Japanese Women and Sport: Beyond Baseball and Sumo

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This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. In 'Japanese Women and Sport', Robin Kietlinski sets out to problematize the hegemonic image of the delicate Japanese woman, highlighting an overlooked area in the history of modern Japan. Previous studies of gender in the Japanese context do not explore the history of female participation in sport, and recent academic studies of women and sport tend to focus on Western countries. Kietlinski locates the discussion of Japanese women in sport within a larger East Asian context and considers the socio-economic position and history of modern Japan. Reaching from the early 20th century to the present day, Kietlinski traces the progression of Japanese women's participation in sport from the first female school for physical education and the foundations of competitive sport through to their growing presence in the Olympics and international sport.

Reviews

This book resolves some of the difficulties entailed in researching the history of womens sports in Japan and provides material for making global comparisons regarding the impact of cultural differences on gender issues in sports...the most significant feature of this book is the time-based analysis of the history of womens sports in Japan, an Asian country, from a Western cultural perspective...Because of this feature, Japanese readers may experience a sense of discord. It is precisely this feeling, however, that can create the potential for enrichment of historical research on womens sports in Japan. This cultural difference will provide stimulus to readers who feel a distance between the significance of womens sports in the history of Asia and Japan and themselves. -- Raita Kyoko * The International Journal of the History of Sport *
Robin Kietlinski's earnest but digestible volume puts the attainments of these athletes in the context of the development of Japanese society over the past 150 or so years, explaining how attitudes to sport, and women's proper place in it, were gradually transformed. But it was the stories of the women themselves, trailblazers nearly all, that most held my attention. -- David Owen, former FT Sports Editor * Inside the Games *

Author Bio

Robin Kietlinski is Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at the City University of New York - Baruch College, and a visiting research scholar at Columbia University's Weatherhead East Asian Institute. She has also served as Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Fordham University in New York City. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. from the University of Chicago, all in East Asian Languages and Civilizations