Palgrave Series of Sport in Asia. Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore, 2020. xii, 238 pp. (Illustration.) US$89.00, ebook. ISBN 9789811531965.
In 1997, South Korea was facing a national crisis. The very same year witnessed the debut of Chan-ho Park and his outstanding performance as a pitcher in Major League Baseball (MLB). In Global Sports Fandom in South Korea, Younghan Cho tries to elucidate this coincidental relationship as a pivotal metaphor to understand the complex transformation of South Korean society on a global scale. Sports fandom via the online community, MLBPARK (www.mlbpark.com), provided a rich source of data for this research.
Cho begins with an anecdote about his bafflement when he joined an offline meeting of MLBPARK. Despite their shared interest in Chan-ho Park and the MLB, the participants showed greater enthusiasm for drinking wine and chatting about local matters: “These fans do not easily match up with the typical image of global fans in any kind of pop culture, including global sports, who are supposed to exhibit their fandom via special costumes, cosmopolitan manners, professional knowledge, and relevant jargon” (2). This surprise led the author to a theoretical search into the dynamic interactions between nationalism and globalization, focusing on global sports fandom.
The book consists of two parts. Part 1 is devoted to explaining the historical context where the transformation of Korean society and globalized sports fandom meet in the late 1990s South Korea. The national economic crisis invited a severe intervention by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which forced South Korea to restructure its developmental economic system. This historical transition went hand in hand with the rapid advancement of media technology, including cable TV and the Internet, and the globalization of the marketing strategy of MLB to attract both players and fans from abroad, including East Asia. The coincidence of the transformation of the socio-cultural landscape in South Korea and the debut of Chan-ho Park in the MLB did not take place without those structural factors. Many Koreans were encouraged by Park’s phenomenal pitching on the other side of the planet in the midst of national adversity. So Chan-ho Park became a kind of icon of “long-distance love,” who “traversed the boundary of sports” (62) to represent a rare moment of South Korean national history. He played as a global star who symbolized the complex dynamics of nationalism, globalization, and sports fandom. Cho tries to decipher this multiplex macro puzzle through ethnographic micro research of the online community.
Part 2 is a result of the ethnographic research on the global fandom of Chan-ho Park. MLBPARK is a very active online community to cheer Park. Most members are heterosexual young male Koreans. However, it is not a monolithic group; in fact, frequent inconsistencies and conflicts are enacted. This discrepancy is exemplified by the confrontation between Park-ppa (pro-Park) and Park-kka (anti-Park) factions, which came to surface along with the decline of Park’s performance. “While Park-ppa did not hesitate to promulgate nationalistic slogans such as ‘We, Koreans, owe Park too much, and it is time for us to pay him back by delivering patient and endless support,’ Park-kka, in contrast, posted sarcastic responses to such nationalistic discourses and were often disturbed by the national(ist) aura around him” (157). So the virtual community is not a site of static texts to read but a mobile arena that changes with complex interactions of individual tastes, nationalism, regionalism, and globalization.
Park’s eminence as a global star lifted the national spirit of South Koreans who were suffering from a severe economic depression. Nevertheless, such a nationalistic interpretation is not satisfactory if multiple voices in the online community are to be considered. To understand such complex dynamics, the author proposes hybrid terms such as “national individual” or “individuated nationalism.” These terms imply a new form of online identity that is “complicated and seemingly contradictory compromises among transnational corporations, national governments, and public desires” (166). Cho also tries to develop the interpretive method by employing other hybrid terms such as “sporting governmentality,” “glocalization from above,” “glocalization from below,” and “the national” to grasp fluid identity and social reality. Focusing on the communication of the online community, many familiar issues such as nationalistic sentiment, Americanization, and antagonism against Japan, are reconsidered in a more sophisticated and dynamic way.
Global Sports Fandom in South Korea shows the author’s academic dexterity in dealing with global sports fandom in our age, and as he claims, it also shows “that studies on sport in Asia have come to be more recognized and established to certain a degree” (8). It is an important milestone to seek such development, and I believe many suggestions are included in this book for further research. For example, as is well known, an online identity is characterized as somewhat fragmented, fluid, and disguised compared to regular communications. As Cho himself admits, “ethnography in media studies easily drifts toward a ‘quasi-ethnographic’ approach” (17); how it should be developed is an unresolved problem. On the other hand, in terms of quantity, MLBPARK is a large fan site, including 90,000 registered members and 35,000 page views daily (as of 2006). Obviously, ethnographic research should be supplemented with a quantitative method such as text mining to prove synchronic variance and diachronic change. The author’s exquisite interpretive skill will let the reader anticipate further development of the research in this field.
Masaki Tosa
Kokushikan University, Tokyo