throughout the world. However, the Japanese have made it into a unique leisure style ever since ancient times. The history of the “Yuami” and the “onsen” in Japan is closely associated with processes of secularization and popularization as both developed from, in ancient times, “sacred water” within which divine spirits reside into a present-day play or leisure activity.
    In contrast with the Western “hot bath” which is artificial, practical and instrumental, the Japanese “Yuami” is sensual, pleasurable and autotelic. In other words, the Western bath could be said to involve a “conquest” of nature while the Japanese “onsen” involves “coexistence” with nature. The Japanese people have developed unique “folkways” concerning the “hot bath” as a form of NATURAL PLAY in which human natural energy (i. e. the soul) is nestled in the bosom of nature like an embryo in the womb. In onsen, people play with nature in “hot baths” like birds playing with the wind and the clouds in the sky. They rely on and give themselves over to nature. This tradition remains even though there is a recent trend toward Western-style spas.
    Japanese “hot bath” folkways have been formed by both the physical and cultural factors. Physically, Japan is humid, hot, and stuffy in the summer and cold in the winter. And there are a large number of volcanos and hot springs. Culturally, there are the ancient animistic beliefs in nature of the Jomon era, Chinese “Taoism”/“Shoyoyu”, the “Shinto” beliefs, and Buddist ideas of the “hot bath”.
    Thus, it can be said that the folkways surrounding the Japanese hot bath are basically constituted by the identification of humans and nature as a type of cultural eidos and the reincarnation of life as a type of ethos.
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  • Kazue Kawahara
    1995 Volume 3 Pages 37-45
    Published: March 20, 1995
    Released on J-STAGE: May 30, 2011
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    The process of the introduction and dissemination of concepts and practices of “fitness” in Japan can be viewed as a social phenomenon. Throughout the 1980s, the concept of “fitness” was utilized by many people as a symbol for a modern life style. Numerically, the number of fitness clubs in Japan increased 630%, from only 246 in 1980 to 1, 564 in 1992.
    The “fitness boom” was in part a result of people's “health consciousness, ” and its negative version, “health anxiety”. However, “fitness” is not simply a means of staying healthy, it also has an element of “fashion” (or “beauty”) which is different from “health”, and which played a major role in the process of dissemination and establishment of fitness in Japan. This can be seen in the great popularity of aerobics in the early 1980s.
    Building upon the argument above, the second half of this paper studies the various sociological meanings of “fitness” from two different perspectives. First, from the perspective of consumer sociology, I will examine how the human body has been transformed into an object of consumption, and how the uses of the body (for example, fitness) have also been consumed as a type of “style”. Next, from the point of view of the sociology of knowledge, I will analyze the ideological conditions related to “fitness”.
    Lastly, I will touch upon how fitness, which enticed most ordinary women through the power of fashion, changed the way women think about their bodies.
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  • Motoaki Fujita
    1995 Volume 3 Pages 47-59
    Published: March 20, 1995
    Released on J-STAGE: May 30, 2011
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    This research project looked at how organized sports teams are supported and managed and how this process relates to regional characteristics.
    It was agreed that the nuclear families would participate as single units for the purposes of this research on S-Boys Baseball Team, It was also agreed in principle that the participating families would evenly share the responsibilities of running the team. There were four basic particularistic relationships, between father and child, father and father, mother and mother, and child and child, and it was determined that these were related to the regional characteristic of urbanization.
    The primary factors that determined the leaders of the team were: the father's occupation, the length of time the child had been on the team, the length of the parent's residence in the area, and the child's playing skills. The amount of time and energy the leaders devoted to running and leading the team was an important factor that determined the level of parental support and the continuation of smooth operations.
    For the team, winning was an opportunity to justify the efforts expended, and losing was an opportunity to confirm the educational value of the sports. And the results of the games had a strong influence on the formation of a we-feeling.
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  • Emphasis on the Paper Published in The Korean Journal of Physical Education
    Se-Chang Jang
    1995 Volume 3 Pages 61-69
    Published: March 20, 1995
    Released on J-STAGE: May 30, 2011
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    The purpose of this study was to analyze the general research trends in sport sociology in Korea through dividing the papers which were published in The Korean Journal of Physical Education into three periods; the first period (1953-1980), the second period (1981-1988), and the third period (1989-1992). The main results can be summarized as follows;
    1. Generally, the percentage of natural science papers related to sport was about 60 percent in the first period and increased to 62.2 percent in the second period. And the rate of the cultural and social science papers, with the exception of papers on sport sociology, was 32.9 percent (49 among all the 157 papers) in the second period, increasing to 35.7 percent in the third period.
    However, the rate of sport sociology papers was 38.4 percent (58 among a total of 151 papers) in the second period, decreasing to 29.8 percent in the third period.
    2. The papers on sport sociology in the domain of sport, play, culture and society, and the domain of social psychological research on sport and play amounted to 58.7 percent of the 151 papers published in the second period. Though these papers decreased in the third period, the papers dealing with social problems such as those concerning the household and the aged tended to increase.
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