Asian Sport Celebrity

Koji Kobayashi, Younghan Cho, Koji Kobayashi, Younghan Cho

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367695330
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000372205
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

What does the 'Asian' mean in Asian sport celebrity? With a collection of nine essays on Asian sport celebrities variously associated with Australia, Belgium, China, Japan, New Zealand, North Korea, Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States, this book offers a comprehensive understanding of the multi-faceted construction of what it means to be Asian from the perspectives of race, ethnicity and regionality. Sport celebrity, as a modern invention, is disseminated from the West to the rest of the globe including Asia, and so are its functions of symbolizing particular values, desires and personalities idolized and idealized within their respective societies. While Asian athletes were historically depicted as weak, fragile and biologically 'unsuited' to modern sport, the emergence of more than a few world-class Asian athletes in the twenty-first century demands an in-depth inquiry into the relationship between sport celebrity and the representation of Asia.

This book is therefore essential for those interested in a range of socio-cultural issues—including globalization, transnationalism, migration, modernity, (post-)coloniality, gender politics, spectacle, citizenship, Orientalism, and nationalism—within and beyond Asia.

It was originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.

‘Ono, oh Yes!’: An A-League Tensai (Genius) Made in Japan

Brent McDonald

and Jorge Knijnik

ABSTRACT

In 2005, Football Federation Australia (FFA) launched its latest attempt to create a professional men’s soccer football league in Australia, the A-League. The new competition aimed to distance itself from the old National Soccer League, which was based around ethnically affiliated clubs and in doing so appeal to a bigger, more mainstream, market. The formation of the A-League also coincided with Australia’s alignment with the Asian Football Confederation for World Cup qualification and related championship play. Ambitious thinkers within FFA envisaged soccer football providing a vehicle to facilitate economic, cultural and political linkages into Asia in what has been termed the ‘Asian Century’. However, while teams boosted their rosters with international players, there was a noticeable lack of players from Asia. In this paper we focus on Japanese international Shinji Ono, a marquee signing for the Western Sydney Wanderers (WSW) in 2012, who arguably became the first ‘Asian’ sporting celebrity in Australia. Hs impact on the A-League is considered both for fans of the WSW and in the marketing of the league more generally. Affectionately known as tensai (genius), Ono embodied characteristics that marked him as uniquely Japanese and captured the imagination of Australian football fans as few other players have.

Farewell to a Legend

April 4, 2014. It was a nice Saturday evening in Parramatta, one of the fourteen cities that constitute the Western Sydney region in New South Wales, Australia. Considered by many as the ‘heartland of football in Australia’¹, the Western Sydney area is one of the largest multicultural settlements not only in this Southern Hemisphere country, but also in the world.² Of the many different and diverse cultural traditions that migrants have brought to Australia in the past hundred years, there was a common trait that remained strongly rooted in the region: the passion for the game of football.³ Hence, since the inception of the region’s professional club, the Western Sydney Wanderers FC (hereafter Wanderers or WSW) in the 2012/2013 A-League season, it was no surprise to see Parramatta stadium packed with Western Sydney fans to support a football team which thousands had craved for so long.

However, on that autumn night, in addition to supporting their beloved WSW in their last game of the 2013/2014 regular season of the A-League (before the final rounds) against the Brisbane Roar FC, there was another massive reason for the Westie fans to fill the stadium: they wanted to bid farewell to their favourite Japanese tensai, the playmaker who had arrived in Western Sydney just a few days before their inaugural A-League game and led the club to their immediate success: Shinji Ono⁴, the star Asian⁵ player who headed the club to the League’s Premiership in their foundation season.

This research examines Shinji Ono as an Asian sporting celebrity in Australia. Ono, as a celebrity athlete, has the potential to provide insight into ‘contemporary debates about identity politics’ in Australia.⁶ As such he acts as a cultural product that is represented and consumed across a range of markets and spaces including the Wanderers fans, the A-League, the Australian media, and the broader public. Ono is not the first ‘Asian’ sporting celebrity, indeed cricket teams from India, or tennis players such as Li Na from China have been very popular and garnered enormous support from the Australian public. However, unlike these touring international stars, Ono is unique as his position as a marquee signing in the 2012/2013 season anchors him to a ‘contextually sensitive’ domestic locale (Western Sydney) and national discussion (Australia in Asia).⁷

This research draws on a content analysis of mainstream and social media that references Shinji Ono and the WSW both during Ono’s time at the club, and after his retirement. Official documents from the club, FFA and government reports both in relation to Ono but also to the variety of ambitions that each organization held, were also examined. Finally, the ethnographic experiences of the second author, who was in attendance at the Wanderers’ games during its first two seasons, are utilized. These experiences were captured in field notes and include various conversations and statements from other fans and the club’s officials.

The article begins by concisely tracking the progression of football from a marginalized ‘ethnic’ game to becoming the ‘sleeping giant’⁸ on the Australian sport landscape. Placing football in context we therefore consider its position in the broader cultural and political discussions regarding multiculturalism and national identity. In particular the focus is on how the formation of the A-League and Football Federation Australia’s realignment with the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) fit within Australia’s geopolitical and cultural relationship with Asia. Following this is discussion of the formation and rise of the newest A-League team in 2012, the WSW, in relation to its multicultural and geographical context. Next, the FFA and the A-League 2012 marquee signing strategy are considered, by briefly explaining its aims but then focusing on Ono’s history with the WSW. It is important to understand how Ono’s profile, as a player, but also as a Japanese man, fits the multicultural narrative brought by the Wanderers to the region. Evidence is provided of the impact that Ono has left on the club, on its fans, and in the local community. The conclusion questions why, looking at Ono’s meteoric success in the League and the clubs, FFA have not had a more strategic approach for the signing of Japanese and other Asian marquee players, which would definitely support Australian engagement in the Asian region.

Sleeping Giants

The long history of football in Australia has been one of marginalization. For most of the twentieth century the game struggled to gain broader acceptance outside of those communities who held it dear as it played second fiddle to the rugby codes in New South Wales and Queensland and Australian Rules football in the southern states of Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. The exact reasons for its failure to grab the imagination of sports fans are a basis for conjecture, though historian Roy Hay lists a range of factors including resistance from colonial and Australian elites, animosity from other codes especially in relation to playing spaces, geographical distance, financial mismanagement and corruption, difficulty in presenting a unified direction for the game, lack of free-to-air television coverage, and until recently a failure to accommodate (both as spectators and players) women.⁹ A feature of football clubs in Australia, and particularly due to post World War Two migration, was that many were formed around an ethnic identity derived from the country or region where these migrants originated. As such football has been trapped in a battle of identity politics, which was not helped by a mainstream media that was often hostile to the game and chose to highlight (and exaggerate) ethnic tensions between clubs that drew particularly on conflicts in home countries.¹⁰

Despite the identity politics affecting professional football in Australia, through the efforts of the aforementioned clubs and grassroots organizations, the game itself is a sleeping giant, as evidenced when it became the number one participation sport in 2003.¹¹ The issue of how to translate the enormous participatory support into mainstream commercial success was taken in hand by Football Australia (replaced by Football Federation Australia, FFA, in 2004) with the most radical revamp of the sport. Informed by an independent review in 2003,¹² and basing itself on the success of the J-League in Japan and to a lesser extent the K-League in Korea and Major League Soccer in the USA,¹³ the Hyundai A-League was launched in 2005. The A-League made an explicit departure from the previous National Soccer League, creating an eight team league with clubs being based around city or regional identity and mainly playing out of generic ‘mega-stadiums’.¹⁴ ‘Soccer’ was replaced with ‘football’, the league shifted from the traditional autumn-winter season to a spring-summer programme to avoid direct market competition with the Australian Football League (AFL) and rugby league, and introduced a salary cap for all clubs with the addition of the ‘marquee’ player category, which was not governed by the salary cap restrictions.¹⁵ Within only two seasons the A-League would be heralded a success based on the unprecedented popularity of the product that saw it rise to a level similar to the rugby codes, and comparable to leagues in Korea, Scotland and Argentina.¹⁶

The creation of the A-League was not only focused on appealing to a domestic market. A broader realignment of football occurred at the same time with FFA successfully moving from FIFA’s Oceania zone to be rezoned as part of Asia. The move to the Asian Confederation was significant on many levels. FFA recognized that the future commercial success of football relied on the ability of the national teams th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Introduction: Asian Sport Celebrity: The Nexus of Race, Ethnicity, and Regionality
• 1 ‘Ono, oh Yes!’: An A-League Tensai (Genius) Made in Japan
• 2 Globalization, Migration, Citizenship, and Sport Celebrity: Locating Lydia Ko between and beyond New Zealand and South Korea
• 3 Reading Tiffany Chin: The Birth of the Oriental Female Skater on White Ice
• 4 Disrupting the Nation-ness in Postcolonial East Asia: Discourses of Jong Tae-Se as a Zainichi Korean Sport Celebrity
• 5 The Absent Savior? Nationalism, Migration, and Football in Taiwan
• 6 The Heroic White Man and the Fragile Asian Girl: Racialized and Gendered Orientalism in Olympic Figure Skating
• 7 Reading Yani Tseng: Articulating Golf, Taiwanese Nationalism, and Gender Politics in Twenty-First-Century Taiwan
• 8 China’s Sports Heroes: Nationalism, Patriotism, and Gold Medal
• 9 Sports Celebrities and the Spectacularization of Modernity at the Far Eastern Championship Games, 1913–1934
• Index