Description
Book SynopsisJapanese fitness clubs combine entertainment and exercise, reflecting the Japanese concept of fitness as encompassing a zest for life as well as physical health. This book reveals through an account of these clubs how beauty, bodies, health, and leisure are understood and experienced in Japan.
Trade Review“
Working Out in Japan is a theoretically sophisticated analysis informed by wide reading and well-grounded in the author’s extensive experience as a fitness instructor.”—Allen Guttmann, coauthor of
Japanese Sports: A History”Laura Spielvogel views notions of the body and gender in contemporary Japanese popular culture from an interesting new angle. This highly original work offers an important complement to the Western-dominated literature on the body, sports, and fitness by describing the distinctly Japanese body culture that is a product of both regional traditions and transnational influences.”—Susan Brownell, author of
Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People's Republic“A thoughtfully researched and well-written book. It provides a comprehensive case study of Tokyo fitness clubs and the contributions of the management, patrons, and staff toward the debates over identity and gender roles as experienced through the female body.” -- Tracy Taylor * Sociology of Sport Journal *
"Enjoyable, professional, and well-written. . . . Spielvogel's book . . . manages to be both scholarly and entertaining. . . . It ranges widely and fluently over a range of issues that already exist in a very scattered form in the literature and succeeds in relating them in fresh and interesting ways that should provide new models for anthropologists of Japan to take up and extend even further." -- John Clammer * Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute *
"Exceptionally well-done. . . . A rare and highly welcome complimentary perspective to our general understanding of the way cultural ideologies are inscribed upon the body. . . . One of the best and most convincing books I have read this summer. . . . This book is a fine ethnographic account, a theoretically sophisticated narrative, and an absolute must-read for anyone with a general interest in sport, consumer culture, the body, or the feminine in late-capitalist Japan." -- Wolfram Manzenreiter * Monumenta Nipponica *
"[Spielvogel's] study covers an extraordinary range of topics and examines them with uncharacteristic theoretical breadth. . . . This well-written, thoughtfully argued, accessible study is a welcome addition to the growing body of excellent ethnographies on sport, leisure, and body culture." -- Thomas B. Stevenson * Journal of Anthropological Research *
Table of ContentsIllustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. The History of Aerobics in Japan: The Sexy American Import 33
2. The Discipline of Space 61
3. The Discipline of Bodies 85
4. Cigarettes and Aerobics: Frustrations with Gender Inequities in the Club 115
5. Young, Proportionate, Leggy, and Thin: The Ideal Female Body 142
6. Selfishly Skinny or Selflessly Starving 174
Conclusions 207
Notes 215
Bibliography 227
Index 243
