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Books > Sport & Leisure > Sports & outdoor recreation > Track & field sports, athletics > Cross-country running
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Marathon Japan - Distance Racing and Civic Culture (Hardcover)
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Marathon Japan - Distance Racing and Civic Culture (Hardcover)
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Japanese have been fervid long-distance runners for many centuries.
Today, on a per capita basis, at least as many Japanese residents
complete marathons each year as in the United States or any other
country. Marathon Japan is the first comprehensive English-language
chronicle of the history of this important part of Japanese sports
culture. It traces the development of distance racing beginning
with the Stockholm Olympics of 1912, when the Japanese government
used athletics, and above all the marathon, as a means to continue
its late nineteenth-century project of winning the respect of
Western countries and achieving parity with the world powers. The
marathon soon became the first event in a Western-derived sport in
which Japanese proved consistently superior to athletes from other
countries. During the 1920s and 1930s, Japanese runners regularly
produced the fastest times in the world, and twice in the period
after World War Two - in the 1960s and late 1970s-1980s - Japanese
men again dominated world marathoning. Japanese women likewise
emerged as some of the world's fastest in the 1990s and early
2000s. Meanwhile the general public took up distance running with
enthusiasm, starting in the 1960s and continuing unabated today,
symbolized most recently by massive open-entry marathons in Tokyo,
Osaka, and other Japanese cities comparable in scale and challenge
to major world races in Boston, New York, Chicago, London, and
Berlin. In this book, Thomas Havens analyzes the origins,
development, and significance of Japan's century-long excellence in
marathons and long-distance relays (ekiden), as well as the reasons
for the explosive growth of distance racing among ordinary citizens
in more recent decades. He reveals the key role of commercial media
companies in promoting sports, especially marathons and ekidens,
from the 1910s to today and explains how running became a consumer
commodity beginning in the 1970s as Japanese society matured into
an age of capitalistaffluence. What comes to light as well are the
relentlessly nationalistic goals underlying government policies
toward sports - above all marathons, where Japanese have been so
successful - throughout the modern era. The public craze for
distance racing, both watching and running, has created a shared
citizenship of civic participation among young and old, male and
female, persons of every social background and level of education.
The combination of speedy elite athletes and huge numbers of
general-citizen runners means that Japan today is truly a marathon
nation. Marathon Japan will appeal to Japan specialists interested
in modern cultural and social history. It will engage recreational
runners in Japan and abroad as well as anyone interested in the
history of sports.
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