This document summarizes the positioning and practices of "feminized fans" in Japanese soccer culture through the experience of the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Korea and Japan. It finds that women soccer fans are placed in a hierarchical and gendered system that prioritizes masculine spectatorship. While women express support in distinctive ways such as fashionable team apparel, their voices and activities tend to be confined to less visible spaces like websites and emails rather than public stadiums. The interests of "feminized fans" also extend beyond the game itself to include players' appearances and private lives. However, their perspectives are often overlooked or dismissed in mainstream sports discourse.

1. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 5, Number 1, 2004
The positioning and practices of the ‘feminized fan’ in
Japanese soccer culture through the experience of the FIFA
World Cup Korea/Japan 2002
Toko TANAKA (Translated by Hiroki OGASAWARA)
When women talk about soccer
Just as this paper is about to do in a performa-
tive way, there is a certain effect generated
once the words of ‘women’ or ‘feminine’ are
attached to the title of a paper or essay. A
work whose title includes ‘women’ either
rarely attracts male readers’ interests or is
almost ignored by the male counterpart. ‘Fem-
inism? It’s a problem of women, isn’t it?’ This
understanding is not exclusively Japanese re-
ality. It is perhaps a commonly shared view in
other male-dominated Asian countries. It is
most unfortunate if the work that aims to
complement the male discourses in sports
writing may actually help, in spite of its orig-
inal objective, exclude a certain type of read-
ers and then contribute to the reductive
reproduction of the field. Therefore, I would
like to begin by clarifying my own position
with regard to this difficulty of feminist inter-
vention into sports writing.
First, whether it is in the academy or

2. sports journalism, there is no guaranteed
space for us, feminists and female writers, to
produce the discourses on sports (although
we should not underestimate the richness of
the sub-cultural sphere, as I will discuss later).
It is possible for male writers to talk about
sports in general or the ‘universal sport’, if
such a thing has ever existed, without hesi-
tation and excuses made. This is aligned with
the fact that a variety of enunciating subjects
in sport, such as athletes, commentators and
writers, are already predominantly gendered
as masculine.
In contrast, the ‘feminized/feminine’1
writers can only access, in many cases, to such
limited subject matters as, for instance,
‘women and sport’, ‘female athletes’ or ‘sport
criticism from women’s point of view’. It
would be clear if we found what kind of
topics female scholars were assigned to con-
tribute in a sport-writing anthology. Or we
just need to remember that, in sports journal-
ism, feminized/feminine writers are simply
the minority. Even if feminized/feminine
writers became able to produce the same
quality of writing as other masculinized writ-
ers do, and became the regular contributors in
major sports journals and magazines, this
achievement is understood as not due to their
ability but attributed to their uniqueness that
is yielded by their own femininity. Instead of
the explanation as to what this ‘femininity’
means, it is accepted that they got their

3. chances because they had their own feminine
perspective and approach, and were capable
of composing sensitive writing. When femi-
nized/feminine writers took the lead by a
scoop, they are even backbitten by the rumour
that the scoop is thanks to the ‘sleep and get’
with male athletes. In short, the enunciating
position of women is placed in the territory of
the ‘ladies’. They are allowed to speak and
write as far as they are committed to the
limited subject.
Secondly, there is a moment of hesitation
as soon as women seemed to manage to se-
cure their position of telling. Because of this
timidity, few words are enunciated and artic-
ulation has gone. It is necessary to note that
the mechanism of self-censorship affects
women’s telling. Whenever this mechanism
operates it reminds us that women, the very
targets of this policing, internally possess the
ISSN 1464-9373 Print/ISSN 1469-8447 Online/04/010052–
2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1464937042000196815
The ‘feminized fan’ in Japanese soccer culture 53
incongruity about the existing criteria by
which the necessary institutional (journalistic
or academic) languages are classified as either
legitimate or illegitimate. However, as Michel
de Certeau argues, those who are placed
lower in a cultural structure are made to

4. spontaneously cooperate with the hierarchical
system of classification through the system
itself. Such people are,
excluded not only from a culture, but
also from the culture (since the system
that eliminates them from and ‘in-
struction’ also deprives them of their
own traditions); and, being judged
only as a function of the unique crite-
rion imposed through the secondary
school (but also through the family
and through the milieu), they mar-
ginalize themselves, becoming these
‘auto-relegues’ whom Pierre Bourdieu
has studied, and who, despite them-
selves, ultimately remain in complicity
with the system that tends to perpetu-
ate the existing relations of force.
(De Certeau 1997: 86)
It is not only in culture in general, but also in
the cultural and institutional specificity of
‘soccer’, that the feminized speakers and writ-
ers, ‘despite themselves, ultimately remain in
complicity with the system that tends to per-
petuate the existing relations of force’ (De
Certeau 1997: 86). Thus, it is extremely
difficult for those who become the targets of
censorship and excluded from the dominant
cultural norm to detach them from the struc-
ture sustaining and reinforcing the existing
cultural values. We/they try to speak, articu-
late, analyse and express, but the means of
those practices are not our/their own. This is

5. the disadvantage of feminized/feminine writ-
ers in sport.
This situation can be analogized to the
darkness. In the complete darkness, one can-
not rely on vision for drawing the cartogra-
phy of power. In it, how can we/they practise
the power?
As soon as the question is raised, we
realise that we join hands with her
standing next to me. This ‘her’ then
holds the hands of another her next to
her and then … As the chain of hand-
in-hand continues we/they could be-
come cartographers, gaining our own
peculiar space. We may even be able
to find a line of light in the apparently
pitch-darkness. If we strain our eyes, it
would be possible to see the bright
radiance in ‘her’ eyes next to us. It
may not be that dark after all, as far as
their/our eyes mutually resonate in
silence. Hence, open your eyes, watch
out around us, and try it harder but
gently.
In the darkness, it would be far better to be
sensitive and grope for others’ hands, miming
what others do, than doing a rash thing.
We/they need to become the ‘cartogra-
pher’ in the Deleuzian sense and then create
our/their own proper map, the map that can
be a guidance of our/their own way. This

6. cartography is carried out through bricolage by
which the pre-existing means, the pre-given
perspective, and the preferred coding, all of
which are not provided as our/their own, can
be even partly appropriated. The art of brico-
lage is elaborated and accumulated through
everyday practices. One day we/they may be
able to find it surprisingly peculiarly creative
to produce a sub-cultural sphere.
In this paper, I wish to describe the ways
in which the fan culture is ‘feminized/made
to be feminine’ in sporting spectacle and to
clarify the ways in which the feminization is
inevitably inter-connected with much larger
problems. During the 2002 World Cup, such
inter-crossing points have been found in the
media in Japan as well as outside Japan, in
our/their practices, and in the anonymous
discourses that narrated the event. It is poss-
ible, first of all, to talk about our/their pecu-
liar cultural practices and then make trace a
few problems of commercialization, racism
and machismo on the terrain of the sub-cul-
tural sphere.
The position of ‘feminized/feminine’ fans
The following scene may not be totally un-
familiar: watching a soccer match or talking
54 Toko Tanaka
about soccer with friends and family, men

7. talk eloquently while women remain quiet.
Why do women remain silent although a lot
of women like watching and talking about
soccer? On the other hand, there are not a few
women who tell their love of soccer and what
they know about soccer by pushing aside the
situational power that forces them to self-
regulate themselves. However, as soon as
they try to speak, curiosity comes up in such
a phrase as ‘you know it very well for
women’s standard’ or ‘I haven’t seen a
woman like you talking about soccer’. When I
come across some women who declare that
they are serious soccer fans, they stubbornly
insist that ‘I’m not a mi-ha2 fan, I’m watching
soccer seriously’. What this scene represents is
that we are placed in a discursive, practical
and gendered hierarchical relation, which pri-
oritizes a particular mode of spectatorship in
soccer games.
There are many female supporters in the
stadium. They express their own distinctive
fashion and support their team at their will.
Some combine the replica shirt with trendy
cloths. In summer, the team shirt is arranged
with Sabrina trousers and high heel sandals.
In winter, summer wears are replaced by half-
coat with fake-fur. Some fans prepare a tele-
photo-lens and wait for players coming on to
the pitch. Sun-tanned high-school football
girls occupy one corner of the stand, whereas
housewives enjoy their rare free time on the
other corner. Some high-school girls wear the
team shirt over their school uniform. This
‘fashion’ can be observed every Saturday

8. afternoon at a J-League match. They rush off
to the stadium as soon as school finishes.
Their school skirt is transformed to ‘micro-
mini’ style and combined with the team shirt.
They deliberately choose the smaller size shirt
because they believe that the smaller size
makes their body look much sharper and
good looking. Equipped with well-used
Loafer shoes and white socks, hand-made
beaded accessories and colourful hairpins, a
group of high school girls ambush the team
coach arriving at the stadium (iri-machi as
they call it, meaning ‘waiting for coming in’).
During half-time, it is time for their mobile
phones to work at full throttle. They exchange
what they saw, thought and experienced
about the game and players with friends and
family in other stadium and home. This is
what has happened during the World Cup. A
lot of women came to take part in the event
while far more women enjoyed the game on
television.
You may quickly denounce the above de-
scriptions by saying that; ‘you would want to
suggest that women’s supporting style is dif-
ferent from men’s and women have their own
unique style. But is it to essentialize the femi-
ninity after all?’ On the contrary, what I want
to suggest is this; the everyday activity of
watching and talking about soccer is a quite
ordinary cultural practice. This practice is pro-
duced in the possible realm of the bodily arts
approved in everyday life. It is also squeezed
out by means of the composite of resources

9. that are available in everyday life. We ‘watch
soccer’ under particular social and cultural
conditions through which a variety of arts of
practices are gendered. It is necessary to as-
sume to a certain extent the bodily arts his-
torically accumulated and gendered in
everyday life when the cultural practice is
considered.
Bearing in mind this assumption, I have to
admit that the feminized mode of soccer sup-
porting activity may be plain and less visual-
ized than is the masculine counterpart. Male
supporters can collectively organize support-
ers’ clubs or play park soccer wearing their
favourite teams’ shirts. In contrast, the active
territory of the feminized pattern may appear
to be confined in a certain limited space. In-
deed, feminized supporting activities tend to
prefer a secret mode of communication
through letters and the internet to committing
themselves to publicly organized fan activity
or talking in public.
Furthermore, the feminized voice is al-
ways deferred. When our/their voice and ac-
tivity make a detour time lag is inevitable.
There are various vehicles such as media in
the course of this detour.
Colourful pen script, brightly pat-
terned small notebooks, murmuring,
cyber space, mobile phone communi-
cation, mobile e-mailing, comic type

10. The ‘feminized fan’ in Japanese soccer culture 55
illustration, poem, look-alike cartoon
in magazines, ‘message in a bottle’ cir-
culated from class room to class room,
conversation in a fast food restaurant,
different jargons, colourful idioms.
Detour, or time lag, can be perceived as
something like resonance. The active territory
of the feminized fandom is found in less
showy spaces, such as websites and e-mail,
coterie magazines or mobile phone conversa-
tions, tea break conversations in schools and
offices, rather than easily visualized places of
the stadium and mass media. Because of such
less visible modes of communication and the
time lag, our/their support activity is hard to
notice compared with the journalistic and aca-
demic discourses.
The mode of practices of ‘feminized/femi-
nine’ fans
It may be possible to classify what we/they
notice and choose to talk about when soccer is
narrated in such a difficult situation. The fol-
lowing can be found in several fan websites,
fanzines and books, or in actual conversations
and readers’ letters to magazines.
Players’ facial expressions (crying, smiling,
anger, joy, etc …), their movements (talking,
raging, swearing, passing beautifully, etc …),
and the sites where those movements take

11. place (on the pitch or on the bench, before,
after or during the game, when the play stops,
during or before and after the training, on the
television): fans memorize those elements in
details, and talk and write about them. The
persistent attachment to a moment when
something takes place in the stadium is nar-
rated as if the filmed record is replayed in a
video device. Such an attachment is narrated
and spelled out as a memory that is amalga-
mated with fantasy. However, who can be
convinced by the claim that ‘masculine’ fans’
memory is not affected by fantasy when they
talk and write about ‘that historic goal’?
‘Feminized/feminine’ fans’ activity ex-
tends from the on-the-pitch matters to indi-
vidual players. Many fans have even set up
websites where the story of their travel to the
training ground is introduced. Some provide
‘pre-harvest’ information, such as ‘we
couldn’t get him in the first team session, but
instead we were eye-caught by xxx in satellite
(second team) whose ball touch was superb’,
which is not unusual. Others inform us that
‘ooo kindly appreciated us fans’. Those narra-
tions of information would never appear in
professional soccer journals. The fans are also
highly interested in what the players wear.
The knowledge is exchanged sometimes as to
what kind of necklace or ring they wear dur-
ing the training and the game, or how they
wear the shirt. The range of interests expands
even to players’ private clothing and hairstyle
when they appear on television.

12. Players are evaluated by whether they are
‘good looking (iketeru)’ or ‘bad (iketenai)’, or
can be ‘prince-like’ or ‘pretty (kawaii)’.3 For
instance, when Turkish midfielder Il Han Ma-
siz scored a winning goal, his good looks
repeatedly appeared on television. Immedi-
ately afterward, his popularity quickly grew
through the Internet and by word of mouth. A
women’s magazine, which had nothing to do
with soccer, featured ‘Il Han Information’ for
several weeks even after the tournament
finished. In this way, we/they continue
watching soccer extremely keenly in the sta-
dium or in the training ground, and on tele-
vision or through magazines, in order to look
for ‘our own idol’.
Some articulate their surprise, admiration
and appreciation of a variety of skills dis-
played on the pitch. While they are actually
watching the match, some put it in their home
pages or talk to friends by mobile phones
once these friends have ventured home. On
the other hand, they may orchestrate booing
or give banter in the Internet chat pages.
Those ‘feminized/feminine’ fans are more
aware of the way soccer is actually played as
well as of the orthodox way of seeing it than
male journalists and commentators who de-
spise them as mi-ha. Yet, we/they do not
express our/their awareness explicitly in pub-
lic.
Some of the aforementioned modes of
watching soccer are cross-cultural in the sense

13. that they commonly share some elements
with other fan cultures. They may resemble
the ways in which boys’ pop groups and
visual bands are chased and loved by their
56 Toko Tanaka
followers. Buying the dedicated magazines
and photo-books, watching the video tape
that records their television appearance,
bringing the bromides, and even writing car-
toons and short stories because of too much
love for them. As shown in these activities,
the patterns of love chasing are countless.
Those self-made stories and witness reports,
vary from fantasizing how players think
themselves or how they monologue, and then
letting them speak about their inwardness, to
writing of the excitement of homoeroticism
when seeing players hugging and touching
each other. We/they conduct our/their wit-
nessing in order to pursue our/their specific
mode of watching, fantasized imagination
and eroticism, rather than competing over the
amount of knowledge, the authenticity of
spectatorship or the absolute empiricism of
‘you need to play in order to know’.
There is no ‘graduation’ in this kind of fan
activity. It continues with working, and bring-
ing up children after marriage, even though
what to do may be slightly different from time
to time.4 There is also no such thing as gradu-
ation in other popular cultural genres. Many

14. adult women see themselves deeply struck by
the ‘super-hero programme with special ef-
fect’, which until recently have been regarded
as aiming for small boys. However, their
mothers became the most fanatic viewers.
Those mothers invest their affection in the TV
programme, appropriating the ways in which
they have constructed similar practices in
other sub-cultural spheres. Such multi-genre
sub-cultural spheres are utilized as a site
where a variety of voices and practices of
women are interlinked and syncretized. Those
voices and practices may often be fractured
according to different choices of life style and
generations. Feminist movements may tend to
be disempowered through the ‘internal-fric-
tion’ of the hostile division between ‘full-time
housewives’ and ‘working women’ or by the
conflict over the moral norm between mothers
and daughters.
However, those characteristic modes of
fandom in the sub-cultural sphere raise larger
and more complex problems. Those problems
may become explicit in such a big event as the
soccer world cup to which those who belong
to different social categories give substantial
attention.
One such problem is concerned with
‘race’. Before and during the world cup, as
Kim Hyunmi precisely pointed out, the ‘femi-
nized/feminine’ fans got the opportunity to
distinguish their favourite players from others
according to their liking and to be excited

15. about these players’ performances at the
site of bodily spectacle where ‘different
types of more than 200 male bodies were
exhibited’ (Kim 2003: 21). Indeed, this might
have been conspired with the starlet construc-
tion system devised by the media. Yet, even if
the possibility of the media manipulation is
subtracted, we/they have ‘deterritorialized’
the object of male pleasure through the affec-
tive investment.5 On this point, Kim concisely
notes that,
Because the power relation between
men and women has been broken
down through ‘gaze’, it makes women
emerge not as the position of ‘being
seen’ but as the position of seeing the
male body.
(Kim 2003: 24)
When it comes to overturning the relationship
between the ‘seeing/seen’, and the ‘choosing/
chosen’, it is possible to assess the way that a
variety of modes of supporting soccer, which
have actually operated as ‘their secret joy’, are
visualized through the public spaces and the
mass media during the World Cup. However,
why have we/they crowded to see Beckham,
Owen and the Italian players, almost all of
who have white skin, rather than Henry and
Desailly? The principle of our/their prefer-
ence clearly exposes our/their liking, which
appears to be affected by skin colour and the
area where players come from. Furthermore,
it needs to be remembered that it is strong

16. heterosexism that sustains the racial leanings
to white skin. We women are in many cases
required to face the male body from the view-
point of ‘female’, which is lined with hetero-
sexual desire.6 White supremacism and the
love for sports athletes as the heterosexual
The ‘feminized fan’ in Japanese soccer culture 57
targets mutually supplement each other
through their conspired relationality.7
This phenomenon highlights my second
point; that is, the post-World Cup corporate
strategy of advertising and commodification
of players. Although our/their way of watch-
ing the game may continue partially to over-
turn the existing mode of spectatorship — the
‘masculinized spectatorship’ — the love in-
vested has been transformed into money and
collected by corporate capitalism immediately
after the world cup. When Il Han scored the
winning goal against Senegal, his photograph
was quickly inserted into the promotional TV
advertisement of Sky Perfect TV, a pay-per-
view satellite broadcasting company. This ad-
vertisement appeals to us/them that ‘we/they
can meet him (and other foreign players)
whenever we/they like by joining the satel-
lite’. Beckham, on the other hand, appeared in
the advertisement of TBC, which is an aes-
thetic salon for women. It tells ‘Beckham-
philia women’ to ‘become beautiful by
coming to the salon’. We/they have once

17. gained the position of loving and enjoying the
beauty of Beckham, but this relationship has
been immediately overturned once again.
Whereas photo-books of those popular ike-
men (good-looks) players were continuously
published, some travel agencies set up, one
after another, the tour that invites supporters
to see the players and to dine with them. The
targets of this commercial activity are
financially stable single working women. The
income of those women is exploited by photo-
books and overseas tours although it may be
a wiser way of using money than saving the
money for marriage in the bank accounts.
As I will discuss further in the next sec-
tion, it should not be overlooked that during
the world cup such ‘feminized/feminine’ fans
became a suitable photographic object and
then were consumed as a commodity for the
purpose of competition over the viewing
figures. Our/their body and spectatorship are
represented and consumed as mi-ha rushing
to see certain players, trying to shoot by good
cameras, and shouting in a piping voice.8
Those descriptions denote the ‘women as
childish and slightly stupid’.
The gaze towards the ‘feminized/feminine’
fans
As discussed so far, there are multiple ways
of existence in soccer fan cultures. However,
the richness of those fan cultures tends to be

18. frequently forgotten when they are repre-
sented by the mass media. Referring to de
Certeau’s idea of culture once again, I would
argue that the moment the media took a look
at us, the ‘feminized/feminine’ fans the ‘tear
between “what is happening” and “what is
being thought” ’ is disclosed (De Certeau
1997: 85).
The fans visiting the stadium wearing sexy
cloths and fashions are exposed to the dan-
gers of becoming the target of photographs
for newspapers, magazines or sports websites.
In fact, this is clear if we look at large photo-
graphs of the faces and particular parts of
women appearing in male magazines and the
sport news websites during the World Cup.
The shots focusing on the women’s bodies are
almost exclusively the ones that highlight the
bare skin of their breast, groin, hip and legs.
Compared with the actual fashion of women
in the stadium, which colourfully varies, the
representation of the female fans in newspa-
pers and television is the surprisingly and
uniformly similar clothing of ‘exposing’ fash-
ions. The way the media represents the female
fans in the stadium is cross-cuttingly identical
beyond the differences of country, race and
the genre of sports.
Les Back, Tim Crabbe and John Solomos
well-summarize this point. Back et al. observe
that black female fans covering their bodies
with sexy clothes in the stadium become the
photography target of male fans and camera-
men. According to Back et al., the colourful

19. and erotic fashions and performances of the
dancehall-queen style exhibited by black
women could produce the ‘potential trans-
gression’, which confronts the space of the
soccer stadium where the male-centric norm
and body technique become predominant.
However, Back et al. also point out that this
potential transgression of black female fans is
vulnerable to the danger that it ‘could be
re-inscribed by the male soccer audience who
reduces these women and their agency to
58 Toko Tanaka
sexual objects’ (Back et al. 2002: 29). The sexy
fashion and behaviour of the women disturb
the masculinity in the stadium while at the
same time their distinctive style is violated by
the male gaze. Moreover, those women could
be conspiring with masculinity such that it
appears that the negotiation of those women
with the masculine principle does not exist.
Although this negotiation perhaps quietly
takes place here and there in the stadium, as
well as in the discursive space, the conspiracy
could be made possible by excluding the
otherwise visible and observable voices and
presences from the frame of the finder.
Another problem comes out when ‘female’
soccer fans are collectively represented by the
media; that is, the mi-ha bashing phenomenon.
There were not a few self-claimed ‘soccer
fans’ among the media-wise male figures,

20. from the general public to entertainers ap-
pearing in TV shows. Clearly, some of them
suddenly became soccer fans and even ‘ex-
perts’ of soccer when the World Cup began.
Presumably, because the World Cup brought
about a strange phenomenon in which some
entertainers, especially male stand-up comedi-
ans, were given a number of opportunities to
get TV jobs or to gain a chance to speak out
once they declared themselves as soccer fans,
everybody wanted to talk about soccer. As, I
suppose, this country did not have sufficient
human resources in the soccer critique, what
they talked about was extremely poor in
terms of the quality of talk. Japan did not
seem to have enough population to a produce
sufficient quantity of first-class soccer com-
mentators. However, it was only because they
were ‘male’ that they could spend peaceful
time not being labelled as mi-ha or ‘impro-
vised’ fans.9
In contrast to the male counter-part, fe-
male fans have been always collectively
named and signified in just the same way as
the representation of the ‘ignorant mass’ has
long been suffered whenever they appear in
the media. The collective description of female
fans during the World Cup was extremely
stereotyped in the professionally written me-
dia. Some of them even scorned us/them in
explicit ways. For example, in a book pub-
lished after the World Cup, a male ‘soccer
journalist’ wrote resentfully that ‘I can resign
to Beckham after Beckham in women’s

21. magazines. But I don’t understand why some
newspaper articles reporting the match
against Argentina were also full of Beckham’
(Gotou 2002: 6).
Indeed, it is true that many women’s
magazines heavily featured Beckham. How-
ever, as this soccer journalist clearly noted, the
newspapers that he seemed to trust were ‘full
of Beckham’ too. It is firmly necessary to
criticize such a version of gender discrimi-
nation as his, which referred to women’s
magazines in order to accuse the media for
their overwhelming ‘Beckham-philia’ trend.
Elsewhere, he also wrote that;
As the information for those mi-ha fans
is necessary, I don’t mind if women’s
magazines publish a special issue for Il
Han and Beckham.
I would want writers and the media to
report a properly knowing report for
knowing people because it would be
much healthier if the proper one co-ex-
ists with the mi-ha one. Everybody
doesn’t have to say difficult things, but
professional journals shouldn’t butter
up on mi-ha.
(Yamazaki and Gotou 2002: 127)
Here, linked with the genre of women’s
magazine, the frequently used idea of mi-ha is
regarded as identical with the ‘feminized/
feminine’ fans that are ‘female supporters’

22. and ‘female spectator’. Then, emplaced in the
dichotomous and hostile relation to those who
‘say difficult things’ or ‘knowing people’ who
are associated with professional journals and
classified as such, the ‘feminized/feminine’
fans, being identified as mi-ha, are signified as
‘improvised fans’ or the ‘fans who can’t know
how to see and talk about soccer’. As I have
noted, however, despite the problem within,
such as race and race thinking, extraordinarily
rich and complex practices are produced and
consumed among the despised, scorned mi-ha
mode of fandom. Thus, I would argue that
male journalists such as this one are those
who don’t actually know ‘how to see and talk
The ‘feminized fan’ in Japanese soccer culture 59
about soccer’ since they do not seem to be
able to read the rich culture of women’s fan-
dom and sincerely listen to them.
Meanwhile, the relatively visible character-
ization of mi-ha fans is the one that appears in
the soccer corner of women’s magazines and
TV shows. There, the following leads and
captions were seen.
‘20 Parisienne’s view of Troussier’,
‘Takuya and Hide, yell each other by
mobile just before kick-off’, ‘Real Il
Han, much more popular than Beck-
ham’, ‘Heart break Ronaldo, his son
ignored Daigorou hair’.10

23. Looking at those leads, I found them very
similar to those in sport tabloids in terms of
the vocabulary employed. I wonder how
many people can give a correct answer if they
were asked in which media those wordings
appeared. Here, it is pertinent to bear in mind
that whatever vocabulary they employed,
those words are never interpreted as mi-ha as
far as they are written by ‘soccer journalists’.
It is an exercise of power in the name of
naming to categorize someone as mi-ha so that
a particular mode of spectatorship, which is
‘feminized’, could be despised and violently
refused.
Such an exercise of violence is ordinarily
repeated in less official places and less visible
fields of everyday life. It is even possible that
it becomes more violent in unofficial places of
everyday life. When the date of large-scale
international soccer approaches, there takes
place discordance between newly participat-
ing ‘female/feminine’ fans and knowing,
otaku type ‘masculinized/masculine’ fans that
have already been there in several fan web-
sites of the Japan team.11 In this cyber space,
the fans who newly take part, having less
convincing knowledge about professional soc-
cer criticism and spectatorship, are exposed to
the violent mi-ha bashing by being literally
feminized, as well as through such warnings
as ‘support the team more seriously’ or ‘don’t
come, you mi-has’. As soon as this bashing
occurred, those who are regarded as mi-ha are
so frightened that they can rarely return to

24. contributing to the site. They are immediately
weeded out of the communicative field of
soccer fandom. Otherwise, they express the
more acceptable way of ‘supporting the Japan
team more seriously’ or the more ‘proper way
of soccer criticism’. Consequently, they repro-
duce the already defined code and rule as
they are.
What I have observed from this mechan-
ism of dismissal is that those who are con-
vinced that ‘it is only them who watch and
talk about soccer seriously enough’ tend
severely to attack and expel other modes of
fandom. The potential machismo in soccer
fandom can been seen in the accusing, despis-
ing and ignoring tone against ‘feminized/
feminine’ fans. The excuse often expressed
when they attack something they cannot ac-
cept is the aggressive and macho competitive
consciousness such as; the holy sacredness of
the national team, the aestheticization of the
serious battle between fellow, nationalized
men, ‘it is me who knows best’, or ‘it is only
me who has correct knowledge and gaze to
watch soccer’. In short, the mode of sport
spectatorship, including soccer, is the site of
cultural struggle through which the gendered
norm is assessed. The most violent power in
this struggle is the combination of nationalis-
tic tendency in the support of the national
team with the machismo that protects the
‘masculinized’ spectatorship. Eventually other
modes of practices are ferociously driven
away.

25. In conclusion, when the particular mode of
‘feminized/feminine’ fans is contested by the
existing forces, what we need to think about,
discuss and discover is this; it is in this nego-
tiating situation where a critical view of the
authenticity of soccer supporters, in other
words, the ‘masculinized characteristics’ of
the soccer fandom, comes into existence. The
violent exercise of bashing words unexpect-
edly reveals that a variety of modes of soccer
supporting, one of which is conventionally
called mi-ha, potentially has a certain effect of
dislocating the power of the mainstream, au-
thenticated interpretation of what it is to be a
soccer supporter. It seems likely that the
fragile, the heterogeneous and something that
is positioned as a target of assault, may tend
to be considered vulnerable to the violent
biting of bashing. However, rather than stay-
60 Toko Tanaka
ing in this way of thinking, I would suggest
that this very heterogeneity is so powerful
that it could astonishingly yield the bashing
itself as a reactionary force. It is wiser to look
for the way that the power of heterogeneity
can be amplified and to produce certain novel
languages to describe it.
To create an alternative language to talk
about soccer, we/they attempt to practise it
through the fan activity in everyday life.

26. Bricolage the limited resources available for us,
and knitting them with the hand of delicacy,
we/they manage to create an unknown, un-
seen gadget in order to ‘avec-faire’ (De Certeau
1990: 50). The bricolage fills the sub-cultural
sphere with this gadget and enriches our/
their ordinary life.
Author’s note
This is a heavily revised version of the paper
presented at ‘Inside-out: Beyond the FIFA
World Cup: Shared Event, Different Experi-
ence — Globalisation, State, Gender and Cul-
tural Studies’, November 2002. The author
would like to thank the organizers for the
invitation and the discussants for their pro-
ductive questions. The research on which this
paper is based is also helped by the specific
subject research support fund, number
2002A–052, issued by the Ministry of Edu-
cation and Science in Japan.
Notes
1. I choose ‘feminized’ or ‘feminine’ fan instead of
‘female’ fan. What is the strategic significance
of using these idioms? Indeed, those wordings
may objectify themselves as the targets of slight
and despise. However, my choice is made un-
der the influence of what Felix Guattari called
the ‘devenir-femme’. This is a metaphorical de-
vice to signify the metaphor, the work of an
alternative imagination, the expression of poss-
ible resistance and the heterologies, all of which
represents the others’ point of view, which is

27. excluded from the mainstream narrative of
sports culture writing.
2. mi-ha is a derogatory calling of the
fans who are regarded as improper, temporal
and unreliable. They often become the target of
exclusion because of their ‘not being serious
enough’.
3. It is a particular pattern of the kyara-dachi
(distinctive characterization). The
‘prince’ originates from the position of male
heroes in Japanese girls’ comics. The object to
which this ‘title’ is applied is determined by the
interrelation between his looks and his manner
and behaviour in the whole story. Good exam-
ples can be drawn from the ‘prince on the hill’
in Igarashi Yumiko �
Mizuki Kyoko’s Candy Candy (Igarashi
Yumiko � Mizuki Kyoko 1995), ‘Oscar
’ of Ikeda Riyoko’s The Rose of
Versailles (Ikeda Riyoko 1994), or those manners
and behaviour of the ‘elder student adored by
heroine’ typically appearing in the 1980’s
school comics. By the same token, kawai ko chan
is deeply associated with
girls’ comics. However, it is more influenced by
the yaoi culture. The yaoi culture is a
distinctively sub-cultural idiom predominantly
used in the alternative comic market to the
largely circulating commercial one. As ya
stands for yama-nashi (no climax), o for ochi-

28. nashi (no point) and i for imi-nashi (no mean-
ing), the yaoi culture may be interpreted as a
parody of previous narratives. It often works as
an allegory of sexualized relations among the
male casts. Kawai-ko-chan, for instance, is given
to the character which quietly indicates the
‘receiver’ character of the basic coupling of the
yaoi culture of ‘receiver/attacker’. He is not
necessarily good looking but can be objectified
as a fancy treasure. For instance, Oliver Khan
of Germany attracted the hearts of elder
housewives when he conceded defeat by Brazil
and lay on the goalpost for a while.
4. Many examples are found in the readers’ letters
section in soccer journals and respective sup-
porters’ magazines such as: ‘I’m a 34 years old
housewife with 14 year and 9 year old sons. So
excited about J-League but sometime I feel
ashamed when I found myself so blindly ex-
cited like teenage girls’ (Soccer Ai 1999: 71).
What is detected from this wording is that even
though despite her adulthood she feels
ashamed of her ‘girly’ excitement, she still
wants to communicate with others who might
have the similar affect as hers.
5. Elsewhere I have discussed the potential bash-
ing of this kind of intervention. See Tanaka (2003).
6. However, a few exceptions continue to emerge
in the sub-cultural sphere. For example, how is
it explained from which subject-position those
who write the yaoi stories and comics produce
their work? Is it actually possible to determine
that a person writes as a gay man or a straight

29. woman? I would say that the transition from
the fixed subject-position and genderization as
‘woman’ has already begun when we are at-
tracted by soccer that is supposed to be a
masculine genre.
7. Kim’s view is helpful in that she describes the
relationship between race and nationalism in
The ‘feminized fan’ in Japanese soccer culture 61
the Korean context. The similar problem is ob-
served in Japan too during the World Cup, but
the configuration of the fantasized love of
white masculinity and nationalism seems
slightly different from Korea. It would be inter-
esting to carry out a comparative study about
this point in terms of the geopolitical and his-
torical relationship between the two countries.
8. The particular mode of fans’ activity implied in
the idea of mi-ha seems to be regarded as
distinctively characteristic in girls in Asian re-
gions. The nearly possessed love mingled with
reality and fantasy, the shrilling voices of
screaming, the tears of excitement, and eventu-
ally the faint, these mi-ha activities apply not
only to sports fans but also to the girl groupies
of boy idol groups, as I have already pointed
out. Referring to Butler, I would rather like to
re-appropriate the idea of mi-ha and to carry
out the practice of resistance against the mi-ha
bashing by actively and aggressively self-ac-
claiming as such and strategically assigning the

30. idea to the process of re-signification. Yet I
propose to think further about the emphasis on
‘infancy’ that the idea of mi-ha implicitly indi-
cates. Although my thought on the infantile
element of the mi-ha is still premature, the
bodily practice of mi-ha consists of the body
technique oppressively enforced by the male-
centric society and the one that enforces Asian
women to learn (obviously this ‘Asian’ is an
‘imagined’ Asian that similarly resembles what
Edward Said argued in his Orientalism (1979).
When the meaning of mi-ha is considered as a
delicate compound of infancy, prettiness and
stupidity, I cannot help thinking of its simi-
larity to the position of Asian women in Eu-
rope. Even if Asian women reach adulthood
they are treated as if they are still teenagers
who need the care and patronization by adults
who are, in many cases, European men. I will
discuss this point elsewhere.
9. I cannot forget a scene in the NHK programme
‘Saturday Sports’, which is broadcast every Sat-
urday evening. One day the female caster who
has been in charge of the programme for years
and must have experienced enough to know a
variety of sporting genres said that ‘from today
I take charge of soccer’. The male partner in-
stantly asked her, half-jokingly, whether she
knew actually that soccer is a game of 11 play-
ers. It was too complex a feeling to describe in
a word since I was convinced that this verbal
exchange was too complicated a situation to
dismiss as a silly joke. Although this male
caster might have said that without any mal-in-
tention at all, it is in such a habitual enuncia-

31. tion beyond the speaker’s intention and
consciousness that it makes a tiny but import-
ant truth emerge.
10. These are drawn from some major weekly
women’s magazines such as Josei Jishin
(Koubunsha , Shuukan Jo-
sei (Shuhu to seikatsu sha
) published in June and July
2002.
11. As is widely known, in the web chat-pages
such attributions of social research as ‘sex’,
‘age’, ‘social strata’, ‘position’ and ‘occupation’
no longer work to indicate a contributor’s so-
cial life. They become ambiguous and meaning-
less. It is to say that ‘femininity’, ‘masculinity’,
‘youth’ and ‘intellectual’ are all masquerade
and performance. Nonetheless, it is important
that those categories maintain a kind of materi-
ality in cyber space and remain to be used as
the code when we contribute to and read the
site.
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Special terms
iri-machi iketenai
kawaiiiketeru
62 Toko Tanaka
Author’s biography
Toko TANAKA is a PhD candidate at
Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. Her research con-
cerns are the politics of gender, power, media and
everyday practices and cultural studies.
Translator’s biography
Hiroki OGASAWARA has been awarded
PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University
of London and currently teaches at the Faculty of
Cross-Cultural Studies, Kobe University, Japan.