This roundtable brings together several leading scholars to examine Japanese sports through historical and sociological lenses. The discussion offers a dynamic look at how sports reflect and shape Japanese society by exploring themes from nationalism and identity to the cultural meanings of celebrity and disability.

Dr. Robin Kietlinski, historian, gender studies and Japanese studies scholar, opens the conversation with an exploration of sports in Japan’s modernization, from Meiji-era gender relations to Olympic environmentalism. Her insights frame sport as both a political tool and a symbol of national reinvention, with particular reference to female sporting figures and the sustainability movement.

Dr. Dennis Frost, historian of sports celebrities and disability games, discusses how athletes with disabilities and popular figures like Naomi Osaka challenge and expand Japan’s definitions of ability, identity, and representation. He will explore the legacy of the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics and the politics of inclusion in sport.

Finally, Dr. Aaron L. Miller, anthropologist of Japanese sports, delves into the everyday practices of sport in Japan—from high school baseball’s moral education to how athletes in "minor" sports like basketball approach their craft even as they struggle to attain "major sport" status. His ethnographic approach uncovers how values like endurance, hierarchy, and group belonging are embedded in sporting life and why Japanese use sports to maintain a sense of ethnic uniqueness.

NB: due to scheduling difficulties, Nakazawa Atsushi (Waseda) and Yamaguchi Ichirō (Mainichi Shinbun, retired) were unable to participate in the recording, but we thank them for their generous contributions to the planning of this episode.

More than fifteen years have passed since the Japanese Ministry of Education’s Global 30 project, which encouraged universities to accept more international students and was followed by a series of other projects that led to an increase in English-medium instruction (EMI) across faculties, newly-designed English-taught programs (ETP), and the concomitant hiring of many scholars with doctoral degrees from non-Japanese institutions. During this period, the term kokusai-nihongaku became a floating signifier for several types of Japanese studies curricula, offered as stand-alone study programs or embedded (implicitly or explicitly) in a variety of liberal arts and area studies degrees. This podcast aims to discuss several challenges that these conditions have raised in terms of what it means to teach Japanese studies in Japan, by bringing into conversation scholars who have experienced these pedagogical changes in distinct ways.

Representing three types of institutional contexts ― a public university where Japanese Studies is explicitly offered as a minor within a curriculum open to all undergraduate departments (EMI), a private university where Japanese studies courses are offered implicitly within a generalized Liberal Arts curriculum taught in English (ETP), and an American university where Japanese studies courses are embedded in a specialized Area Studies undergraduate curriculum (ETP) ― the scholars in this podcast discuss three types of challenges: 

1) how student audiences and class content have complicated the meaning of the multivocal word kokusai when employed as a qualifier for Japanese Studies, Liberal Arts, and many top-down strategies of internationalisation of higher education institutions in Japan.

2) how the reality of in-class translanguaging has put into question assumptions about the association of the Japanese language with Japanese Studies and of English with internationalisation.

3) how the varied backgrounds of faculty involved in Japanese Studies pedagogy have come to supersede the existence (and perhaps necessity) of “Japan-explainers.”

Podcast guests (in alphabetic order):

Ioannis Gaitanidis (moderator) (Chiba University)

Sachiko Horiguchi (Temple University, Japan Campus)

Gregory Poole (Doshisha University)

Satoko Shao-Kobayashi (Chiba University)

Suggestions for further reading:

Gaitanidis, Ioannis and Satoko Shao-Kobayashi. 2022. Polarized agents of internationalization: an autoethnography of migrant faculty at a Japanese University. Higher Education 83:19-33 (published in 2020).

ガイタニディス ヤニス、小林聡子、吉野文 編. 2020.『クリティカル日本学―協働学習を通して「日本」のステレオタイプを学びほぐす―』明石書店

Gaitanidis, Ioannis and Gregory Poole (eds.). 2024. Teaching Japan: A Handbook. MHM Limited and Amsterdam University Press.

Horiguchi, Sachiko, Yuki Imoto and Gregory S. Poole (eds.). 2015. Foreign Language Education in Japan: Exploring Qualitative Approaches. Brill.

Poole, Gregory. 2010. The Japanese Professor: An Ethnography of a University Faculty. Brill.

テーマ

「日本の大学における日本研究教育の課題と対応」

ゲスト

1．千葉大学大学院国際学術研究院総合国際学講座 ヤニス・ガイタニディス准教授 （主催者）

2．テンプル大学ジャパンキャンパス 堀口佐知子教授

3．同志社大学国際教育インスティテュート グレゴリー・プール教授

4．千葉大学国際教養学部 小林聡子准教授

内容

15年以上前に文科省が日本の大学の「国際化」を促進すべく「Global 30」という取り組みを始めたのです。その現状を踏まえ、今日の日本における日本研究教育の課題と対応についてパネリストが議論します。なかでも「国際」日本研究の「国際」という漠然とした概念、日本研究の教育現場におけるトランスランゲージングという現実、そしてこうした取り組みに携わる学者や教育者の世代交代の意義など、日本における日本研究教育が直面する最重要課題のいくつかについて意見を交わします。

“Has Japan solved the problem of homelessness? And even if it has not, what lessons for other countries does the Japanese experience have to offer? 

According to Japanese government statistics, Japan’s street homeless population peaked in 2003 at 25,296. The figure for 2023 was 2,830 – 2,575 men, 172 women, and 73 ‘unclear’. That is an 89% decline. Of course these figures must be treated with caution, but there seems little doubt that Japan’s street homeless population is far lower than most other industrialized countries. So has Japan virtually “solved” the problem of homelessness? Or is the truth more complex? This podcast will outline the reasons for Japan’s low homeless population, explore problems that still remain, and discuss ways in which the Japanese experience may offer hints to other countries struggling with large and growing homeless populations. The panel includes a Japanese homeless activist and the manager of a homeless shelter in Yokohama, as well as British and American academic specialists in the field.

Organizer:

Tom Gill, Professor of Social Anthropology, Meiji Gakuin University

Other members:

Masao Seno, head of the Hamakaze Living Autonomy Support Centre, Yokohama

Tetsuo Ogawa, homeless activist

Matthew Marr, Associate Professor of Sociology, Florida International University

Profiles of Panelists

Tom Gill is Professor of Social Anthropology at Meiji Gakuin University and author of Yokohama Street Life: The Precarious Career of a Japanese Day Laborer (Lexington Books, 2015).

Masao Seno is head of Hamakaze, the only municipal homeless shelter in Yokohama, Japan’s second-biggest city, and as such at the cutting edge of homeless policy in Yokohama. 

Tetsuo Ogawa has been living in a homeless community in Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park for many years, and is an articulate advocate for the rights of homeless people. 

Matthew Marr has studied homelessness in the USA and Japan, and is the author of Better Must Come (Cornell University, 2015), a comparative study of homelessness in Los Angeles and Tokyo.

Relevant scholarly works

Gill, Tom. Yokohama Street Life: The Precarious Career of a Japanese Day Laborer (Lexington Books, 2015).

Marr, Matthew. Better Must Come (Cornell University, 2015).

Maruyama, Satomi. Living on the Streets in Japan: Homeless Women Break Their Silence (TransPacific Press, 2020).

Available in Japanese as 丸山里美 『女性ホームレスとして生きる――貧困と排除の社会学』(世界思想社, 2021).

Jencks, Christopher. The Homeless (Harvard University Press, 1994).

テーマ

「日本はホームレス問題を解決したのか？もしそうでないとしても、日本の経験は他国への教訓となりうるか？」

ゲスト

1．明治学院大学教授 トム・ギル （主催者）

2．横浜市生活自立支援施設はまかぜ施設長 妹尾光治 (セノ・マサオ)

3．ご自身が路上生活者で、長年にわたり路上生活者のために活躍している 小川てつオ (オガワ・テツオ)

4．フロリダ国際大学准教授 マシュー・マー

内容

日本の路上生活者人口が他の先進国に比べて少ないことは疑いようがない事実です。しかし、日本はいわゆる「ホームレス問題」を事実上「解決」したといえるのでしょうか。それとも、背後にはより複雑な事情があるのでしょうか。今回、日本のホームレス人口が少ない理由を概説したうえで、路上生活者にかかわる諸問題を多角的に探り、日本の経験がどのような教訓を提供できるかについて議論します。