Introducing Hanshin Tigers Baseball

This chapter introduces the Hanshin Tigers and baseball in the Kansai region of Japan through an account of my own first encounters with them as I began fieldwork in 1996. The chapter questions the limits of national character accounts of Japanese baseball. Instead, it introduces the concept of sportsworld to formulate the ways that players, management, media, fans, and the regional population all contribute to make Hanshin Tiger baseball culturally meaningful and socially dense. The chapter examines the qualities of baseball as an extended-season, interval team sport that make it an exemplar of a melodramatic, masculine soap opera. It is an intricate matrix of statistics and stories and multiple overlapping narratives of individuals, careers, teams, and seasons.