 Good evening and welcome to SOAS. My name is Fabi Gigi, I'm the Chair of the Japan Research Center, and it is my great honor and pleasure to open the proceedings tonight. I especially welcome our special guests, His Excellency, the Ambassador of Japan to the United Kingdom, Mr. Hayashi Hajime and Mrs. Hayashi, the Director General of the Japan Foundation, Mr. Tanaka Shinichi, Professor Peter Konitsuki, the President of the British Association of Japanese Studies and Jason James of the Daiwa Foundation. Good evening. And of course, we also welcome our guests from a bit further away, Elizabeth Bowes, the Deputy High Commissioner to the UK from Australia and Hannah Bretherton, the Head of Public Diplomacy of the Australian High Commission in London. Thank you very much for joining us. Tonight's event is called Crossing the Finishing Line, and it is a veritable smorgasbord of an event. It's the final JSC sports symposium together with the Beasley Lecture, and it is also the book launch of the Handbook of Sport and Japan and the celebration of the achievements of Dr. Helen McNaughton and her team. The WG Beasley Memorial Lecture, as many of you will recall, is named after Professor William Beasley, a leading figure in the development of Japanese Studies in Britain. He is most well known for his historical work on the major restoration and the rise of modern Japan. During his tenure at SOAS, Professor Beasley headed the history and fire departments and was the founding chair of the Japan Research Centre, 1978, the year I was born, to 1983. Now, in his time, women's history had not yet come to prominence, and one may only wonder what he would have thought about a history of sport. By focusing on women in sport in Japan, tonight's event is both carrying on his legacy and extending it with a critical focus on gender embodiment and the links between nationalism and sport. We are extremely grateful to the Toshiba International Foundation for their generous support of both the Symposia series, the research contributing to the Handbook and the support we have received for the Beasley Lecture since 2017. We would also like to thank the Japan Sport Council, the Embassy of Japan and Sake Samurai for reasons that will become apparent once we move on to the convivial part of the evening. Without further ado then, I will hand over to the organiser and master of ceremonies of tonight's event. Please welcome to the stage Dr. Helen Macnaughton. Ambassador Hayashi, Mrs. Hayashi, the Japanese Embassy team, the Japanese Studies community, so our colleagues, friends, family, everybody, rugby fans, everybody is welcome here tonight and it's amazing to look out on the Sea of Familiar Faces. I've been lecturing here in Term 2 and they didn't look quite so animated as we do, so that's... I'm just gonna talk you quickly through about how this series came about. So in 2017, I was chair of the Japan Research Center, which Fabio is now doing a splendid job of, and I was trying to think about how to make a mark on the JRC and it was 2017 and we were looking, we knew that Japan was about to host the Rugby World Cup in 2019 and the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 and I thought sport is a great new theme to do because it's so as we don't teach on sport. And so that's how the series came about and it came about with the very early cooperation of the Japan Foundation London, the Japan Sports Council, the Japan Sport Agency and Sake Samurai. So we've got this theme of Sake and sport going through every one of our events. So we'll do that consumption later. So, and it has led into the handbook, which you can see on your flyer in which we're gonna present tonight. So really great thanks to Toshiba International Foundation who funded the whole thing. So I'm gonna talk you through the series itself. As I said, we started out six years ago yesterday with our first event and we were using the idea of sport as an opportunity for diplomacy. We had Tetsuya Kimura come over from the Japan Sports Agency and we had a former UK Minister of Sport who talked about the legacy of 2012 in London and Kimura-san talked us through what Japan was trying to do in the build up to the Olympics, how they were using sport as international exchange, giving developing countries access and funds for embedding sport, setting up of course sports leaders and really as he put it embedding sport into the UN sustainable development goals. And as part of that, I talked about the legacy of Tokyo 64 looking back on the development of Tokyo city itself, how Japan was framing itself at the Tokyo 64 Olympics, showcasing technology and reframing Japanese identity as well in 1964. And of course in 2017, we were all happily looking forward to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Later that same year in November 2017, we held our second event which obviously as you can see here was focused on the Paralympics, looking forward to the Paralympics of 2020. Our guest speaker was Dennis Frost from I love this college, Kalamazoo College. He became one of the authors of our handbook. We again had somebody come over from Japan Sports Council Kawai-san who was also a former Paralympian. Noel, I think is here tonight, former UK Paralympian and Tim Hollingworth from the BPA was here as well. And we won't go too much into this because it's part of the handbook that we were reflecting back on Tokyo 64 Paralympics and the journey for disability and Paralympics in Japan since that time. And then our third event was exactly to the day, one year out from the kickoff of Rugby World Cup in 2019. Phil couldn't come along tonight but I think Lydia his colleague from World Rugby Museum might hear. My co-author of the rugby chapter coming up, Mike was here. So the two are then presented on the long history of rugby in Japan. And then I looked at the post-war growth of rugby and team corporate sports. We had Simon Chadwick talking about the business and revision of Rugby World Cup 2019, one year out. And Hilary Frank who was from Cornwall Council but actually it was nothing to do with Cornwall. She had previously been on organizing committees in Japan for Olympics and other events. So she talked through that experience. So that was another great event one year out to that mega sporting event. And it was all looking wonderful. We were gonna have Rugby World Cup, we were gonna have Tokyo 2020 Olympics and our fourth event, mindful that thus far the three events had been somewhat male dominated. Should we say we were gonna do our fourth event on women in sport in Japan. And Hey Presto got canceled for obvious reasons. We were going to have Sakai-san again from the Japan Sports Council, former Olympian. We were going to have a Japanese professional footballer based in Germany. I think she is still based in Germany. And Christian who has become one of our authors as well who was the local organizing committee of FIFA in Germany. And she was gonna talk on this, the theme of women and sport, what they're doing in the Japan Sports Council heading up to the Olympics that this is a snapshot from her presentation that she was gonna give. But it got canceled and so we thought, well, we all went into hiding, didn't we? We all went into lockdown. But during that time, I thought, well, we will close the series eventually at some point in the future. This is the closing event. We've kept with the theme of women in sport. We've got the marvelous Robin here, one of our key authors. She, this is the third time we've tried to host this event, third time's a charm. We tried in March, it got canceled very, due to various strikes. And Robin, bless her, came in March, flew in in March and then has just flown back on the red eye overnight to speak to us. And she hasn't slept at all. So big round of applause in advance too. So we went into lockdown and we were only just finishing the series. The series was supposed to finish in 2020. It was always gonna run until 2020. But during 2020, I was approached by a publishers in Japan who are doing a series of handbooks on Japanese studies. They hope to produce, I can't remember about 20 handbooks. And so they approached me and said, would you like to edit a handbook of sport in Japan? And I said, yes. I felt like I didn't have anything to do in lockdown. And I thought, well, I'm not gonna do it by myself. So I've learned laterally in life that if you want to get something done, get a team of women together, but also get people who are much younger and more energetic with inspiring ideas. And so Verity, my lovely co-editor Verity and Emily, who's hiding over there came on board and Robin has been crucial to it as well. So this is our all female team and we're gonna talk you through the handbook which is gonna be published later this year. And then we're gonna have a big presentation, our guess note, a keynote talk from Robin on a century of Japanese sports women. And I think for most of us, this is a really niche and new topic and we're all gonna learn a lot, including Verity and I. So we're really looking forward to that. So that's where we're up to in the series. So we're launching our handbook. And when we were thinking about it and approaching authors in 2020, we sort of kept it quite loose but we gave all our authors the challenge of centering their study of sport within the study of Japan. Some of us are Japanese studies people. Some of us are sports studies people. Some of us are historians. But we said, right, whatever sport you're doing, bring to the book but not just think about your sport but think about what is the significance within Japan, within its development, within its history, within its turning point. So we gave them that key challenge. We wanted to have scholarship from a lot of different disciplines. So if you ever get around to reading the book it's got lots of different flavors and styles of writing. We wanted some Japanese authors as well as non-Japanese authors and we wanted to get some established scholars in there as well as some new early career scholars. And we wanted established sports as well as emerging sports. So it's a bit of a tall order and we haven't been able to cover absolutely everything as you can see but we're pretty happy with the results that are coming out. I'm not gonna talk too much about the themes because Verity is gonna wrap it up at the end that we sort of gave out these sort of ideas on what sort of themes they could think about depending on what sport they were doing. And of course it was mid-2020 when we were asked to think about this. So we said, well, you're gonna have to, as you write, you're gonna have to keep up with what's going on in the world in terms of the pandemic, take your 2020, you're gonna have to rewrite as you go along and try and get where possible the impact of the pandemic in there. So it was quite a tall order in some ways. As you can see from your flyer, we have done it pretty much. We've sent the final drafts off to the publishers. We've got 16 chapters, we've put it into two halves. I'm gonna go through the first half very quickly just to give you a flavor. Verity is gonna go through the second half. Now, those of you who are eagle eyes might realize or might have spotted, we don't have any Boudoir sports in there. We don't have any martial arts. We don't have some more. And that is because there is a companion volume coming out. A guy called Alex Bennett, who's also a Kiwi, but is based in Kansai University is doing a companion volume on the Boudoir sports. So we haven't neglected it. We're just doing all the imported sports in our volume. We haven't been able to cover every single sport played in Japan because there are many. But as I said, we've tried to get some key long running sports as well as some emerging sports and a few surprises in there as well. So I'm gonna quickly run through the first half, which is nine chapters focused on a particular sport. So first up, we have baseball, Bill Kelly in America. He's written how baseball is pretty much a national sport in Japan. It's still the most viewed sport in Japan, both the arenas and on television. He's focused on schoolboy sport in high schools and universities and on the professional leagues. And he's talked about the growth and popularity of it, but he's also signaled that it is under a little bit of threat from other sports like football and basketball, from talent being siphoned off to the US professional leagues. So it's a really great opening chapter looking at Japan's national sport, discounting sumo of course. Chapter two is myself and Mike. We look at the very long history of rugby, 1864 to 2019. We look at the very early interaction of foreign players, not surprisingly British military and educators based in the port cities of Japan in the early days major period. We look at its post war growth in universities and corporations. And then we bring it right up to the World Cup and just beyond thinking about how rugby as a sport has been used in soft power strategy and SDGs and in disaster recovery as well. So bringing it right up to now. Chapter three is on golf. Golf is still one of the most popular leisure sports in Japan. This is Angus Lockyer formerly of Soas who's now living the good life in Colorado. So he's written on the history of golf a little tiny bit on the pre-war 1920s when it was mainly for elites and for expats, early expats, but really focused on 1970s onwards, 1980s, the big boom in golf in Japan. When golf memberships were just as high as the Japanese stock market at the time, where it really became a middle class ideal lifestyle to play golf, the consumption of golf through not only playing but magazines and fashion and all those types of consumption of media. And a little bit like baseball, the post bubble scrambled to survive since the bubble burst. It's an expensive sport in Japan. And so he's talked a bit about that as well. Chapter four, we have basketball, Aaron Miller, who is in California. Also an American import like baseball, very much growing in popularity, not quite the long history that baseball has, but really starting to get popular, particularly with schoolboys and university students. So really giving baseball a run for its money, if you like, the setting up of the B League, an original league in 1967, but the new B League in 2016. And he's talking about how it's also consumed, a lot of our chapters have this popular consumption through manga and animation as well in Japan and TV series. It's consumed, a lot of our sports consume that way as well as played. And he's talked about how it's been marketed primarily at boys and young men, but it's actually the women's national team that has had recent success and doing better than the national men's team and actually took silver at Tokyo 2020. So he sees the sport going in a different direction now that girls are becoming much more interested in basketball as well. Chapter five is myself and my colleague, a owner who's Polish, but based in Japan. We talk about volleyball, the early corporate origins in the textile industry. It's very much focused on women's volleyball, looks at this team, the Tokyo 1964, witches of the orient team who won gold, who were world champions in the sixties. The legacy that they left in the sense that volleyball is still one of the most popular sports for girls in Japan today, girls and women. And the legacy that they left, particularly for older women was that prior to 1964, housewives, old American women didn't play sport for leisure really. So after that sport really took off, not just volleyball, but all sport took off for women in Japan in the seventies and eighties. And again, the popular consumption of volleyball through TV shows, manga, animation, that's quite a thread that runs through a few of our chapters. And then chapter six is on football, soccer. Yununan, who is an early career researcher in Mexico. She looks very briefly at its 1870s origins, but mainly at the growth of football since the establishment of the 1990s J-League and the co-hosted Korea Japan FIFA 2002 Football World Cup. And she looks at how it was primarily men and boys who were playing it and women were fans of football, huge fans of football, particularly after the World Cup. But then suddenly sort of almost under the radar, the women's team, the Nare Shiko, won the World Cup in 2011, just after the Torhoku disaster, which kind of rallied the nation and they became overnight heroines from winning the World Cup. So she delves into the media of football stuff so she delves into the media of football stars and how their gender identity and their stardom is played out in Japanese media. Chapter seven is a really out there one, really exciting. An established Japanese scholar, Keiko Aiba, who's been researching this for some time. I was amazed to hear that the first women's pro-wrestling game match was scheduled in 1948 and the men's came later. She talks about how it's moved from being this very erotic sexual spectacle to a really serious, as serious as pro-wrestling gets, serious aggressive fight, really fierce competition, a combination of both sports competition and theatrical entertainment in arenas but also on television. And she's done, her chapter's really rich with voices of women who pro-wrestle and go against our framing of what it means to be feminine in Japan and what Japanese women's bodies look like. So it's a great chapter. Chapter eight is surfing from an early career researcher in Japan, Mizuno-san, and she looks at very early sort of surfing called Itago and that with these Japanese wooden boards that you can see, even in the 1800s, the riding of the waves, if you like but also used for like search and rescue and things like that. Women were doing it as well. There's not a linear progression to surfing but she juxtaposes it. But she looks at how surfing really took off in Japan in the 60s with this import from Hawaii and California of California culture, fashion and surfing took off then. And of course, surfing a new sport at the Tokyo 2020 games where Japan took a silver and a bronze for men and women. And then our final one in this half, sport-focused, is figure skating from Monden-san, who is... Oh, yeah, okay. Who is Japanese but based in Australia and he looks at how Japan, as he describes it, has been one of the few non-Caucasian countries who have managed to dominate in figure skating. He looks at some of the stars. He looks at the consumption of it in popular media there too. He looks at the gendering of them and he notes that it's a very niche sport in Japan in terms of participation numbers, but it's a highly popular sport in terms of watching on television and watching competitions, not least because Japan does very well in medals in the Winter Olympics over the years. So again, a really interesting sport. So that's the first half of the chapter. I'm now going to hand over to my wonderful co-editor, Verity, who's going to talk you through the second half of the book. Thank you for having me, Helen. Hello, everyone. As Helen has done a wonderful job, I am Verity and I'll be whizzing through in a couple of moments what part two is. Fortunately, the first edition part of part two is by Robin. So I'm going to skip over this very quickly as you're going to hear a fabulous talk tonight, but Robin kicks off. And as Helen alluded to, the second part of the handbook contributors take on a more thematic approach around the relationship between different elements of society, politics, nation-building, or a range of community-based points that tell more of a story of the dynamics of sport in Japan. So we start off with a fabulous contribution from Robin. This is followed by a contribution from a colleague, Michelle, who is based in Singapore. And she continues discussion about the sporting body. And she explores gender and sexuality and sexually varying athletes in Japan. So very contemporary, very under-researched topic and how this culture can be found in the archive, in scholarship, and on the track, field, and floor. This chapter is an important act of visibility in space-making, which works by bringing together Japan's sport studies, queer and transport research to ask important questions about where sport fits in these wider debates that are spoken about in certain areas of academia, spoken about in certain areas of the world, but is very much a sensitive topic. This is a really valuable contribution to our handbook. Next is Christian, who I believe is on the call. So hello, Christian. Apologise if I'm about to completely butcher what your fabulous chapter is on. And we're really standing on the shoulders of some of the work that Christian's done with other colleagues, as there have been previous textbooks, handbooks, edited collection. Christian did a fabulous one that came out in the mid to late 2010s. But he kindly contributed a chapter about Japan and its zeal to host events. He looks in particular at the Olympic Games and the canceled events in the 1940s. And then he cleverly moves on to the context of hosting the Summer Olympic Games in 64 and then in the most contemporary area, era of 2020, Brackets One. And he highlights the symbolic and realised aspirations of Tokyo and Japan to achieve non-sporting aims through showcasing particular aspects of society, joint events, for example, technological advancements or advancements in transportation. To follow on with our focus on events and this zeal for hosting and zeal for really showcasing the talents of Japanese athletes. Dennis Frost, as Helen alluded to, did a talk earlier in the series. And this is an extract from his book that recently came out. And it is all about the history of the Paralympics and Disability Sport in Japan. Again, a really valuable contribution to this book as it's something that partnerships are still continuing to build around. We have a representative from the National Paralympic Heritage Centre tonight and continuing that's a really valuable relationship between Japan and other nations around promoting disabled bodies and the use of sport and how it influences society. So Dennis again takes us through not just the sporting aims and the sporting legacies, but how there are connections with both challenges and opportunities in society around all things, Paralympics and disability. I would highly recommend his book as well, it's marvelous. Our next contribution is co-authored by Helen Simmons and by Ashishan, so a UK-Japan partnership. They trace the influence of sports administrator Kano Jigoro and how Japan became the first, he became the first Asian member of the International Olympic Committee. So again, more of a historical gaze on how in some respects Japan was trailblazing in how it engaged with the global sports community. And that really comes out as a theme of the second part of the handbook. They do this through quite a biographical take on his lifetime and the historical context of his achievements and ongoing influence on Japan's approach to contributing to global sporting systems in particular through education. So, Obayashishan is currently working at Scuba, so that has a real significant connection still with this particular aspect. Our penultimate chapter, again, is a UK-Japanese partnership and I believe a couple of the co-authors are online. Aramaxan and Jeff Kohi delve into comparing the specific aspects of events which ties in cultural relations as well as some of the sporting aspects. So they utilize big documents from the 1964 hosting and the 2020-21 hosting to look at media representation, collective memory formation around the torch relays. So this goes beyond Tokyo and showcases the different regions and prefectures and how the Olympic relay tries to engage Japan as a society around some of these events. And it's a really fascinating understanding of the politicization at both local, national, regional and international layers of Japan and events, promotion and sports. The final entry, and I might be biased, we save the best till last, because this is one I directly contributed to, is again, a UK-Japanese connection and I have to give a shout out to the Japan Society of Promotion of Science as I received some funding from them to travel to Japan in 2019, which is where the origins of this chapter came from. And we have built on some of what Helen was outlining in Massifumi-Mondon's take on figure skating and broadened this out to look at Japan and winter sporting cultures. We do sort of a survey of representations of culture within winter sports. So we look at participation, we look at the media aspects and we look at the events hosting because not only has Japan got a rich history of hosting international summer games, often multi-sport games, they also have a very rich history of hosting internationally faced winter games. We also look and to encourage more research on this because generally in sports studies, the winter sports are often neglected and generally in Japanese studies, this sort of niche aspect of Japan's connection with sport isn't heavily researched on. So it's almost an appeal to people to do more on this topic. So very briefly, as I would very much like to hand over to Robin for her keynote, is we just wanted to tease out some of the reflections and conclusions because as the title of this talk is, this is the finishing line of the symposium series, but we see the handbook not as the finishing line of this topic area. We want to further cultivate research partnerships, partnerships to knowledge exchange, some of the really rich debates that we've started in this book and continued in this book. So the four columns sort of depict four of the main themes that we've spoken about across all of the chapters in the handbook. I'm not going to read them verbatim and on the flyer, on the back of it, you've got a really lovely summary text. But just of note, our chapters serve to highlight that there is a capacity of sport, not just in Japan. So I'm a specialist in international sports events and I look at the UK, Japan and Australia, so not just in Japan, to serve two contradictory purposes. On the one hand, sport can amplify the most conventional and dominant ideologies of society. For example, masculinity, Western ideologies, the philosophy and history of physical education, and a particular sporting spirit. On the other hand, sport has the power to bring visibility to core elements of society. And as we've noted throughout this handbook in Japanese society, on particular marginalised aspects of debates or communities. For example, femininity, sexuality, disability, and it is a platform to provide a voice for some of those important conversations. We've argued throughout this handbook and we've had discussions with our contributors and hopefully this will really come out in Robin's talk today, that sport is central to modern Japan in its bivocal contradictory functions to both a project but also a way to disrupt some of the dominant structures. And we really want to showcase that as a powerful theme that shines through throughout some of the juxtaposition of these chapters. So I'm covering, as Helen alluded to, mainstream and highly popular sports and others discussing more niche and emerging sport and debates. And we're really proud of that diversity within this handbook and we hope to encourage people to do further research on some of these aspects. I'm going to pause there as we have taken up farting which time and pass on to the fabulous Professor Robin Kajlinski who has got a very extensive biography slide. So I'm not going to steal any of that thunder either and just give you the floor Robin and change your slides over. So thank you. All right. I won't go through the extensive list of thank yous but I echo my colleagues in thanking everybody for being here especially Ambassador and Mrs. Hayashi, friends, colleagues, family around the world. I know my parents are watching from Vermont. And yes, as Helen mentioned, I did come in March because the trip was planned and the university and the transit system went on strike about two days before the scheduled event. And so I came anyway, had a lovely time but I have to say if I had to choose one day to come back for 24 hours to London, today was a wonderful day. I arrived at 6 a.m. Haven't slept in a few days but I'm heavily caffeinated and very excited to be here. So yeah, then thank you of course to Helen and Verity for reaching out to me. I'm very delighted to be here in person. I could have done this by Zoom, but I just did not want to and I really appreciate the energy and feedback from audiences. I have a small interactive part of my talk so please do participate. So yeah, I'm gonna give a little brief self introduction in very Japanese fashion. Jiko Shokai is always the first thing you learn when you're studying Japanese language. So I will start my presentation with a Jiko Shokai. And as well, like many times people say how did you get interested in that? So I'll tell you a little bit about that. And then you'll notice my chapter in the handbook focuses on the kind of transition from calisthenics and like physical education to competitive sport. And that really happened in the 19 teens to 20s. But I decided for this talk to make it a nice round number, a hundred years, a century. So from really, I'll do a bit of the prehistory which is in the chapter, but then really the first Japanese woman to take part in the Olympics who you can see here on the left. Those are both the same woman with the tennis racket and then running. Of course, 1964, Helen is an expert on these volleyball players and up to this silver medal winning Japanese national basketball team from the 2021 Olympics. I'm okay, I'm just, here we go. So my self-introduction. I teach history at the City University of New York. There are a number of campuses around New York City. Mine is a community college, meaning I teach the first and second year sort of survey courses. I mostly teach world history. So although I have a very specific interest in modern Japanese women in sport, I teach ancient world history. I went to go see the Rosetta Stone today at the British Museum and I have really broadened my interests. So I teach these survey courses but my research has been pretty focused on sport, Japan and the intersections of society and sport. I really started this research about 20 years ago and focused on gender pretty exclusively for about a decade. I've since started to look a little bit more at environmental issues and sport and development but there are some interesting overlaps there as well. If anyone's interested, we could talk about that in the Q and A. Today I'm very focused on women and gender. So, and here's a picture of Queens where my college is located and those are some of my students, the Japan Club when we took a field trip. So how did I get interested in Japanese women in sport? I myself am a runner. I ran in college. I ran track and cross country and now run recreationally for my mental and physical health. And so I've always just had an interest in track and field and marathon running. And when I was in graduate school, which I went in 2003. So in 2004, I was in an anthropology class and I wanted to write a paper about marathon runners because I had a personal interest in marathon runners. And because in 2004, when I was taking this class, Noguchi Mizuki had just won the Olympic marathon in Athens. And it was the second time in a row that a Japanese woman had won the Olympic marathon. This is a sport that's often dominated as you probably know by East African women. And so I thought, oh, that's interesting. Japanese women won two Olympics in a row. How did they get to be such good marathon runners? It was a very simple question. And it turned out there was no simple answer. There was no scholarship. So I contacted actually Bill Kelly who's the first author of this book. And he was nearby me at Yale University. I asked him, has anyone written about the history of Japanese women participating in sport? And he responded with what every PhD student wants to hear, which is nobody's ever written a scholarship about this. And so that was how my dissertation came to be. The scholarship that did exist. And of course, there's much popular journalism and literature, popular writing, but academic literature on Japan and sports was pretty focused on male sports. Bill Kelly had written about baseball and I really enjoyed his scholarship. But with very few exceptions, baseball is pretty much a male sport. The martial arts as well, like sumo wrestling, it's a male sport. There are definitely women who do martial arts, but sumo and baseball, the subtitle of my book is Japanese Women in Sport Beyond Baseball and Sumo, because those two national sports are almost exclusively male. So I wanted to talk about women's sports. I knew from having studied in Japan and lived in Japan and done sports in Japan that women did do sports. There just wasn't scholarship. A lot of the sports, so I did a lot of gender studies and a lot of the gender and Japan scholarship focused on this kind of passivity. I didn't see a lot of scholarship on strong women. And so I wanted to fill in that gap. And then there was a fair bit of scholarship on women's participation in sport, but a lot of it was Eurocentric about Victorian ideals or in the United States, a lot about Title IX and women's participation in college sport. So that's where my research came in. I wanted to talk about women's sports in Japan, female strength and non-Western or non-Euro-American women participating in sport. So where did I begin? It was a work of history. So it was historical and there are, you could have many different starting points. What I thought was kind of interesting and this is what my chapter focuses on was this transition from women doing kind of play, three-legged races and passing balls around. This is what sport for women or girls would have looked like at the turn of the 20th century. These are sports days at schools for girls. And this was also the trend in the West at the time. Women were not really doing exertive competitive sport, but within about a decade, just by the 1920s, you had Japanese women in the Olympics. So I thought it would be interesting to see how that transition came to be. And these are the first female Olympians who I'll talk about today. Some of the questions to keep in the back of your mind as I'm talking, those kind of broader theoretical questions driving this scholarship is why have the Japanese prioritized their involvement in sport? And this was alluded to in the introduction to the volume. Why were women encouraged in sport when you often hear them talking about this good wife, wise mother? In Japanese, it's DOSI Kembo. Oftentimes like the Meiji era or early 20th century, this good wife, wise mother ideal seems to be in the discourse about women. So how do you kind of square that with a tan muscular woman winning an Olympic medal? It didn't seem to fit into that ideal. And then have women sports had any transformative effect on Japanese society? There should be a question mark there, sorry. That's a question. Because I think you could say yes or no, but maybe by the end of my talk, you'll have an opinion on it. The other thing I wanted to mention is that over the past 20 or so years that I've been doing this research, attention kind of waxes and wanes on who cares about women's sports in Japan, but it's often the Olympic years or the World Cup years that people pay attention and it is a World Cup year. So in just a few months in Australia and New Zealand is the women's soccer or football World Cup. So perhaps you'll have a better, the Japanese women are supposed to do quite well. So you'll maybe have a better understanding of how that came to be. Because I know in 2011, when they defeated the United States, everybody was shocked except for me. Because I had just completed a book about how they had this long history of participation. Okay, so yeah, I'm very honored to be speaking at the Beasley Memorial Lecture. So it seems appropriate that I discuss one of his expert topics, which was the Meiji Era, we'll start here. So Moriari Nori was one of the most prominent and influential ministers of education in the Meiji Era. He stated in 1882 that if the body is strong, the spirit will advance of its own accord without flagging. Physical training is an indispensable element for character training. And many people make the assumption that sports came into the Meiji Era because a lot of foreigners were coming in, but there was already a foundation of physical education and sport, particularly these kind of indigenous, late Tokugawa military training, sorry, military and martial arts training that both males and females had been taking part in. So it's been argued that there was a preexisting sort of institutional infrastructure and societal reverence for physical culture that laid a very good foundation, a fertile foundation for Western sports to be, you know, embraced in Meiji Era Japan. This was an era for anybody who studied Japanese history, which was also a period of imperialism, militarism, expansionism, and sport played very nicely into that as well. The addition of physical education, for example, into the compulsory education system was meant to physically strengthen people's bodies and characters. This is a woodblock print from 1880 of students demonstrating a Western style of calisthenics or taiso for the Japanese, for the Meiji Emperor. This is from an 1895 British employee named John Morris who was working in Japan at the Japanese Imperial Public Works Department. So he was part of like a foreign community living in Japan and he said, sport is his observation as, you know, an early expatriate living in Yokohama. Sport is pursued in all its branches with that, which distinguishes the Anglo-Saxon race wherever met with. An extensive race course is situated not far from the public gardens and a magnificent recreation ground where cricket, tennis, and other games are played with a zest, which amazes the native population, lies just in the rear of the business thoroughfares, boating and yachting, rifle, sorry, it's a typo, rifle shooting and athletics, further tend to fill the cup of youthful happiness to the brim. And here's some Meiji era photographs as well of both male and female sports. So baseball famously, you know, became popular in the late 1800s, but many other Western sports took root as well. As I mentioned, the education system was a big part of the promotion and growth of sport. For the first time ever, there was compulsory education for young women in 1872. In the 1870s and 80s, there were a number of Japanese women who went abroad to both Europe and the United States and came back and brought some of the physical education ideas and practices and clothing, which I'll show you back from abroad. Physical education in 1878 was added to the compulsory education. And then in 1880, so very quickly, they made some kind of physical activity as part of the day-to-day education for all Japanese children. Inokuchi Akari, these are some of the so-called mothers of sport for women in Japan. So these are the, these are people who specifically targeted women's physical education. You know, Akari was actually, her birth name was Aguri, but when that was pronounced in English, she said it sounded like ugly. So she changed it formally to Aguri. And she went, she changed her name because she went to go study in the United States and Massachusetts. She received a scholarship from the Ministry of Education, Mon Bouchot to be the first male or female person from Japan to study physical education abroad. She spent four years at Smith College and Harvard and learned different methods of female physical education. So in 1903, she returned to Japan and aggressively began setting up American style physical education for young women. This also included uniforms because women had, were wearing clothing that was not conducive to doing sport. And so she copied bloomers and short skirt, kind of physical education uniform from the United States. By the start of the Shoah period in 1926, Japanese girls were wearing more Western style uniforms. Around the same time that she was establishing departments of physical education for girls, sports had already begun to take off. So outside of school, women were also doing sports. Let's see Fujimura Toyo. And this is a statue of her at the Tokyo Women's College of Physical Education. She had had a lot of physical ailments when she was young. And she had her physical health had been improved by doing various exercises. And so she wanted to help strengthen other Japanese women. Of course, this was a time where women could die in childbirth. And so she felt like this wasn't really in contradiction to the good wife, wise mother. This was precisely to help develop strong mothers. So she helped to introduce a series of Swedish calisthenics. So just slightly different. And Fujimura had traveled abroad extensively to Europe and the United States. I just wanna point out that, in the broader context, women's sports globally was not exactly being embraced. Dr. Henry Modsley was here in London at University College. And he was a very influential opponent to women's physical education and education generally. He believes that if women engaged in mental or physical exertion, the energy would impair their overall well-being and fertility importantly. So he said, the energy of a human body being definite and not inexhaustible quantity can it bear without injury and excessive mental drain as well as the natural physical drain which is so great during the years after puberty. When nature spends in one direction, she must economize in another direction. And it's kind of funny to look back on it now. It feels quite dated, but he was not the only person with this kind of mindset that it could potentially be very dangerous for women's ability to bear children if they were to exercise too much. And so in Japan, they set up an organization to try to study the effects of sport and physical education on women's bodies. And over time they determined it does not prevent you from having children. And pretty quickly, they started having more competitive events for girls and women. They held something called the Japanese Olympic Games in 1913. And this was at the same time, as Verity mentioned briefly, that Japan was trying to get involved in the Olympic Games. So yeah, here's the interactive part. And maybe some people in this room know the answers to these questions. When were the first modern Olympics held? You can just shout it out, yes. Excellent, 1896 in Athens. When did women first compete in the Olympics? I guess I heard 1912 and 1920. Certainly they first participated in some sports in those years. The first exhibition sports were in 1900, so that's the second Olympics. Any guesses what events they were? Archery, I guess. Penis, no, you couldn't do that easily in a long skirt. But it was, yeah, tennis, yachting or golf, which could all be done in a long skirt. And then when did Japan first take part in the Olympics? Do we know? It's a good guess. And most people think it's later, but it's actually earlier, yeah. So in 1909, this is very shortly after the first Olympics, Kano Jigoro became the first Asian member of the International Olympic Committee. And then the first Japanese athletes went to the Stockholm Olympics. It's a very interesting story. If anyone's interested in kind of obscure sports trivia, the two runners did very, very poorly. One of them was a marathon runner who apparently passed out, was taken into somebody's house, given some juice. And he didn't finish the marathon, but then went back, I think, for the 50th anniversary of the Stockholm Olympics, and then he finished the race as an elderly man. So those were the first two Japanese athletes. And it was, in fact, this poor performance that really motivated Japan to invest more money and resources into developing better athletes. It was so humiliating that first time. And then when did the first Japanese woman take part? Don't worry, no one but me has really written much about this. And in fact, most Japanese people, when I tell them about this woman, they don't, most Japanese people aren't familiar with this history. It's quite obscure. So 1928, Amsterdam Summer Olympics was the first Japanese woman to take part. I should also note, this was the first time women did track and field at the Olympic Games. And here is Japan's first Olympian. Hitomi Hinue, Hitomi is her surname. It's also a first name, but that's her surname. So you can see her there in the front row with her, the rest of the all-male track and field team in Amsterdam. Let's see. So yeah, I wanna just spend a moment talking about her. She's very important as a trailblazer, as a, she was not just an athlete. She was also the first female sports journalist for the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun. And so she was a very good writer. And there's a number of memoirs and things that she's written. So here's one of her kind of diary entries from her autobiography about the race that she went to Amsterdam hoping to win. She had competed in other international competitions and done very, very well in the 100 meter race. She unfortunately took fourth place and was so heartbroken by this fourth place finish because of course that's the first one that doesn't get a medal. And what's fascinating to me is how much the Olympics have changed since this time because apparently she was able to register at the last moment for an event that she had never raced before. So she was a sprinter and a jumper, but of the five track and field events that were held for women in 1928, the only other options were the 800 meter or some relays. As you saw, she was the only woman, so she couldn't do a relay. So she begged her coach, please let me do the 800 meter race. Does anyone here run track and field? Because if anyone has either trained for a 100 or an 800 meter, they're very different. 100 is a dead, full-out sprint. 800 is called middle distance and you kind of need to know how to pace yourself. So let's see how it went. They had video equipment at this time. She's in the innermost lane. I guess that's lane one. And hopefully this works. I believe the Japanese subtitles are slightly cut off and it's all in Japanese. So but you'll get the point just from watching. I was just doing a three-step jump. Now, Oda is the first and Rambu is the second. I was inspired by many things. I wanted to try and do my best. I felt that my body was opening up. The start of the destiny of the race is approaching. The first course of the race. The winner of the race is the third course. The first race- The words are coming out of myography. It's crazy, like a sprinter. That's it. 歩んと言う間に6位に落ちていた。 She fell to sixth place after the first lap. 人火は6位のまま出すと1周のかながらになります。 後400名と。 竹内監督の激が聞こえた。 この時私は奥馬を思いきり強く噛み締めた。 ストライドが少し伸びた。 神が風を切るのが分かった。 スピードを上げた人火は前よ行く先手を一人また一人かわしていきます。 The rest is 150 meters, and the person is finally 3 meters. Up to 2 meters to 4 meters, up to the top of the hill, 15 meters to go. I can't believe my legs anymore. I hit my right cheek with all my might. The words I was told by the director of the bamboo house were all over my head. If my legs don't move, I'll shake my arm. I'll just shake my arm with all my might. The goal is 100 meters to go. The person who is holding my arm is finally trying to capture 2 meters. I went one step closer to the top of the hill. She's really using her arms. That's what she remembered. She's using her arms. I ran through the last one. And then, the day went by. The first person to win was the silver medal. I don't want to be sensitive to the timing, but it's so good. I wanted to show you the whole thing. There was some very interesting fallout. Just to highlight, I think it was pretty clear, but the first ever Japanese athlete to take part in a race that she had never raced before took the silver medal. There was some interesting fallout after this event. Again, there had been five track and field events. The 800 was the longest race in 1928 that women were allowed to race. This is from a manga about her life. This is from the New York Times. The final of the women's 800 meter run in which Braulina Radka of Germany set a world record, plainly demonstrated that even this distance makes too great a call on feminine strength. And it's kind of funny, but the Olympic committee didn't think it was funny. They canceled women's races over 400 meters. Until, does anyone know when they were allowed to race 800 meters again? 1960. So this was raced one time in 1928. They breathed heavy and sweated and the IOC canceled the event until 1960. That's when the 800 meters was reinstated. I think that this episode highlights the tensions globally that people were feeling about, you feel this pride when you see the Japanese flag go up and the nationalist sentiments and yet people were still uncomfortable with women doing competitive sport and looking exerted. There were also a number of other kinds of fallout after the event as Hitomi gained fame back in Japan. You know, I think one of the things that has always interested me about her and has made me very fond of Hitomi Kinoe is that I am the exact same size as her. So in feet, she's about five foot seven and 130 pounds. She is the exact same size as I am. She was considered a giant in Japan and people called her monster giant. And of course she was taller than many of her teammates, but people thought she could not be biologically female. She certainly has, you know, she was muscular. She has somewhat masculine features, but this is something that still goes on today, right? If a woman is too good of an athlete, there's no way she could be a woman. And sadly she never married or had children because she died at a very young age at 24. Yeah, after she took a boat, I think it was a competition in Europe, in Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia. And on her way back to Japan, she developed pneumonia and died shortly thereafter. So she was, she never competed in other Olympics. Yeah, very sad. In her short life, she was a very important trailblazer. She laid the foundation for more Japanese women to compete in the Olympics. And I'll go very quickly through the rest. Feel free to read my book if you want the whole history. It's actually open access. You can read it for free online. I forgot to mention it's also very symbolic. It was published by Bloomsbury Academic Press. So it's, it's really, you know, meaningful to me to be here in the Bloomsbury neighborhood. 20 years after I started researching this topic. My hatahideko is somebody that some Japanese people of a certain generation might remember. The most famous thing about her is actually the Japanese NHK news reporter who reported her win. So she was the first gold medalist from Japan. She was a swimmer. She won the silver medal in 1932 in Los Angeles. She won the silver medal and said for her deceased mother, she was going to keep competing until she won the gold medal. And she went back to the infinite infamous Berlin Olympics in 1936. And it was at those Olympic games. That she swam against the, the German swimmer who's in the back there. You can identify her. And it, the, the broadcasting technology was such that it was the first time there was simultaneous radio broadcasting. So you used to have to, you know, tell a story after the event. And for the first time they had a Japanese NHK reporter at the pool while the event was happening. So people back in Japan, I think it was the middle of the night were listening live to this event. And I think it was the middle of the night. I think it was the middle of the night. I think it was the middle of the night in Germany. And so the German woman was favored to win. And the Japanese reporter completely loses his cool. Unlike the most NHK reporters. He says, I think 32 times. My hot, the gun body, which means like, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go. And he's, he says my hot, the gun body, gun body, and then I lost everything because the, the German fans are cheering so loudly for their swimmer. So this was so exciting, actually, there's a. There's a photo up there of people gathered around their radios, saying bonsai. And so I hear some people laughing. Yeah. So maybe somebody could read it could translate the, the headline what's the headline say? clean of the water. And then what does the subheading highlighted in yellow say? Yes, it says Sugiwa kekonda means next comes marriage, lest anyone get concerned. And indeed, she did get married and she continued to teach swimming. But if this again shows the kind of cultural milieu of the day. So these were two very important trailblazers that I really kind of wanted to focus on. I'll go very quickly through the rest. Just some kind of Japanese Olympic history as it relates to women competing. Of course, the 1940 and 40 games were canceled, 44 were canceled, and then Germany and Japan were not invited to participate in the 1948 Olympics in London. However, there were still Japanese women doing competitive sports in Japan, as well as in regional sporting competitions. Another interesting thing that happened was, and of course she's not Japanese, she's Dutch, but this particular athlete really changed global perceptions of sports and motherhood. She competed in the Olympics, the last Olympics before the war in 1936. And she did okay, but she didn't win any medals. During that, what is it, eight year, 36, 12 year interim, she had two children. And she came back to win four medals. So they called her the flying housewife. And people said, I guess you can be an athlete, have children, and perhaps even be better. That sentiment did carry over into Japan. There were a few prominent Japanese mama-san senchu, mother athletes who were, you know, metal winning competitive athletes with children. Another very famous one, Tami Ryoko. She got married to a professional baseball player, and she continued competing. And then she, and so her name was Tamura. They said, Tamura demokin, Tani demokin. And then when she had a baby, they said mama demokin, meaning even as a mother, she can still win a gold medal. She also went on to serve in the Japanese parliament. So she was quite influential. You can refer to Helen's extensive research on the 1964 very famous women's volleyball team. I've always found it very interesting that volleyball developed in post-war Japan in large part because you need very little space and very little equipment. So even when Japan was devastated after the war, if you just had a bunch of people, a ball, and anything you could make a net, you could play this sport. So this was the first team sport added to the Olympic roster. And the Japanese women did very well in some world championships, as well as at the Olympics. And again, there's significant work about this, but they did win the gold medal in 1964. And that was another famous turning point. And the public perception of what Japanese women were capable of as athletes. Some more kind of broader Olympic history in 1996, women's soccer and softball were added to the Olympics. And Japan sent a softball team. So you probably in this room are aware of some of the changes that took place at the London Olympics in 2012. They stated that no more sports would be men only. So every sport, including boxing, had women added also in London, all participating nations, including Saudi Arabia for the first time, sent female athletes. And any new sport henceforth that was added to the program had to include women. After 2012. So for example, they added ski jump in 2014. And Takanashi Sada was predicted to win a medal, but she got four. Here's a list of when women's sports were introduced. Again, the early ones are mostly ones that you could do in a skirt. 1912, the British sent women to swim. The Americans did not yet. It took the US longer. But you can see here. So 1964, as you can see, is the first team sport that was volleyball. Volleyball is definitely an intensive sport, but it's not as much of a contact sport as things like basketball, soccer, rugby, definitely a contact sport. The Japanese women qualified for the 2016 Olympics. And here's another visualization of women's participation. So this is the Japanese delegation. As I mentioned, two men went in 1912. And if you look at the light pink line, you can see it's not exactly a perfect trajectory, but it's growing in general. This does not include the winter games. But here's the more recent ones. So sometimes there's a few more women than men. Sometimes there's a few less women than men. But overall, there's been this trend towards much greater equity. And then finally, I'll conclude with Tokyo 2020. Yes, we all know it was 2021, but it doesn't sound as nice. So Tokyo 2020 marked a turning point as the most gender equal Olympics in the game's history. Women accounted for 49% of all of the athletes, overall, not just Japan. When the games returned to Paris in 2024, there is anticipated to be exactly 50-50 female and male athletes. And then also just, I wanted to point out that there, it's not just the athletes, but there are more women in positions of leadership within the world of sport in Japan. And one thing I thought was very interesting was when the Japanese officials were trying to decide whether or not to postpone or cancel the Olympic games due to COVID, only one person spoke out, this female on the Japanese Olympic Committee. She said that we shouldn't do it. And nobody else would say it. She said it should be canceled. And she took a lot of heat for this statement, but she herself is a former judo wrestler. And yeah, so she said that it was a bad idea. But of course, the event went on and it went on with a very striking female presence. So I just wanted to end with these images of some of the women who were very instrumental in this Tokyo 2020 Olympics. The president of the organizing committee, Hashimoto Seiko, a seven-time Olympian herself. Of course, she took over, if anyone is familiar, after some sexist comments were made by the prior president of the organizing committee. But when the event took place, she was the president. The minister was a woman, the governor of Tokyo was a woman. And then in the opening ceremony, I don't think it was a coincidence that the first and last athletes to be seen were also women. As I say here, I feel like it was a striking visualization of how much has changed in the past century from that one woman in Amsterdam to women as athletes and as in the leadership of women's sports in Japan. So I thank you very much for your time and attention, and I welcome any questions you might have. Thank you. And I'm going to check the Zoom chat if there's any questions, but we have time for one, maybe two questions from the floor for Robin after that fantastic talk. I've never heard such an engagement from an audience before. There was a lot of emotion in it amongst that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I have a question and a comment. First of all, I first went to Japan in 1985 as a high school exchange student where I participated in two sports. One was three legacy and one was Chile. And then at university in Japan or women's university, I attended. I joined the tennis club and I was encouraged to join the competitive maple dancing. Which I did. But my question and my interest has moved forward since then, but my question is around the participation of the mixed-race people in Japanese sport. It hasn't come up in what you've said today, but I know that mixed-race Japanese attended the Olympics at least from the 1960s. And indeed, I guess the contribution of mixed-race people to sport and Japanese society more broadly in recent years has shaped the Japanese identity quite strongly. And I wonder if you've got anything to say on that. Yeah, well, thank you so much for sharing your experience and that very astute question and you're absolutely right. I think it's a broader kind of question as you alluded to about Japanese identity. You know, I showed Naomi Osaka, who's obviously very famous. I believe she took Japanese citizenship right before the Olympics so that she could compete for Japan. And then I think there was also a Miss Universe or Miss World, some beauty star who was mixed-race and they're popular, whether it's how they look or how they perform. And I do think it speaks to a broader question about Japanese identity. It's a largely homogenous country. But I can't say whether there's a broader sort of movement. But the notion that they do have this population crisis where you have an aging society and a very low birth rate, perhaps it's something to do with immigration and the necessity. If they're going to continue to have a strong economy and society, they really do need to welcome outsiders. So I'm not sure it's always thought of in those terms, but you're very right to observe that there've been a number of athletes in different sports. And then some of the, if you recall from the first slide, like the National Basketball Team, they have some players who are not Japanese. I think, is it rugby as well? So it's peppered throughout the handbook. Rugby, basketball, baseball, but also Michelle's chapter. So it is a little thread. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a historian. So historically, it was quite uncommon. But you're absolutely right that recently it's been a trend. Yeah. And one to pay attention to. Yeah. Robin is staying for the sake. So if you want to grab a few questions as well. Oh, there's a question back here. Yeah, we're going to pause on questions because as I say, we've got Robin will be present throughout the whole reception and we need to shuffle a chair and do a few more announcements. Sorry. No, thank you so much, Robin. A massive round of applause for.