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This study explores how a zainichi (residing in Japan) Korean athlete reveals often-concealed postcolonial and post-Cold War tensions revolving around ethnic essentialism and nationalism in East Asia. The focus of the study is Jong Tae-se, a third generation zainichi Korean football player who has become a star in Japan, North Korea and South Korea. By examining media representations and online responses to Jong in South Korea as well as his autobiographies written in both Korean and Japanese, it is explained how Jong, as a zainichi Korean sport celebrity, both represents the arbitrariness of nation-ness and reproduces unresolved geopolitical and historical issues of postcolonial East Asia. Whereas his mobility, multilingual capability and fluid belongingness may signal changing dynamics of national-ness in East Asia, this analysis also reveals that his media discourses keep him tethered to anti-Japan and anti-communist sentiments. Such vicissitudes of the discourses around him attest that colonial and Cold War memories and historical wounds continue to be conjured in contemporary East Asia. Ultimately, this study discusses both the possibilities and the limits of a zainichi Korean subjectivity as a de-colonial tool for destabilizing national, colonial, and Cold War ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the multiplicity of South Korean Major League Baseball fans, with a focus on the tensions that they experience under the nationalistic aura surrounding MLB fandom while pursuing their individual hobby. For this purpose, it employs the idea of “post-Westernization” to interpret baseball as a global sport and examine its recent popularity in South Korea. By exploring the activities and voices of an online community among Korean fans, it demonstrates how national desires were complicated when they collided with a global strategy during the first World Baseball Classic in 2006. Analysis of Korean MLB fans during the WBC indicates both the possibilities and the limits of global baseball as a case of post-Westernization. The study shows that becoming an MLB fan in South Korea is at the intersection of national identity (nationalist fervor for MLB), regional rivalry (against Japan, the former colonizer) and global sensibilities (American sport fandom). Korean fans’ responses can be summarized as the national-regional-global nexus in which they perceive the existence of regional and global hierarchies, but they also routinely contest their own and each others’ perceptions. Finally, it suggests that fans’ articulation of the national, regional, and global are far from being fixed or unidirectional: they are constantly under construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Baseball was introduced to Korea by American missionaries in 1905 but the sport was popularized in Korea during the Japanese Occupation (1910–1945). Baseball in Korea thus took root in relation to two colonizers: Japan and the US. To date, the popularity of baseball among Koreans can still be explained in terms of their relationships with their past colonizers. For example, given the historically constructed status of America as the ‘modern’ Other, the success of a Korean player in American Major League Baseball (MLB) may provoke euphoria, nostalgia and nationalism. Nationalism is most pronounced whenever the Korean national team meets the Japanese at an international baseball tournament; the victory is, for fans, akin to having ‘avenged’ the oppressive Japanese occupation of Korea. This paper argues that recent developments of Korean MLB fans show that the globalizing processes of baseball have fed their nationalism vis-à-vis their past colonial administrators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines complex interactions of sport, nationalism and media in South Korea by questioning how mediated sporting events are (re)constituting nationalism. Analyses of media representations of three Olympics (1968, 1984 and 2000) in South Korean newspapers focus particularly on the country's changing political and economic circumstances. A contextual and historic approach to this data shows that sporting nationalism has been both fundamental and salient to these changes, and also suggests that it changes in response to contextual shifts. I conclude both that sporting nationalism in the media is a not a fixed or unilateral entity but rather flexible and multidimensional, and that its transformation is both constituted by and constitutive of general societal changes and the shifting status of nationalism in particular. Finally, this study supports the necessity of media studies on nationalism in sports, which will provide important clues for explicating the shifting status and roles of nationalism in the global era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the process by which Korean nationalism was challenged and transformed through utilizing sports celebrities as iconic figures during the International Monetary Fund (IMF) intervention in South Korea. The influences of the IMF intervention were not limited to economic and political fields; rather, Korean nationalism had undergone substantial changes through the national crisis. At that time, two Korean athletes who were hugely successful in the US became national celebrities, or even national heroes in South Korea, a baseball player, Chan-ho Park and a goler Se-ri Pak. The media representation of these two Korean athletes is useful for the understanding of altered nationalism during the IMF intervention. The analysis of media coverage of these two athletes can be summarized in three ways: first, the coverage is focused on a self-governing individual; second, that individual is invested with the image of economic success in global competition; and third, that individual is invested with the image of responsibility for both family and nation-state. Conclusively, the two celebrities were presented as models for a new kind of citizenship, i.e. a national individual. Finally, this paper suggests that Korean nationalism has been altered through the IMF intervention, but remains a hegemonic ideology albeit combined with neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]