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Reviews of Books

plicated. In perhaps one-third of Japan, forms of corporate farming under “joint ownership” coexisted withprivate family farming (p. 96). Shares of land (bothpaddy and dry ﬁelds) were periodically redistributed on
the basis of equal shares per family, per capita, or thelevel of preexisting cultivation rights. The initiative forsuch “land division” (warichi ) arrangements came fromthe villagers themselves, or in some cases (such as Kagaand Satsuma), the domain.
Brown discusses various explanations for the persistence of warichi throughout the Tokugawa era and evenbeyond the Meiji Land Reform of 1873. These include
the desire to share risk in regions where landslides frequently destroyed crops, preserve equitable tax burdens, and maintain cooperative management of cooperatively reclaimed lands. But there is no single
explanation for the widespread phenomenon. Brown’s
deployment of topographical maps indicates only a thincorrelation between the practice of warichi farming andthe susceptibility of a region to ﬂooding and landslides.
He concludes it “impossible” to directly compare the“geographical conditions” of “warichi and non-warichi
villages” (p. 43) and “no consistent, direct relationshipbetween redistribution intervals and natural hazardrisk” (p. 144). There were myriad reasons to maintaincollective lands and reassign them periodically.
While at pains to note that “the socialist principle ofallocating resources . . . based on need” was never operative (p. 69), Brown writes the “study of Japan’s experience reminds us that nonmarket and nontechnological social solutions have been viable and may
remain viable today” (p. 5). Although he leaves it to thereader to draw any lessons, this perspective is valuable
and the entire discussion of the complexity of landholding in Tokugawa Japan is engrossing.
This is not, however, a reader-friendly book. Spaceprohibits even a summary of the complex arguments
and descriptive material Brown presents concerning
the origins and rationale of warichi systems, the disputes they produced, and the nature of their twentiethcentury persistence. The writing style is occasionallyawkward to the point of obscuring meaning. For example, “From the standpoint of warichi’s potential to retard economic growth or to accommodate commercial
crops, how long-maturing crops with potential commercial value were treated holds potential interest” (p.
163).
The haphazard unfolding of vital chronological detail
may puzzle those unfamiliar with Japanese history(among those whom Brown wants to reach). The crucial
fact that “samurai were forbidden from residing in villages or owning land” is mentioned only parenthetically, after Brown has substantially outlined his argument (p. 31). The whole issue of tenancy—risingthroughout the Tokugawa era—is addressed only at theend of the book, in relation to the impact of the Meiji
Restoration and the new land tax system. Here welearn, for example, that a “dispute settlement” in
Kawaji village in 1786 “speciﬁcally notes that tenants
were to be included in the warichi process.” Brown tells

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us that thereafter “rents were to be set villagewide” butdoes not explain how this happened (p. 182).
Given the many references to primary sources, one
might have hoped for direct quotations to add color anddepth to this work. But these are few and far between.
The citation form is minimalistic, and sometimes thereferences are frustratingly vague. For example, whenBrown adduces an example of a village ofﬁcial stoppinga request for redistribution, he refers in a footnote toanother above, cited to document peasants’ gift-giving
to village ofﬁcials “in many parts of Echigo.” The noterefers to an archival primary source (monjo)—likely acache of documents—“for sources” (p. 247). This is notvery helpful.
The reader comes away from the work fully convinced that many early modern peasants embraced andpreserved joint ownership systems for good reasons;that they made common lands increasingly productive
and receptive to market forces; and that the warichi systems left a legacy that might (for example) “have madeit easier to form tenant unions” in the early twentiethcentury (p. 187). All of this is important, and the work
deserves the energy required to engage it. But one
might have hoped for a clearer, more streamlined presentation.
GARY P. LEUPP
Tufts University
DENNIS J. FROST. Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity,and Body Culture in Modern Japan. (Harvard East AsianMonographs, number 331.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Asia Center. 2010. Pp. xi, 337. $39.95.
Dennis J. Frost outlines the development of “modernsports celebrity” in Japan through a “transnational history” focused largely on four “stars” from sumo, track
and ﬁeld, baseball, and boxing. By looking at the discourse of celebrity surrounding ﬁgures ranging acrossthe 1910s, 1920s, wartime, and the 1970s, each chapter
thus opens onto a dense and distinct socio- and culturalhistorical scene, offering the possibility of a novel perspective on the global articulation of modern regimesof sports, celebrity, and commodiﬁcation as they intersected with transformations in bodies, gender, discipline, mass culture, nationalism, and identity.
Frost traces the advent of sports celebrity in Japanback to the seventeenth century, rapidly narrating theadvent of popular ad hoc wrestling spectacles and body
exhibitions that, through patronage, regulation, andideological investment, were transformed into the invented tradition of sumo. The “stars” of this systememerged from new ranking practices and publicity, andfrom intertwined “big body” exhibitions (often without
any athletic component). Frost’s account passes rapidly
over this history; readers wishing for a fuller understanding of Edo-period body politics and spectacle, orof this transitional process, will need to look to the cited
literature (R. Kenji Tierney in particular). Frost focuses his analysis in his ﬁrst two chapters upon Hitachiyama Taniemon (1874 –1922), locating this cham-APRIL 2012

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pion as a “transitional ﬁgure” into modern, masscultural sports celebrity. Enhanced by the ideologicalcachet of his “samurai” background, and spreadthrough new forms of mass publicity, Hitachiyama’spublic image in the early twentieth century, Frost argues, both set narrative standards for the “sports star”
paradigm generally and facilitated the rewriting of
sumo as an exemplary, and exclusively male, “nationalsport.” The focus upon celebrity, however, allows Frostto consider less “star”-focused phenomena only in passing: particularly, the contemporaneous dominance ofuniversity sports, including baseball, part of the latenineteenth-century energetic promotion of physicalculture and athleticism throughout Europe and America, as well as Japan.
Chapter three, on Hitomi Kinue (1907–1931), a track
and ﬁeld star, considers the range of contentious issues
invoked by Japan’s ﬁrst female Olympian. Embraced as“Japan’s ﬁrst international woman,” Hitomi was simultaneously the source of gender anxiety and speculation
via her international victories, androgynous appearance, economic independence, and long-term same-sex
cohabitation—a legacy summarily dismissed by heteronormative biographical reimaginings in the 1980s and1990s. While her victories and life became bound up
within mass cultural debates and the fantasy of the“modern girl,” her premature death in 1931 energizedongoing contention over women’s physical education,“abnormality,” and state regulation of women’s bodies.
Chapter four treats Sawamura Eiji (1917–1944), thestar pitcher, war casualty, and namesake for the eponymous pitching prize. Frost situates Sawamura’s rise at
the moment of baseball’s professionalization and corporate promotion, after decades of highly popular amateur university and secondary school leagues. Sawamura’s initial fame, for three strikeouts of the visiting
Babe Ruth, ﬁts within a larger story of promotional
tours between Japan and the United States instituted by
the Yomiuri Shimbun, the newspaper sponsoring Sawamura’s team, which developed the Yomiuri Giants asJapan’s ﬁrst professional baseball team. Frost explores
these exchanges through contemporaneous media accounts; again, the focus upon the public as opposed toinstitutional level of celebrity leads away from the convergences that made such cultural exchanges feasible
and proﬁtable.
Detailing both Sawamura’s and baseball’s propaganda involvements, Frost’s account ﬁnds both sportand star fully integrated within national military commitments; Sawamura played a wartime role comparable
to those of Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio. In Sawamura’s case, his willingness to make personal sacriﬁces
cost him ﬁrst his vaunted pitching ability and ﬁnally hislife. Frost identiﬁes both the myth of a persecuted
sport, and the “postwar re-remembering of baseball’s
wartime past” free of militarism, as a continuation ofAmerican wartime propaganda under the supervisionof the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. He
describes this process as part of an effort to divert
blame onto “warlords” while promoting a racially pa-AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

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ternalistic reformist political agenda. But Frost’s account of this reductive propaganda is itself all too brief:
it gives scant attention, for example, to the interested
self-rehabilitation of some of the same media institutions central to his narrative. Frost passes too quickly
over the immediate postwar context for Sawamura’s reimagining into a generalized “postwar” context that encompasses biographies produced in the 1980s. Thus,Frost misses an opportunity to ﬁt Sawamura’s 1947 memorialization within a broader pattern of cultural promotion by newspapers seeking to distract their readersfrom both recent war boosterism and postwar labor
conﬂicts. Sho៮ riki Matsutaro៮ , owner of both the Yomiuri
Shimbun and the Yomiuri Giants, who was still in
Sugamo Prison as a Class-A War Crimes suspect in
1947, exempliﬁes this conjunction of interests.
In the ﬁnal chapter, on boxing champion Gushiken
Yo៮ ko៮ (1955-), Frost brieﬂy describes Okinawa’s marginalization in order to give context to Okinawan expressions of pride in Gushiken’s victories and to biographical accounts of Gushiken himself. Frost notes
how such expressions indexed both fraught identiﬁcation with and against mainland Japan, and “dramaticdifferences” internal to Okinawa itself. For Frost, theﬁgure of Gushiken helped mediate and tame such differences—and their concrete political accompaniments(military bases, inequity)—by making them consumable as a form of “spectacular difference.”
A brief epilogue considering Ichiro Suzuki (1973-),
inadvertently underlines the book’s weaknesses. Frost’s
examples seem too spread out, leaving obvious gaps between his rapid expositions of the topics at hand. As aconsequence of Frost’s focus on the publicity aspect ofcelebrity, his trope of “transnational co-constitution”
frequently ﬂattens into reﬂective forms of positionality
against either a generic “West” or the United States.
We miss the coevalness inherent in, for example, Hitomi’s participation in the international expansion of
women’s sports and physical education, and the inherent transnationalism of commodiﬁcation and professionalization. In following the formulaic biographicalnarratives of the sports stars, Frost does not always provide much guidance in contextualizing the particular effectiveness of speciﬁc narrative choices in a given historical moment. While this may be the “ﬁrst criticalexamination of the history of sports celebrity outside aEuro-American context,” Frost’s book only begins tosketch the outline of an adequate understanding of thishistory.
WILLIAM MAROTTI
University of California,
Los AngelesE. TAYLOR ATKINS. Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945. (Colonialisms, number 5.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2010. Pp. xv, 262. Cloth $60.00, paper$24.95.

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