The Gender-related Discursive Function of Japanese Football since Its Professionalization

Abstract

The history of football in Japan begins in the 1870s. However, it took more than a century for the sport to have a professional league in the country. A decade before the beginning of the J.League, in the 1990s, young Japanese of the time had developed an interest in football thanks to the popularity of the manga and anime called Captain Tsubasa. The heroes of this story awakened the dreams of national representation, personal success, teamwork and a masculinity model that was different from that represented in baseball or traditional Japanese sports and presented itself as cosmopolitan. After the World Cup of 2002, co-hosted by Japan and South Korea, the popularity of media football in Japan continued growing mostly related to men as players, influencing the amateur practice among youngsters. Meanwhile, female football was also developing. Following the triumph of the Female National Team in the World Cup of 2011, a few months after the Great East Japan Earthquake, Japanese female football stars also became celebrities inside the country. By the second decade of the 21sttwenty-first century, media football and its Japanese stars have become a relevant terrain for the negotiation of national and gender identity discourses within Japanese society. In this chapter, I propose to rely on the textual analysis of some of Japan’s most relevant male and female football stars of the last four decades to trace and examine this development of football to become one of the most popular sports in Japan, as well as to unveil the main discourses that media has built around the sport and its stars.