← New Books Network
New Books Network
Aaron L. Miller, "Basketball in Japan: Shooting for the Stars" (Routledge, 2024)
01:03:34
Loading summary
Transcript76 lines
- [00:01]
Chevrolet Advertiser
There's a reason Chevy trucks are known for their dependability because they show up no matter the weather, push forward no matter the terrain and deliver. That's why Chevrolet has earned more dependability awards for trucks than any other brand in 2025, according to J.D. power, because in every Chevy truck, like every Chevy driver, dependability comes standard. Visit Chevy.com to learn more. Chevrolet received the highest total number of awards among all the trucks in the J.D. power 2025 U.S. vehicle Dependability Study Awards based on 2022 models. Newer models may be shown. Visit jdpower.com awards for more details. Chevrolet Together, let's Drive.
- [00:31]
Liquid IV Advertiser
Some days call for working up a sweat, working on your passion and endless action. Ditch the glitch with Liquid IV's new energy multiplier, Sugar free refreshing flavors like strawberry, Kiwi and BlackBerry lemonade. Scientifically formulated to support physical energy, hydration, focus, mood and social stamina. Liquid IV's new energy multiplier, Sugar free hydrating energy Tap the banner to learn.
- [01:00]
Brooks Running Advertiser
More Brooks Running reminds us that we're all powered by something. Whether it's the me time energy of a run after a day at the office, the electrifying energy of your first marathon, or the infectious energy of a group run with your friends. No matter what energy powers you, Brooks has gear specifically designed to unleash it. So lace up and let it out. Let's run there. Visit BrooksRunning.com today to learn more.
- [01:28]
Aaron Miller
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:33]
Keith Rathbone
Hi and welcome to New Books in Sports, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Keith Rathbone and I'm coming to you from Macquarie University. Actually, it's funny, I usually don't come to you from McCor University. I'm usually at home, but this time I'm actually in my office and I'm here today talking with Aaron Miller. Aaron is the author of a fantastic new book out this year, 2025, called basketball in Shooting for the Stars. It's been published in Rutledge's Contemporary Japan series, and Aaron is a lecturer in the Department of Kinesiology at California State University, East Bay. Thanks for joining me today, Aaron.
- [02:18]
Aaron Miller
Very happy to be here, Keith. Thanks so much.
- [02:20]
Keith Rathbone
Now Aaron, I love this book and I have to admit I didn't know much about basketball in Japan before picking it up. So I I obviously I do this this podcast. I read a ton on sport and if you were to ask me what I knew about sport in Japan, it would be very limited indeed. But it would probably be mostly about baseball or or martial Arts. So I'm wondering how you came to the topic of basketball in Japan.
- [02:52]
Aaron Miller
Yeah, thanks so much, Keith, for having me. It's a really pleasure and honor to be here. You're right. I mean, not a lot of people know much about basketball in Japan. In fact, I was myself in the dark about basketball in Japan. When I first went to Japan to teach English many years ago. I really never heard of any Japanese basketball players at that point in time. And it was only around that time that Yao Ming came to the United States to play basketball in the NBA. And so there weren't a lot of Asians in the NBA at that time either. But when I was teaching English. I got really interested in sports. As a way of connecting people from different countries. And so this is before I became an academic. And before I wrote this book. Before I even conceived of this book. But I was in this small town in the middle of nowhere. The Japanese government had hired me to teach English. And they'd thrown me in. This town of 5,000 people. I think there might have been one stoplight. One supermarket, one restaurant. The restaurant was a Chinese food restaurant. It wasn't even Japanese food. And wonderful people in this small town. And I didn't speak any Japanese at the time. And they took me under their wing. And one of the ways that I was able to have some kind of amount of success. A limited amount of success. In learning the language and learning about the culture. Was through sports. And so I helped coach the baseball team for the middle schoolers. And I would go to the basketball practices. Because I had grown up playing those sports myself. I played softball with some of the adults in the town in the evenings. And then I went to the Koshian baseball tournament. Outside of Kobe, Japan. As a. As a trip, a weekend trip. Because I'd heard about it. I'd read about it in a book which was written by Robert Whiting. Which is very popular among Japan folks. It's called you've got to have Wa. And this book is all about how Japanese baseball is a reflection of Japanese culture. I was really interested in that. And this book was, as far as I remember, a New York Times bestseller. It was a really well regarded book. And my really, really good friend gave it to me. Talking about take to Japan. When I went there to teach English. I didn't speak any Japanese. So, you know, it was. This was my. The first thing I really read about Japan. I didn't study Japanese in college. I didn't. You know, I had some Japanese American friends growing up. But really had very little knowledge. And so that book really shaped my view on Japanese sports for a long time. And I was fascinated to learn more about baseball myself firsthand and go to these games. And Bob Whiting, who I mentioned earlier, wrote that book. He had written in that book about this baseball tournament called Koshien. And Koshien is. It's kind of like the NCAA tournament, but for high school baseball in Japan. It's this really, really intense cultural event. It's not just high school kids playing baseball. It's the top team from each of the regions of Japan, they're called prefectures. And the top teams all go to this stadium outside of Kobe called Koshian Stadium. And the stadium was modeled after Wrigley Field. And it's a historic place where the Huncheon Tigers also play one of the most important professional teams. So all these young kids are just spending their entire year outside of school practicing baseball to try to get good enough so that their team can be the one that goes to this tournament. And when I went to watch it, I was 22 years old, you know, not, not too much older than the kids who were actually playing in the tournament, four or five years maybe. And I just thought it was this amazing and interesting cultural event. And of course, you know, being American, being naive to Japan, being naive to Japanese language, Japanese culture, really ignorant actually is a better word. I mean, I didn't have much, much knowledge. This was a way for me to kind of start to understand Japanese culture without really doing much research in the library. And so that was fun. It was kind of like getting to do a field trip almost to learn about something that I was already interested in, but from a slightly different cultural angle. And that got me writing about Japanese sports. So I wrote some magazine articles and things like that at that time about Koshien and you know, was thinking that maybe I'd become a travel writer. You know, I was really influenced by, by some travel writing I had read at the time. And this is all very long winded way of saying that Japanese sports as a way of understanding Japanese culture really kind of sunk their teeth into me. And that was 2002, it's now 2025. I mean, I've been thinking about these issues for 20 plus years now. I wrote another book about Japanese sports that was published in 2013, and that was about similar connections between sports and education and culture, but with a focus on the violence that goes on in some of these really high intense youth sports like high school baseball. And so this book in particular was my attempt to understand how a sport like basketball, which isn't very popular even in Japan, and lots of people in Japan don't know that, you know, there's a national basketball team. They don't know that there have been, you know, women who've played in the WNBA or from Japan. They don't know about some of the Japanese players who've made it to the NBA, albeit briefly. And we can talk about that later. But so there's. There's not a lot of knowledge out there, even in Japanese. And so I was just really fascinated by trying to solve a kind of a puzzle. Why is it, you know, that I saw so many young kids playing basketball in these schools, one of which I taught in myself. And I, you know, this was a really energetic and passionate team that I was with in this small town. They care a lot about it. But then all of a sudden, you know, everybody starts watching baseball on TV when they graduate high school, and basketball is nowhere to be found. There's no basketball on tv. At least there wasn't at that time. So it just got me thinking about those issues. And eventually I said, I have to somewhere put this into print so other people can. From what I've learned.
- [09:17]
Keith Rathbone
No, no, I. And I. That. I think that beautifully encaptures kind of the. The question that you tried to answer, which is, like, basketball, in some ways, is this hugely popular sport for kids. And then it. And then it kind of seems. Seems to dissipate, just before we get into the nitty gritty, a little bit of some of the details of basketball and maybe why that happened. Can you tell us a little bit? Because a lot of our listeners are researchers, how you did your research, Because I'm a historian, so I find myself in dusty archives. I get respiratory illnesses. But that wasn't your approach. And reading more of your book, I'm very jealous.
- [10:00]
Aaron Miller
Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, my undergraduate degree was in political theory at a time when I thought I was going to become a lawyer. And then I went to Japan as a kind of a way to figure it out and see if I really wanted to be a lawyer or not in Japanese culture. But Japanese sports, as I say, really had a profound effect on me. And I think what I was most interested in was how a sport like baseball or basketball could be played in a place very far from my home where I had learned the sport and often in a very different way. And yet the folks who were playing it were equally effective, very successful. Right. There was. There's. There's different ways of doing the same thing. And I found that to be really fascinating. And, you know, that fascination extends beyond sports. I happen to research sports, but Japan as a whole really fascinates me in terms of, you know, all kinds of things. Crime, business, you know, politics, the environment, approach to the environmental movement. I mean, there's so many things about Japan that I feel are, are really worthy of study. And if I had more time, I would, I would study those things too. But, but I think to your question, which was, you know, about. Well, what was your question again, Keith?
- [11:15]
Keith Rathbone
No, it was about your method a little bit. No, no.
- [11:18]
Aaron Miller
Method. Yes, I'm sorry.
- [11:20]
Keith Rathbone
I loved. It was for me, like. And I guess to, to verge off what you're saying in just a little bit towards your biography again too. Like, one of the things I loved about the book was how embedded you were in the culture of basketball itself. And kind of just the language of your book, like unpacking for the reader in a very clear way the complex Japanese terms that have these kind of like, layers of meaning. It was really kind of anthropological and really embedded. Like, I would never, if I were researching basketball in France, I would not, I would not coach basketball in France. But here you are. Totally different method, really rich. And so I want to get people who haven't read the book a sense of, like, how you, how you understood this.
- [12:07]
Aaron Miller
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I mean, you're right. I mean, I, I've. I found pretty early on in living in Japan that it was difficult to get the full story from conversations with Japanese people. That, you know, Japanese language is a very high context, low communication language. And so unless you're really, really fluent, which again, when I started living there, I smell hot. And I subsequently studied Japanese intensively, but it took many, many years before I could feel like I had some confidence in the language. Um, but though the conversations would give me pieces and it was sort of like, you know, little kind of crumbs that I was, you know, following down on, on or clues. But eventually, you know, I was able to read Japanese and so I started reading books. And that was where, you know, I got some of the ideas for, for how to kind of frame this study. But in terms of the methodology, you know, my training is in social anthropology and the ethnographic method is really where I start. For the book I mentioned earlier, I spent a year doing field work. For this one, I spent a year during fieldwork, and there's some overlap between the field sites that I looked at in those two works. But this book about basketball really focuses on a field site at a university in Tokyo that I call Mutual. And I was just fortunate to know somebody through some connections in the academic world who was able to get me connected to the coach who ran that team. And for me, it's a triangulation of a few things. It's the ethnography, being there, listening, observing, asking questions in semi structured ways, just following people around to make sure I know what they go through and, and then understanding, you know, when it's the right time to dig deeper into a particular subject, being really probably annoyingly curious, if I'm honest. And then I'm, you know, I'm a, I'm a reader, I love reading books. And so anything I can get my hands on in English or Japanese on the subject, I try to triangulate that with what I'm seeing. And then I rely on folks like yourself. You know, as a sort of a secondary historian. I like to, I like to historicize what I'm looking at, if as best I can. I mean, I'm not a historian. I don't have the training to go into the archives and really, you know, work with primary materials. But there's been some really good research out there on Japanese sports from a historical perspective. And so I've relied on, on those books as well to kind of paint the picture a little bit. And the reason I think I do all of that is because I'm just really interested in social change, I think, as we all live these brief lives, but history, as being an historian yourself, it's so fascinating to think about the changes that happen in our own lives and the changes that have happened in previous generations. And so that focus on social change really has given me, I think, kind of a unique perspective on what Japanese culture is. And you know, there's a lot of people, and this gets into the argument of the book, but there's a lot of people who say, you know, Japanese culture is this, or Japanese culture is that. And there are certainly continuities over time, but there's also a lot of change that happens over time. And I think sports are this kind of interesting place to study those changes because of course, sports originated outside of Japan, unless you include judo and the martial arts in your definition of sports. And then they come into Japan and they get really Japanized, right? They get localized to fit Japanese needs. And so that process, that negotiation of what gets left behind, what gets incorporated, that just always has been really fascinating to me. So that's kind of, I guess, an overview of how I approach my research. But in the first book I wrote about Japan, I had to rely more on. On printed works because it was studying, you know, violence in Japan and being able to predict where violence is going to occur and witness it. And then, you know, when. When, if you witness it, what is. How are you defining what it is? Is it corporal punishment? Is it violent? You know, is it abuse? Is it the whip of love? That was. That was a methodological challenge I faced. And so in that book, I relied more heavily on printed sources in Japanese and English. This one is more ethnic.
- [16:50]
Keith Rathbone
No, I loved. I loved how close up to your subjects you were and how much that proximity to them allowed you to kind of get into their mindset. And you could really. So for people who haven't read it yet, it doesn't proceed strictly chronologically. And that's, I think, a benefit of it, actually, because your questions, while they are about, about kind of change over time and about the way in which the sport of basketball can be used at different points in time in Japanese history. It's not strictly a chronology of basketball in Japan. So that's, I think one of the really interesting things for me reading it as a historian was actually kind of decentering that chronology and going, oh, no. But really the question is, is more about how the culture is shifting. And so I needed to know where we were. Now I know.
- [17:49]
Aaron Miller
Yeah, I could imagine that being both, you know, perhaps a challenge for a historian reader. But, you know, I think the questions that. I love puzzles, you know, and I think you. You mentioned earlier what the. The puzzle of this book was. And I think if I'm brutally honest with myself, sort of solving those puzzles and also getting things chronologically in order, I find that challenging in writing a book.
- [18:20]
Epglis Advertiser
Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from Epglis. After an initial dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people taking EPGLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year, with monthly dosing.
- [18:39]
EBGLIS Librekizumab LBKZ, a 250mg 2ml injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies. Ebglis can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to ebglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Undesirable eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Epglis. Before starting Epglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection searching for real relief.
- [19:13]
Ask your doctor about ebglis and visit epgliss.lilly.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-5979.
- [19:24]
WhatsApp Advertiser
When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone.
- [19:47]
Epglis Advertiser
Learn more@WhatsApp.com this episode is brought to you by State Farm. Checking off the boxes on your to do list is a great feeling. And when it comes to checking off coverage, a State Farm agent can help you choose an option that's right for you. Whether you prefer talking in person on the phone or using the award winning app, it's nice knowing you have help finding coverage that best fits your needs. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
- [20:16]
Keith Rathbone
It didn't need to, for me, it didn't need to be chronic. Actually starting, starting with the now was good because it was about, you know, for me reading, it was about kind of de centering this idea of this on moving Japan. So you, I mean you had, we, we could start, I mean we could start talking now about like where basketball came from and you could do that story as you do in the book in a, in a later chapter, like what, where, where that is. But maybe let's start, let's start because you were talking about mu and I won't quiz you on what MU actually is, so don't worry. But, but kind of tell us a little bit about MU and the coaching there and how they were challenging this kind of how they were presenting a new mode of thinking about sport in Japan. I was really fascinated by their use of sport science in particular.
- [21:10]
Aaron Miller
Yeah, yeah, I was as well. I mean I wrote part of the, not, not the entirety of the book, but some of this book was part of my dissertation and it was it was that topic that really drove the dissertation, you know, what is the application of sports science in a Japanese cultural context? Because, you know, much of at least initial or, you know, sports science in the post war period was originating outside of Japan. And then, you know, it's been adapted and changed and localized in Japanese context. But I was, as I mentioned earlier when we were talking about baseball, there's this focus in Japanese baseball on the samurai, and much of what's written in English about Japanese sports focuses on baseball because it's this super popular sport, not just in Japan, but outside of. There's lots of Japanese major leaguers. Arguably the best player in the entire world right now is a Japanese player, Shohei Ohtani. And of course, it wasn't always that way. But, you know, even when I was doing my research, there was Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui, and before that there was Hideo Nomo and all these great players. And so if you talk to somebody here where I am in California about baseball and you talk about Japanese baseball players, people know Japanese pacemakers. So. So there's a lot written in English, but because there's not so much written in English about other sports, I had to initially, before I started reading Japanese sources, I had to build my knowledge around baseball. And, you know, the. In. In the baseball world, there's this focus, I think, on the samurai, and there's a long story here, Keith, about how that kind of shadow of the samurai is cast in baseball. There's some really good books on the subject, some really good analysis that I've relied on.
- [23:14]
Keith Rathbone
Title for a book, too. The Shadow of the Samurai in a Japanese Sport.
- [23:20]
Aaron Miller
Yeah, I mean, there's a book in my library here somewhere that I would love to show you, but in the interest of time, I'll skip it. But, but yeah, there's. There's been. There's been a good number of books written about how there's an overemphasis on the samurai in Japanese baseball. And, and that, you know, the comparisons between samurai swords and baseball bats is overblown and exaggerated and this kind of thing. But, you know, the. The Japanese in modern times have, in many ways, even outside of sports, use the samurai metaphor as a way of kind of building the national consciousness about things like discipline and hard work and sacrifice and loyalty to your company and these kinds of things. And so that was the initial fascination, was why are the samurai so important in Japanese baseball and in other sports as well? And then when I got to this field site at mu, I realized that the Coaches there were not following samurai rhetoric. They were different. And they were, you know, it depends on your perspective, of course, but in some sense, sort of enlightened to the fact that a samurai approach might mean you make your players run and run and run and run until they fall down. Because it's about sacrifice, it's about loyalty, right? And they were using sports science. And so they were saying, no, we have to pay attention to the wet bulb, globe, globe temperature, right? It's really hot outside in the Japanese summer, it's very humid. We can't be running our players into the ground. And so I was fascinated by that, for lack of a better term, sort of dichotomy between, you know, what are the philosophical or even ideological underpinnings for how people are approaching sports and thinking about sports, especially at this, you know, relatively high level of play. So that got me interested in sports science. And then I started reading more about sports science and its historical development outside of Japan and how it came into Japan. And, you know, the Japanese were pretty late adopters of sports science on a global scale. You wouldn't know that if you, if you looked at, you know, Japanese national sports teams today, they've got some of the finest training facilities in the world, and there are many non Japanese people who come to Japan to train in various sports. And so, you know, but. But for a long time, I think there was this shadow of the ceremony, and people said, well, no, sports are really about us cultivating our Japaneseness so that we can beat Americans and Westerners at their own games. And so there's that, that history too, which, you know, I could get into, if you're interested. But at this particular field site where I, you know, where I start the book, Sports Science was really hard for some of these young kids to understand because they themselves had been taught and coached in a totally different way, in some cases by these hard charging. They. They call it hard training in Japan by these coaches at the high school level who just. They didn't care if they threw up on the court, they didn't care what sacrifices had to be made to win the games. And so part of what I wrote about in my dissertation was how these young kids were really confused and they were almost like at the. It seemed to me, this is my interpretation, of course, as an anthropologist, but it seemed to me that they were sort of at this. What's the right word here? This sort of crossroads of Japan changing a little bit. And from, you know, the focus on. On the, the hard training and the commander Style coach to more of a player style coach, more of a, you know, a thoughtful sports science based approach. So that's what got me interested in that. And as I, the more I did the research on it, I realized it was sort of a false dichotomy because you know, there's gradients to this. Even some sports science minded coaches can be commander sal coaches. And you know, so it's not a perfectly clear distinction between these two things. And so my dissertation was about that and how frankly both of these approaches can become dogmatic. Right. It doesn't matter whether you rely upon, you know, the imagery of an American cowboy or sports science or the samurai in sports science. You know, any of these can become dogmatic if you're not careful. And that, and that can be problematic in a number of ways.
- [27:59]
Keith Rathbone
Yeah, it really comes out in, in the book, kind of some of the interrelations between what I was thinking of as kind of scientific sport and sport management versus the kind of more spiritual approach. But then also with this angle that was really interesting and we'll hopefully get to at the end with this Japanese thinking about their own physicality, like how maybe Japanese basketball needs to be a bit different because of Japanese bodies. And so if you're reading the book and you're coming like I was coming to it from a more historical approach, you can see that kind of tension about national bodies kind of playing out throughout the whole book where people are like, oh no, we have to play a Japanese way. Oh wait, maybe we can play an international way. We can globalize. But wait, we still have these bodies. Like we still exist in bodies that might be different. So it was really for me like a pleasure to read all that. Probably for some of our listeners though, they might want to know a couple of little basic facts and a little bit of that history for some context. So maybe Aaron, you could tell us a little bit about some of what you've hinted at before, which is that there is this longer history of sport in Japan. So like when this basketball come to Japan and how do, when, when it first comes, how are Japanese people understanding basketball, you know, in a kind of global context?
- [29:30]
Aaron Miller
Yeah, I mean it's, you know, it's a really fascinating history and there's some really great historical work that's out there in Japanese. Unfortunately, I've only been able to, you know, kind of share up.
- [29:42]
Keith Rathbone
There's a little bit of English now about it as well.
- [29:46]
Aaron Miller
Well, it's, you know, I appreciate you saying, I mean it's chap. It's just one chapter, really. And I, I don't claim to, to have, you know, exhausted the literature on this because, you know, there's so much to this, this particular moment in time where Japan opens up to the west. And there's been, you know, I'm sure, you know, lots of, lots of historians have looked at this period. Frankly, if I were, you know, able to do it and go back to graduate school and, and, and do a history Ph.D. it would be, that would be the period of time I would be most interested in. Because, you know, as you probably know, Japan finally opens up to the west after being isolated for 200 years and starts to trade on a limited basis, but has this sort of arm's length relationship with the west and all that. That opening of Japan is facilitated by or really forced by the American block ships and the black ships, you know, where this fleet of ships led by Commodore Matthew perry of the U.S. navy and they point guns at Yokohama Harbor. And I think it was 1853, if I remember the date correctly. But this leads to this process of Japan trying to catch up with the west, not just in sports. I mean, they didn't even care about sports in the 1850s. Sports hadn't even existed here in the United States at that point in a formalized, institutionalized way. But Japan starts to really try to understand what Westerners are doing in their economy and in their military and in their education system. And so they start bringing over folks from other countries and some of those people bring their sports with them, right? And they end up teaching at different universities in Japan, but they bring, you know, baseball with them and they bring basketball with them and so, and so on. What's interesting too about the basketball case is that there's some debate, I think historically about when it exactly comes to Japan, but there's some evidence that there were Japanese folks who went to the United States and picked it up at ymcas in the east in the eastern part of the United States, and then brought it back along with volleyball, which those were both American invented sports, as opposed to, you know, soccer and rugby, which obviously come from the United Kingdom. And so the, when they, when they get brought back to Japan, there's a period of time where they're, you know, really only played in these YMCAs in Japan and they don't really spread out, but eventually they do become more of a, a math sport with more of a massive appeal. And I think, you know, the puzzle again is like, I Show up in 2002 and basketball's, you know, a really important sport in Japan, at least in the schools. And then you start to look at the statistics and you find that there's lots and lots of kids, you know, tens of thousands of kids that are participating in basketball in Japanese schools. And so it's clearly been incorporated by that point. But in the early days, there were sports like basketball, volleyball, baseball, these American sports. People had suspicions about them, and I think rightly so, in the sense that if you. If somebody points guns or cannons at your harbor and says, open up and trade with us, and then something from that country comes to you, you know, there's going to be people who are skeptical of that foreign entity. And there's an interesting story that comes out of that from baseball, where there's this one very promising baseball player. And he actually has to hide the fact that he's a great baseball player because he's written up in the newspapers from his own father. And it just kind of shows you how there's a generational conflict that exists at this time. That was the early 20th century. But eventually that person becomes such a passionate, really kind of ambassador for the game of baseball that now he's known as one of the fathers of Japanese baseball. But he. But again, he had to keep that from his own father. And I think part of what may have limited the introduction of basketball to Japan is probably the Christianity element as well. Obviously, the YMCA is where the game was invented in the United States, and then it was spread around the world through these YMCA networks. But the Japanese were not, largely speaking, generally speaking, they were not interested in being proselytized, too. And so that's another interesting part of basketball and its history in Japan. Whereas, you know, if you look at the history of basketball in another country, like, let's say the Philippines or something like that, you know, the story will be very different. And there's a good book on basketball in the Philippines, too, that's out there. So maybe you've had.
- [34:46]
Keith Rathbone
Actually, when I was reading the book, I was thinking a lot about the. And I'm blanking on the author now, but this. This book on basketball in the Philippines, because there's a. There's a fair number.
- [34:58]
Aaron Miller
Hello. I don't know how to pronounce the last name, but. Lou.
- [35:01]
Keith Rathbone
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of. There's a lot of good parallels. Well, it does bring up the question. I mean, and we've.
- [35:07]
Aaron Miller
We.
- [35:07]
Keith Rathbone
We've danced a little bit around the subject. I mean, obviously, baseball enormously popular in Japan, basketball, popular with younger people, but less popular. And A lot. Your book does a lot to tease out that history. And part of the story seems to be okay. Baseball has this early victory over a team. But undergirding all that as a major part of your book is this idea of Japanese kind of, of Japanese in the, in the 20th century, Japanese people trying to like pursue an anti colonial strategy through sport. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about kind of that, that vein throughout the 20th century. Like, how does sport figure in Japanese society as a way of kind of asserting a masculine norm and power?
- [36:05]
Aaron Miller
Yeah, yeah. I mean, this goes back to the samurai and the, the long shadow of the samurai. I think part of it is, you know, if you think about what happened with the black ships, you've got a technology, a very dangerous technology. You know, we're talking about long before atomic bombs and things like that, but you've got this technology that's really quite frightening in these cannons that are pointed out the harbor and this and the, and the ships that are being brought. And so there's this catch up that has to be played. But at the same time, while Japanese are trying to catch up militarily and technologically and economically, they're also not sticking their head in the sand. They're saying, we're proud of who we are, we're proud of our Japanese spirit and we're proud of our national character. And this is, I think, please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is when that sense of national character really starts to crystallize in the minds of a lot of people around the world. The nation state period is coming about. Right. So the Japanese, I think, are doing that outside of sports before sports even become a thing in, in Japan. But then in the early 20th century, I think sports become a conduit for doing that, for emphasizing their nationalism, for emphasizing, hey, you know, we might not have those same guns or, you know, ships, you know, later airplanes and technologies and things like that. But, but we have Japanese spirit. And let us show you on the baseball field. And so that, you know, the game you mentioned was in Yokohama, interestingly, right. Same spot as the black ships, but there was a team of Americans living there and they had challenged the Japanese, a Japanese team to a game. And the Japanese team won 29 to 3. And I mean, not in baseball. I don't know if you know baseball well, but that's, you know, that's a.
- [37:55]
Keith Rathbone
Big, big, that's a huge win drubbing.
- [37:59]
Aaron Miller
You just never see that score in baseball. So it was A walloping. And of course that made national newspaper news the next day. And, and it really became a watershed moment, at least the way I read that hit that part of the history because Japanese people said, okay, look, we can beat these Americans at their own game. And you know, subsequent to that, there's, there's different tours of, of Japan by, by prominent American baseball players and, and some Japanese teams go to the U.S. so this becomes, you know, it's interesting. It's, it's sort of a cross cultural bridge that's being built. But my, my reading of it, and again, this is my, my interpretation, my reading of it is, is behind all of that, there's a lot of nationalism and antagonism and this sort of proxy war type happening underneath, at least in those years. Right. And as I think, you know, things change quite a bit after the, after the war, in the post war period. But at that point it's pretty, it's pretty antagonistic. So where am I going with that? Help me keep on track here because.
- [39:10]
Keith Rathbone
I think that you make a strong case in your book that that fund fundamentally shifts the sporting landscape in Japan in that even today, I mean, in a much less antagonistic way, like Japanese basketball is driven by the question of can we ever beat America? Like, can we build, build a team that's globally competitive in, in a serious way? And like, that's a, both in men's and women's basketball in Japan is kind of like a fundamental question, like, how do we do this? How do we, how do we become successful? The Australians can do it. Like, how do we.
- [39:47]
Brooks Running Advertiser
Disney's Lilo and Stitch has finally landed on Disney. Now you can watch the global phenomenon at home with your ohana.
- [39:56]
Liquid IV Advertiser
Be good for one second.
- [39:58]
Aaron Miller
You're the devil.
- [39:59]
Brooks Running Advertiser
Lilo and Stitch is verified hot on Rotten Tomatoes with an audience score of 93%.
- [40:04]
Keith Rathbone
Wow.
- [40:05]
Aaron Miller
Stitch also cute and fluffy.
- [40:07]
Brooks Running Advertiser
Disney's Lilo and Stitch rated PG now streaming on Disney. And right now you can, you can get Disney, Hulu and all of ESPN with an incredible limited time offer. Terms apply. If you thought goldenly breaded McDonald's chicken.
- [40:20]
Aaron Miller
Couldn'T get more golden, think Golder.
- [40:24]
Brooks Running Advertiser
Because new sweet and smoky special edition.
- [40:26]
Keith Rathbone
Gold sauce is here made for your.
- [40:29]
Brooks Running Advertiser
Chicken favorites and participate in McDonald's for a limited time.
- [40:33]
Lowe's Advertiser
Lowe's knows how to help make your home holiday ready for less. Get Select Style Selection's vinyl flooring for just $1.99 per square foot and have it installed before, before the festivities begin. Our team can help you every step of the way see a Lowe's Red Vest associate or visit lowe's.comholidayinstall to get started.
- [40:52]
Aaron Miller
Lowe's.
- [40:52]
Lowe's Advertiser
We help you save basic Install only. Date restrictions apply. Subject to availability. Install by independent contractors. See Associate for details. Contiguous US Only.
- [41:03]
Keith Rathbone
So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about. Because that brings up a lot of the other questions of your book, like how you've got this great chapter on the DNA of Japanese basketball, like, can we bring in foreign players to play in Japan? And what complications does that. Does that. Does that bring up? You've got a great chapter waiting for a male hardwood hero, like, is it enough to have a great women's team, or do we need a great men's team? So I'm wondering if. If you can talk a little bit about some of those. Some of the ways that Japanese basketball is operating in the shadow of the NBA, but also Team USA and, and how are they trying to pursue that, that success, what they understand to be success? Because it seems to me having a lot of great working out is a good success, too.
- [41:54]
Aaron Miller
Yes, yes. I mean, there's the, you know, at the levels where I was doing research for this book, the folks I was interacting with were fairly preoccupied with this question, right. How do we create the players who might make it? You know, I tell this story at the beginning of the book about this. This one player called Tabus Yuta, who, in the early 2000s, right around the time I was going to Japan to teach English, he was here in the United States trying to become the first Japanese basketball player to make it in the NBA. And he, you know, in the. In the world of sports, people say he had a cup of coffee in the NBA. You know, he got to play a couple games, and it was huge news back in Japan. And when I saw him play in Japan, he was working out at the university where I was observing, and. And he was like a God to these young, younger players. He must have been about 10 years older than the players I was watching. And one of the coaches said, you know, he's like a beetle coming back. I hope he can raise the level of basketball in Japan just by his presence. And he went on to play in the professional leagues in Japan, have a very successful career. But it just goes to show you that there's this fascination within Japan about those who can make it outside of Japan. And again, I think to me that the way I interpret that is you can make it in Japan and be a successful pro athlete, but if you really want to become well known in Japan. You have to make it overseas. And that's not the same in every industry. But in sports, it feels pretty much the case in almost every sport. Right. We talk about baseball, you talk about basketball. And so my research has always been not just this book, but I think everything I've written, it's been contextualized in that international kind of global sporting migration context. Right. Like who are the players who are deemed strong enough to make it? When I was first in Japan, people were saying, oh, there'll never be a Japanese power hitter in baseball. Well, you know, then Hidekimatsui came up. Yeah, he's in and helped World Series title. He was the World Series mvp. Then they said, well, there will never.
- [44:08]
Keith Rathbone
Be, you know, Ohtani pitched five innings last night and then hit a home run.
- [44:14]
Aaron Miller
I mean, you know, and so I think the Japanese players have probably always been good enough to play in the major leagues. Maybe not every Japanese player, but you know, the top rung of players. I think they've probably been able, like somebody like Sada Haruo who, you know, had 868 home runs back in, I think the 60s, 1960s, somebody like that probably could have played in the United States. But there were these structural barriers, there were cultural barriers, there were, you know, racism existed. Still does. And so I think with, you know, with the case of basketball, what, what you, you mentioned earlier is there's a, a desire to create a star in the men's game, particularly that is fully Japanese. And this is where I think, you know, things get complicated. And I, you know, I won't be able to, to share all the, the details of what's in that chapter here in this podcast. But I, I hope folks will at least download that chapter and read it. I titled the chapter DNA because the word DNA is used in Katakana in Japanese language, which is a script for loan words. And people say DNA and it doesn't have the same meaning as it has in English. It's not used with precision in Japanese. But there's this pretty enormous question that overhangs all of Japan, not just the sports world, about who is Japanese. Right. Like if you live there a long period of time and you speak Japanese and you mentioned earlier we were talking about being an American but living in Australia and you can become an Australian. It's not the same in Japan. There's this relationship, complicated relationship between ethnicity and nationalism. And, and so there have been Japanese born players, Japan born players who've made it in the NBA. In fact, one player right now plays for the Lakers. His name is Rui Hachimura and he's a very, very talented player. Plays with LeBron James. I mean, he's a fantastic player. And I think some, but not all Japanese dismiss him as not really Japanese or not fully Japanese. And so that chapter is about is it possible for the Japanese to either a get beyond that mentality of needing a fully Japanese male player to make it in the NBA, or is it possible that somebody like Hachimura will be embraced? And I don't know the answer to that question. I mean, I don't have a crystal ball. But I think part of it is because of this national character and this idea that the Japanese in sports are re emphasizing what it means to be Japanese. And if you can do that, it's good for almost everybody involved, particularly the people who are making money off of international sports heroes. Right? I mean, Ohtani, I haven't been to Japan in a couple years, but Ohtani, as I understand it from talking to folks there, is everywhere, right? He's on every billboard you can imagine. And you know, there's a huge capitalist enterprise that benefits from a Japanese, ethnically, fully Japanese, Japan born player succeeding in an international environment. And so that's why the subtitle of the book is Shooting for the Stars, because I think so that double entendre, shooting baskets, shooting to, to create superstars that are popular internationally. I think that's the only thing. And again, it's my interpretation here, but that's probably the only thing that will satisfy those in Japanese basketball circles who are trying to feel that Japanese basketball has made it on the international stage. I could see somebody saying, well, no, winning an Olympic medal would be just as good. And that's certainly part of it. But to me it's, it's, it's a similar kind of thing. It's not, it's not playing basketball for basketball sake. It's not playing basketball to become a better Christian. Which is incidentally exactly what Dr. James Naismith wanted, right? He, when he invented basketball, he, he said very explicitly he wanted to use the sport to win men for the master. And he was talking about Jesus Christ. And so, you know, basketball has come a long way since then. I don't think many people associate basketball in, in 2025 with, with religion in that way. But, but it's been very much separated from that in the Japanese context now. It's much more about nationalism and, and capitalism in my mind. And so that's what I was trying to get out with that Subtitle yeah.
- [49:01]
Keith Rathbone
No, and I. I mean I loved I I. It draws me kind of Two other questions I wanted to ask and then of course I need to ask you what's going on next. Uh, but no, I. There is this tension. There's kind of maybe twin tensions. I would say one tension in your book is, exists and, and I'm. And I thought you did like, for me, like I was quite satisfied in the way in which you inhabited the tension and didn't try to resolve the 10 this tension. But the idea that. Is there a Japanese way to play basketball? Because there was a lot of, a lot of your interlocutors, people you're talking to. We're committed to the idea that there's a Japanese way to play. But maybe that is a. Maybe that's a samurai way. Maybe that's a sports science way. Maybe that's a, a way that's shaped by Japanese bodies. Maybe that's, you know, this kind of sense of the inferior people. I'm, I'm giving us finger quotes, but you can't see it because you're just listening the inferiority of Japanese bodies. Or maybe it has to do with like kind of the invention of new techniques. And I was, when I was reading that chapter, I was like, why isn'. Why isn't there some cool Japanese moneyball coach who's just has his players, you know, full court pressing and chucking threes?
- [50:19]
Aaron Miller
Well, they do that. That, that is a strategy that that's used quite often. In fact, the coach I, I followed, you know, was very happy for the, the player. And this was long before Steph Curry was, was, was cham in the NBA. But, but you're right, the. There is a tension there because I think most people who go to Japan for a couple of weeks and maybe go to a professional basketball game in Japan, and we haven't even talked about that there is a professional league.
- [50:46]
Keith Rathbone
Yeah yeah, that was the other question is.
- [50:48]
Aaron Miller
But, but you know, that can, you know, we can save it for. Or let the book, let the listeners read that chapter on their own. But, but if you, if you go there for a couple weeks and you check out a Japanese basketball game, you probably will have list of five to 10 things that you say that's the Japanese way of playing basketball. The deeper you go, you know, the less you're able to say that. And I think one of the things that I was eager to do in my research was, was just shed a little bit of light on the diversity of opinion on these matters. So Much of English literature on Japan generally, and also English literature on Japanese sports specifically. So much of that literature is really focused on how the Japanese are X, Y or Z, period. And, you know, I lived there almost 10 years of my life. I met people with long hair, short hair, dyed hair, black hair. I mean, you know, it's like any other place in the world. There's a lot of diversity in Japan. It's just sometimes it's harder to see on the surface, you know, and they, of course, they have different immigration policies, and so you don't have as many folks from mixed race backgrounds. And so there is a desire among some people to maintain Japan's relative homogeneity in terms of ethnic makeup, but there's a lot of diversity there. And as an anthropologist, that was one of my commitments, is just to shed light on that diversity. And you see that in the sports world quite a bit. And yet, as I've already said a couple of times, there's still this kind of thrust or this, this desire among so many people who care about sports in Japan, and particularly basketball, baseball, these kinds of very masculine sports, tough sports, you got to be tough, you got to run to the catcher, be willing to get hammered going into the lane. These are sports where the masculinity comes out, the nationalism comes out. For lack of a better term, the samurai in you comes out. And so, so I think there's, there's a. There's. There's always different ways of playing sports, but sometimes those alternative ways of playing sports get overshadowed by the mainstream way. And, and so hopefully this book sheds light on the fact that there are other people in Japan doing sports in a different way and.
- [53:15]
Keith Rathbone
Totally. Yeah, and I've. I liked that. One of the things I really liked is that they all were defining themselves in terms of Japaneseness.
- [53:22]
Aaron Miller
Yeah, that's right.
- [53:24]
Keith Rathbone
And in some ways, isn't that right? Like, they all are Japanese and they're not. They're playing sport, as you alluded to, Aaron. And I'm conscious of the time, of course, but there is a lot of. There's a lot of great stuff in this book about the commercialization of basketball in Japan, and we could talk more about that, but the tension that exists between Japanese basketball and fiba, Japanese basketball and the NBA, and this tension between funding men's and women's basketball in Japan, the corporatized structure of sport in Japan, in a way that's somewhat unique, maybe for American audiences, but less for, for Europeans who might be listening, that that's very much part of the thing is. Do you want to say anything about that quickly?
- [54:15]
Aaron Miller
Yeah, yeah. If you don't mind, Keith, I, I do want to say something briefly about that. I mean, you hit the nail on the head already about the different, you know, sort of sources of influence, if you will. You know, FIBA is this international body that governs basketball and its rules and whatnot, but the NBA sort of stands alone and it has this enormous global reach because it's where all the best players play. And so I think at the coaching level in Japan, there are a number of coaches who are really focused on what great FIBA teams are doing, international teams. And so you get a lot of cross pollination with European countries and what they're doing, particularly, you know, countries like Spain, countries that do really well against Americans. Because the Japanese have, I think rightly noted that, you know, trying to be exactly like Americans is maybe not the best way to beat the Americans. We have to look at what the Spanish are doing or other, other teams like that. And then another part of, is that, you know, the Japanese in the mid-2000s decided after many years of controversy and conflict, and I write about this in the book, that they wanted to create their own truly professional league. Prior to that, they had these businessman leagues, they had a, an upstart league that had more foreigners involved, but they wanted to truly create their own league. And part of that was because FIBA had put pressure on the Japanese to have one league. That was really fascinating to me because my first book was about Foucaultian power relations. And first thing I thought was here isn't this international power relations that we're looking at here? So I won't go into that theoretical stuff, but the point is that got me really diving deep into that issue is, you know, how, how are the Japanese going about this process of creating this, what they call the, the third league or Daisan Ryugu is how they called it. They didn't want it to be a merger. They were very explicit about that between the two leagues that had existed at the time. And you know, by all accounts now that league is really quite, quite powerful within Japan. I mean, there's still, you know, the, the risk that exists in baseball or the risk that also exists in baseball will exist in basketball, which is if you have a great Japanese player, Japan born player, if they're really good, their, their ambitions are not going to be to go to the B league in Japan. They're going to go to the, to the A league, so to speak, in Japan. It's an unfortunate Name. I, I wish I had been involved in the, the decision to make that. But I will say the reason that that league is called the B league, I read about this in my book is because of a historical incident where one of those foreigners who was hired by the Japanese government to come over and teach, I think it was agriculture. He had, he had also been sort of a, you know, kind of a Teddy Roosevelt type guy. And so he had told the Japanese people, the young boys, boys be ambitious. And so apparently the B league, the name is because of that statement, boys be ambitious. But, but the last thing I wanted to say about your question is you mentioned it. There's not the same level of investment in women's basketball in Japan. And that really stood out to me as a big miss. My second book was about basketball, college basketball in the United States, particularly women's basketball. And that sport has come a long way in the United States. But there's been increasing investment in it now and you're starting to see the returns on it in the United States. The Japanese, on the other hand, have not invested in the women as I think they should have. And I think part of that is just plain sexism because, and I say that because the Japanese women have Japan born women, fully Japanese. Right. And using my air quotes too, when I say that some of those folks have been very successful in the wnba. And so it would stand to reason, I think, that there would be more investment in women's basketball because there's been more success internationally. Their, their, their national women's team has done better in, in international competition than the men's team, relatively speaking. So I always thought that was a big miss on the part of the Japanese leaders who are in charge of Ja. Japanese basketball. But yeah, so I just want to briefly note that I think there's probably going to be growth in that area.
- [58:44]
Keith Rathbone
Yeah, and that comes out in the book as well. I mean, your, your sense that there was a missed opportunity and that there was definitely a preference among many people in Japanese basketball for a male hardwood hero, like a female hardwood hero clearly wasn't sufficing in some ways. Look, I want to ask our last question, but just to remind people we're talking right now about, and I'll remind them again at the end, but basketball in Japan, Shooting for the Stars, Aaron's fantastic book on, on Japanese basketball history. But as you've mentioned, it's not the only thing you work on. So I don't know, Aaron, if you want to tell us here in the last couple minutes, what else you have, you have, anything on the, on the, on the bubble, so to speak, that you, that you have, we can look forward to in the future.
- [59:41]
Aaron Miller
Thanks, Keith. I appreciate that opportunity. Yeah, I do have another book coming out in a few weeks. I think we just went through the proofs. I say we because I'm writing it with a co author who's based in Japan and he's a wonderful scholar, and it's been a really amazing collaboration with him because he's just the most professional and thorough scholar and, and he has done really, really great work to help me understand Japanese sports on an even deeper level than I did before. So we decided to write a collaborative book about youth sports in Japan. Most of my research in Japan was with college athletes, but my colleague has done a lot more research at the K12 level. And so we sort of combined our, our experiences and our research. He's a historical sociologist and so. But he also does ethnographic research as well. And the two of us, we aligned really quite, quite amazingly on the same thesis, which is that Japanese youth sports have become too intense and too serious and too adult driven. And, you know, you see this trend all across the world. And so we, we do have a chapter in that new book about the United States as well. And I've been working here in the United States for many years now. And it was a difficult book to write in the sense that the Japanese do a lot right in youth sports. There's no cuts on most teams. So it's not this elitist kind of sports world that we have in the United States in youth sports. The pay to play kind of culture that we have in the United States, where it can cost tens of thousands of dollars every year to put your kid through private sports clubs and private lessons and all that. And it's very cost prohibitive for most American families. You don't have that, at least not yet in Japan. So there's a lot of things that we gleaned in doing the research from a comparative perspective that I think is. Makes it a little bit complicated to draw clear conclusions. But overall, what we found is that the Japanese are really intense in terms of how they approach youth sports. And so we actually call that book beyond the Black Clubs because there's this phenomenon in Japan now, or in the language that people use, they're talking about how youth sports clubs can be black clubs. Now sometimes what people mean by that is that the teachers who work at the school are being forced to coach the sports teams. And so it's Sort of a black club from the teacher's perspective. But it's also about the young kids and how they're being pushed to their limit. There's hazing, there's corporal punishment. There's a lot of different problems that exist in Japanese youth sports. And so that was our starting point. We'd both looked at those youth sports problems in our other research, and we'd both looked historically, we'd both seen the changes over time. And so we're trying to instill more enjoyment, more play into it so that that book comes out in a couple weeks. And I'm, you know, I'm quite proud of that work, I think, you know, having a collaborative first time. I wrote a collaborative book, and I gotta say, I. I really enjoyed the process. I. I don't know how many books I'm gonna write by myself anymore. It's just for writers out there consider a collaboration, you know, because it's. It's really a joy. Well, I may have been very lucky. I mean, my collaborators, as I say, a real pro. But I've really enjoyed that process.
- [63:22]
Keith Rathbone
Oh, well, fantastic. I'll look forward to that one as well. All right. It was a pleasure speaking with you today, Aaron. Thank you very much for joining me, listeners. You've been listening to New books in Sports, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Keith Rathbone, and we've been speaking with Aaron Miller. He is a lecturer in kinesiology at California State University, East Bay. And we've been talking about his book, Basketball in Shooting for the Stars. It's out with Rutledge in 2025 in their contemporary Japan series. It's fantastic. Go out, pick up a copy, download those chapters. Like Aaron was saying, especially if you're interested in some of the things we didn't get to bring up because there's so much in the book that we didn't get to talk about. Thank you again, Aaron, for joining me.
- [64:14]
Aaron Miller
Thank you, Keith. I really appreciate the opportunity.
- [64:28]
Keith Rathbone
Dude, did you order the new iPhone 17 Pro?
- [64:31]
Aaron Miller
Got it from Verizon. The best 5G network in America.
- [64:34]
Keith Rathbone
I never looked so good.
- [64:35]
Brooks Running Advertiser
Even look the same.
- [64:37]
Aaron Miller
But with this camera, everything looks better. Especially me.
- [64:39]
Epglis Advertiser
You haven't changed your hair in 15 years.
- [64:42]
Aaron Miller
Selfies check, please.
- [64:44]
Liquid IV Advertiser
New and existing customers can get the new iPhone 17 Pro. Designed to be the most powerful iPhone ever, with eligible phone, trade in and unlimited ultimate any condition guaranteed. Best 5G towards root metrics data, United States 1H 2025 All Rights Reserve, Trade in and additional terms apply for all offers see verizon.com for details.