Through a study of basketball in Japan, this book aims to help readers better understand the historical formation and contemporary reformation of cultural identity in Japan.

This reformation includes the process of reconciling the perceived differences between basketball in Japan and basketball in the West, the process of reconciling how perceptions of one’s body are shaped in a globally interconnected society, the process of reconciling what it means to be a modern man, and the process of reconciling what it means to be Japanese in a nation that is increasingly multicultural. In other words, basketball in Japan matters, not only because it has for too long been over‑simply labelled as a “minor” sport, but also because it is much more than a game.

Examining the real and symbolic power which sport has on Japanese culture, and even in some instances the state, this book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of Japanese culture and society and the sociology of sports.

Buying In: Big-Time Women’s College Basketball and the Future of College Sports juxtaposes the rise of women’s college sports with the historical transformations that set the stage for contemporary big-time college sports. Aaron Miller draws on positive psychology to create a new framework he calls “positive anthropology.” He uses this lens to highlight the accomplishments of women’s college basketball teams and engages with college athlete exploitation, pay-for-play, and other contemporaneous issues that affect both women’s and men’s teams, though women’s teams are often excluded from the popular conversation.

With insights drawn from – and applicable to – a wide range of scholarly fields in the humanistic social sciences, this book will be of particular interest to scholars, researchers and educators working in the fields of sports studies, gender studies, education, sociology, history, and anthropology, as well as anyone interested in the future of big-time college sport and higher education. This book poses and answers the question: “How can scholars help envision a brighter future for all college athletes, male and female?”

This book is about the many "discourses of discipline" around "corporal punishment" (taibatsu) in Japanese schools and sports. These discourses encompass the ways that people discuss discipline, the patterns of rhetoric about what discipline would be, and what discipline signifies. By scrutinizing these discourses we can disentangle the allegedly intimate connections among culture, discipline, and pedagogy in Japan. This anthropological study sheds light on the relationship of the education system and the economy and differences between Japan and other nations, as well as between classroom education and sports education.