From the Meiji period (1868–1912) of rapid modernization and nation-building through the present day, Japanese society has displayed an impressive interest in the sport of distance running. As Thomas Havens charts in this book, Japanese distance running as both consumable spectacle and participatory event reflects a number of intersecting historical forces, including early twentieth-century national and imperial ambitions, postwar democratization, corporate image management, elite academic identities, shifting gender norms, commercial media, and, of course, the multiple interests of the Japanese public. Drawing on official Japan Amateur Sports Association and media records, as well as autobiographies and personal accounts, Havens has produced a richly detailed and interesting work of sport history.
Running in Japan stands out for numbers alone. Since the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Havens writes, the number of formal (42.195 km) marathons held yearly in Japan has risen to several hundred (p. 4). In one weekend in November 2012, more than 77,000 people finished Japanese full marathons—a figure greater than the total number of finishers in sanctioned Japanese marathons in all of 2004 (p. 167). At the same time, as Havens argues, the sheer volume of runners is accompanied by multiple meanings for Japanese history and society. And while Havens notes at the outset his intention to eschew a “single methodological approach or theoretical position,” his stated aim is to reveal “patterns and tendencies” in the history of modern Japanese distance running (p. 30), focusing particularly on the “multiple efforts to reinvent and redefine both citizenship and achievement” in light of Japan's “long-term urbanization and growing affluence [through] enterprise capitalism” (p. 3).
Havens succeeds in presenting a detailed account of Japanese distance running in the modern era. His introduction moves briskly from the Edo period (1600–1868) through Japan's rapid modernization during the Meiji period (1868–1912), its “confident nationalism” from 1915 to 1945 (p. 15), the Olympic success of the 1960s, the “mature phase” of economic growth in the late 1970s and 1980s (p. 16), and the “years of painful adjustments” of the 1990s and 2000s (p. 17). Against this timeline Havens situates the various institutional forces that have helped to structure the world of modern Japanese running, from government entities to media outlets, and from elite universities to corporate sponsors (including the importance of “company athletic teams,” through which top athletes were recruited to at least notional employment at large corporations, thus retaining their amateur status and trading individual profit for job security).
While the names, dates, and statistics presented in the introduction may prove daunting to the less sports-oriented reader, the chapter provides a useful reference that complements the fleshed-out detail in the rest of the book. Throughout, Havens weaves the stories of individual athletes into the context of various running events and institutions in and beyond Japan, from long-distance relay races (ekiden) to formal Japanese and Olympic marathons. Marathon Japan follows the basic chronology of his introduction, narrating themes of nation-building and nationalism, corporate sponsorship, women's events, mass media, and popular participation as a series of interlocking moments in the timeline of modern Japanese running.
Havens's approach has the great strength of presenting runners and running on their own terms. Accounts of the lives of runners male and female—from the telegenic “Mr. Marathon” Seko Toshihiko, the rural “lone wolf” Nakayama Takeyuki, and the tragic Tsuburaya Kōkichi to the outspoken, controversial first professional female distance runner Arimori Yūko, the media star Tanigawa Mari, and the early twenty-first-century Olympic marathon gold medalists Takahashi Naoko and Noguchi Mizuki—do a great deal to illustrate, if not interpret, the intersection of corporate, academic, and media influences on Japanese (and, indeed, international) runners.
Again, this is a successful work in presenting the stories of Japanese runners and their contexts. While Havens notes the relevance of analytical frames such as capitalism, class consciousness, nationalism, and gender, however, he seems mostly to prefer a light analytical touch, letting such “patterns and tendencies” speak for themselves. Indeed, Havens often seems at pains to avoid theoretical analysis. He describes, for example, the “curious feature” of the inaugural Tokyo International Women's Marathon in 1979 of collecting blood and urine samples of all participants—supposedly, as Havens writes, to “establish a baseline for future women's marathons” (p. 92). The subjection of female athletes to this kind of explicitly medico-scientific bodily scrutiny might to many scholars seem juicy, low-hanging fruit, ripe for interpretation, but Havens leaves it unpicked. Similarly, his account of the 1936 Berlin gold and bronze medalists Sohn Gi Jeong and Nam Sungyong, both colonized Korean subjects representing Imperial Japan, offers little beyond the fairly well-established vision of Japanese oppression and Korean suffering (pp. 47–48). I would have welcomed Havens's insights into how the history of Japanese running helps to reshape our understanding of gendered, national identities in Japan—of how corporate or state interests coincided or conflicted with the lives of popular and elite runners throughout the rapid changes of the 1900s and 2000s.
In all, Havens has produced a satisfying and useful history of distance running in modern Japan. He has not followed the theoretically charged path of some recent scholarship on Japanese sports, such as the edited volumes Japan, Sport and Society: Tradition and Change in a Globalizing World and Sport, Memory and Nationhood in Japan: Remembering the Glory Days, or monographs such as Robin Kietlinski's Japanese Women and Sport: Beyond Baseball and Sumo and Wolfram Manzenreiter's Sport and Body Politics in Japan.Footnote 9 But Havens's work offers a helpful and detailed account of the various ways in which running has become an important part of the Japanese cultural landscape in the last 150 years.
