The Culture of Japan as Seen through its Leisure

By Wolfram Manzenreiter

In his opening remarks Sepp Linhart (University of Vienna) stressed the importance of this so far rather neglected segment in the field of the study of the Humanities. In particular by providing contrasts to the stereotypical and oversimplified assumptions of a Japanese ethic of hard work, this approach towards the social sphere of non-work will help to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms of present-day Japan. The first of six panels was opened by Ishikawa Hiroyoshi (Seijo University, Tokyo) who presented a paper on the changing concepts of leisure due to the broader social, political and economic developments within these years from the early 1920s to the 1990s. The close connection to situative contexts and the mutability due to the changes in the surrounding environment were acknowledged by virtually all of the papers dealing with a specific leisure pursuit over a longer span of time. Eckard Derschmidt (University of Vienna) discussed the history of jazz cafes in Japan and explained their disappearance in terms of economic factors, changing consumer tastes, and changes in the way of jazz is perceived and in listener attitudes. Nagashima Nobuhiro (Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo) pointed out the significance of gambling and betting as a leisure activity in both historical and present-day Japan. Despite a century-long history of official prohibition and moral ostracism, licensed gambling has recently emerged as a prospering industry and fashionable pastime. Elements of excitement that are usually associated with games of chance also characterize the more highbrow pastime provided by the world of antiquarian book fairs. Ann Herring (Hosei University, Tokyo) described the activities at the Tokyo Kosho Kaikan from an ethnographic point of view as a legitimate and creative form of leisure activity complete with its own rules and patterns of behaviour.

Urban Middle Class
Various papers read at the conference confirmed the significance of the later Taisho years, characterized by the emerging urban middle-class lifestyles and consumer tastes as well as new perceptions of production and merchandising patterns, for the rise of a modern type of leisure consciousness. Katarzyna Cwiertka (International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden) elucidated how cooking became a pastime under the combined auspices of the state's promotion of Western food, the desacralization of food under the influence of modern thought, and the spread of urban middle-class culture. Shifts in the leisure behaviour of the urban workingclass become virtually intelligible in terms of body politics. The contribution of Inoue Shoichi (International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto) illustrated changes in class-related patterns of practising and reflecting on "beach behaviour" in interwar Japan. Drawing on her analysis of letters to the editor of women's journals and popular-sexological periodicals, Sabine Ruehstueck (University of Vienna) depicted the early 20th century as the period when science gained control of the discourse on sex and, in consequence, normative orientations towards correct sexual conduct superseded elements of pleasure and enjoyment.

Theatre
Roland Domenig (University of Vienna) analyzed Kobayashi Ichizo's vision of a new popular theatre combining traditional elements with Western forms. His concept, then integrated into a voluminous complex of entertainment, housing and railway industry, gave birth to the well known Takarazuka Revue. In the course of the following decade the ambition to control people's leisure activities for the sake of profit transformed into the determination to organize and regulate popular leisure activities by placing them in an ideological framework which coalesced smoothly with the military state's totalization of the nation, as Jennifer Robertson (University of Michigan) argued. Her analysis of the contemporary productions of the revue theatre revealed how a "new dramaturgy" of social, political, and economic relationships led to the increasing rationalization of everyday practices that finally amalgated with the military state's interests. In her paper, Annegret Bergman (University of Bonn) dealt with the attempts to found and establish a national theatre in the same period. The transformation of Kabuki from a sub-cultural art in the direction of a national heritage and, recently, once more a commodified entertainment emphasized the significance and mutability of the concept Japanese tradition.

Martial arts
The invention of tradition in the martial art of budo, which is another field of leisure activities heavily exploited for nationalist sentiments, was discussed in the paper of Inoue Shun (Osaka University). Centring his analysis on judo, Inoue commented on the various stages at which the martial arts have been diffused, transformed and instrumentalized for anti-modernist and chauvinistic purposes adapting to the changing socio- political contexts. A number of studies agreed in underscoring the significance of tradition, whether invented or historically justified, explicitly stated or implicitly embedded, for contemporary leisure activities. Having been involved in extensive participant observation in various courses of traditional aesthetic pursuits, Rupert Cox, (University of Edinburgh) concluded that despite many structural similarities to other leisure activities, the o-keikogoto are characterized by the explicit manipulation of symbols that serve to maintain the appearance of continuity with the past.

Time organization
Wolfred Manzenreiter (University of Vienna) interpreted the success of the game of pachinko as a response to both traditional and modern notions of time, space, and money. While the manufacturing industries have adopted to modern and rationalized concepts of time and space following their most efficient and profitable exploitation, the setting of the game constructed a "tradition without a past" due to the perfect assimilation with traditional perceptions of time and space in the context of leisure time and urban entertainment culture. Another paper taking up the theme that the study of leisure in present-day Japan should not overlook older forms of managing time was presented by Peter Ackermann (University of Erlangen-Nuernberg). Referring to interviews with aged inhabitants of Tokyo's Koto-ku, he gave a detailed account of the temporal and spatial framework as well as the kinds of entertainment that characterized this particular and spectacular part of downtown Tokyo at the end of the Meiji Period.

Leisure parks
Ideological references to tradition and practical considerations are merging in the way that people in the Japanese countryside employ their leisure activities. Nelson Graburn (University of California) described and analyzed the conflictual aspects of this development which are endangering the ecology and atmosphere of rural Japan. The leisure park boom of the 1980s certainly takes the prize as the most noticeable phenomena in the changing concept of rurality. Annegret Hamilton (University of Bonn) took a closer look at the leisure park business and at the underlying forces of growth and decline, as well as the way in which particular leisure parks react to trends in favourite leisure pastimes and introduce new patterns of leisure behaviour. Japanese people not only travel domestically, more and more they are leaving the country in their holidays. The long-term growth potential of the overseas travel market was analyzed by Henning Goedicker (University of Bonn), who stressed the major importance of economic factors in the expansion of the market. Even in pre-modern times travelling was considered to be one of the most popular leisure activities. Drawing on sources on the Tateyama pilgrimage in the Edo Period, Susanne Formanek (Institute for the History of Culture and Thought in Asia, Vienna) explored the ways in which travellers made good use of the religious framework as pretext to escape everyday routine and the rigid restrictions on mobility. In a manner similar to travelling, cherry blossom viewing is another very common contemporary leisure activity that originated against a religious background. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (University of Wisconsin) presented an excursion through the history of hanami and outlined the changing nature of its symbolism and popularity in reaction to the agency of cognitive and emotive dimensions of symbols.
Games
The game of ken, although elaborated and ritualized to a great extent in some periods, never managed to reach a comparably high orbit, and one major reason for its decline may be that it was simply top-heavy with rituality. Having done intensive research on the social and historical background of the origin and development of the janken, Sepp Linhart (University of Vienna) analyzed some of the aspects that induced the various ups and downs in the history of the game and its exotic predecessors. The world of sports certainly offers one of the most predominant settings for complex rituality and compact symbolism in modern societies. This is especially true of national sports, as T. J. Pempel (University of Wisconsin) revealed in his discussion of contemporary Japanese athletics. His disquisitions on the kinds and styles of media coverage given to major sports events delineated some structural components in order to consider for the relationships in which a given sport manages to attract a nation's attention.
William W. Kelly (Yale University) epitomized the history of Japan's most popular spectator and participant sport, baseball, as a mirror of the ideologies and institutions of modern Japan. Embedded in the educational system, the mass media, corporate interests and patriotic sentiments, baseball has passed through various stages in which pedagogical, economic and social structures intersect. In his contribution on golfing culture among Japanese business expatriates in Singapore, Eyal Ben-Ari (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) showed that active participation in sports may encapsulate a meaning not to be found in the purely sportive context. In terms of the life of an individual, playing golf represents one of the major socialization processes in which junior executives are prepared for their career. The close and overlapping allocation of leisure activities and work-bound procedures was approached by William H. Kelly (Osaka Gakuin University), whose paper focused on the role of practice and training to achieve the proper form in karaoke and tennis. As this prominent feature is not an aesthetic consideration but should be thought of in terms of group sociability, it relates the execution of the leisure activities to the more serious sides of life.
Intense discussions followed the presentation of papers and continued in the conference breaks. The participants welcomed the opportunity to gain an insight into research work related to their own interests yet approaching these from the methodological and theoretical realms of other academic fields. A publication of selected papers is planned to make some results of the conference available for a wider audience.