Assessing the sociology of sport: On Western hegemony and alternative discourses

Reflections on the trajectory of the sociology of sport in Japan

Alatas (2003: 602) labels the United States, Great Britain and France the ‘contemporary social science powers’, due to their large output of research and the ‘global reach of the ideas and information contained in these works’. ‘Third World’ scholars and intellectuals are inevitably dependent on the ‘powers’ for ideas, the media through which to publish their research, aid and investment in research and education, and demand for their skills (Alatas, 2003: 604).

The Japanese case shows that the reasons for this hegemony are not entirely economic. Japan has the world’s third largest economy, but is not one of the ‘social science powers’ (Alatas, 2003: 605). Although sociology in Japan does not rely on the ‘powers’ for aid and investment or demand for its scholarly output, the discipline in Japan is based on theories and methodologies developed in the West (Koto, 2010: 324). Alatas (2003: 606) includes Japan as one of the ‘semi-peripheral social science powers’, along with Australia, the Netherlands, and Germany. However, Japan, because of the language barrier, is more peripheral than the other three. In an investigation of economic, linguistic and political factors affecting the scientific output of different countries, Gantman (2012: 980) found that ‘Linguistic imperialism is not a myth in the social sciences…. (I)f publishing in international journals is important for the members of the scientific community, it is clear that social scientists from non-English speaking countries are at a disadvantage…’.

A study conducted by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) counted the number of articles written by Japanese authors in 23 ‘leading’ journals of sociology (18 in English, three in German, two in French) for the 20 years between 1990 and 2009. Out of a total of 13,038 papers, 118 were by ‘Japanese’ authors (as identified by name) – that is, 0.91% of the total. This is significantly lower than the proportion of Japanese citizens in the world population (1.7%) and the estimated proportion of Japanese sociologists in the world (10%; JSPS, 2011: 67–68). The study also searched the ‘Web of Science’ and ‘Google Scholar’ for journal articles and citations in English by 105 of the most prominent and prolific Japanese sociologists of the past few decades. The results were very low: 26 of the scholars, including some past presidents of the Japan Sociological Society, had no hits on either database. The sociologists with the highest figures tended to collaborate with overseas researchers, be known as specialists in a particular aspect of Japanese society, and/or have obtained their doctorate overseas (JSPS, 2011: 69).

Similar results were obtained from a review of articles published in the journal in your hands (or on your screen), the International Review for the Sociology of Sport. There were 277 articles written by 503 authors in the IRSS in the ten years from 2004 to 2013. Seven (2.5%) of these articles had at least one ‘Japanese’ author; the nine Japanese authors comprised 1.8% of the total. Two of the articles were by single authors (both affiliated with universities outside Japan), four had a Japanese first author and one or more non-Japanese coauthors, and one article had three Japanese authors, at least one of whom had obtained his Ph.D. in one of the ‘social science powers’. That is, there were no papers published in the IRSS during this decade written solely by Japanese scholars who obtained their degrees at and were currently employed by a Japanese university. This corresponds to the findings of the study on the larger discipline of sociology cited above. It is also interesting to note the ‘field’ of each article: all three articles published between 2004 and 2011 were about Japan. Four articles appeared in 2012 and 2013, one on Japan and one each on Cambodia, Fiji and Vanuata. Thus the pattern of scholars from peripheral countries tending to write about their own countries would seem to hold for papers by Japanese authors in the IRSS until 2011; and even the more recent expansion is limited to the Asia–Pacific region.

Assessing the challenges to the sociology of sport from Japan

It may appear from the above data that Japanese sport sociologists are not very productive, but of course this is not the case: they just write in Japanese. The Japan Journal of Sport Sociology has been published annually from 1993, and biannually from 2009. The 15 issues that appeared from 2004 to 2013 (the same period surveyed above) contained 95 articles: 37 voluntarily submitted contributions and 58 solicited articles. (The editorial board solicits articles in the form of ‘special contributions’ and ‘special feature articles’, often from prominent scholars or presenters at symposia of the annual conferences. Six of these were translations of contributions in English from overseas scholars.)

Table 1 shows the ‘field’ of the submitted and solicited articles in the JJSS over this period. Of course, most of the articles coded in one of the geographical categories also have theoretical components, so this is a very rough classification. Slightly more than half of the submitted articles mainly discussed Japan. On the other hand, 19% of the articles dealt with the ‘West’, and 16% with theory. These areas are not represented in the articles by Japanese authors in the IRSS. What is striking about the solicited articles is the percentage (38%) that discuss mainly ‘theoretical’ concerns. Again, this is not reflected in the IRSS. Although the IRSS is only one of several journals publishing articles on the sociology of sport, the above results would suggest that Japanese sociologists of sport discuss a wider variety of topics, both geographical and theoretical, than appears in the English literature.

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Table 1.

‘Field’ of articles in the JJSS, 2004 to 2013.

	Japan	Other Asia-Pacific	Africa and Middle East	The ‘West’	Theory
Submitted	20	2	2	7	6
Solicited	27	4	1	4	22

Fifty-two books have also been reviewed in the JJSS over the past ten years: 42 of these were written in Japanese, which is more than the number of submitted articles published during that period. Since only a fraction of the many books written by sport sociologists in Japanese are reviewed in the journal, these figures show that monographs, anthologies and other works in book form are perhaps the principal means of conveying ideas in the sociology of sport in Japan – and this is consistent with sociology in general. (Sociologists publish more than 300 books in Japanese every year, some of which become best-sellers: see, for example, JSPS, 2011: 75; Machimura, 2010: 203). The above figures also show that a lot of research available in Japanese is not being shared with an international audience, ‘…which hinder[s] scholars of these works from having scientific dialogues with their foreign counterparts’ (Okamoto, 2013: 60).

This isolation is exacerbated by the fact that the social science community in Japan ‘does not gauge success according to publication in western periodicals and western languages’ (Alatas, 2003: 606). That is, although theories, methods and models are imported from the West, Japan maintains a fairly autonomous community of sociology conducted in Japanese. The Japan Sociological Society was founded in 1924 and there is a vast accumulation of books and articles written in Japanese as well as a large audience for such works. In fact, publishing in an established journal in Japanese has been more important than publishing an article in a so-called ‘international’ journal in English, and a monograph (preferably single-authored) is even more prestigious (JSPS, 2011: 75–76).

In recent years, however, under pressure from globalization and neo-liberal reforms, the government and academic and research institutions have adopted evaluation standards that stress publication in international (English) journals, which has led to an emphasis on competition and quantitative evaluation of academic output (Machimura, 2010: 205–206; Manzenreiter and Wieczorek, 2008: 93–94).

For their part, the IRSS and other leading journals include scholars from diverse regions on their editorial boards, international journals dedicated to specific regions such as the Asia Pacific Journal of Sport and Social Science have been established, and the ISA recently published The ISA Handbook of Diverse Sociological Traditions (Patel, 2010). But these publications in English tend to be part of the ‘dominant arena of competition’, and thus perpetuate the dominance of the ‘social science powers’ (Keim, 2011: 129).

Future directions for the sociology of sport: on Western hegemony and alternative discourses

Patel argues for the need to ‘deconstruct the provincialism of European universalisms’, and asserts that ex-colonial countries have made constructive use of methodological nationalism to ‘confront colonial discourses of social sciences’ (Patel, 2013: 125, 127). While there can be no doubt about the need for ‘alternative discourses’, one must be aware of the pitfalls of methodological nationalism. This may be especially true for works in a language with a relatively limited readership such as Japanese. Facile comparisons between ‘East’ and ‘West’ can perpetuate ‘orientalist thinking patterns’ and ignore ‘the existing heterogeneity within both “Western” and “Eastern” societies’ (Weidemann, 2013: 111). To give one example (though it is unsportsmanlike to pick on someone who is not here to defend himself) in Supōtsu bunka no datsukōchiku (‘Deconstructing sports culture’) the author claims that the Eastern martial arts are the solution to the crisis of modern Western sport. To summarize his argument, the latter is a product of the rampant rationalism and excessive competition of modern Western civilization, whose origins are monotheistic Christianity, in which nature is to be subjugated and the ‘other’ (other people) denied. The end results were the atomic bomb, Auschwitz and, in sport, doping. In contrast, the various Eastern martial arts of India, China, Korea and Japan share a common origin: the unique, polytheistic world of the East. Unlike modern Western sport, the Eastern martial arts aim to achieve spiritual growth through physical training: they embrace the ‘other’ and strive to attain unity with nature. The author contends, however, that the Eastern martial arts have had their original, pre-modern meaning and content distorted through contact with the modern West. We have to strip away the modern embellishments from the martial arts to reveal their true, essential Eastern nature. As the title suggests, he declares that this analysis is an implementation of Derrida’s project of deconstruction (Inagaki, 2001).

Although there is much to be said for this critique of modern Western sport, a more appropriate ‘deconstruction’ of Eastern martial arts, rather than ostensibly revealing their original essence, would show that it is also a constructed concept, closely informed by the antithetical constructs of modernity, the West and sport. The above example is intended to illustrate the mundane yet somewhat brazen point that the effective response to ethnocentrism is not another form of the same. In this vein, Sato suggests that ‘the preferable way to get Asian-born concepts and theories accepted by a general audience in sociology’ is to first generate general, more universal concepts from particular Asian ones, and then derive local concepts from these more general concepts (Sato, 2010: 199). This is perhaps the challenge and future direction for achieving a more international and universal sociology of sport.