Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers

Baseball has been Japan’s national pastime for over a century, and the Hanshin Tigers have long been the country’s second favorite professional team in its second-largest city. This ethnography, based on multiple years of fieldwork, analyzes Hanshin Tiger baseball as a complex sportsworld, the collective product and the converging actions of the players themselves, demanding coaches, layers of intrusive management, a large and prying media, and millions of passionate and organized fans across the Kansai region. It explains the team’s popularity through decades of futility in the late twentieth century and charts the recent changes that have transformed it into a regularly competitive team. Over these years, the Hanshin Tigers have been a long-running soap opera of workplace melodrama and second-city anxiety, and they illustrate the enduring features and new vulnerabilities of professional baseball in the twenty-first century. The book demonstrates the significance of baseball for modern Japan and the importance of ethnography in critical sport studies.