ABSTRACT
Since the Football World Cup Finals in the summer of 2002 there have been two, apparently mutually opposite discourses produced in the media, intellectual milieu, households, classrooms, and on the streets in Japan. Some – who we shall call ‘instrumentalists’ – insist that the World Cup was, at the end of the day, all about the embodiment of nationalism and the narrative of nation building. This discourse invokes the talisman of critical thinking. This views sports mega-events as part of a series of nationalist exhibitions, firmly associated with the mass mobilisation of the population and displays of exclusive chauvinism. There are many types of ghostly cliché of this kind, which describe international football as a proxy war, nationalist enhancement, the embodiment of authoritarian fascism, capitalist exploitation of the body, and a civilised form of the release of uncivilised savagery. In this camp the exclusive entitlement and belonging to a particular race/nation couplet becomes the almost exclusive issue. This discourse assumes that the World Cup promotes the instrumentality of nationalist ideology. Football, whether it is to do with on-the-pitch play or off-the-pitch concerns, can be colonised by the instrumentalists’ formulation of mass culture.
