Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern Japan by Dennis J. Frost

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From: "Andrew Field" <shanghaidrew@GMAIL.COM>
To: <H-ASIA@H-NET.MSU.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2011 8:05 AM
Subject: H-ASIA: Member's publication Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity,
Identity, and Body Culture in Modern Japan by Dennis J. Frost

H-ASIA
Feb 10 2011

Member's publication Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and
Body Culture in Modern Japan by Dennis J. Frost
*************************************
From: Dennis Frost <Dennis.Frost@kzoo.edu>

Please forgive the self-promotion, but I am pleased to announce the
publication of my book:

_Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern
Japan_

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010

ISBN-13: 978-0674056107

In Seeing Stars, Dennis J. Frost traces the emergence and evolution of
sports celebrity in Japan from the seventeenth through the twenty-
first centuries. Frost explores how various constituencies have
repeatedly molded and deployed representations of individual athletes,
revealing that sports stars are socially constructed phenomena, the
products of both particular historical moments and broader discourses
of celebrity. Drawing from media coverage, biographies, literary
works, athletes' memoirs, bureaucratic memoranda, interviews, and
films, Frost argues that the largely unquestioned mass of information
about sports stars not only reflects, but also shapes society and body
culture. He examines the lives and times of star athletes—including
sumo grand champion Hitachiyama, female Olympic medalist Hitomi Kinue,
legendary pitcher Sawamura Eiji, and world champion boxer Gushiken
Yokō--demonstrating how representations of such sports stars mediated
Japan's emergence into the putatively universal realm of sports,
unsettled orthodox notions of gender, facilitated wartime mobilization
of physically fit men and women, and masked lingering inequalities in
postwar Japanese society. As the first critical examination of the
history of sports celebrity outside a Euro-American context, this book
also sheds new light on the transnational forces at play in the
production and impact of celebrity images and dispels misconceptions
that sports stars in the non-West are mere imitations of their Western
counterparts.

Contents
List of Figures x
Author's Note xii
Introduction: Sports Celebrity in Japan: A Transnational
History 1
1 Saving Sumo: Re-Presenting the National Sport
19
2 The Making of a Self-Made Star: Celebrity Images and the Emergence
of a Sports-
Star Paradigm 69
3 "So, Your Daughter Is a Sportsman": Gender Anxiety and
Nationalism in the Golden
Age of Sports 109
4 "Japan's Number One" Goes to War: Baseball, Militarization, and
Memory 151
5 Becoming the Kanmuriwashi: Ethnicity, Narrativity, and "Spectacular
Difference" 190
Epilogue: So How Tall Is Ichiro? 226
Reference Matter
Notes 239
Bibliography 303
Index 327

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674056107

Dennis J. Frost
Kalamazoo College

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