Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. xi, 227 pp. (Illustrations.) US$47.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-4101-0.
I like running. I also like reading about running, including academic writings, so what else would it need to warrant a highly sympathetic account of the first and therefore highly welcomed history of distance running in Japan? Certainly a bit more than the run-of-the-mill narrative of modernity that the renowned historian of modern and in particular twentieth-century Japan offers, with his incessant quoting of athletes’ names, running times, and rankings. Readers who are thrilled by an almanac of annual finishing times and records will find their bible in this book. For me, reading page after page about who ran the fastest marathon in Japan in 1967, how the follower-up did in 1968 at the Mexico Olympics in relation to the fastest times of the year, and what times Japan’s top runners delivered in 1969 and what their respective ranking was in 1970, was a bit like the dreary stretch between kilometres 32 and 36 of a marathon: hard to enjoy but necessary to slog through on the way to the finish. So if you want to get a feel for the meaning distance running has and had for the Japanese, or if you want to know what civic culture may have to do with the fascination Japan obviously has with running, you will have to wait for another study—maybe one more interested in body culture, the anthropology of running or fieldwork among runners than in the assemblage of facts. But this would be exactly the opposite of what Havens promises in the opening lines of his study.
It is not that Marathon Japan entirely fails to identify the aspects that have helped make Japan into a runners’ nation, both at the elite and more recently at the mass participation level, too. But the evidence Havens gained from combining randomly selected academic secondary sources with a fastidious extraction of rankings tables and finishing times from sport chronicles and genre magazines like Rikujo kyōgi (Track and Field) or Rannāzu (Runners) and a strikingly positivist interpretation of elite runners’ autobiographical accounts is not strong enough to provide a consistent explanation and coherent answers to the core questions the book wants to address: why Japanese love to watch marathons and distance relay races (ekiden) that are Japan’s original contribution to global running culture, and why so many decide to become distance runners themselves.
Judging from its name, the opening chapter on “The culture of running in Japan” appears to look into possible theoretical explanations for the role of running in society. In fact this chapter is a condensed summary of the chapters to follow. As Havens chooses an old-fashioned approach, putting trust only and exclusively on facts from the archives, he does not attend to theories or analytical frameworks developed by other scholars of sport in society. Partly due to the self-selected seclusion, the pattern that emerges from the five chronologically ordered chapters hardly differs from what other more or less undertheorized historical analyses of Japanese sport in general, or baseball or football in particular, have unsheathed.
Chapter 2, on “Racing to catch up,” covers the early period of modern sport in Japan from its introduction by Western powers until the end of the Pacific War. Running, very much like other sport disciplines, was tied to nationalist aspirations as well as to educational objectives, and the nation’s elite schools nurtured the top athletes that came to represent Japan on the international stage. Chapter 2, “A galaxy of distance runners,” records the development of running at the top level throughout the first two decades of postwar recovery. The emerging dominance of Japanese runners is explained in front of the background of national rehabilitation, industrial growth, and rising prosperity. More than the marathon, ekiden races captured the attention of the nation at a time when television became the lead mass medium and Japanese companies provided their semi-professional employee-athletes with ideal training conditions to excel in the name of the nation, when abroad, or the company, when competing at home.
Corporate Japan’s wealth continued to provide the basis for the ongoing success of Japanese runners abroad. Despite its theory-savvy chapter heading, “Distance running as a commodity,” entertains the reader just like all the other chapters: first of all with detailed accounts of runners’ biographies and achievements, both in domestic and international arenas. However, the period from the 1970s onward is the first time that women runners entered centre stage. Chapter 5, somewhat wearily titled “Greater depth, more women,” argues that organizational changes during the 1990s opened up teams and contests for recreational runners that had been previously confined to top runners only, and thus initiated the burgeoning popularity of distance running across all boundaries of age and gender. This was certainly the case ten years later and therefore is extensively covered in chapter 7, “Running for everyone.” In between, chapter 6, “From peak to plateau: elite runners in the 2000s,” offers more detailed information on the achievements of Japan’s top runners.
In the course of reading the 175 pages of text, I encountered an impressive amount of details about the history of top-level running, of which I have forgotten all but the more curious at the time of writing this review. As mentioned above, the general storyline that links the sport of running to the state’s ambitions of nation building and corporate Japan’s commercial interests is far from being new or original, while the scholarship that has taken the lead in that regard remains almost invisible. The link between civic culture and the sport of running is not elaborated in a way that explains differences and similarities to the running boom in other places. I can only guess if a historian would agree with me in rating the analytical power of the chosen approach as weak; the cumulative usage of words like “perhaps,” “maybe,” “seem,” or “apparent” that soften many of the more general statements leaves the reader wondering what evidence is needed for more affirmative results. Listening to the subjects of this history would have been one option. The voices of runners, coaches, and sport administrators only emerge from published sources, such as autobiographies and interviews in the sport media. These are fine sources but like any other source they demand reflection and nuanced interpretation. In that regard I found it striking how statements produced for media consumption are taken at face value and treated exactly in the same manner as race results and finishing times. Shunning theory is one thing, but writing history without reflection on the nature of the data is certainly “old school,” without the positive connotation of the term.
Wolfram Manzenreiter
University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
pp. 662-665