ABSTRACT

How do we explain the Japanese government's increasing interest in gauging and assessing the value of sport? How do we make sense of the fact that the Japanese have come to link physical education, as well as team sport and ball games, with moral guidance and spiritual development? Or that gambling on sport has been promoted as the main revenue source for the financing of recreational sports? Why is it that sports mega-events have acquired such a high symbolic significance that within little more than a decade the Japanese Olympic Committee has issued bids three times to host the Olympic Games? And why has the construction sector been the biggest recipient of federal funding for the execution of sports policy? All of these questions relate to a cultural phenomenon that is of global relevance and prevalence. Its manifestations in Japan are inseparably linked to the political economy of modernity, which must be taken into account when studying the global body culture of sport in any particular nation. I thus share with Tomlinson (1999:70) the view that ‘the core idea of global modernity as the social and cultural condition that proceeds from an epochal shift in the social organization of time-space’ remains ‘a highly compelling way of understanding our present complex connectivity’.