Global Sports Fandom in South Korea : American Major League Baseball and Its Fans in the Online Community [1st ed.] 9789811531958, 9789811531965

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PALGRAVE SERIES OF SPORT IN ASIA

Global Sports Fandom in South Korea American Major League Baseball and Its Fans in the Online Community Younghan Cho

Palgrave Series of Sport in Asia

Series Editors Younghan Cho Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Seoul, Korea (Republic of) William Wright Kelly Yale University New Haven, CT, USA

This cross-disciplinary series publishes the works of leading scholars who critically engage with the complexity of Asian sport from global and comparative perspectives. By exploring historic and contemporary Asian sports alike, it provides both a theoretical and empirical understanding of Asian sports, examining aspects that include, but are certainly not limited to: mega-events (the Olympics, Football World Cup, Asian Games); media (broadcasting, journalism, representation), fandom (celebrity athletes), body practices (exercise, training), cultural industry (leagues, publicity, sponsorship), and diplomacy (transnational institutes, governments and NGOs). The series welcomes cutting-edge contributions in the fields of anthropology, cultural geography, cultural studies, gender studies, history, media studies, performance studies, and sociology. As the first of its kind, the series provides critical assessments of the practical implications of sport in Asia for the international community of English-speaking scholars, academies and institutes, helping to foster a constructive dialogue and collaboration.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/16544

Younghan Cho

Global Sports Fandom in South Korea American Major League Baseball and Its Fans in the Online Community

Younghan Cho Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

ISSN 2662-9348 ISSN 2662-9356 (electronic) Palgrave Series of Sport in Asia ISBN 978-981-15-3195-8 ISBN 978-981-15-3196-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3196-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Hye Young Sohn This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgments

Sport has been my lifetime partner in various ways. When I was young, I spent much time playing various sports including football, baseball, table tennis, arm wrestling, ssireum (Korean wrestling), and so on. In my youth, believe it or not, I was quite good at playing many games, which gave me more confidence at making friends at school. The popularity of certain sports reflected the cultural and social trends of each period of South Korea: for instance, I enjoyed baseball with friends in elementary school, when the first Korean professional baseball league was launched in 1982, and I played football in junior high and high school when the Korean football team consecutively advanced into the final league of the Football World Cup finals since 1986. By reading the sports news sections, I began to read newspapers and to watch sports news programs regularly. I became familiar with a personal computer by installing and playing sports games. I once dreamed of becoming a professional sports writer or sports announcer—a dream I may still pursue in the future. Since my graduate program in 2001, I have chosen sports as pop culture as my major research topic, which has provided me with unexpected opportunities and many exciting and rewarding moments. While I am thankful for sports in its various forms, I want to express my gratitude to many people and institutes as well. To start, this work would not have been possible without Lawrence Grossberg, who is not only an academic supervisor but also a great life mentor. Larry always encourages me to struggle with my research questions and to articulate v

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the specificity of their complexity with my own words and reasoning. An example of professionalism, Larry is also punctual, reliable, supportive, and humorous. I still learn from him by reading his works, having conversations, and exchanging emails with him. This book project began as my doctoral dissertation as a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I am especially fortunate to have worked with the great faculty members there: Janice Radway, Jane D. Brown, Joanne Hershfield, Ken Hillis, Della Pollock, Dennis Mumby, and Sarah Sharma, who provided initial guidance, wisdom, and encouragement. I am also fortunate to have a supportive network of friends in Christina R. Foust, Eve Z. Chrevoshay, Mark Holt, Mark Haywood, Rivak Syd Eisner, Kyungmook Lee, Eunsuk Lee, Seon Joo Kim, and Youngeun Chae. They helped me become accustomed to the U.S. university system and culture. I also appreciate Kay Robin Alexander, the editor of my dissertation, many journal articles, and the first version of this manuscript, who carefully read my works and shared his many thoughts with me. I also express my gratitude to people and institutes from the time between grad school and before my return to South Korea. During this transitional period, I came to join the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin where I had wonderful conversations and support from Robert Oppenheim and Yvonne Sung-Sheng Chang. At the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, I also had invaluable experiences and learned a lot from working with another group of scholars and friends. I am exceedingly grateful to CHUA Beng Huat, who was the supervisor of my postgraduate fellowship and another mentor for academic life. By working with Beng Huat, I have learned the values and merits of forming inter-Asian connections and perspectives within the academy. ARI is the excellent institute where I was able to enjoy academic conversations with great (visiting) scholars and had wonderful support from the administrative staff: Leo Ching, Allen Chun, Hiroko Matsuda, Ronit Ricci, Kai Khiun Liew, Tani E. Barlow, Wan-ling C. J. Wee, Irene Fang-chih Yang and Valerie Yeo, Sharon Ong, Noorhayari Binti Hansan, and Henry Kwan. At Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS), I received invaluable intellectual and institutional support. I appreciate the faculty members at the Graduate School of International and Area Studies, and the students at the department of Korean Studies. In particular, I would like to give special thanks to the members of the Center for Koreanophone

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Studies in which I have learned as much as I have taught from conversations and collaborations with my students. I also appreciate Mikah Lee for polishing this whole manuscript at the final stage. Beyond HUFS, I have learned and benefited from scholars and friends in South Korea as well. Special recognition goes to Myungkoo Kang, who was an advisor for my M.A. thesis when I studied critical communication studies and embarked on my research on sports and nationalism. I should also mention several colleagues who helped me adjust to academic life in South Korea: Many thanks to Keeheyung Lee, Sangil Lee, Taejin Yoon, Moonyoung Cho, Sooah Kim, Yeran Kim, Daemin Park, Yisook Choi, Sujeong Kim, Doboo Shim, Young Chan Kim, Young-Gil Chae, Dae-guen Lim, and more. I am also blessed to have many colleagues and friends from various routes and opportunities in transnational traveling: my special thanks goes to Koichi Iwabuchi, Jiyeon Kang, Ji-Hyun Ahn, John Lie, Andy Chih-ming Wang, Kuan-hsing Chen, Shih-diing Liu, Hyunjoon Shin, and Su Young Choi. Also, I have confidence in my efforts in sports studies from my collaborations with wonderful scholars: William W. Kelly, Koji Kobayashi, Susan Brownell, Seok Lee, Jung Woo Lee, John Horne, Simon Creak, and more. The many Korean MLB fans and members of MLBPARK also deserve recognition. I am particularly grateful for the fans whom I met offline for the interviews and during offline meetings. Their passion for MLB and active participation in their online community have become a great asset for me to continue this project. While I was staying in the U.S., I would have felt disconnected or even alienated from South Korea if it had not been for MLBPARK. I also extend many thanks to Palgrave Macmillan Editors Sara CrowlyVigneau, Connie Li, Leana Li, Hua Bai, and to everyone on the editorial team. In particular, I thank Sara for her great support and passion for studying sport in Asia. Some portions of this book appeared as earlier versions in previous publications: earlier versions of Chapters 2 and 3 were published as “The National Crisis and De/Reconstructing Nationalism in South Korea during the IMF Intervention,” in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 2008, pp. 82–95 (https://www.tandfonline.com/ doi/full/10.1080/14649370701789666) and as “Broadcasting Major League Baseball as a Governmental Instrument in South Korea” in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues, vol. 32, no. 3, 2008, pp. 240–254. © SAGE Publications, Ltd. DOI: 0193723508319721). Parts of Chapter 4 were published as “Materiality of an Online Community: Everyday Life

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of Global Sport Fans in South Korea” in The Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia, Routledge, 2015, pp. 130–140 (Reproduced with permission of The Licensor through PLSclear), Ltd., and earlier versions of Chapters 2 and 6 were published as “The Glocalization of U.S. Sports in South Korea” in Reprinted with permission from Sociology of Sport Journal, 2009, vol. 26, no. 2, 2009, pp. 320–334. http://dx.doi.org/ 10,1123/ssj.26.2.320. © Human Kinetics, Inc. Parts of Chapter 7 were published as “Toward the Post-westernization of Baseball?: The NationalRegional-Global Nexus of Korean Major League Baseball Fans During the 2006 World Baseball Classic” in International Review for Sociology of Sport, vol. 51, no. 6, 2016, pp. 752–769. © SAGE Publications, Ltd. DOI: 1012690214552658. I appreciate the generous granting of permission for the articles that I wrote. All of the materials have been substantially revised and incorporated into this book. Most importantly, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my family, who has become the solid foundation for my life. I am profoundly grateful to my parents Ui-hyun Cho and Jae-Sook Hong, and my brother Younghun Cho. My greatest appreciation goes to Hye Young Sohn, for her relentless love and compliments, encouragement, and for reminding me of the importance of my work. Lastly, I am always grateful to God for his guidance and care.

Contents

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Introduction: The Cultural Politics of Sports in the Era of Globalization Prologue Identity Politics and Global Sports Fandom Nationalism/Nation-State and Global Sports Fandom Glocalization and Global Sports Fandom Internet Ethnography and Global Sports Fandom Conducting Internet Ethnography: A Personal Journey Chapter Outline References

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Part I Sports Governmentality: Glocalization of American Sports in South Korea 2

Sport and Crisis of Nation Under Globalization Nationalism as a Hegemonic Ideology in South Korea Colonial Experience and the Division of the Country in the Twentieth Century Developmental Nationalism as Hegemonic Ideology The Crisis of Nation-State During the Asian Economic Crisis Structural Transformation Under the IMF Intervention Shifts of Governmental Power and Roles

37 38 40 44 47 48 51 ix

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Crisis and Survival of Nationalism During the Economic Crisis Survival of Nationalism During the Economic Crisis The Fever Pitch of American Sports in South Korea References 3

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Glocalization of Sports from Above: A Korean Baseball Player as a National Individual New Mediascape and the Globalization of U.S. Sports in South Korea New Telecommunication Technology: Cable, Satellite TV, and the Internet Restructuring the Broadcasting Business A New Strategy for Globalizing U.S. Sports Governmentality and MLB Broadcasting Government Engagement with the MLB Fandom in South Korea Representing a Sport Celebrity as a National Individual A Self-Governing Individual Economic Success in Global Competition New Ethic of Being Responsible for Family and Nation-State The National Individual: A New Kind of Citizenship References Glocalization of Sports from Below: Online Communities Among Korean MLB Fans The MLB Fandom on the Internet in South Korea Making the Community: Individual and Collective Identities Information of Consumption Alternative Ways of Communication The Culture of Online Communities Materiality of Online Communities Community Times: Uneven but Simultaneous Community Spaces: Asymmetric but Synchronous The Multiplicity of Identities of the Online Community References

54 58 61 63

67 69 70 72 74 77 79 84 85 87 91 93 98

101 103 107 108 111 113 116 117 121 125 128

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Part II Undoing Nationalism: Ethnography of Korean Major League Baseball Fans 5

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The Making of the National Fandom and Its Discontent The Formation of the MLB Fandom in Mid-2000s Korea The Making of “the National” Among Korean MLB Fans Making National Narratives Building Racial Boundaries Defining National Players National Fandom in the Online Community Contesting the National: Multiplicity of Korean MLB Fandom Who Are the Authentic Fans? Love for the Nation or Love for the Team The Polarization of the Korean MLB Fandom: Park-ppa (Pro-Park) Versus Park-kka (Anti-Park) Unlikely Collusion Between the National and the Global References

133 136 139 140 142 145 148

The Emergence of Individuated Nationalism Sporting Governmentality Under Neoliberalization The Changing Structure of the National in the Korean MLB Fandom The National with Personal Choice: Disputes Over “Objective Position” The National with Individual Rights: Disputes Over “National Interest” The National with Market Principles: Disputes Over “National Profit” The Emergence of Individuated Nationalism References

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Articulation of the National, Regional, and Global National Fever for the 2006 World Baseball Classic Entanglements of the National, the Regional, and the Global Nationalism as a Global Strategy: Fans’ Penetration and Limitations Baseball and Fans’ Sense of Regionality

193 197 200

149 151 155 158 161

173 174 178 182 187 190

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MLB and the U.S. as the Field of Dreams Baseball and the National-Regional-Global Nexus References

211 216 219

Postscript: The “Here-and-Now” of Global Sports Fandom Epilogue: The Global Sports Fandom in 2019 References

223 223 232

Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Cultural Politics of Sports in the Era of Globalization

Prologue During the summer of 2005, I returned to South Korea to interview several Korean fans of Major League Baseball (MLB). When I heard that an informal meeting of fans would be held in Busan, a southern city about 5 hours by car from Seoul, I immediately made plans to be there. I was nervous and excited about this gathering. It was my first face-to-face experience with people I had initially gotten to know online, although I had already met up with several interviewees whom I had contacted online. At 7 p.m. on the appointed evening, about 20 fans showed up and stayed until after midnight. Upon arrival, the group shook hands and introduced themselves by their user IDs or online nicknames rather than their “real” names. All but a few were meeting for the first time; most resided in Busan; and all but three were male. The majority was in their mid-twenties but several were in their thirties and forties; the oldest had a daughter in high school. When they began to recognize how they ranked from the eldest to the youngest, instead of addressing each other by their online user IDs, they began to use very informal titles such as hyeong [older brother] and dongsaeng [younger brother]. Such labels are typical of lad culture and patriarchy in South Korea. The attendees also ate pork-belly barbeque and drank soju (Korean distilled liquor), both of which are stereotypically favored in all-male gatherings. To my surprise, instead of focusing on MLB, they enthusiastically chatted about © The Author(s) 2020 Y. Cho, Global Sports Fandom in South Korea, Palgrave Series of Sport in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3196-5_1

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their local franchise team, the Lotte Giants, and the Korean Professional Baseball League (KBO). “What the heck are they doing?” I wondered, “Are they really MLB maniacs?” The intensity of their conversations and their strong Southern accents bewildered me, almost as if I had stepped into the wrong party. Although it was small and informal, this gathering revealed much about how Korean fans enjoy their favorite sporting league, MLB, in their local spaces. Many of the conversations that night did not include or necessitate vast knowledge or the latest news about MLB teams and players. Despite their shared interest in MLB, these fans also expressed strong attachment to and passion for their own local baseball teams and players. Nor did these fans display their distinct loyalties in the ways devoted sports fans might be expected to: only one attendee showed off his fan allegiance by wearing a team jersey. These fans do not easily match up with the typical image of global fans in any kind of pop culture, including global sports, who are supposed to exhibit their fandom via special costumes, cosmopolitan manners, professional knowledge, and relevant jargon. This book was motivated by the surprise and curiosity I felt when I began to compare the informality and local flavors of this meeting to how Chan-ho Park, the first Korean MLB player, was received in South Korea in 1997, when South Korea was about to plunge into an economic crisis. As my fieldwork progressed between 2005 and 2006, I also began to reflect on my own experiences and memories of watching MLB games on domestic television channels as well as my observation of MLB’s sudden popularity in the late 1990s. During the economic crisis, which was caused by the shortage of foreign funds and was habitually represented as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) intervention, Park’s great success in the U.S. attracted massive public attention and made him a national celebrity. Considering the country’s economic devastation and frustrations at the time, his great performance in the U.S. was heralded and accepted as a stellar example of Korean national competitiveness in a global contest and as proof of Koreans’ ability to overcome the ongoing shameful and confusing conditions of South Korea in the era of globalization. This book has also developed along with my personal transitions from South Korea to the U.S. (and subsequent return to Asia and South Korea), from a local baseball fan to a MLB fan, and from an indifferent observer to an engaged ethnographer of an online fan community. I came to consider global sports and its fandom as a serious topic of

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research upon my sojourn to the U.S. at the age of 29, a shift that I regard as a physical movement in pursuit of a doctorate at an American university rather than a perpetual migration. My change of residence and in particular my geographical distance from my home country gave me sufficient time and space to tackle the issue of cultural globalization especially via global pop cultures, including MLB, and its impact on national identity, citizenship, as well as the domestic government in South Korea. Simultaneously, I also struggled with an ontological and epistemic dilemma between my compassion for my country’s cultural phenomena and as a researcher in media and cultural studies, whose theories are based on Euro-American contexts. Several dominant and influential theories and concepts, which have often originated from the field of postcolonial studies, are not necessarily applicable to the cultural phenomenon and issues of South Korea which I experienced and observed in person. In particular, studies on global sports and fandoms have been largely discussed and developed in Western contexts and by Western scholars. The more I learned about the existing research on global sports, the more I seemed to be confused and at a loss when it came to applying such studies to my particular research objects. In any case, I am a sport fan for life who enjoys both playing and watching sports games. When I stayed in the U.S. (mostly in Chapel Hill, North Carolina) for five years, I came to increase my interest in various U.S. sporting events in general as well as MLB in particular. Before my sojourn, I used to be a big fan of Korean Baseball Leagues (KBO) and watched mostly Park’s games or his franchise team, i.e., the L. A. Dodgers in MLB. As I developed my interest and expertise in MLB in the U.S., for better or worse, I became a fan of MLB in general rather than of any specific franchise team. Because the town I lived in is a small university town, it is not affiliated with any professional sports teams: even in North Carolina itself, there is no city that hosts MLB franchise teams. At home, I used to watch the program Baseball Tonight on ESPN, and I often watched the games of the Atlanta Braves and the Chicago Cubs, which are broadcast nationwide on cable television. As time passed and I had watched more MLB games, my memories of enjoying Park’s games and MLB almost a decade ago in South Korea began to coalesce into a recognition of subtle and undiscernible issues around Park and MLB, as well as nationalist sentiments and some divergent voices. Besides Park, my initial interest in MLB was connected to video games such as the MVP series for the PC and MLB The Show for the PlayStation.

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Also, I happened to find and visit an online community for Korean MLB fans, e.g., MLBPARK (www.mlbpark.com) in early 2002, just before moving to the U.S. As a novice fan of MLB in general, I was able to familiarize myself with information about and knowledge of MLB players and some baseball history as well as the latest news. While in the U.S., I also felt an immediate sense of connection to South Korea by reading Koreans’ responses to MLB and updates about local news and events through MLBPARK. To put it in slightly exaggerated terms, participation in the online community provided me with ordinary but precious moments of pleasure and a break from my painstaking and agonizing life as a grad student in a foreign land. As visiting and spending time in this community became a routine, I began to realize MLBPARK’s potential as an object of study: the interactions among Korean MLB fans appeared to me as a wonderful resource through which to explore some of the intriguing and complicated research issues and questions that I had in mind. As long-distance fans, these Koreans heavily utilized and relied on the internet for obtaining news about their favorite leagues and for exchanging their thoughts with other fans. At the same time, their responses and agendas were still engaged with their local or national sentiments within the fabric of their daily lives in South Korea. By being there myself, virtually, and by participating in Korean fans’ interactions, I was able to develop my research questions and eventually decided to conduct internet ethnographic research on the Korean MLB fandom. Since returning to South Korea after a short stopover in Asia, I was able to watch another MLB game recently in which Hyun-Jin Ryu, another Korean player in MLB, played as a starting pitcher for the L. A. Dodgers in a very important game of the 2019 postseason. As Ryu was having another wonderful season, MLBPARK was swarming with Korean MLB fans. Writing this book sounds like an over-due project, but at the same time, it has been a lengthy process of re-visiting my ethnographic notes and conversations that happened in 2005 and 2006, as well as reexamining my previous analyses during the past decade.1 Using the words of Kelly, this book also “turns what had been for me an ethnographic present into an ethnographic past” and vice versa (2019, p. 28). Since the late 1990s, the Korean MLB fandom has changed, and the fans’ online communities have also undergone several transformations, but I am still able to observe continuing patterns and iterating controversies amidst the cheers for Korean players in MLB and surrounding fans’ enjoyment of MLB in their own homes and on any corner of the street. I hope that

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this book will be a useful documentation of the past as well as a platform for imagining various and emerging forms of fans and their communities around global sports and any other kinds of global pop cultures.

Identity Politics and Global Sports Fandom This book aims to investigate the other side of identity politics by focusing on people who encounter, experience, and undergo globalization in their original and local spaces, i.e., without either temporary or permanent physical movements. Identity politics in the global era continues to be a central topic in many disciplines including literature, cultural anthropology, media studies, critical studies, and cultural studies. Despite the vibrant and abounding studies on identity under the banner of postcolonialism, most of them tend to pay attention to people who migrate from their original homes to new places—mostly metropolitan cities in the West. Under the rubric of Americanized postcolonial theory, recent rhetoric employs descriptors such as hybrid, subaltern, transnational, or even cosmopolitan to describe the transformation of identities of migrants. Yet, the images that I gleaned from my online and in-person fieldwork in South Korea revealed the gaps that cannot be fully grasped by the current frameworks. In South Korea, most of the MLB fans and others who continue to have their own careers and lives in their local spaces are commonly exposed to the changes brought on by globalization. Irrespective of their willingness, they are forced to either confront or voluntarily embrace globalization and its influences on their local societies. As Tomlinson observes, “for the majority, the cultural experience of globalization is not a matter of physical mobility, but of staying at home” (1999, p. 150). In order to fill the gap in the existing research, this book pays serious attention to the identities of people who undergo globalization without physical mobility, which will expand the scope and perspectives in the search of identity transformation in various manners and places. Since 1980, under the banner of postcolonial theory, many theoretical concepts that attempt to explicate issues of identity and interconnections between the global and the local have been developed and popularized. Concurrent advancements in transportation technologies enable more people to travel as well as to migrate, not only more often but more easily. The resulting presence and visibility of migrants in metropolitan areas, especially in the West, have led scholars to consider identity issues among

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immigrants who are removed from their cultures of origin (Ang, 2001; Sassen, 2000). Increased numbers of migrating people, in turn, remind metropolitan citizens or people in the West of the need to live side by side with neighbors from very different backgrounds. At the same time, the identity politics of ex- or post-colonized people takes into account their previous colonial societies; for example, the connections between Great Britain and the residents of its ex-colonies (Gilroy, 1993; Hall, 1997). Such academic efforts often incorporate researchers’ own experiences of traveling or expatriating from their native countries and accommodating to new places. Meanwhile, postcolonial theory has provided important insights as well as fundamental concepts such as mimicry, multiculturalism, diaspora, hybridity, and the subaltern. While these concepts contribute to illuminating the unalienable agencies and the inevitable resistance of the (ex-)colonized, they still tend to privilege the cultural and discursive dimensions of identities among immigrants, mostly in Europe or in the U.S.—a limited set of perspectives, which often elicit critical or even negative responses. Some of the earliest and most well-known examples of such critiques are the essays of Shohat and McClintock, first published in Critical Inquiry in 1992. By assessing the impacts of postcolonial theory, both authors criticized postcolonial theory for its lack of critical edge and its elitism, as well as for the institutional power it derives from its popularity in American universities. In particular, they noted the coincidence between the emergence of postcolonialism as a fashionable trend in the First World academy and the burgeoning dominance of global capitalism, which led them to suggest the inadvertent but uncritical compliance of postcolonialism with neoliberal capitalism. Other critiques have directly included voices from Asia and the Third World. The special edition of Cultural Studies published in 2000, “(Post)Colonial and its Discontents,” presented works that transcend a single, magically applicable theory of postcoloniality. By highlighting the diversity of the colonial experience as a product of its historical specificity, Chun (2008) goes so far as to state that postcolonial “theory” would appear to be a new Orientalism, effectively divorced from the actual postcolonial struggle. Another significant discontent has emerged from concern about the dominance of postcolonialism as the theoretical lens for explicating the politics of identity in the world of globalization or global capitalism. Postcolonialism and its related concepts provide very powerful means

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by which to construct the basic frames of identity politics and relations between the global and the local. And, most of these concepts are proposed, circulated, and widely adopted by scholars in the West. In particular, the institutional power of North American universities, represented by the Ivy League, continues to exert substantial, fundamental influence (Chun, 2008). Thus, it is not surprising that many Asian students choose to obtain their doctoral degrees in the U.S.—a pattern that I also followed. However, if they have not established perspectives that take their own origins into account, these postgraduate students often cannot reject postcolonial theory as a dictum for their research on their native countries. As a result, these young Asian scholars—whether consciously or not—develop their research questions or sets of inquiries from a pre-established framework that is a form of postcolonial theory but excludes their own experiences. Consequently, as an umbrella term, postcolonial theory has been used to represent an uncomfortably wide range of studies simply because the authors either utilize these concepts or are heavily influenced by these concepts and their advocates. This is not to say that, within the larger field of postcolonial theory, concepts are initiated only by Westerners or native English speakers: rather, nonWestern scholars of (post)colonial origin who migrate to the West and then become professors in the West often emerge as key figures in postcolonial theory. However, it is still rare to witness that concepts initiated by non-Western scholars who spent most of their academic careers in their native countries are embraced in the West, with a few exceptions. In the field of postcolonialism, the vocational location matters more than race, nation, ethnicity, or language. With this overuse in mind, this book begins with both my appreciation of and my discontent with postcolonial theory as the most common way of illuminating experiences of the global, regardless of origin. In Asia, new approaches to explaining modern lives outside of the American-Western axis have been widely circulated over the past decade. The region’s rapid industrialization, urbanization, and economic development have inspired new illustrations of Asian lives and sensibilities. Since the late 1990s, most significantly, cultural studies scholars in Asia have participated in ongoing conversation by personal means as well as through institutionally based efforts such as regional conferences and journals advocating “inter-Asia” (Chen & Chua, 2007). By developing concepts such as “Asia as method” (Chen, 2010), “inter-Asian referencing” (Iwabuchi, 2014), and “the Yellow Pacific” (Cho, 2016), these approaches encourage less

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concern about what the West thinks of “us” in favor of open conversations at the regional level and the use of “our” research as references rather than the application of Western theories to local cases followed by standardized comparisons to other classical studies in the West. Furthermore, this book also pays attention to the interconnections between cultural and economic globalizations and their influences on people and their thoughts, perspectives, and standards of their own societies and the globe. Since cultural products, particularly American pop culture, have been circulated around the globe, much academic attention has been paid to their influence on local people and, consequently, to resultant transformations of locals’ cultural and national identities. From concerns of cultural imperialism or Americanization to the defense of local appropriations of American pop products, (global) media studies also makes an effort to explicate diverse and unpredictable interactions between the global and the local. These trends are often criticized for privileging cultural and discursive dimensions of globalization, which also end up romanticizing the roles of locals and their capacity in consuming American pop cultures. Despite their enormous contribution to redirecting the attention from producers to consumers, these studies often fail to account for complicated contexts and subjectivities as well as the intricate relationships between them. What we observe in the era of globalization is the inseparable connection between the cultural and the economic. In this vein, it is imperative to understand cultural activities and practices in consuming global pop cultures in close relation to structural and economic changes. In South Korea, cultural globalization has been accompanied with the economic changes and the intrusion of transnational corporations and global agencies, represented by the IMF. Particularly during the 1990s, economic globalization was deeply entangled with job conditions as well as people’s everyday lives via the influences of exchange rates, the stock market, and investments, while cultural globalization was carried out mostly through the circulation of American pop cultures. Among various genres, global sports are particularly effective and influential in the process of (re)constituting national, regional, and even global imaginaries as they also underwent the larger experience of globalization. During the economic crisis in the late 1990s, not only Korean sports fans but also most Koreans started to enthusiastically watch MLB games as they cheered for Park and the L. A. Dodgers. This book is an attempt to grasp the changes of Korean society and its people who embraced

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the impacts brought on by cultural and economic globalization: the case of the sudden popularity of American baseball and Korea’s structural reformation under the guidance of the IMF in the late 1990s and onwards.

Nationalism/Nation-State and Global Sports Fandom This book examines the roles of nationalism and the nation-state (or government) under globalization as well as their transformations through interaction with global agencies, including transnational corporations (TNCs) and international institutions such as the IMF, the World Trade Organization, and global sports agencies, including MLB. Many cultural critics believe that the end of the era of nationalism and nation-states, which began in the West during the modern period, has arrived.2 In this vein, it is still the case that many studies assume that nationalism is either weakening or disappearing, or that the nation-state is operating in basically the same old ways as the necessary conduit through which global flows are both enabled and regulated. The issues of nationalism, however, are still becoming more salient and diversified: in this global era, nationalism remains broad and extensive as well as popular and intensive. Nationalism continues to influence vast populations and is relatively successful at garnering popular support. As Smith points out, “religious nationalism, or the superimposition of mass religion on nationalism has made a remarkable comeback” (1993, p. 22). In this regard, sports are still important for national formations in terms of both popular imaginaries and political entities, as well as being the catalyst of some of the most powerful investment in national identity. My own participation in the Korean MLB fandom and its online community also pushes me to pose a set of questions about strong national connectivity within the global sports fandom in South Korea. What are the roles of nationalism as globalization extends into local places? Where do local governments stand vis-à-vis cultural and economic globalization? And, how is the nature of nationalism being transformed throughout the process of globalization? The study of nationalism is also essential to the unraveling of identity politics, because national identity has long been one of the most dominant forms of human identity. Although nationalism and nation-states have weathered substantial challenges posed by globalization, the resurgence of nationalism is visible in many places. For instance, nationalism in Asia has

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faced similar challenges from economic imbalances and the challenges of globalization. Many Asians, frustrated with nationalist propaganda about the dangers of economic crises, have produced various kinds of nationalist backlash against the IMF’s encroachment during the Asian Economic Crisis of the 1990s. For instance, by 2003 in Thailand, the ruling party had successfully drawn out the support from various groups, including the labor group, because it had instilled a distinctly nationalistic economic policy. In the name of “national interest” and “national security,” the Thai government was able to deploy economic nationalism that is only national in a very specific and neomercantilist sense (Glassman, 2004).3 The United States is also in the midst of a resurgence of nationalism as a response to the events of September 11, 2001. Recently, under the Trump administration, patriotism with the motto of “Make America Great Again” seems to provoke both nationalistic fanatics and discontents (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018).4 The situation of South Korea is not much different from that of fellow Asian countries that went through extensive globalization as well as economic struggles. The understanding of both the universal and unique natures of Korean nationalism is crucial for illuminating the vicissitudes and tenacity of nationalism in the face of cultural and economic globalization, which are represented by the surging fandom of MLB and by the IMF intervention during the same period, respectively. There have been relentless efforts to define nationalism in Korea among academic figures, but it is almost impossible to draw a clear consensus. While liberal intellectuals argue that Korean nationalism is but a modern invention particularly mobilized by authoritarian governments, some emphasize its exclusivity in terms of race and ethnicity with a long history: the latter is by and large oriented by the primordial perspective. Despite the constant discontent with defining the nature of Korean nationalism, the modernist and the primordial perspectives are most often applied to explain the evolution of (South) Korean nationalism.5 Otherwise, several studies often end up providing a conciliatory perspective, which presumes that Korean nationalism is not only intense and saturated, but also unique and particular, meaning that it cannot be easily explained through either the modernist or the primordial perspective (Shin, 2006). At a glance, such a compromised conclusion seems to give serious consideration to the specific conditions of Korea and the roles of nationalism without relegating nationalism as outdated or applying Western theory to Korean contexts unilaterally. However, such a view also has the problem that it renders Korean nationalism as particular or even special, which

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often ends up either mystifying nationalism in Korea or leading to an impasse for any further discussion. Rather than holding up a traditional or a mythical perspective of Korean nationalism, this book takes the adventurous rationale in which Korean nationalism is also a universal and modern phenomenon in terms of being particular and specific, just as Western nationalism. Instead of generalizing the diverse features of recent nationalism, it is imperative, for this reason, to identify the historic and contextual specifics of modern Korean society that contribute to shaping the unique and consistent characteristics of Korean nationalism. Discussing the status of nation-state (or government) is also necessary to the consideration of current identity politics, particularly in relation to the emergence of global agencies. In fact, the modern nation-state system has survived, but it faces unprecedented challenges from emerging agencies such as transnational corporations, international organizations, and even various groups whose interests are neither easily confined by the nation-state’s boundary nor controlled by the sovereignty of governments. One result of these challenges is that the scope and capacity of individual governments in invigorating and constituting national identity have diminished. These reductions have relocated the nation-state in relation to the matter of culture and of an increasingly globalized culture while leaving gaps in which globalized culture, or more specifically the globalization of American pop culture, seems to nurture non-national, hybrid, and cosmopolitan sensibilities and identities. Surprisingly, there has not been much detailed empirical investigation of the relations between nation-state and culture. At the same time, however, it is also the case that many researchers assume a one-dimensional relation between nation-state and sport in which sport is not only supported and orchestrated by individual governments, but also contributes to invigorating national unity and identity among its people. It is often taken for granted that “within this global era, state rhetorics of nationalism continue to inform understandings of sport, and the nation remains a central way of framing consumer practices of sport” (Joo, 2012, p. 35). As a nation-state or government never exists as a single entity and, furthermore, as its roles, constitutions, and capacities have been transformed, the relations between sport and state also vary and undergo substantial changes. Sport is one of the most significant absences in discussions of contemporary globalization, although it is perhaps the most significantly geographically dispersed form of culture.

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Furthermore, it is not so much that global sports, particularly the globalization of American professional sports, is not studied, but that such work is largely ignored by scholars not only in cultural studies but also in fields that study the broader themes of culture. Such a seemingly apparent contradiction between the rapid and successful globalization of sport and its strong articulations to national culture and identity is precisely what first provoked my personal and academic inquiry. In this vein, the globalization of sport, particularly the expansion of American professional sports into the world, including East Asia and South Korea, would provide a unique arena in which to investigate a very important and understudied aspect of this relation, and of globalized culture itself. Nationalism remains a salient feature of South Korean life and society. However, the ways in which global popular culture and global sport specifically have expanded in South Korea demonstrate that their success has intersected with constituting altered nationalism and has also corresponded to structural governmental reforms. Current forms of the global sports fandom in South Korea illustrate the changing relationships between global culture and nationalism or nation-state: nationalism no longer functions as the dominant rhetoric that spurs mass mobilization and demands individuals’ sacrifices for the nation-state. In the modern, globalized nation-state, people personally select and favor particular flavors of nationalism in the course of pursuing their own individual interests. The intimate relationship between them indicates that nationalism has become a resource for accomplishing personal desires and even individual goals.

Glocalization and Global Sports Fandom Another concern addressed in this book is how global sport is popularized among local people and how they enjoy, consume, and even appropriate global sports in their own places and everyday lives. U.S. sport, which has been anointed the “new Hollywood,” has been globalized with tremendous speed. However, in order to succeed in the world, U.S. sports are also compelled to keep accommodating the local—not only because of the constantly shifting local tastes, sentiments, and trends, but also because of the complicated relationships between sport and other societal elements. For the latter, sport has been in close connection with nation-state, which might work paradoxically in the case of Americanized global sport and each government.6 This book deploys the concept of “glocalization”

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as a lens for analyzing the detailed process of U.S. sports’ expansion into South Korea. In particular, I suggest reviewing the procedures of glocalization as a continuum between “glocalization from above” and “glocalization from below” (Cho, Leary, & Steven, 2012). In so doing, I attempt to discuss the implications and consequences of the glocalization of U.S. sports without romanticizing the local or fetishizing fandom. The thesis of glocalization, as advocated by Robertson (1995), has been widely used to explicate both global consumption of an American popular commodity and the accommodations of both the commodity and the ways it is consumed in local contexts. On the one hand, according to Robertson, glocalization is narrowly defined as micro-marketing: “the tailoring and advertising of goods and services on a global or near-global basis to an increasingly differentiated local and particular market” (1995, p. 28). On the other hand, glocalization in a more general sense can be used to explicate “the simultaneity and the interpenetration of what are conventionally called the global and the local” (Robertson, 1995, p. 30). Despite the significant scholarly attention paid to Robertson’s thesis, there is still a dearth of research concerning the complex relationship between the globalization of sports and local responses (Giulianotti & Robertson, 2007). Although several studies have tackled various uses of sports in Asian contexts, the field of sports studies has, with few exceptions, not yet efficiently investigated either the macro- or the micro-dimensions of the expansion of U.S. sports into Asia and South Korea in particular. Arguably, the globalization of U.S. sports became an international juggernaut in the 1990s with the popular triad of Michael Jordan, Nike, and the National Basketball Association (NBA). Asian markets have been no exception to the enormous trend of globalizing U.S. sports. During the 1990s, the proliferation of U.S. sports in South Korea was further assisted by the deregulation of broadcasting as well as Koreans’ increased income and leisure time. The recent sport mediascape in South Korea, in particular the tremendous popularity of MLB since the late 1990s, seems to exemplify exactly this kind of global-local complex. As mentioned earlier, MLB started to become one of the major spectator sports in South Korea in 1997. In contrast to the national gloom caused by the country’s economic crisis and the subsequent IMF intervention, Park’s brilliant MLB performance became a huge sensation for Korean sports fans and the rest of the population as well (as noted above, many Koreans became interested in MLB because they were attracted by the presence of a Korean player). By taking advantage of existing nationalistic rhetoric

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and catering to the specific tastes of local fans, U.S. sports endeavors such as MLB have been able to create a global fandom. Accordingly, transnational corporations such as MLB International and ESPN tried to invest in Asian markets overall as well as in local broadcasting companies in specific countries (Japan, Taiwan, and Korea). Meanwhile, the South Korean governments also heavily utilized MLB and Park’s performance for their own purposes. Such a sportscape makes it imperative to “explicate the unavoidable interplay between global and local forces that contributes to the reshaping of cultural spaces of identity within the new global media landscape” (Andrews, Carrington, Jackson, & Mazur, 1996, p. 432). Because the current expansion of U.S. sports into Asia is becoming more aggressive and exploitative, the imperative to examine the concrete ways of glocalizing U.S. sports in Asia grows stronger. The growth of the MLB fandom in Asia, including South Korea, provides a particularly useful site in which to explore exactly how sports become glocalized vis-à-vis national and regional identities. As mentioned previously, I elaborate the concept of glocalization into glocalization as a continuum between glocalization from above and glocalization from below. Glocalization from above refers to cooperative efforts among local governments, domestic and transnational corporations, and American sports leagues. Glocalization from below means the diverse ways that local fans consume and enjoy MLB. These theoretical parameters allow for an examination of the glocalization of U.S. sports as multi-dimensional and even contradictory, yet at the same time, connected and continuous.7 Within this theoretical framework, the two can be treated as distinct processes that are nonetheless clearly interconnected.8 On the one hand, glocalization from above also comprises localizing processes employed by hegemonic agents such as governments and conglomerates, either for maximizing profits or for promoting political ideology. In particular, it heavily depends on such nationalistic elements as local players and propagandistic rhetoric to entice local fans. In the context of South Korea, glocalization from above implies both the latest marketing strategy and the newest governing tool. Therefore, glocalization from above is made possible by the collaborative efforts and alliances among local governments, domestic and transnational corporations, and global sports leagues. Especially for highlighting the unusual collaborative efforts of local governments in this process, I also employ the perspective of governmentality as an effective lens through which to analyze the

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South Korean government’s role in populating MLB in the late 1990s. Nonetheless, governmentality as I refer to it herein is not just about the state or state power. It also extends into power relationships—to norms and issues of self and identity; to private interpersonal relations, including self and self; relations within social institutions and communities; and cultural phenomena such as values and rules of conduct. This book does not assume that governmentality must entail homogenous or unified outcomes, however. Instead, it predicates that the use of MLB broadcasts as a governing tool is not reducible to a form of social control but rather involves a compromise between regulation and autonomy. On the other hand, glocalization from below refers to the ways that local fans customize their consumption and enjoyment of global sports and interact with other fans. It also deals with the unexpected consequences of the global circulation of U.S. sports for local fans, particularly for their individual and collective identities, and further implications of them. This book focuses on Korean MLB fans in online communities as a representative case of glocalization from below, and suggests that Korean MLB fans are able to rationalize their MLB fandom in individualistic ways. The South Korean governments’ intervention in the MLB fandom can be identified as part of a larger process of power relations. However, the ways in which governmentality is demonstrated are neither inevitable nor unidirectional, and furthermore, its outcomes cannot be guaranteed. Miller also writes that “unruly subjects seeking to reform themselves” when he proposed that the outcome of producing loyal citizens by means of cultural capitalist policy is neither inevitable nor unidirectional (1993, p. ix; 1998). By paying attention to the diversity of responses among Korean MLB fans, this book also attempts to answer how global sports fans constitute their thoughts, perceptions, and feelings by negotiating governmentality through global sports functions as “technologies of the self.” By analyzing the South Korean sportscape through the continuum of glocalization, this book suggests that glocalization is neither a unilateral nor predetermined process, but rather an outcome of negotiation or contest among numerous agents. Although I differentiate the two types of glocalization, I do not intend to imply that these processes function as opposites or are in opposition. Rather, they are intended to highlight the complexity of glocalization and also the inseparability of the global and the local. Through its exercise of the dynamics of power both in the macro and the micro, a thoughtful analysis of governmentality

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can pinpoint relationships among governing bodies, the act of governing itself, and the governed subject(s). Realizing the centrality of glocalization within the globalization of popular cultural products, including sports, highlights the necessity of dissecting its various, detailed, connected procedures and observing what kinds of glocalization are happening at specific junctures within a recognized society.

Internet Ethnography and Global Sports Fandom This book is the result of ethnographic research on global sports fans in an online community. While I am indebted to the tradition and methodology of the field of media studies, I also needed to figure out how to design and conduct ethnographic research on the internet. During the period of designing the research scheme and conducting fieldwork in 2005 and 2006, I could not help but wonder whether it was appropriate or even possible to apply ethnographic strategies and principles to the internet and people who interact on it. As I learned and adopted theoretical and practical approaches from multi-sited ethnography, autoethnography, and conjunctural ethnography, I designed internet ethnography, which requires an adaptive approach and pursues connectivity as an organizing principle. For the past several decades, there has been an ethnographic turn in media studies in order to provide a thick description of the complexity of media viewing and a holistic understanding of media audiences. By shifting its attention from texts to audiences, the ethnographic approach in media studies underscores the contextualization of audience experiences in everyday culture. Such an approach continues to be applied to the study of various media, from radio and TV to the internet (Morley, 1992; Spigel, 1992). Taking this orientation a step further, Ang (1996) advocates the notion of “radical contextualism,” which assumes the impossibility of determining any social or textual meaning outside of the complex situation in which meaning is produced. Present-day communication technologies and media environments offer both challenges to and possibilities for applying ethnography to global media systems, products, and their audiences. To investigate the changing conditions of global media and its relationships with audiences, a group of scholars who undertake what they term “global media studies” have examined the validity of existing methods, including ethnography, and discussed various ways of research (Murphy & Kraidy, 2002). These studies prove their efficacy

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in explicating the role of TV in the transformation of identity among migrant and diasporic communities (Gillespie, 1995), characterizing the competition as a medium wherein the global and local intersect (Butcher, 2003; Parameswaran, 2001), and investigating how diasporas make use of communication media (Cunningham & Sinclair, 2000). Despite theoretical innovation and meaningful outcomes, ethnography in media studies often receives the criticism that it inherently lacks methodological rigor. Contrary to ethnography in anthropology, which requires a researcher to spend one or two years in a local setting, ethnography in media studies easily drifts toward a “quasi-ethnographic” approach, which is criticized as a “sort of hit-and-run version of participant observation, not ethnography” because of its lack of “consistency and the intersubjective knowledge and relationships between the observer and the observed” (Murphy & Kraidy, 2002, p. 12). Nightingale (1996) also made a similar point that although media studies is broadly ethnographic, many of its research techniques do not employ research strategies that are typically thought of as ethnographic.9 Along with the emergence of the internet as a hub of human communication and media circulation, similar concerns are raised in ethnographic approaches to the internet. As scholars have faced the additional challenge of elaborating a nuanced way of conducting ethnographic research on the internet, an ethnographic approach needs to be elastic and adaptable to changing contexts, driven by the refinement of theory. To that end, I employ seminal insights and sophisticated methods from three ethnographic trends such as multi-sited ethnography, autoethnography, and conjunctural ethnography. Firstly, the notion of multi-sited ethnography has been widely advocated in anthropology in order to follow diverse subjects within one inquiry, for example: people, things, metaphors, stories, lives, and even conflicts, which enable researchers to expend ethnography beyond the narrow and traditional. According to Marcus, an early espouser of this notion, multi-sited ethnography examines “the circulation of cultural meanings, objects and identities in diffuse time-space” by moving from “the single sites and local situations” to “multiple sites of observation and participation” (1995, p. 95). Marcus (1999) further contends that ethnography may embed itself in multi-sited contexts because a field itself potentially harbors multiple sites. The emergence of global media and the internet as its representative form contributes to the multiplicity of dispersed and fluid fields as well as mobile and multi-vocal subjects. As

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researchers encounter these new fields and subjects, multi-sited ethnography allows them to follow the patterns of de- and re-contextualization that occur as cultural forms flow across the scopes of the world system. Ethnographers on the internet must be positioned in ways that enable them to examine, as, again, Marcus (1995) puts it, the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space. As strategically situated ethnography, the seminal insights from multi-sited ethnography assist ethnographers in navigating “unexpected contexts, shifting constituencies, and changing agendas” that are found on the internet, its populations and their interactions (Marcus, 1999, p. 92). As Hine (2015) suggests, the internet is inherently diverse, flexible, and heterogeneous and thus demands an adaptive, situated, methodological response. Secondly, autoethnography that is widely used among feminist scholars provides useful lessons for problematizing the roles of researchers by initiating the use of autobiographical data and validating self-referential logic.10 By underscoring the connections offered by personal cultural experiences with informants and even readers, autoethnography encourages ethnographers to develop a close and even complementary relationship with subjects, to treat them as co-researchers, to share authority, and to assist participants to author their lives in their own voices. As autoethnographers mostly present themselves as a member or even allies of the field, they even prepare to accept a certain level of symmetry or reversibility within the interactions with informants (Moores, 1993; Radway, 1984). In autoethnography, empathy becomes the basis for defining not only a commonality between academics and audiences, but also a relationship between interviewees’ stories and the interviewer’s own story. In so doing, the goal of autoethnography is not to secure validity or accuracy, but to communicate emotional truth, which is inherently partial and incomplete, so a rigorous sense of partiality can be a source of a representational fact (Clifford, 1986). In internet research, many scholars similarly begin their interests as fans or audiences and then deploy autobiographical narratives that make close connections and even identify with informants (Hine, 2000). Thirdly, the call for a contextual approach to ethnography advocates combining several qualitative methods so that macro- and micro-levels can be simultaneously considered. Mankekar (2002) coined the term “conjunctural ethnography” to examine how TV series in India contribute to reconfiguring nation, culture, and community in relation to Hindu

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identity. Her work combines research on political economic elements, media discourses, interviews, and analyses of online bulletin boards. On a similar note, to explore TV as a key institution for the production of national culture in Egypt, Abu-Lughod (2005) not only interviewed many audiences but also analyzed media texts and traced structural changes in Egyptian society. By describing relationships between the macro- and micro-aspects of media consumption as conjunctural, the contextual approach aims to elucidate complex webs of media consumption in relation to their structural contexts (Grossberg, 1997, 2010). While well suited for investigating ongoing constructions of unstable relations between structures and practices, a conjunctural approach is particularly useful for theorizing agency and escaping the deterministic conclusion that every practice can be interpreted as the inevitable result of manipulation or as a form of resistance. By highlighting structural influences, at the same time, a conjunctural approach in ethnography helps researchers avoid falling into populism and losing their critical edge. A conjunctural approach makes it possible for ethnographic study to pursue a combined commitment to macro- and micro-questions of power and culture. As a way of responding to the demand for ethnographic rigor and to take advantage of new mediascapes, I have chosen an online community, i.e., MLBPARK, and member interactions within it as an ethnographic object. By incorporating these lessons, an ethnographic approach to a study of an online community could unravel the complex ways in which people are not only engaging with new media technology, but also influenced by the structural changes of their local spaces that may come about as a result of their engagement. An ethnographic approach, driven by theoretical and practical rigor, can enable us to examine communication among people who are seeking to assert their creative agency over meaning construction and media use via the internet. In this sense, ethnographic intervention in internet research is more than just a strategy; it has become a research process of forming communities and making conversations with people who reside on the internet. This book demonstrates that internet ethnography is pivotal both for generating understanding of how people engage with new technology and for understanding how the phenomenon of globalization is played out locally in relation to a particular context of a certain society.

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Conducting Internet Ethnography: A Personal Journey Vignette: On the final page of my master’s thesis, which analyzes changes in sportingnationalism in South Korea, I wrote: “This study misses the element of audiences who enjoy sporting events through mass media…in my next research project, I will use a participatory-observation method” (2002, p. 92). It has been almost five years since I left myself this message, the meaning of which did not become fully clear to me for a while. When I first became interested in the relationship between changes of national identity among Korean MLB fans and structural changes in South Korea, I was baffled as to how I might explore fans’ transformations of identity. At that very moment I discovered MLBPARK, an online community of Korean MLB fans in which I could observe lively, contemporary voices and real-time interactions. Although it was too soon for me to realize that this online community would rescue me from my dilemma, I immediately felt a sense of hope. And so I decided to venture into it as an ethnographer, whatever the outcome. (an excerpt from my field notes in 2006)

To figure out how Koreans consume and enjoy MLB, I needed to locate a suitable group, one in which I could listen to real voices, opinions, thoughts, memories, desires, and so forth. Without having had any conversations and interactions with the fans, only speculation seemed possible. At first, it was difficult to find a group to observe due to time and space considerations: Korean MLB fans are dispersed geographically and watch live games late at night or early in the morning in their own homes because of the twelve-hour time difference between South Korea and the U.S. To complicate matters, many fans employ a diverse set of viewing strategies including TV, internet broadcasts, and websites. At the time, I happened to be participating in an online community for Korean MLB fans, and this website, MLBPARK, emerged in my mind as a potential field for my research. To employ a conjunctural approach, I conducted ethnographic research on MLBPARK with a combination of other qualitative research methods, including in-depth interviews, discourse analysis, archival research on (sport) history, and a review of Korean nationalism and society. Such combined methods have been employed by several other studies in order to respond to shifting contexts such as technological advancements and social conditions (Baym, 2000; Bird, 2003; Miller &

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Slater, 2000). Combined methods as well as the perspectives of different fields encourage the inclusion of socioeconomic and political conditions in internet ethnography. After locating my research field and designing my research methods, I still recognized some challenges inherent in conducting internet ethnography. The first conundrum I faced is related to the dilemma of “where I am.” Unlike traditional ethnographers, I had no local place in which to physically move and could not meet my internet subjects face to face. The question of my location also entailed practical matters: whether I would only observe or also participate in the community, and whether or not I would reveal my identity as a researcher and my research goals. These issues may not be critical to traditional ethnographers because their presence in local or indigenous places already reveals much about them and inevitably influences “their” community. I, on the other hand, could easily lurk unnoticed in “my” online community for years. At first, I was tempted to remain in an observatory position (i.e., reading others’ posts but not writing any myself) because I felt that observation of the community might suffice, and also because significant participation would probably entail a lot of work. As I developed my research questions, however, I chose to participate as well as to observe and to reveal my identity as a researcher and my research goals to the community. My reasoning was based more on ethical than practical concerns; I felt that I, as an ethnographer, needed to struggle with this decisionmaking process. These struggles definitely heightened my comprehension of, and reflexivity about, research methodologies. So for six months in 2005 (March through August), I steadily translated and uploaded local sports news, downloaded pictures of the Chicago Cubs, and posted them with my comments. With such regular, frequent updates, I expected that my user ID would eventually gain recognition (indeed, some of my postings were even highlighted by forum moderators as “Today’s Recommendation”). In so doing, I was able to form and maintain relationships with other members without being physically situated in the community. Furthermore, I developed personal attachments and formed long-lasting off-board friendships. Even though I completed my fieldwork in March 2006, I still visit the community every now and then without interrupting my regular duties. The constant accessibility of MLBPARK and the convenience of being able to visit it whenever I choose allow me to indefinitely extend the duration of my research. I was able to observe that my perspectives and relationships with the

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community and its members did not only develop but also varied from time to time. Moreover, my expanded “residency” helped me develop a more sophisticated theoretical understanding, which in turn has helped me develop and refine my research questions. However, this sense of no-place leads me to the question of how I can justify my expertise in the field and the objects of my research. During my fieldwork period, I regularly logged on to MLBPARK and spent at least two to three hours there. Similar to other internet researchers, I had been familiar with my research subjects before officially launching my study. Compared to traditional ethnographers, my defense is that internet ethnographers already have residency and familiarity with a community prior to starting their research. Also, internet ethnographers undergo multifaceted involvement such as that of naïve fans, mediocre participants, to active researchers. The shift in perspectives I have experienced during my many years of membership in MLBPARK has given me greater ease, and greater reflexivity, in switching my perspective back and forth between participant/storyteller and researcher/cultural critic. Hine (2000) eloquently describes how ethnographic authority resides always and only with the ethnographer who was there, to which I add that authoritative conclusions about internet ethnography depend on experience, not travel. My long-term observation of and participation in MLBPARK enables me to discern MLB’s cultural norms and ways of communicating, to evaluate disputes that deepened members’ involvement, and to trace shifts in members’ expressions and attitudes toward MLB and the Korean baseball players in it. The second challenge in internet ethnography is to rationalize online space and social interactions within it as a field object. Unlike a local community with a fixed locus, an online community on the internet does not have a geographical location. Therefore, it is not sensible to ask whether MLBPARK is a community in South Korea, though most participants are Koreans who interact with other members through posting, responses, and messages. Like all internet communities, this one is scattered, dispersed and voluntary. If they are connected to the Web, members can join no matter where they live. This characteristic affords tremendous convenience: members need not be bothered by unnecessary or unwanted interactions and can, if they wish, maintain complete privacy and anonymity. To log on (arrive), link (participate or lurk), or log off (leave) is as simple as pushing a few buttons on a keyboard.

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These conditions create a contradiction: the community is regarded as temporary and fluid, but also displays characteristics of constancy and even permanence. For example, the first post by new members, which functions like an introduction, is often followed by welcoming responses; members who are leaving the community for good often explain their departure (usually they feel they have been treated unfairly or have had persistently difficult relationships) and accept farewell messages. The unique culture of an online community is constantly undergoing construction and transformation according to member interactions. For example, massive disputes often erupt, entangling many members who may then spend several hours in debate before logging off. Another standard procedure is to frame issues in the thread titles in order to attract attention. The more time members spend posting and responding, the more skillful they become at eliciting others’ reactions by, for example, baiting them. Members measure each other’s popularity according to their number of interactions, their positive or negative tone, and the inclusion of in-jokes and interesting or relevant images. Groups of members form cliques that can function rather like guilds and even, at times, develop into hierarchies that can decisively influence the community’s overall mood and cause individual members or other cliques to become hostile or estranged. To utilize members’ interactions in the online community as the main resource, I approach their messages and replies on the bulletin boards as social interactions rather than as texts or discourses. In other words, I treat postings as multi-layered activities that provide critical clues for tracing how Korean MLB fans construct their individual and collective identities. For that purpose, I deploy the word “posting” as a noun, instead of the more common “post,” to indicate not only these messages, but also the actions and intentions of members. In the online community, individual postings, which embody the mobility of text, look like everyday conversation. When postings are approached conceptually, not merely as texts but as traces left by members in the community, both the actions and the content of postings can be regarded as crucial clues about member identities and relationships. At the same time, ongoing dialogues that continue through the process of posting can be regarded as a social activity in the sense that people form relationships and develop a collective identity by exchanging posts. Postings as an object of ethnography can be regarded as something between oral and written language. Rather than utilizing literal texts, postings are a “combination of pictorial,

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phonetic and textual signs” that might actually deconstruct the established structures of written language (Reid, 1996, p. 408). Bulletin board writing blurs the boundary between speaking and writing, and writing on an internet forum is a combination of pictorial, phonetic, and textual signs. For instance, people on MLBPARK routinely use emoticons or compose their postings like hieroglyphics. The inclusion of visual images is a common strategy: textual substitution in online space is a highly stylized, even artistic, procedure. This new writing is a kind of hybrid, as Turkle argues—“speech momentarily frozen into artifact, but curiously ephemeral artifact” (1995, p. 183). Others may prefer forms of “share,” “exchange,” and “add” instead of describing all the permutations of this communicative act as “writing.” I suggest that postings should be regarded as the lively language of the inhabitants of an electronic frontier; as such, they reflect emergent cognitive styles and new worlds of interaction. Unlike traditional forms of written exchange such as letters, online postings amalgamate into a kind of never-ending story in which distinctions blend to form a reading-writing continuum. In these ongoing interactions, replies can be added continuously as soon as a discussion begins, which creates an onscreen result similar to that of real-time chat. To me this result implies that, despite their use of literal texts (i.e., their production of writing either in words or hieroglyphs), the way that members communicate with each other is like an open-ended conversation. In a discrete discussion thread, the subject matter has neither a concrete beginning nor end; an issue that elicits huge interest may digress into another topic without having reached a conclusion or even presenting an explicit reason for the shift (“hijacking”). Also, because people can so easily join or leave at any time, it may quickly become difficult to identify the initiator(s) of such discussions-within-discussions. Online, ways of communicating “seem to have a rhizomatic element, for there is no beginning, no end, all happens in the middle” (Lotfalian, 1996, p. 131). Thus, the interactions in online space become hybrid zones between written, oral, interpersonal, and mass communication: according to Lindlof (2002), such practices in computer-mediated communication constitute a sophisticated “electronic paralanguage” that involves codes of abbreviation, acronyms, punctuation, spelling, and emoticons. Postings do not comprise only texts; instead, they encompass the unique expressions of people in a community whose sojourns there are temporary but also continuous, and who

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form relationships and construct individual as well as collective identities there. The next piece of the puzzle concerns the representativeness of these postings: whether individual postings reflect this online community as a whole and how I synthesize the postings and interviews as the data for tracing the global sports fandom in South Korea. In the beginning, it was hard to get responses and to interact with people in MLBPARK. In an online community with a huge number of members, a lack of responses is often typical (Hine, 2000). After I had obtained enough respondents and data from the bulletin boards, I had to decide how to manage and collate numerous resources using numerous methodologies. There was an enormous amount of material to manage, including 60 hours of interviews, multiple media representations of Korean players in the late 1990s, and more than 10,000 bulletin board postings. I also had to decide how to synthesize different outcomes from different data sources. Because information gathered during interviews can differ from or even contradict postings, I knew that I would have to carefully synthesize the outcomes according to their sources. Hine (2000) has already identified this paradox: although pursuing face-to-face meetings with online informants might be intended to enhance authenticity, it might also threaten the experiential authenticity that comes from an understanding of the world the way it is for informants. In the end, I decided to treat my observations of the MLBPARK community, including my analysis of its bulletin boards, as primary, and data from face-to-face interviews as supplementary. Despite having spent much time deliberating this, it would be fair to say that this decision is an ad hoc one rather than a theoretical conclusion. Furthermore, people may not be entirely forthcoming in interviews— and internet ethnography is further complicated by the fact that any interviewee may maintain several online identities. The multiplicity of identities of internet participants is an interesting issue, but it should be treated with intense caution and its possible effect on study results must be taken into account at all times. In addition, the thoughts and feelings contained in postings may be neither transparent nor straightforward. Clearly, the issue of interpretation is endemic to internet ethnography. My experience in MLBPARK confirms this observation: many of the interviewees who volunteered for the research did not participate in the community actively, and some of them also expressed discomfort toward the prolific members and their thoughts in the community. The complexity involved in constructing online identities does allow the

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development of alternative identities, but offline identities and circumstances influence the parameters. The disjuncture between online and offline identities is testament to the contradictions and the fluidity of self-representation in the online community. Source materials of multiple origins are helpful in charting people’s experiences within any community in relation to larger societal changes. My goal was to consider both macro- and micro-levels of cultural phenomena; in this case, the kind of internet ethnography I was constructing would allow me to consider both micro- and macrodimensions of the Korean MLB fandom by connecting the transformative development of cultural and national identities by Korean MLB fans with political and economic changes in South Korea. Following Appadurai, my intent is for this study to “not be read as a mere case,” because “it is a site for the examination of how locality emerges in a globalizing world, of how colonial processes underwrite contemporary politics, of how history and genealogy inflect one another, and of how global facts take local form” (1996, p. 18). In this vein, I propose this book neither as only a study of the Korean MLB fandom nor a simple ethnography of Korean internet users who happen to be MLB fans, but rather a study of how specific yet changing conditions within global sports fans have been articulated into, and by, the country’s changing economic and political circumstances.

Chapter Outline The six chapters of this book are structured into two parts. Part I, “Sports Governmentality: Glocalization of American Sports in South Korea,” investigates the intertwined procedures of the globalization of American sports and of the emergence of their global fandom in South Korea. Through the lens of sport governmentality, I dissect the concrete procedures through which global sport was expanded into South Korea via an unusual alliance among the Korean government, transnational corporations, and American leagues. Part II, “Undoing Nationalism: Ethnography of Korean Major League Baseball Fans,” illuminates how Korean MLB fans consume and enjoy MLB online—a set of activities that help them to build individual and collective identities as global sports fans. Here, “undoing nationalism” refers not only to the processes of decentering and fragmentation but also to the process of discovering and revealing personal identities—not only within online communities but

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also as individualized expressions of nationalism. Korean MLB fans’ activities and thoughts reveal how nationalism, regionalism, and even globalism are unevenly articulated into the peculiar passion of global sports fandom. Part I delineates the complexity of global sports and fandom in South Korea with a focus on the turn of the new millennium. Chapter 2 starts with mapping the background and a theoretical discussion of nationalism in order to explain the significance of the success of a Korean athlete, Chan-ho Park, in the U.S. in the context of the national crisis in the late 1990s. To situate the MLB fandom in socio-structural contexts, this chapter examines the impact of South Korea’s economic crisis and the IMF intervention (1997–2001) on the country’s economic and political sectors. It also reviews the various discourses of Korean nationalism in order to detail the impact of the national crisis on its hegemonic nationalism. In Chapter 3, I outline how globalization brought American sports to South Korea in the late 1990s via an unusual alliance between the government, transnational corporations, and American sporting leagues along with strong nationalist discourses. By analyzing media representations of MLB and its star Korean player, this chapter contends that the ways of representing MLB and Chan-ho Park helped establish a new set of norms: the self-governing individual, economic success in global competition and responsibility to family and nation-state. Together, these norms functioned as a new model of citizenship, hereafter named the “national individual.” I further argue that the construction of the national individual encapsulates a new governmental rationality in which neoliberal principles and Korean nationalism are building unlikely alliances. Chapter 4 illuminates how global sports fans actively utilize the internet to build their own community and how they participate in online communities. This chapter focuses on the fans’ daily uses of MLBPARK and participation in their online community as ways to construct individual and collective identities. This participation demonstrates that fans’ activities do not replace traditional or offline identities but instead contribute to constructing multiple senses of spatialities and temporalities. Based on my fieldwork in the online community MLBPARK, Part II argues that Korean MLB fans are transforming structures of the national as they enjoy MLB and interact with other fans in their online community. I suggest that the Korean MLB fandom is a peculiar type of long-distance support, whose members virtually enjoy all the games and information about them from across the Pacific, and that this fandom is instigated by a combination of personal, arbitrary, and family experiences as well as by

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national emotion, a desire for modernization, and postcolonial anguish. Chapter 5 traces Korean fans’ narratives about becoming fans of MLB, most of whom began with their experiences of enjoying Chan-ho Park’s games in the late 1990s. I illustrate that becoming an MLB fan in South Korea often leads to a reconstitution of national imaginaries. I refer to this salient stream as national fandom, a term that also encapsulates the specific nature of global sports fandoms in many locations in Asia. While national fandom stands as the dominant strain, there also exist different and even conflicting strains of fandom. Several disputes query the qualifications of authentic fans and even disavow the national fandom of MLB among Koreans. Utilizing Raymond Williams’ notion of structures of feeling (1977), Chapter 6 illuminates how the structures of the national are changing as Korean MLB fans enjoy MLB in their online community. Korean MLB fans actively rationalize and advocate their national sentiments as a personal choice, based on their individual experiences. To capture the specific characteristics of global sports fandom in South Korea, I suggest the term “individuated nationalism,” which illuminates the reconstitution of fans’ national identities as their country underwent its painful transition from a developmental to a neoliberal state. Chapter 7 delineates how Korean MLB fans construct their regional and global perspectives via consuming and enjoying baseball. MLB becomes an arena in which these fans follow their national players, admire American baseball and its superb players, and encounter regional rivalries, including Japan, their former colonizer. This chapter focuses on the fans’ online interactions during the 2006 World Baseball Classic (an international tournament invented and organized by MLB). I suggest that the significance of MLB, beyond functioning as an interrogation between the global and the national, also contributed to heightening Korean fans’ regional consciousness and sensibilities. In the Postscript, I discuss the present state of studying global sports fandoms by answering two questions of how significant sport is in the transformation of cultural and national identity and how this book contributes to the expanding understanding of global sports fans in different times and spaces. With the hope for more rigorous and theoretical discussion to come, I explore the possibility and positivity of the global sports fandom in the contexts of post-Westernization, inter-Asian connections and political empowerment.

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Notes 1. I have mentioned the list of previous publications in the acknowledgements, parts of which have been reworked and updated for this book. 2. According to Kohn (1944), nationalism has become a universal element in the West after the French Revolution and the rule of Emperor Napoleon at the end of the eighteenth century. Nation-states, assisted by nationalism, have been regarded as the basic units for international relations or constructing world orders. Nationalism has been particularly effective and influential in the past two centuries while the nation-states strived either to expand its territories or to obtain independence during the imperial period and the Cold War. 3. For more discussion on economic nationalism, see Glassman (2004). Based on research on the economic changes of Thailand, Glassman (2004) argues that economic nationalism in Thailand is itself one of the products of neoliberalism and the orientation of these economic policies has been driven by complex interactions between transnational and social forces to which political parties and the state must reply while marginalizing and repressing the various groups. 4. Mignolo and Walsh highlight the election of Donald Trump and “the announced shift from ‘neoliberal globalism’ to ‘national Americanism’” as its examples (2018, p. 5). For a more detailed discussion of the resurgence of nationalism after 9/11, see Bratsis (2003), Callinicos (2003), and Kellner (2002). 5. According to the modernists, the idea of nationalism first asserted itself in the aftermath of the French Revolution and during the rule of Napoleon I. In this context, nationalism is seen as an essential element of the modern that is both politically and economically inevitable. According to Kohn (1944), nationalism became a universal element after the French Revolution. Anderson (1983) also points out that the creation of national artifacts happened in the end of the eighteenth century. Gellner (1983) insists that “it is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round” (1983, p. 55), and nationalism could invent the nation for an economic purpose, but not vice versa. By contrast, Smith and Calhoun are more moderate in the modernistic perspective. Calhoun states that “nationalism is distinctively modern,” but draws on “ethnic identities of long standing, on local kinship and community network” (1997, p. 29). By contrast, the primordial view emphasizes cultural and ethnic factors and does not regard nationalism as an inarguably modern phenomenon. It also emphasizes common territory, language, race, and cultural artifacts, but identifies common language as the most important element. According to the primordialists, attempts to arouse national sentiments or

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6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

invent national traditions cannot succeed unless the people already share a common culture and history. In 2019, the NBA has complicated its relations with China, which emerged as another big market for the NBA. With Morey, GM of the Houston Rockets, tweeting his support for Hong Kong’s protests against the Chinese government, the NBA has experienced significant financial losses in its Chinese market, as all NBA broadcasts in China have been suspended. In order to name transregional social movements, Clifford (1997) employs the term “globalization from below,” paired with “globalization from above,” to describe certain entanglements of modern diaspora networks. In my study, the term “glocalization” is more useful because the context shifts from diaspora networks to local fans who enjoy global sports. Similarly, Andrews and Ritzer (2007) conceptualize globalization as bound by globalization and glocalization to indicate interconnected but opposite directions of glocalization. Nightingale (1996) also decries researchers’ lack of reflexive engagement and the failure of media ethnographies to produce a dialogical text. The term “autoethnography,” coined in the 1970s, is closely linked to the feminist movement; autobiographies have been favored by second-wave feminism.

References Abu-Lughod, L. (2005). Dramas of nationhood: The politics of television in Egypt. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London and New York: Verso. Andrews, D. L., & Ritzer, G. (2007). The grobal in the sporting glocal. Global Network, 7 (2), 113–153. Andrews, D. L., Carrington, B., Jackson, S. J., & Mazur, Z. (1996). Jordanscapes: A preliminary analysis of the global popular. Sociology of Sport Journal, 12(4), 428–457. Ang, I. (1996). Living room wars: Rethinking media audience for a postmodern world. London and New York: Routledge. Ang, I. (2001). On not speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West. London and New York: Routledge. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis and London: The University of Minnesota Press. Baym, N. K. (2000). Tune in, log on: Soaps, fandom, and online community. Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage.

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Miller, D., & Slater, D. (2000). The internet: An ethnographic approach. Oxford and New York: Berg. Miller, T. (1993). The well-tempered self: Citizenship, culture, and the postmodern subject. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press. Miller, T. (1998). Technologies of truth: Cultural citizenship and the popular media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Moores, S. (1993). Interpreting audiences: The ethnography of media consumption. London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage. Morley, D. (1992). Television, audiences and cultural studies. London and New York: Routledge. Murphy, P. D., & Kraidy, M. M. (2002). Towards an ethnographic approach to global media studies. In P. D. Murphy & M. M. Kraidy (Eds.), Global media studies: Ethnographic perspectives (pp. 3–20). London and New York: Routledge. Nightingale, V. (1996). Studying audiences: The shock of the real. London: Routledge. Parameswaran, R. (2001). Global media events in India: Contests over beauty, gender and nation. Journalism & Communication Monographs, 3(2), 51–105. Radway, J. (1984). Reading the romance: Women, patriarchy, and popular literature. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina. Reid, E. M. (1996). Communication and community on Internet replay chat: Constructing communities. In P. Ludlow (Ed.), High noon on the electronic frontier: Conceptual issues in cyberspace (pp. 397–411). Cambridge: The MIT Press. Robertson, R. (1995). Glocalization: Time-space and homogeneityheterogeneity. In M. Featherstone, S. Lash, & R. Robertson (Eds.), Global modernities (pp. 25–44). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sassen, S. (2000). Spatialities and temporalities of the global: Elements for a theorization. Public Culture, 12(1), 215–232. Shin, G.-W. (2006). Ethnic nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, politics, and legacy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Shohat, E. (1992). Notes on the “post-colonial”. Social Text, 31(32), 99–113. Smith, A. D. (1993). The Nation: Invented, imagined, reconstructed? In M. Ringrose & A. J. Lerner (Eds.), Reimaging the nation (pp. 9–28). Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press. Spigel, L. (1992). Make room for TV: Television and the family ideal in postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tomlinson, J. (1999). Globalization and culture. Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press. Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the internet. New York: Simon & Schuster. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PART I

Sports Governmentality: Glocalization of American Sports in South Korea

CHAPTER 2

Sport and Crisis of Nation Under Globalization

To situate the Major League Baseball (MLB) fandom in the conjuncture of the national economic crisis in the late 1990s, this chapter explores both significance and crisis of nation in South Korea. In particular, it examines two dimensions of nation: nationalism and the nation-state of South Korea when it underwent globalization, and the economic crisis as the consequence of this globalization. A review of the hegemonic and oppositional discourses of nationalism in Korean modern history is necessary for understanding the complicated and tenacious relations between sport and nation, even in the crisis of nation in South Korea. In many parts of the globe, it often sounds as if the era of nationalism has come to an end as globalization and related ideas such as postmodernism and neoliberalism are sweeping the world. As the new millennium progresses, however, the resurgence of nationalism is becoming evident in many places. According to Morley and Robinson (1995), one of the main responses to globalization in Europe is the resurgence of nationalism, regionalism, and ethnic centralism; some scholars even suggest that rapid globalization directly produces these kinds of national or ethnic movements. At the same time, Smith warns that the revival of national sentiments should not be interpreted as a mere throwback to earlier nationalism, though he also agrees that “the great forces of globalization, economic, political and cultural have undermined the power of the nation-state” (1999, p. 254). Rather than generalizing all examples of © The Author(s) 2020 Y. Cho, Global Sports Fandom in South Korea, Palgrave Series of Sport in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3196-5_2

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resurgent nationalism as political manifestations of ethnicity, it is worth investigating how nationalism has been challenged, how it has changed, and how it has survived globalization in a specific context. Arguably, nationalism has always mattered in Korea; even now it plays an important role not only politically and economically but also in the cultural and ideological realms (Lim, 1999). Specifically, in South Korea, nationalism is not only a hegemonic ideology—it is also an accepted moral order throughout society. Globalization trends, for better or worse, have increased opportunities for Koreans to encounter foreign cultures and, consequently, their exposure to fertile ideas about national issues in the face of global changes. Its investigation of competing discourses and ongoing disputes around nationalist doctrine reveals how, despite major challenges, nationalism managed to survive South Korea’s economic crisis. Global sports and its popularity certainly enable Korean people who have less mobility to consume, experience, and appropriate foreign culture, landscapes, and commodities to the degree of transforming their own national identities and global perspectives. In this vein, the globalizing procedure, including the Asian economic crisis, provided a critical time for South Korea and its people to undergo both cultural and economic globalization, the latter of which and its connection to the conditions of government and the identity of the people have not yet been researched. Investigating South Korea’s crises of nationalism and nation-state as the country underwent an economic crisis is critical to understanding the contributions of a changing state’s capacity as well as nationalism to the increasing fandom of MLB and Chan-ho Park in South Korea.

Nationalism as a Hegemonic Ideology in South Korea As discussed in the Introduction, it is impossible to reach a unanimous conclusion on when the ideas of nation, nation-state, and nationalism were constructed in Korean history. Nonetheless, many academics in South Korea suggest that the modern notion of nation or nationalism had not been introduced into Korea’s society until the late nineteenth century. From this perspective, attacks by foreign countries such as Japan and Russia finally awakened a sense of nationality in the common people. Korean historians Lim (1999) and Park (1998, 2000) contend that the notion of nation in the Korean peninsula before the late nineteenth

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century should be understood differently from the modern definition of the nation: it was closer to ethnic nationality or pre-nationality (Choi, 1995; Park, 1994). Rather than following either the modernist or the primordial views, this study takes up another position: that Korean nationalism is a universal as well as a modern phenomenon in terms of being particular and specific just as Western nationalism is. This position advocates that Korean nationalism is as particular as it is universal, so it is important to trace important historic contexts and their impacts on the characteristics of Korean nationalism rather than to ask how exclusive or unique Korean nationalism is.1 In Korean modern history, I pay special attention to two incidents that were decisive in constructing Korean nationalism. The two incidents are the colonization by the Japanese Empire and the division into North and South Korea. To the colonized, nationalism tends to bear emancipatory implications that mobilize their opposition on both rational and emotional levels. In this sense, nationalism might function as a liberating ideology, not merely as a governing tool, in a society that experiences colonization. Having said that, however, I do not posit that (post-)colonial societies are fundamentally different from (post)colonizer or Western societies that have been independent for the last few centuries. Nor do I agree with privileging the Western model of nationalism over an Eastern model or a colonized model by rendering the first universal. Billig (1995) identifies such a dichotomy, in which the Western model of nationalism is regarded as neutral, harmless, and even virtuous, but by contrast, the Eastern model is presumed as representing exclusivity, brutality, and even fascism. These chronic dichotomies are echoed throughout discussions about Western and Eastern nationalism: good vs. evil, civil vs. ethnic, neutral vs. manipulated, peaceful vs. violent, and so on. To overcome such a dichotomy between Western and Eastern nationalisms, de-colonial thinking, concepts, and analytics are useful and necessary: that is to say, it is especially imperative to perceive coloniality as “constitutive of modernity,” so “there is no modernity without coloniality” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 3). By underscoring the two sides of the coin known as modernity/coloniality, Mignolo argues that coloniality is the “reverse and unavoidable side of ‘modernity’ – its darker side” (2000, p. 22).2 Under this rationale, there is no reason to assume the Western Empire or modernity as the de facto standard or fundamentally different from Eastern colonies or coloniality. Once applying this approach to the

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discussion of nationalism, Western and Eastern nationalisms are complementary, so that Eastern nationalism is also constitutive, not derivative, of Western nationalism.3 In so doing, we can think of diverse, different, distinct, but similar shared natures of nationalism, which highlight both the relational and pluriversal rather than the universal: according to Mignolo, “to take pluriversality as a universal project to which all contending options would have to accept” (2011, p. 23).4 In this vein, I think of Korean nationalism as both universal and particular, which well reflects its society’s colonial and Cold War experiences, trauma, and collective desire of overcoming them. The omnipresence, tenacity, and even everydayness of Korean nationalism are not only the consequence of very specific conjunctures of Korea’s modern history, but also a useful resource for thinking about the nationalism of its neighbor societies and former colonizer, and the continuing struggles and hatred among them (Ching, 2019). Colonial Experience and the Division of the Country in the Twentieth Century The colonial occupation by Japan and the enforced separation of North and South contribute to the interpretation of nationalism in South Korea as both historical praxis and incomplete mission: the former contributes to constructing the notion of nation without nation-state, and the latter enables the burgeoning of nationalism without nation. Firstly, the Japanese Empire occupied Korea between 1910 and 1945, and until the end of Chosun rule, Lim suggests, national sentiments remained at the level of nativism, which was a kind of “proto-nationalism” (Choi, 1995; Lim, 1999). Modern notions of nation and nationalism became prevalent specifically between 1884 (opening of the national market) and 1910 (the start of Japanese occupation). This order of events indicates that Koreans did not embrace nationalism as it is recognized today until the nation’s markets were involuntarily opened to foreign trade by the Japanese. Through the relentless attacks of foreign countries and the loss of national sovereignty to Japan, the notion of nationalism became widely recognized before the idea of nation-state had time to materialize, and thus, related concepts such as nation, state, and nation-state became clearly differentiated in the minds of Koreans. The earliest manifestations of nationalist thought in Korea functioned as articulated longings for independence from Japan. This motivation, in

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turn, fomented the acceptance of nationalism not only out of desperation but also as an indisputable doctrine. As Koreans experienced various forms of subjugation by the Japanese, they began to comprehend that a nation-state of their own would be indispensable not only for their national survival but for their private lives as well. In a similar way, they came to recognize that the possibility of fulfilling their personal interests and desires depended on the sovereign autonomy of their nation-state. Thus, nationalism became more than an ideology for Koreans: it functioned as an oracle that blended the recognition of the hardships of daily life with the understanding that the pursuit of national destiny, in the form of independence, could not be separated from the pursuit of personal dreams. After independence was achieved, governments of the nascent nation-state did not hesitate to utilize similar rhetoric in order to encourage people to sacrifice their personal interests for the good of the nation-state—in other words, for the sake of nationalism. This fusion of national and personal desires and efforts under the banner of nationalism was easily achieved because memories of the colonial occupation are constantly being repeated and even reimagined in Korean society. However, these reproduced memories, which are often exaggerated or even reinvented, in fact constitute yet another narrative of nationalism in South Korea (Morris-Suzuki, 2005). In sport, every athlete embodies his or her identity as national representative, so to be awarded a gold medal in the Olympics, for instance, has been represented as a national goal rather than a personal achievement (Cho, 2009). Also, Japan as former colonizer is still and perhaps will always be represented both as Korea’s most dangerous opponent and as an enemy to defeat for national survival. Coverage of the Olympics in Korean mass media, for example, portrays Japan in invariably negative terms when even North Korea, South Korea’s closer and more hostile enemy, receives a variety of labels that range from “evil” to “brother.” The media in South Korea, like the government, routinely uses historical narratives to publicize and stir interest in national events that further the national interest. If colonial experiences awakened Korea’s sense of nationalism without building a nation-state, secondly, the separation between North and South both intensified and distorted this sense, and, combined with the Korean Civil War (1950–1953), it gained particularly schizophrenic and counterintuitive features. While nationalism in South Korea was mobilized

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for South Korea and nationalism in North Korea did the same, nationalism in Korea becomes an ideology that is put to the service of the state rather than the nation. After the division and the civil war, people in South Korea also accepted that government use of concepts such as nation and nationalism referred to their state only. In this vein, Korean nationalism closely resembles statism, or state-nationalism. Independence from Japan had been achieved, but the notions of nation, state, and nationalism were still contradictory, confusing, and even abstract. When Korea became independent in 1945, and the separate states (North and South) were founded in 1948, ordinary people scarcely understood either the permanence or consequences of the split. Moreover, separation introduced a totally unfamiliar paradox to Koreans on both sides of the border, as their (eternal) nation came to exist in the form of two (temporal) states. Not only were the two governments and the border between their two peoples never fully accepted either politically or diplomatically by the people themselves, but also, neither government was willing to acknowledge the other. According to both North and South Koreans, whichever state they found themselves living in was the solely legitimate one. The governments on both sides of the border exploited these automatic affiliations by intentionally eschewing the descriptors of “North” and “South,” instead referring to both countries as “Korea.” At the same time, the nationalist rhetoric most accessible to the rest of the world, which originated in South Korea, generalized it as representative of both North and South—even as it excluded any mention of North Korea as a real, viable neighboring state. The onset of civil war shattered this complex but familial relationship: North Korea replaced Japan as South Korea’s most threatening enemy. Not only were the brothers of yesterday suddenly today’s bitter enemies, Koreans were additionally traumatized because they found it impossible to discern enemy from brother merely by appearance. The seemingly simple fact of which country one belonged to became difficult to determine because the border was frequently redrawn; even worse, people who cooperated temporarily with one side often experienced persecution when they found themselves to be on the other side (in one extreme case, a mountain village was controlled by the South during the day and by the North during the night). Although the battle lines gradually shifted from the mountainous areas of northern South Korea to the lower lands more readily identified with North Korea, some refugees from the North contrived to stay in the South. As Southern neighbors began to routinely

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accuse each other of being pro-North, and North Koreans who lived near the borders or battle lines began to suspect that their neighbors would prefer to live in the South, everyone began to experience living in an atmosphere of self-censorship and mistrust. After the war ended in 1953, the South Korean government continued to exploit the threat of renewed North Korean hostilities for political purposes. This threat provided a convenient excuse to suppress dissenting opinions and movements, particularly anti-government and anti-capitalist ones; the quickest and surest way to single out anyone for persecution was to call him a communist. The government also urged people to report any openly rebellious or even mildly suspicious activities, and rewarded South Koreans for turning in anyone who could be accused of spying for the North. Ordinary South Koreans became inundated with undocumented rumors about dangers posed by North Korea, especially during election seasons. Alleging that support for the current ruling party and government was the best way to keep families safe from North Korean aggression, successive South Korean governments disseminated propaganda meant to persuade people to support and vote for these entities. This type of propaganda, which depended on still-fresh, traumatic memories of the civil war, faithfully presented such memories as risks both present and impending. As had been the case before the war, South Korean governments continued to frame the terms “nation” and “nationalism” in terms of one nation, Korea, but actual references were about South Korea only. Thus, the idea became fixed in the minds of South Koreans that South Korea was in fact the entire nation, instead of a state within a divided nation, and that citizens’ loyalty belonged only to the South Korean government, not to Korea as a nation or to Koreans as a temporarily divided people. Memories of Japanese occupation and the civil war still haunt the everyday lives of Koreans just as the exploitation of these experiences in government propaganda has made the issue of nationalism represent more than ideology. Because the two Koreas remain divided, in principle, the civil war has not yet ended, and the DMZ along the border remains a menacing symbol. The political issues of pro-Japanese and pro-communist sentiments, which also continue to be controversial, still function as rallying points for a certain level of militarism in South Korea. Most males are required to serve in the army; military preparation was offered in universities until the 1970s and in high schools until the

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1990s. Civil defense training programs also continued until the early 1990s. Sporting events in which South Korea competes against North Korea or Japan, although only analogous to armed confrontations, attract enormous public attention and spark media frenzies. Developmental Nationalism as Hegemonic Ideology Because nationalism is a flexible entity, it can be embodied or concretized according to its affiliations and the social conditions in which it materializes. Accordingly, nationalism is in fact an ideology of prefix; if so, consideration of the specific ideology that it is affiliated with is highly worthwhile. Not only colonization and division, but also rapid development and military authoritarianism were the crucial contexts in which nationalism materialized in South Korea. Though there are several ways of defining nationalism, its most salient forms can be categorized into oppositional and developmental nationalism. In South Korea, developmental nationalism was a major ideology during the military regime in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Developmental nationalism, which was mainly deployed by governments and conservative groups, emphasized national growth, modernization, and the central role of the government in maximizing the efficiency of economic sectors for the sake of individual earnings and rights. In particular, it promotes increased export and industrialization in reference to indicators such as GNP (Gross National Product) and GDP (Gross Domestic Product). As a postcolonial nation, economic growth was essential for the founding of South Korea, but, at the same time, the division between North and South made South Korea’s quest for economic capability more desperate not only because of South Korea’s poor infrastructure at the time, but also because of its new and threatening rival, i.e., North Korea. The regimes that seized power through coups in 1961 and 1987 justified their authoritarianism and militarism, and thus secured their political legitimacy, by citing the goal of national economic development and the potent threat of North Korea. The dominance of developmental nationalism as a governing ideology received another boost by being conflated with anticommunism. As such, it was routinely cited as crucial to South Korea’s defense against the specter of North Korea and its communist ideology. Obviously, developmental nationalism can dovetail with the interests of businesses and mass media. In South Korea, this was primarily

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accomplished through propaganda narratives that equated national economic development with social values, particularly personal virtue. Thus, domestic conglomerates embraced developmental nationalism more warmly than any other ideology, often wielding it against labor unions and strikes in attempts to sway public opinion and appease the government. This alliance between the South Korean government and businesses peaked in the 1970s and 1980s, when successive regimes exchanged preferential treatment for illegal contributions. For its part, mass media perpetrated nationalist discourses both to minimize government scrutiny and control and because of their own cozy relationships with the business sector. Meanwhile, diversity within South Korean society, on both civic and individual levels, gradually suffocated due to this integration of nationalism and political power plays. In the 1980s, developmental nationalism remained an effective governmental tool with which to oppress organized dissent and to make individuals feel that they had no alternative but to comply. South Korea’s education system, military system, and long-standing tradition of public events (parades, award ceremonies, etc.) also support the rhetoric and narratives of developmental nationalism. The Ministry of Education’s official history textbooks repeatedly emphasize the racial and ethnic unity of Korea, along with the “economic miracles” South Korea has accomplished. These themes, which are routinely included in national ceremonies, are also given prominence in other school curricula and activities, in workplaces, and even in households. Developmental nationalism is further promoted in the country’s military education and draft systems, which also contribute to militarizing the societal environments overall (as well as maintaining the country’s constant sense of threat from North Korea). Sport played a very crucial role in mobilizing developmental nationalism by uniting the people and elevating their pride in the state. Authoritarian governments also invested maximum support for training elite athletes who could represent South Korea in international events. In the 1960s, the government actively supported national athletes by constructing training facilities and providing stipends in preparation for the Olympics. For instance, the government constructed the Korean National Training Center in which the best athletes were provided spaces for accommodation and training with the best equipment and coaching systems. In the 1980s, the South Korean government was routinely labeled a “sports republic” while holding the 1986 Asian Games and

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1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul. South Korean governments were very sensitive to world media representation of the country’s image and information through sporting events (Roche, 2003). The 1988 Seoul Summer Olympic Games contributed to “validat[ing] the nation’s view that it had earned standing among developed nations, surmounting untold obstacles after much hard work” (Cha, 2009, p. 56). By providing the state a platform for highlighting the country’s entering into the world stage, the 1988 Seoul Olympics catered to the overlapping interests of Korean businesses and the government (Tomlinson & Young, 2005). Another example of the state’s intervention into sports is the launch of a couple of professional sports leagues in the 1980s: the beginning of the Korean Professional Baseball League (KBO) in 1982 was celebrated as an indicator of economic growth, proof that the country and its people were ready to take part in consumer culture.5 In the face of such constant, unrelenting exposure, South Koreans were persuaded via developmental nationalism to unquestioningly sacrifice their individual interests for national benefit. By merging personal and national interests, this discourse still forms the core of South Koreans’ conviction that their personal destinies are one with the political destiny of their government and the economic destiny of their country. This merged sense of destiny assures South Koreans that they belong, voluntarily or not, to a national community: it is on the basis of this assurance that South Koreans construct their national identity. Despite the hegemonic position of developmental nationalism, oppositional nationalism has held its own in (South) Korea from its beginnings in the colonial period through separation and successive authoritarian regimes. Contrary to developmental nationalism, oppositional nationalism is based on people’s sentiments against their ruling entities that suppress and control people and society wrongfully and immorally. The Japanese Empire, authoritarian governments, and the U.S. military (and its political influence) would be the major targets against which oppositional nationalism would be opposed. In a sense, oppositional nationalism is meant to inculcate resistance against imperialism and corrupt power blocs. During the Japanese occupation, the manifestation of a form of nationalism based simply on the rejection of a ruling power invigorated Koreans to oppose the Japanese as best they could. After independence, oppositional nationalism remained relevant due to the widespread perception that de facto occupation by the U.S.S.R. in the North, and by the U.S. in the South, was condemning the nation to a semi-colonial state that would endure

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until reunification, free of intervention from other political entities and foreign influences, could be accomplished. Perhaps anti-colonialism is a more fundamental generator of oppositional nationalism. Oppositional nationalism strongly appeals to South Korean labor unions, anti-capitalist activists, pro-democracy agitators, liberal student movements, progressive intellectuals, and even politicians no longer in office. These groups have promoted it, similarly to oppositional groups in other Third World countries, as a universal principle involving egalitarianism and human rights. Contrary to adherents of developmental nationalism, groups motivated by the rationales and rhetoric of oppositional nationalism have also opposed the South Korean governments that worked against unification and used the North Korean threat to justify suppression. Key causes for oppositional nationalists, who view it as an ideology of liberation, include human rights, improved labor conditions, the rights of free speech and public protest, and other domestic issues (Kwon, 2001).6 Therefore, this doctrine is popular among working and lower-class people. This perception can be seen today in the theoretical and ideological framework that oppositional nationalism offers to activists, progressive politicians, and student groups. Although oppositional nationalism has never been the dominant discourse of South Korean mass media and public education, it nonetheless supplies a utopian vision and individual aspirations that inspire deep loyalty, even at great personal cost. In spite of its minority status, it continues to challenge the dogmas and discourses of developmental nationalism and to provide an alternative ideology to anti-government groups. Even as the country increasingly met its economic goals and the lives of individual Koreans steadily improved in the mid-1990s, nationalism remained firmly rooted and hegemonic, seemingly eliciting more widespread, voluntary conformity and consent. In a sense, both forms of nationalism—developmental and oppositional—are two faces of the same coin in that these nationalisms provided people a set of rules, norms, and ethics that they must follow or adopt.

The Crisis of Nation-State During the Asian Economic Crisis The cultural and economic globalization in the 1990s brought huge challenges upon the people’s perceptions of developmental nationalism, as

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well as the roles of the nation, nationalism, and the domestic governments. This section reviews the crisis of nation-state in South Korea while it underwent the economic crisis, which began as part of the Asian economic crisis in the 1990s. Caused by a shortage of foreign funds, the economic crisis forced the South Korean government to ask for a relief fund from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in December 1997 and accept its reformation plan that initiated intensive and extensive neoliberalization in Korean society. This economic crisis, which is often dubbed as the IMF intervention in South Korea, officially lasted until 2001, but its impact has lasted longer and taken root in Korea’s society and its people. The Asian Economic Crisis of the late 1990s and the case of the South Korean government provide ideal examples of the processes in which the state power has become increasingly permeable with the increased flow of people, products, and ideas brought about by globalization (Appadurai, 2000; Hardt and Negri, 2000).7 Evidently, it is clear that “the Asian economic crisis appeared to signal the end of those East Asian industrial juggernauts whose successful assaults on global markets had been based on state intervention and industry policy” (Robinson, 2004, p. 406). While Korean governments had great difficulty dealing with the financial crisis, however, the power of the governments has not drastically decreased, but rather their roles and degrees of influences have changed as a result of their compliance and compromise with the IMF. Structural Transformation Under the IMF Intervention In exchange for relief funds, the IMF required the South Korean government to carry out a comprehensive structural adjustment. Although the actual changes were carried out by the government, the IMF imposed its own diagnosis and measures. The four main requirements were: (1) decentralization of financial markets by opening them to foreign investment and increasing the transparency of Korean currency and financial transactions; (2) increasing labor market flexibility; (3) restructuring the country’s financial sectors and its major conglomerates; and (4) cutting the government’s public budget. The first two demands received more compliance than the others.8 The IMF’s requests for market decentralization and currency transparency were intended to break the traditional relationship between the economic and political sectors. During the developmental periods, domestic corporations, due to the government’s previous imposition of

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arbitrary state power onto financial markets, had become used to a system in which the raising and distribution of capital were dependent upon interactions between market and state instead of being guided by market values. Autonomous management and the setting of market values were meant to tempt global investment companies to increase their investments and shares. Some progress had already been made in the early 1990s; these efforts gained momentum when South Korea joined the WTO (World Trade Organization) and OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) in 1996. Unfortunately, however, the Kim-Youngsam government reduced its control of the country’s financial markets without proper preparation in the mid-1990s (Cho, 2003).9 The resulting increase of direct foreign capital, including hedge funds and short-term investments, brought about massive destabilization. The eventual withdrawal of foreign capital in 1997 precipitated an immediate, nationwide economic crisis (Kim et al., 2005). Ironically, the crisis that had been largely caused by the unregulated influx of short-term foreign investments would be settled by opening Korean financial markets to global investments based only on market principles, with no governmental regulation. The IMF’s second demand, to enhance labor market flexibility and thereby increase Korean companies’ profitability, forced many companies to boost efficiency by cutting permanent staff and increasing the number of temporary workers. Although the percentages of fired and unemployed workers varied, less-skilled and low-income workers were particularly vulnerable (Kim, 2004; Shin, 2004).10 Therefore, the most immediate impact of the economic crisis was the polarization of Koreans’ economic status. In order to cooperate with the IMF’s requirements, the government hastily promoted a series of deals among conglomerates that consisted of small-company swaps, mergers, and consolidations. Both political and economic considerations influenced these deals, which in turn caused more mass layoffs and more hiring of temporary employees. As a result of these structural adjustments, the Korean labor market was soon characterized by the shortest average term of continuous service of any country in the OECD. Such concepts as mass layoffs, temporary employment, and annual salary negotiations became the new buzzwords. When the labor market became so flexible that it was in fact unstable, Koreans reluctantly accepted the reality that they were no longer safe in their occupations and fell prey to the constant feeling of insecurity and helplessness.

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The third demand, to restructure major conglomerates, was not met thoroughly. In the early days of the intervention, the government engineered deals among the conglomerates by providing bailouts in exchange for their cooperation with reform procedures. Ownership structures hardly changed, however; CEOs and their families continued to control entire conglomerates by retaining majority shares in their mother companies. This uninterrupted concentration of power meant that executives in one company continued to control numerous affiliated companies with a relatively small initial outlay. As the immediate impact of the economic crisis began to subside, conglomerates stepped up their resistance to the IMF’s policies: executives criticized certain reformations in the media as “anti-market” and “active government intervention.” Neither was a tradition of responsible management established by the IMF. One example is Woojoong Kim, the former president of Daewoo, the third-largest conglomerate in South Korea before the economic crisis. Before the crisis, Woojoong Kim symbolized the ideal successful businessman who had quickly elevated his company to global levels. However, his reputation plummeted when he was convicted of embezzlement in 1999 and left South Korea for China.11 Before his emigration, he took no responsibility for his actions and passively observed Daewoo’s collapse. As the fourth IMF requirement, public budgets were cut, but the ideal balanced budget was not achieved because the budgets were not reduced to the level outlined in the initial plan. This demand failed because of the central role played by the Korean government in the enactment of the IMF’s requests. For example, the government distributed bailouts, purchased junk bonds, and suggested tax exemptions for conglomerates that went along with various deals. In addition, the government directly oversaw the restructuring of the country’s banking system (as part of the more general opening of financial markets). In pursuit of these goals, nearly $85 billion in public funds was disbursed to promote mergers of small, weak financial groups and banks with larger, stronger ones. The goal of achieving a balanced budget was doomed by this expenditure of public monies in the name of executing structural adjustments. Although eventually South Korea was “hailed as the first country to pay back the IMF loans it received in late 1997” (Joo, 2000, p. 319), it could be summarized that the structural adjustments mandated by the intervention were, at best, selectively accomplished. Selective reform was a predictive outcome from a series of compromises among competing

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interests: conglomerates, which did not want to give up their privileges; the government, which strove to retain its central role in the country’s economy; and the IMF, which did not want to rouse public resistance by demanding aggressive reforms. As a result, strange hybrids of markets, crony relationships, and arbitrary exercises of state power manifested instead of “good governance” or even “neoliberal governance.” In retrospect, these outcomes imply that the goals of structural adjustment guided by the IMF might have been to guarantee market predictability, financial transparency, and a flexible labor force so that foreign investors could invest safely for predictable returns, rather than to construct a truly market-based economy in South Korea. Shifts of Governmental Power and Roles The economic disaster and the responses of the government in 1997 revealed the inefficiency and incompetence of the South Korean government. Mismanagement of the shortage of foreign currency left the government, and by extension the country, powerless in the face of global agencies. In practice, however, both the manner and degree of governmental economic intervention altered when the government began to compete against, negotiate with, and co-opt the global institutes, transnational corporations (TNCs), and domestic conglomerates. In so doing, the government consolidated its initiatives into a new sphere in which it began to “coordinate” relationships between economic actors, produce new regulatory rules, and channel certain economic interests to new areas. It also participated in the restructuring process through deregulation, reduction of tax rates, and purchase of junk bonds issued by companies that complied with mergers and acquisitions. Needless to say, such governmental participation and agency seemed rather paradoxical, given that the IMF’s plans were supposed to constrain rather than increase it. Because of these complex circumstances and interactions, the structural reform guided by the IMF ended up changing the South Korean government from a developmental model to a post-developmental one, rather than to a neoliberal state based on laissez-faire (Cho, 2004, 2012).12 To be specific, the economic crisis changed its developmental regime into a neo-developmental one, under which the relationship between government and businesses became a “collaborative symbiosis.” Before the 1990s, South Korea had been regarded for decades as a typically developmental state (in which the government involves itself in the whole

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economic process in order to maximize production elements for foreign trade). The country was widely recognized as an example of a successful export-oriented industrialization strategy, meaning that its governments promoted exports for national profit. Nonetheless, such a neoliberal shift of the Korean government was initiated before the IMF intervention: most representatively, in 1994, the Kim-Youngsam government abandoned long-term plans and dismantled the Central Economic Board that used to epitomize the developmental state model. In the mid-1990s, the government also opened its economic border by joining the WTO and the OECD. In 1994, President Youngsam Kim announced that Segyehwa [the Korean way of globalization] would now be a national motto. To keep up with global standards, therefore, the government continued to deregulate some economic sectors, increase the maximum allowable amount of foreign investment in Korean corporations, reduce its own influence on foreign exchange control, and replace the fixed exchange rate with a variable one. These changes became extensive and intensive when the IMF enforced its restructuring plans in the late 1997. In the political sector, a milestone happened: Daejung Kim, a presidential candidate from a minority party that had been out of power for several decades, was elected in December 1997—one month after the Kim-Youngsam government asked the IMF for debt relief funds. A regime change by democratic vote was unprecedented in Korean political history, this occasion being the first among its 15 presidential elections since 1948. Since the coup in 1961, the ruling party had continued its control either by indirect election or by seizing power through another military coup, which was also the case for the developmental regime. The ruling party’s loss in 1997 was a direct result of the economic crisis and ensuing public frustration. This regime change paved the way for the new government to carry out the structural adjustments enforced by the IMF. The new government, e.g., the Kim-Daejung government underscored its breaking off from the previous power blocs. The new president was famous for being an opposition leader and activist for labor and human rights: he also won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 for his work for democracy and human rights in South Korea. With support from the working classes, therefore, the Kim-Daejung government was able to be actively involved in managing conflicts between labor and capital during the structural reform. The best example of this management was the Korean Tripartite Commission (KTC), launched by the government in 1998. It included members who represented both capital (from the Federation of

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the Korean Industries or FKI) and labor (from the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions). The KTC aimed at seeking a compromise between the capital and the political sectors, and its core issue was increasing flexibility in the labor market of South Korea. Meanwhile, labor issues had become critically important: under the auspices of the KTC, the Kim-Daejung government organized negotiations between the FKI and various trade unions about mass layoffs, retirement plans, temporary employees, and more. These KTC negotiations and the government’s role in mediating them did much to salvage the reputation of the government in South Korea, because some of the largest mass layoffs and waves of early retirement had been caused by government-brokered mergers. Because of the KTC’s existence, the government could avoid blame for enforcing corporate decisions and for oppressing labor by carrying out IMF-mandated reforms, and it could also treat the trade unions as equal partners in both economic and political decision making. The KTC was an unusual cooperative venture between the government, capital, and labor that struck many political compromises. Its importance was recognized by the IMF, who saw it as an ally in the construction of a market-based economy in South Korea and who allowed or even encouraged the Korean government to actively intervene in disputes between capital and labor (Cho, 2004). The transformation of the Korean government and its relations with economic sectors during the Asian economic crisis illuminate the contemporary arrangement of global power: the complexities between state and the emerging global agents. Despite the unprecedented influences and harnesses from various global agents, the South Korean governments still played the role of critical agents with different mechanisms of exerting power, which paradoxically confirmed that the local government no longer wielded its exclusive power as it used to. As Hardt and Negri (2004) insinuate in their discussion on the global arrangement of the nation-state, the South Korean government actively negotiated with supranational institutions, major capitalist corporations, and other powers including local companies, organizations, and labor unions, but its main tasks were to guarantee market order, a transparent capital system, and labor flexibility. As the result of the hybrid of politics and markets throughout the restructuring process, it is fair to say that the South Korean government succeeded in maintaining some power positions and influences, although their roles are changed and negotiated by global agents. At the same time, it needs to be highlighted that global agents

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such as the IMF did not require total reform both of the economic infrastructure and of the local government because its goal is not necessarily to accomplish an ideal type of neoliberal government, which is rare in the contexts of South Korea and Asian countries.13 As Robinson (2004) argues, such selective reform under the IMF aimed to constitute a strange hybrid of markets, crony relationships, and arbitrary state power rather than a neoliberal government. In short, the South Korean government was able to hold onto some of its power despite its failure in facing and handling economic globalization. Furthermore, the new government in 1998 attempted to regain its legitimacy by coordinating and participating in the economic sectors. During this process, it was crucial for the newly elected government to develop a discourse of economic reform for the nation by evoking nationalistic sentiments among the Korean people (Shin, 2000).

Crisis and Survival of Nationalism During the Economic Crisis The economic crisis and subsequent structural reform in the late 1990s brought about fundamental challenges to nationalism. During the 1970s and early to mid-1980s, when South Korea enacted its “economic miracle” of rapid industrialization, the discourse of national development functioned as an ideology that effectively united people in the service of one goal: “Let us live well like others.” By forcing people to rethink their notion of national development, however, the national crisis changed “the ideological configuration of each social force, including cultural and political ideologies” (Shin, 2000, p. 427). Most importantly, the economic crisis critically damaged the popular acceptance of the rhetoric of nationalism and national development. As they observed the South Korean government’s incompetence and powerlessness in the face of global market demands, the people realized that the government could no longer guarantee or even protect their personal welfare. They therefore stopped believing in the propaganda that pitched national development as a necessary prerequisite for the improvement of individual lives, and also stopped taking at face value governmental promises that guaranteed the average citizen’s well-being. Even after 2001, when the government finished paying back what they owed the IMF, many Koreans continued to suffer economically and socially. Consequently, the link between the nation-state and its citizens came under

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serious scrutiny. Korean people also began to recognize the negative sides of the development regime, which had engineered economic success under military authoritarian governments. Government bureaucracy as well as liaisons between the government and domestic companies, and the dominance of family-owned conglomerates that were once accepted as positive symbols of Korea’s economic model emerged as serious obstacles to Korea’s competitiveness in the age of global development. Drastic changes in South Korea’s relationship with North Korea also contributed to the decline of South Koreans’ unquestioning acceptance of nationalism. President Daejung Kim introduced his Sunshine Policy in a speech at London University in 1998, explaining that it was to become his country’s major strategy for dealing with North Korea. The name was inspired by Aesop’s fable “The North Wind and the Sun” in which warm sunshine, rather than forceful wind, makes a traveler remove his coat. President Kim intended to breach the wall between North and South Korea by removing restrictions on private investment in North Korea, providing humanitarian aid when needed, and holding joint cultural events. The three cornerstones of the policy specified that no armed provocation by North Korea would be tolerated; that the South would not attempt to absorb the North; and that the South would actively seek cooperation between the two countries. One of the most dramatic displays of reconciliation took place during the opening ceremony of the 2000 Summer Olympics, when the teams of both North and South Korea marched hand in hand into Sydney Olympic Park (Cho, 2009; Lee & Maguire, 2009). For the next two weeks, South Korean media referred to North Korea’s athletes as “brothers” and people in both countries cheered for both delegations. This peaceful mood, however, was in stark contrast to the serious confusion among South Koreans about the boundary of nation and the implications of nationalism. These and other attempts at dialogue and reconciliation stimulated serious reconsideration in South Korean society of the North-South division, the separation of Koreans into “us” and “them,” the boundary of “our nation,” and the question of “Whose nationalism?” The latter became a particularly controversial topic as North Korea had for so many years been presented as South Korea’s most threatening enemy and anticommunism as one of the core ideologies of South Korean nationalism.

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In the academic realm, liberal and even progressive intellectuals came to criticize Korean nationalism, focusing on its oppressiveness and exclusivity, which was prevalent in everyday life in Korea. Along with critiques against the government’s propaganda and political deployment of (developmental) nationalism, at this time, academics began to publish negative critiques of the effects of (both developmental and oppositional) nationalism on both everyday life and South Korea’s political process. Many of these critiques dared to single out the omnipresence of nationalism in South Korean society, along with its oppressiveness, the combination of which had kept orthodox nationalism both indisputable and unquestionable. Some academics went so far as to observe that, in its present form, Korean nationalism enacted the supposedly moral function of mandating that people judge each other’s personal choices in the name of “nation” (Lim, 1999). For members of student organizations and labor groups, which had long recognized and rejected this syndrome, claiming one’s individual rights could even mean sacrificing one’s life—again, for the future of the nation, albeit a very different kind of future than the one promoted by government-generated nationalism. Academic groups also criticized the exclusivity of Korean nationalism, particularly the myth that all of Korea, North and South, is a racially homogenous nation. Traditionally, school systems and mass media were expected to promote the idea that the Korean nation had preserved its ethnic, genetic, and linguistic purity; in any case, Koreans were expected to be proud of their ethnic unity and pure blood. To be sure, this propaganda was sustained not only by the education of Korean history but also by state policy: the South Korean government had mandated heavy restrictions on immigration, so much so that as late as the 1990s, 98% of the South Korean population was ethnically Korean. The drawback of this artificially maintained societal purity, which scholars as well as leftist groups began to openly discuss for the first time, was that South Koreans lacked experience when it came to contact with people different from themselves and, consequentially, thought and behaved in ways that were seen as ignorant and narrow-minded by the outside world. Such xenophobia became a front-burner issue in the new millennium as more foreigners began to arrive in South Korea, some on business related to the IMF intervention and the country’s economic restructuring and others (mostly from developing nations in Southern Asia and Eastern Europe) as laborers.

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In response to these circumstances, intellectuals began to argue that it was time to denounce the exclusivity of South Korean nationalism. Their point of view was aided by two more important changes globalization began to render in the everyday lives of Koreans. Until 1989, South Koreans’ experiences abroad had been constrained by the necessity of obtaining special permission for traveling internationally. After these restrictions were lifted, however, young people (particularly college students) rushed to backpack across Europe and to learn English in English-speaking countries (particularly the U.S.). Group tours to the U.S. and Japan also became immensely popular in the 1990s. These new travel opportunities exposed participants to societies vastly different from their own, which in turn encouraged ordinary people to rethink their own lives at home. Also, after the Kim-Youngsam government announced Segyehwa as the new national motto in 1994, English proficiency became important and even mandatory in South Korean society.14 Not only were scores from standardized tests such as the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) now routine requirements in any admissions or hiring process, such scores and the skills they represented were even used to judge people on a personal level. These societal trends were noted by Shim and Park (2008), who state that Koreans are not really seeking linguistic competence per se when they learn English, but rather the social and economic advantages that can be gained through the symbolic capital of English. In this sense, in South Korea, competence in English is sought not as a linguistic skill but as a form of distinction (Shim & Park, 2008). Such experiences, both mediated and direct, of encountering foreignness further stimulated South Koreans to evaluate their nation-state and its nationalism, and their relationships with all things foreign, in ways they never had before. Thus, in daily practices, drastically increased mobility and the escalating importance of learning English led to important changes in the everyday lives and perceptions of Koreans. As shown, the challenges faced by Korean nationalism in the late 1990s were not caused only by the economic crisis; instead, they originated from a variety of sources including the political landscape, academic discussions, and even experiences that became common in the everyday lives of Koreans. Nationalism could not continue to occupy its place of sacred privilege while challenges to it intensified due to the growing influence of global forces and worsening personal conditions at home.

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Survival of Nationalism During the Economic Crisis As previously mentioned, the years of the economic crisis (1997–2001) saw enormous changes in South Korea’s combination of governmentsponsored developmental ideology, major conglomerates, crony relationships, and deeply entrenched nationalism. Above all, a sense of crisis and even failure became prevalent among the people, accompanied by intense frustration with the notion of national development and related government propaganda. Eventually, this disillusionment began to topple the hegemony of developmental nationalism. As the intervention dragged on and the national mood sank into deeper and deeper gloom, it became urgent, if not entirely acceptable, to constitute an alternative hegemonic ideology. After the beginning of the crisis and the election of a new president in 1998, a discourse of reform became popular right away. Due to the negative aspects of economic success, and also because of international pressure, South Koreans realized that reform was essential to the survival of their society. This discourse delivered political benefits as well. With the motto of reform, for example, a minority candidate, Daejung Kim, effectively separated himself and his party from the ruling party, government corruption, and incompetence. After the election, the discourse of reform spread to every sector of Korean society, and thus a social consciousness that is identifiable with the idea of progress was born in South Korea. The necessity of reforming South Korea’s economic and political systems was so great that for a while it seemed as if reform would become the new hegemonic ideology. The foci in the reform of the Kim-Daejung government lay in the economic changes for overcoming the economic crisis: along with economic reforms, the most urgent tasks were restructuring the relations between the political and economic sectors. The Kim-Daejung government urged several conglomerates and their CEOs to announce specific plans for reform and to make tangible efforts to carry them out. Practices such as loan dependency, crony sponsorship, indiscriminate investments, and family ownership or nepotism were all meant to be discontinued. Politically, the crucial goal was to remove black-market contributions from campaigns in order to stop the routine collusion of political and economic interests. However, as the immediate shock of the economic crisis began to fade, it became clear that the discourse of reform could not fully replace developmental nationalism. Reformist doctrine was unable to supply useful

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replacements for the previous export-oriented, industrialist narratives that had been central in nationalism for decades. Although the discourse of reform sounded inspiring and was undoubtedly timely, it failed to provide the detailed directions and goals the society needed. For whom and in which directions reforms were to be carried out remained unclear. This confusion was augmented by the Kim-Daejung government’s inability to generate specific institutional and administrative policies. President Kim identified himself as loyal to the IMF’s policies, and his government strived to exemplify the IMF’s restructuring plans and to enact economic policies based on neoliberal principles. Due to his party’s lack of vision as well as his own inability to execute its plans, both the president and the party began to lose necessary credibility. In turn, the government began to lose the support and confidence of the labor party, which had been willing to cooperate with it in the early days of the IMF intervention. Discourses of reform lost momentum as a result, which further damaged their potential to become hegemonic. Hesitation about and resistance to reform arose from other quarters as well. Most of the disputes centered on how much change was appropriate for South Korea’s economic sectors. Although public requests for reform persisted, conglomerates and their CEOs either postponed announcing plans for restructuring operations or replaced detailed, mandatory reform plans with vague, personalized ones. They also tried to deflect attention from their excesses and internal corruption by blaming the IMF intervention on political interests. This strategy received some support when several politicians and mass media outlets questioned the extent of the reforms proposed by the government as well as by the IMF. Criticism of the rapidity and direction of reform by a few elected officials also bolstered CEOs’ attempts to evade responsibility for the conditions that had led to the economic crisis. Some of the more conservative media outlets suggested that slower-paced and more thoughtfully considered economic reforms would be better than swift, radical ones. More generally, the media used the rhetoric of national interest to oppose extensive reform. Gradually, the discourse of reform was supplanted by another version of economic nationalism in which terms such as “the national” and “nationstate” were used in a very specific neomercantilist sense. This modified version appealed to South Koreans’ nationalistic sentiments, even though replacing one kind of nationalistic ideology with another during a time

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of crisis appeared to be counterproductive. The commitment of ordinary South Koreans to maintaining some form of nationalist affiliation, however, remained unchanged even though they were disappointed with the responses of government and domestic corporations to the economic crisis. Instead of openly rejecting nationalism as a governing ideology, they tended to rationalize their disappointment by blaming the country’s economic woes upon the encroachment of global interests such as the IMF and TNCs. Even when nationalism is felt to be inadequate, it still appeals to people emotionally. The eventual recovery of nationalistic ideology in South Korea was driven by complex interactions between transitional and social forces that involved political parties and the state, with vast support from domestic corporations, major media, and ordinary people. For example, the Gold Drive Campaign of 1998 heavily utilized nationalistic discourse in ways that strongly reminded South Koreans of its relevance and effectiveness. This campaign, which was initiated by a few local banks that were quickly joined by media corporations and the government, asked for private donations of gold to help pay the national debt. Not only did gold seem more valuable than currency on an emotional level, but using it to alleviate the economic crisis also made more sense pragmatically because the price of gold had remained consistent whereas the exchange rates of the Korean won had suffered greatly from shortages of foreign currency. Moreover, the emotional value of gold was far from idealistic or imaginary: gold items had long enjoyed prominence in Korean society as gifts and legacies. Gold was a commodity that families were expected to own, but not to use for routine transactions. A similar effort, the Movement of Compensation for National Debt, had been implemented in 1907 when Koreans were asked to donate money or valuable possessions for the reduction of Korea’s “national debt” to its colonizer, Japan. Ninety-one years later, the analogy between Japanese domination and the IMF intervention, which was seen as an economic form of colonization, brought forth a desperate, emotional response. The South Korean mass media evoked memories of the earlier movement to provoke the latent nationalistic sentiments of citizens and thereby encourage them to participate in the new initiative. The 1998 campaign was also executed very systematically: schools and large conglomerates advertised it and transported the collected gold to local banks or other collection sites. The Gold Drive Campaign did much

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to unite public opinion under the flag of nation and to resuscitate nationalism in South Korean society. Similar uses of nationalistic discourses were also taking place in other Asian countries whose economies had been negatively affected by global intervention. In reaction to various outside forces, people were often drawn to nationalistic economic policies. For example, the Thai government embraced economic nationalism as a direct descendant of neoliberalism. Although South Korea’s particular circumstances were unique, the reemergence of nationalistic discourse there during the IMF intervention was in line with other Asian countries that were also experiencing shortages of foreign currency.

The Fever Pitch of American Sports in South Korea The context of the economic crisis and the extensive structural reform guided by the IMF are crucial for understanding the explosion of public interest in MLB and Chan-ho Park as the first Korean MLB player in South Korea. As discussed in the Introduction, Park was originally recruited by the L.A. Dodgers in 1994 and had spent a couple of seasons in the minor leagues. After becoming a regular starter in 1996, he was named one of the best MLB pitchers in 1997 and played a vital role on the team until 2001. His annual salary reached almost $10 million that year, in addition to his income from sponsorships by multinational corporations such as Nike and domestic South Korean corporations such as Hyundai. Mass media images of Park were published almost continuously in South Korea between 1997 and 2001, the years during which he played best. TV networks broadcast his games nationwide and ran clips of him repeatedly during their regular news programs. Newspapers and magazines closely covered his exploits on the ball field and published detailed interviews. When he reached milestones such as his tenth and fifteenth wins in a single season, these events were trumpeted on the covers of newspapers and magazines. Stories about him were written from numerous perspectives: some focused on boosting national pride, others explored his effects on Korean immigrant communities in the U.S., and still others evaluated the influence of his economic success on his home country. During the daunting days of the IMF intervention, media coverage of Park ubiquitously supplied literal representations

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of South Korea’s greatest success and future potential. The positive, optimistic quality of these representations, which were endemic to citizens’ everyday lives, implied that the country could and would someday compete successfully with the rest of the world. Park’s impact was not limited to mass media, however. Many Korean baseball fans began to replace their interest in the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) with a passion for MLB. As long as Park’s impressive MLB success continued, the number of MLB fans and dedicated websites multiplied in South Korea, and ready knowledge of teams, players, and games rapidly became commonplace. Even Koreans unfamiliar with the basic rules of baseball acquainted themselves with MLB players’ names. Park traversed the boundary of sports to become an icon—a role model for every Korean. The next chapter will see various governmental engagements in Park’s surging popularity and mass media representation of Park and MLB when competition among various ideologies and changes in the dominant forms of ideology lasted throughout the period of time surrounding the turn of the millennium.15 While the public’s strong initial desire for political and economic reform was successfully merged with a nationalistic ideology rooted in and articulated through the ideas of neoliberalism, the media representation of Park reveals how nationalist sentiments were re-articulated along with the increasing logic of globalization and neoliberalization.

Notes 1. In order to emphasize its distinction, for instance, the manufactured term minjok (民族) is borrowed from a Korean word meaning “nation.” 2. For a discussion on modernity/coloniality in Latin America, see Escobar (2007) and Mignolo (2000, 2011). 3. This idea comes from Mignolo and Walsh’s proposition that “coloniality is constitute, not derivative, of modernity” (2018, p. 4). 4. In explicating other possibilities in design theory and practice, Escobar actively adopts the idea of “pluriverse” in his book (2019). 5. An authoritarian government in the 1980s launched the professional baseball league, named KBO in 1982, in order to divert people’s attention away from politics. 6. Kwon (2001) points out that nationalism in the Third World or colonized societies is not necessarily progressive while admitting that it might have the potential for being radical. 7. In regard to the changing powers and roles of the state, Hardt and Negri also add, “the era of globalization has not brought the end of

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nation-state and nation-states have been displaced from the position of sovereign authority” by international trade and security bureaucracies like the United Nations, WTO, and IMF (2003, p. 109). For details on the aftermath of the IMF crisis in South Korea, see the articles from the special issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies in 2000, including Cho (2000), Shin (2000), Kang (2000), and more. According to Cho (2003), the government initiated this New Economy Policy in 1994. Meanwhile, the amount of foreign direct investment in South Korea increased by six times from 1990 to 1996. According to Shin (2004), the impact of the economic crisis during the IMF intervention was most salient among labor groups: for instance, workers in the technical service sector experienced the highest job loss ratio (about 21% of them lost their jobs). In 1999, Woojoong Kim had disappeared after participating in the opening ceremony of his companies in China. After spending several years abroad, he returned to South Korea in 2006 and was put on trial for embezzlement. Cho (2004) defines the South Korean system before 1987 as the developmental state: he refers to developmentalism as an export-orientation or development-driven society which only highlights the increase of GDP and GNP or the total exports. For the discussion of the development and variations of neoliberalism in Asia, see Ong (2006) and Chua (2010, 2017). The inordinate fever of learning (American) English is not limited to South Korea: rather, it applies to East Asia in general. Chen (2000) comments that American English became the first foreign language to be acquired in East Asia; in Singapore, the popularization of English was a key initiative in switching the society to export-oriented industrialization. By describing the roles of Indian cricketers for political and national values, Nalapat and Parker (2005) suggest that modern-day professional sports stars might transcend their occupational locales to become wider public figures, national ambassadors, global commodities, and/or popular cultural icons.

References Appadurai, A. (2000). Grassroots globalization and the research imagination. Public Culture, 12(1), 1–19. Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London and Thousand Oaks: Sage. Cha, V. D. (2009). Beyond the final score: The politics of sport in Asia. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Chen, K.-H. (2000). The imperial eye: The cultural imaginary of a subempire and a nation-state. Positions, 8(1), 9–76. Ching, T. S. L. (2019). Anti-Japan: The politics of sentiments in postcolonial East Asia. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Cho, H.-Y. (2000). The structure of the South Korea developmental regime and transformation—Statist mobilization and authoritarian integration in the anticommunist regimentation. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 1(3), 408–426. Cho, H.-Y. (2004). Mobilized modernity: Duplicity of developmental region of Park, Junghee. Seoul: Humanitas (in Korean). Cho, M.-R. (2003). Globalization, economic crisis, and the transformation of developmental state. In H.-Y. Cho (Ed.), Economic transformation and changing roles of states in East Asia (pp. 327–374). Seoul: Hanul (in Korean). Cho, Y. (2009). Unfolding sporting nationalism in South Korean media representation of the 1968, 1984 and 2000 Olympics. Media, Culture and Society, 31(3), 347–364. Cho, Y. (2012). Re-reading neoliberal transformation in South Korea through conjunctural economic analysis. Communication Theory, 8(2), 22–64 (in Korean). Choi, J. (1995). Conditions of Korean nationalism. Seoul: Nanam (in Korean). Chua, B. H. (2010). Disrupting hegemonic liberalism in East Asia. Boundary 2, 37 (2), 199–216. Chua, B. H. (2017). Liberalism disavowed: Communitarianism and the state capitalism in Singapore. Singapore: NUS Press. Escobar, A. (2007). World and knowledges otherwise: The Latin American modernity/coloniality research program. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 179–210. Escobar, A. (2019). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2003). Globalization and democracy. In S. Aronowitz & H. Gautney (Eds.), Implicating empire: Globalization & resistance in the 21st century world order (pp. 109–122). New York: Basic Books. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. New York: The Penguin Press. Joo, R. M. (2000). (Trans)national pastimes and Korean American subjectivities: Reading Chan Ho Park. Journal of Asian American Studies, 3(3), 301–328. Kang, M.-K. (2000). Discourse politics towards neo-liberal globalization. InterAsia Cultural Studies, 1(3), 443–456. Kim, D.-C. (2004). Poverty of South Korea after the IMF intervention. Seoul: Nanam (in Korean). Kim, J.-Y., et al. (2005). New East Asian order and the regime of 1987. Changjakkwa Bipyung, 130, 18–63 (in Korean).

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Kwon, H.-B. (2001). Is nationalism evil? Seoul: Aropa (in Korean). Lee, J. W., & Maguire, J. (2009). Global festivals through a national prism: The global-national nexus in South Korean media coverage of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 44(1), 5–24. Lim, J.-H. (1999). Nationalism is treason: Beyond the discourse of nationalism as myth and nothingness. Seoul: Sonamu (in Korean). Mignolo, W. D. (2000). Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mignolo, W. D. (2011). The darker side of western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Mignolo, W. D., & Walsh, C. E. (2018). On decoloniality: Concepts, analytics, praxis. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Morley, D., & Robins, K. (1995). Spaces of identity: Global media, electronic landscapes and cultural boundaries. London and New York: Routledge. Morris-Suzuki, T. (2005). The past within us: Media, memory, history. London and New York: Verso. Nalapat, A., & Parker, A. (2005). Sport, celebrity and popular culture: Sachin Tendulkar, cricket and Indian nationalisms. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 40(4): 433–446. Ong, A. (2006). Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Park, M.-G. (1994). Sociology of nationalism. In H. Sahoihakakwa (Ed.), Korean sociology in the 21st century (pp. 376–405). Seoul: Moonkakwa Jeesungsa (in Korean). Park, M.-G. (1998). Ideas of others and national identity in modern Korea. In S. Jee (Ed.), Research on social theory (pp. 113–155). Seoul: Jungshinmoonhwa (in Korean). Park, M.-G. (2000). Comments: Complexity of nationalism. Donhyankwa Junmang (44), 192–199 (in Korean). Robinson, R. (2004). Neoliberalism and the future world: Markets and the end of politics. Critical Asian Studies, 36(3), 405–423. Roche, M. (2003). Mega-events, time and modernity: On time structure in global society. Time & Society, 12(1), 99–126. Shim, D., & Park, J. S.-Y. (2008). The language politics of “English fever” in South Korea. Korea Journal, 48(2), 136–159. Shin, K.-Y. (2000). The discourse of crisis and the crisis of discourse. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 1(3), 427–442. Shin, K.-Y. (2004). Korean class and its inequality. Seoul: Eulyu (in Korean). Smith, A. D. (1999). Myths and memories of the nation. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

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Tomlinson, A., & Young, C. (2005). Culture, politics, and spectacle in the global sports event: An introduction. In A. Tomlinson & C. Young (Eds.), National identity and global sports events: Culture, politics, and spectacle in the Olympics and the Football World Cup (pp. 1–4). New York: State University of New York Press.

CHAPTER 3

Glocalization of Sports from Above: A Korean Baseball Player as a National Individual

In modern days, sports are not only a hobby for people’s daily practices, group activities, as well as audiences and fans, but also an efficient tool for statecraft, business, and mass mobilization. The Summer Olympics and the Football World Cup are representative global sports megaevents that governments give their utmost effort into hosting, preparing, and advertising. Governments heavily invest in sports both to motivate national confidence and unity and to show off their country’s political and economic status on a global stage. Because sports mega-events are largely based on national boundaries, sports habitually invoke the nationstate as a space of identity. However, the relation between sports and nation-state is neither monolithic nor reified. In particular, globalization provides more complex and even contradictory dynamics between sports and nation-state, and between sports and politics. As Rowe aptly argues, “sport may be constitutively unsuited to carriage of the project of globalization in its fullest sense” (2003, p. 281). Nonetheless, Rowe’s proposition, which is summarized as sport and its repudiation of the global, is not necessarily referring to a declaration of the end either of nationalism or of political efficacy in sports. Rather, the globalization of sports needs to be approached as a tool for diversifying and complicating various dynamics among different agents in sports. In an arena of global sports, local governments, domestic and transnational corporations

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as well as international sports organizations either collaborate, negotiate, compete or collide with each other. The trajectory of sports in South Korea is not much different from the trajectories of sports in other postcolonial states. As soon as Korea was liberated from Japan and then divided into two Koreas in 1945, sports have functioned as the most instrumental tool of statecraft, and governments have endeavored to foster elite athletes, host sporting events, and promote sporting events and athletes as national events. Under the developmental regime, in which authoritarian governments played central roles in controlling the national economy, South Korean governments heavily invested their energy into utilizing sports both to display the country’s economic development to the world and to shift the domestic population’s attention away from politics (Reaves, 2006). However, because of the dynamic tension that characterizes the relationship between sports and society including politics, it is not always possible to predict how sporting events might be made to serve the original intentions of the governments or the business sectors. The 1988 Summer Olympic Games, which were prepared to justify the authoritarian governments, ended up contributing to the democratization of South Korea along with the June 10th liberal movement in 1987. In South Korea, as civil society began to function relatively independently in the 1990s, along with the country’s growing economic success and consumer culture, governmental interventions became less noticeable, either because their frequency and intensity had decreased or because they had become more subtle and complex. Meanwhile, globalization also made significant impacts on the changing dynamics of sports on political, economic, and social dimensions. As discussed previously, the sensational popularity of Major League Baseball (MLB) and the emerging stardom of Chan-ho Park are some of the clearest results of the changing role of governmental interventions and the complicated relationship between political and economic sectors. This chapter explores how global sports both reflect and construct the changing governmentality in South Korea during its national economic crisis in the late 1990s, focusing on MLB broadcasting and the increasing popularity of Park. In the first part, the conditions that enabled the rapid expansion of MLB’s popularity and the changing roles of the South Korean government in this process are reviewed. The second part of this chapter explores the mass media representation of Park and discusses how his representation helped constitute a new governmentality for South Korean society that underwent the neoliberal reform

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prescribed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Examining the broadcasting of MLB in South Korea during the economic crisis reveals how the globalization of American sports was made possible via an unusual alliance between the government, trans/national corporations, and global sporting leagues. In addition, a discussion of the mass media representation of Park illustrates how his images introduced a new set of norms and virtues in response to the economic crisis and then the structural transformation of Korean society. This model reveals the emergence of new governmentality through sports by combining neoliberal principles with a nationalist ideology. Ultimately, MLB’s popularity in South Korea is connected to deeper questions about how nationalism as a governing rationality was deconstructed and then reconstituted during the country’s national crisis.

New Mediascape and the Globalization of U.S. Sports in South Korea The expansion of U.S. sports in South Korea would have been impossible without the transformation of telecommunication technology and the broadcasting business, which had begun globally in the 1990s. Because the relationship between sport and broadcasting is necessary, mutual, and even symbiotic (Miller, Lawrence, MacKay, & Rowe, 2001; Rowe, 1999), the evolution of a new set of economic, technological, and cultural circumstances in South Korea in the late 1990s profoundly affected the introduction of global sports, including sports from the U.S. Rather than taking for granted the changes of a new mediascape, it is necessary to examine the capabilities of specific media technologies in certain social or economic systems in which technology and the broadcasting business are embedded (Feenberg, 2002; Wenner, 1986). Having said that, this does not mean that I am taking a substantive approach toward technology, which claims that technology will change people’s practices. Instead, similar to a critical approach to technology (Feenberg, 2002),1 I am committed to elaborating the contexts and people’s will for which specific technology is developed and which it in turn impacts. The following part of this chapter traces the changes of the three technological elements that had crucial impacts in South Korea as well as Asia to certain degrees, including telecommunication technologies, the broadcasting business, and sports marketing strategies.

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New Telecommunication Technology: Cable, Satellite TV, and the Internet Because sports have been at the cutting edge of the developments in contemporary telecommunication technology (Jackson, Andrews, & Scherer, 2005), an understanding of these developments is crucial to an analysis of the international expansion of U.S. sports. It is no coincidence that during the 1990s, decisive changes in global media became most salient and apparent in South Korea along with the worldwide surge of commercial television (Herman & McChesney, 1997).2 It is television that “contributed to giving sport its global visibility and its importance in the everyday lives of people” (Besnier, Brownell, & Carter, 2018, p. 240): in particular, cable and satellite TV gained momentum in Asia in the mid-1990s. The pace of diffusion of new telecommunication technology throughout the sporting world was accelerated by a drop in hardware costs and by the increased availability of cable and satellite services at affordable prices (Westerbeek & Smith, 2003). These conditions elicited further changes: firstly, they eliminated the obstacle of distance between viewers and places where programs originated, and secondly, they enabled a substantial, dramatic rise in the number of channels (Barker, 1997).3 The new broadcasting system and increased number of channels in the 1990s created a great deal of airtime to be filled. It is not surprising that sports, usually imported from the U.S. and Europe, was an easy and profitable way to fill it. In South Korea, both cable and satellite TV became available in the mid-to-late 1990s. Cable television, launched in 1995, was advertised as a revolutionary event, and its subscribers had more than doubled from 1,002,866 in 1998 to 2,338,159 in 2000 (Nam, 2008).4 In the midst of the increasing popularity of cable TV, sport was one of its core attractions: by 2000, five of Korea’s 40 cable TV channels were dedicated to broadcasting sports. MLB games were also broadcast through a provincial cable network for two years (1998–1999). The introduction of satellite television followed a similar pattern. Between 1998 and 2000, when Korean satellite TV aired its pilot programs, the majority of what it had to offer was sporting events. For example, channels subsidized by the Korea Broadcasting Station (KBS) mainly showed English football leagues and American sports. During or even before the pilot broadcast, many Koreans installed satellite broadcasting receivers to enjoy satellite broadcasting from HK Star TV and NHK BS (satellite) in the late 1990s.5

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On all of these new networks, sporting events were treated as a breakthrough genre. The availability of new telecommunication technology had the additional effect of synchronizing sports fans’ experiences across a large distance (Morley, 2017). In short, as an ideal vehicle for capturing massive and committed audiences, sport has the ability to cross spatial, linguistic, and cultural divides. Another technological innovation in the 1990s was, of course, the internet. At the turning point of the millennium, the original “tiger economies” such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea were more wired and featured more ubiquitous computing than Western European countries (Westerbeek & Smith, 2003). Similar to other Asian countries, in South Korea, the internet has become an irreplaceable vehicle for U.S. sports. In the early 2000s, several sporting leagues broadcast their games over the internet; the frontrunner was MLB, which streamed every one of its games in 2003 on its own website (www. MLB.com).6 Such access allows Korean fans who do not have satellite or cable TV access at home to watch MLB games on their own computers (Stoddart, 2004). In addition, the internet has become a major source of information and news about U.S. sports and players, often for free. Most of the U.S. broadcasting networks attract traffic to their web pages by providing a fantasy league in which fans and viewers can populate their own teams and manage them through seasons (Davis & Duncan, 2006). Sports fans and audiences can access a wide range of sports information, photos, and interviews through the internet and can also actively share information and their own thoughts online. Another contribution of the internet is the development of online sports fan communities, many of which are created out of enthusiasm for a specific sport or a particular sports club (Boyle & Haynes, 2004). Sports-related websites exist in several formats, including blogs, newsreels, listservs, e-zines, and online communities. Korean MLB fans are particularly active in using online communities to share gossip, obtain news, and even nurture their own interests (this part will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4). Such online spaces indicate the enthusiasm of the fans, but are also well suited to the sporting industry and its high-involvement products (Westerbeek & Smith, 2003). The proliferation of these sports fan communities may well prove to be the most profitable and sustainable way of increasing the number of Korean fans of U.S. sports. Access to the internet and to cable and satellite TV has been essential to the expansion of MLB in Korea. When Korean pitcher Chan-ho Park

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was recruited by the L.A. Dodgers in 1994, media ranging from public networks (KBS in 1997 and Munhwa Broadcasting Company (MBC) from 2000 to 2003) to cable TV networks (i-TV in 1998 and 1999 and X-sports from 2004 to 2008) became involved with broadcasting MLB games in South Korea. It was not until 2003 that MLB provided direct access to international fans by broadcasting its games on its own website. Sport functions as a “battering ram” into new media technologies as well as new markets, including South Korea (Robertson, 2004). Restructuring the Broadcasting Business New technologies, sparked by media deregulation in Europe and Asia, resulted in a rush of corporate consolidation within the media industry in the 1990s, including an unprecedented number of mergers and acquisitions among global media giants (Herman & McChesney, 1997). Not only did these mergers facilitate the expansion of global networks into Asia, alliances between global and domestic networks have also proven most relevant to the process of expansion of U.S. sports into the world at large. The procedures of restructuring the broadcasting business illuminate the changing relations not only between global and local agents, but also between corporate and public agents in broadcasting U.S. sports. One well-known example of a merger between networks and stations is Rupert Murdoch’s News Cooperation, which was established as the first vertically integrated entertainment-and-communication company with a truly global reach. Murdoch’s power remains exceptional in Asia; for instance, the acquisition by his News Corporation of the Hong Kongbased Star TV for US $525 million in 1993 gave him a satellite foothold in Asia and the Middle East. News Corporation is also deeply connected to global sports corporations, not only because of its breakthrough broadcasting contract with the National Football League of the U.S. but also through Murdoch’s purchase of sports teams such as the L.A. Dodgers and partial ownership of several other professional teams.7 At the time, Murdoch believed that sport “absolutely overpowers all other programming as an incentive for viewers to subscribe to cable and satellite TV” (Westerbeek & Smith, 2003, p. 90). The example of News Corporation’s involvement with sports shows that cooperative endeavors of media over sports broadcasting were already a goldmine a couple of decades ago. Another notable change in how media companies do business is seen in the flourishing alliances between global and local media corporations.

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One example is MTV, the first global music television service, which began in the 1990s to differentiate its content around the world through wholly-owned subsidiaries and by incorporating local music. This trend can also be seen in sports broadcasting: for example, in South Korea, MBC-ESPN was launched in 2001 as an alliance between ESPN (a global U.S. network) and MBC (a Korean public broadcasting station). Such an alliance was buttressed by the contract that MBC made with the MLB International bureau as a four-year deal to broadcast MLB games in South Korea. Instead of extending its previous partnership with another Korean broadcasting station, ESPN formed an alliance company with a new partner, MBC.8 In Japan, similarly, the Japan SKY Broadcasting Company—a joint venture between Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and the Japanese Softbank Corporation—was launched in 1997. These acquisitions and alliances show that a global-local connection works well in the recent changes in the broadcasting business through sports. The very slogan of ESPN International, which telecasts in 21 languages to 182 nations and 155 million households, is “Think globally, but customize locally” (Miller et al., 2001, p. 65). Such a transformation of the broadcasting business looks effective and lucrative in Asia, which is reflected both in the growing popularity of MLB and in hugely increased broadcasting rights in Asia. The most successful case for MLB is Japan: NHK, the Japanese public broadcasting station, agreed to pay $12 million per year for broadcasting rights in 2000. Then, the monolithic Japanese corporation Dentsu signed a $275 million contract with MLB for Japanese broadcasting rights. In South Korea, the competition for acquiring MLB broadcasting rights was getting serious among domestic stations: as a result, bidding prices for its sponsorship soared. In 1997, the fee for KBS to broadcast MLB games was $300,000 per year, but after Park’s successful pitching debut that same year, the fee increased to $1 million in 1998, and $3 million in 2000. MBC then made an exclusive three-year contract with MLB for $7 million per year from 2001 to 2004. After its expiration, X-sports, a cable station, surprisingly outbid MBC and agreed to pay $10 million annually from 2005 to 2008. The expansion of U.S. sports in Asia has been made possible along with the transformation of media technology and the broadcasting business, and, in particular, a new global-local nexus proved effective and profitable, which in turn contributed to the expanding popularity of the U.S. sports fandom in Asia. At the same time, it needs to be noted that such global-local relationships are neither symmetrical nor equal;

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instead, they are probably much more likely to reflect or even perpetuate existing hierarchies and global structures. Also, global-local alliances often fail to secure continued economic profit in Asian countries. The success of collaborations among U.S. sports, global media corporations, and other multinational corporations highly depends on striking the right balance between market integration and diversity according to various local conditions. A New Strategy for Globalizing U.S. Sports The sudden surge of MLB’s popularity in South Korea during the late 1990s can be said to have been equal parts accidental and prearranged. It was accidental because the MLB fandom in South Korea was made possible due to the surprising performance of Park, the first Korean MLB leaguer, starting from the 1997 season. At the same time, it was prearranged because the MLB fandom was an outcome of the interactions between local government, transnational and domestic corporations, and U.S. sports, which were of course initiated and managed by the new strategy to globalize U.S. sports into a new market, i.e., East Asia. Compared to the ways of globalizing U.S. sports through the National Basketball Association (NBA) in the late 1980s, the patterns of expanding the U.S. sports fandom to South Korea and East Asia in the 1990s have become more multi-directional and localized. As discussed in the introduction chapter, the collaborative efforts among transnational and domestic agents exemplify “glocalization from above,” which functions both as the latest marketing strategy and as a new governing tool. A new kind of global-local nexus was pursued as MLB attempted to become engaged with national sensibilities and local resonances (Mason, 2002).9 One of the most successful glocalized strategies is the importation of local players into U.S. sports leagues. The breakthrough Asian athlete is Nomo Hideo, who was a veteran Japanese baseball player recruited by the L.A. Dodgers in 1995. Despite the lukewarm reception upon his recruitment, he did so well in his first MLB season that he was named Rookie of the Year (Nakamura, 2005; Whiting, 2005).10 His successful debut in MLB provided a huge momentum both for initiating the surge of popularity of MLB in Japan and for orienting MLB’s marketing attention to Asian markets. After Nomo’s debut, many Japanese players successfully took root in MLB: notably, Suzuki Ichiro of the Seattle Mariners and

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Matsui Hideki of the New York Yankees brought about another sensation across the Pacific. In March 2003, MLB held special-event games between the Seattle Mariners and the Oakland A’s in Tokyo and opened the 2004 season with a game in Tokyo between the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The stadiums in Japan were filled to the brim with excited fans. These Japanese players’ brilliant debuts proved that Asian players could be competitive in American sports leagues, and more importantly, that the Asian market could prove to be much more lucrative than previously expected. Aside from Japan, Taiwan and South Korea also became targets for MLB’s new glocalizing strategy: Taiwanese baseball talents, for example, were scouted both by MLB and the Japanese baseball league in the late 1990s (Morris, 2006, 2011).11 In South Korea, Chan-ho Park is the pioneering figure in this regard. Recruited by the L.A. Dodgers in 1994 as an amateur player, he performed excellently as a starting pitcher in the L.A. Dodgers between 1997 and 2001 set off an MLB frenzy in South Korea. It was not coincidental that the Dodgers were the first team to import Korean players; Los Angeles has the highest Korean populations in the U.S. Given the symbiotic relationship between broadcasting and sport, it was also not surprising that the Dodgers were owned by Murdoch’s News Corporation at that time. Park was not only the first Korean player in MLB, but also became the major impetus of the MLB fandom in South Korea. After his successful debut in MLB, elite Korean baseball players wanted to “be like Chan-ho” and left Korea for either MLB or the Japanese league, where several of them successfully debuted. In 2005, for instance, there were five active Korean baseball players in MLB: Chan-ho Park (Texas Rangers), Heesop Choi (L.A. Dodgers), Jaeung Seo (New York Mets), Sunwoo Kim (Washington Nationals), and Byunghyun Kim (Colorado Rockies). Emphasizing the nationality of these players, who were known to their homeland media and fans as “Korean leaguers,” obviously served to expand the MLB fandom in South Korea through national identification. MLB’s extensive scouting efforts in East Asian countries that intended to develop foreign sources of new players as well as to extend MLB into other parts of the world also have resulted in the increasingly multi-ethnic compositions of MLB teams (Kelly, 2007). International baseball players no longer simply add spice and flavor to the big league marketplace—they have become necessary to sustain it and they even go so far as to threaten American exceptionalism.12

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Another strategy of highlighting nationality in MLB can be found in the 2005 Home Run Derby as a partial event of the All-Star Game. This annual event, which has been held prior to the MLB All-Star Game since 1950, is a contest among the top long-ball hitters. In 2005, for the first time, the Derby was called a “We are the World” contest and featured eight sluggers from eight different continents and countries, which was quite a different rule compared to the emphasis on ability and home run records in the previous seasons. Under the new rule, Heesop Choi was selected to represent Asian countries despite the fact that he had hit only 38 home runs during his entire career, not just during the 2005 season. That MLB had favored a player’s nationality over their stats gave MLB fans, including Korean ones, much fodder for discussion. The 2005 Home Run Derby was planned as a preparatory event for the inaugural World Baseball Classic (WBC) in 2006, the first international baseball tournament, which was initiated, organized, and managed by MLB International. The home run contests became a “patriot game” in which particular views of national identities were represented and constructed. Similarly, the 2006 WBC can be seen as an example of the new strategies of U.S. sports based on collaboration between the global and the local. The new media-sports nexus in South Korea exemplifies how transnational and local agencies, including corporations, institutes, and governments, negotiate the global-local dynamics. Andrews and Silk (2005) use the term “cultural Toyotism” to explicate the degree to which transnational corporate forces have begun to reconstitute the tenor of popular national sensibilities and fantasies.13 This process shows that global sports corporations fully recognize the capacity of nationalism as a tool for selling themselves. As a marketing strategy, the glocalization of MLB in South Korea demonstrates that global sports utilize local (i.e., national) sentiments as a way of acclimating global sports within the local. When it is successful, this process increases corporate, government, and team profits and also exploits local markets by nurturing organic or locally rooted fans. The process of expanding the MLB fandom in South Korea indicates that glocalization is not only a process of indigenization or unidirectional expansion, but also of “appropriating the foreign objects and practices by recontextualizing them into local matrices of meaning and style” (Kelly, 2007, p. 108).

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Governmentality and MLB Broadcasting The glocalizing process of MLB in South Korea provides a fine lens for understanding the changing relationships between government and transnational corporations as well as a different way of exercising governmental power in people’s everyday practices. I deploy the term “sporting governmentality” in order to analyze how power operates in the broadcasting of global sports and how the representation of global sports helps reconstitute a particular way of thinking in South Korea in the period of extensive globalization. With reference to Foucault (1997), the notion of sporting governmentality explores both macro- and microdimensions of sports as tools of both statecraft and personal conduct during the economic crisis and ensuing neoliberal transformation of South Korean society. Sporting governmentality via MLB broadcasting destabilizes long-held assumptions about the roles of states or governments in importing and broadcasting global sports and thereby reveals the changing dynamics and social influences of global sports that helped shape, guide, and affect the conduct of Koreans MLB fans as well as Korean populations who watched and enjoyed the broadcasting of MLB and Park’s performances. As Bennett (2003) explicates, the concept of government is “not to be confused with that of the state but refers to the much broader sphere of practices,” so our analysis needs to account for “what we might call ‘the cultural’ developing, alongside the emergence of ‘the social,’ as a particular set of instruments—technologies” (pp. 58 and 61). During the national economic crisis, the broadcasting of MLB represented Park as a new individual who embodied a new set of norms in light of the structural transformation. Conceptually, governmentality encourages questions about how to govern, who can govern, what governing is, and what or whom is governed. According to Foucault, the primary definition of governmentality is “the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflection, the calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security” (1997, p. 102).14 This notion of governmentality offers a useful way to describe the “articulations between the state, the distributions of power, the formations and modalities of power, and an implicitly political economy” (Grossberg, quoted from Packer, 2003, p. 41). Under such a formation of power, it is

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fair to say that the state’s role is defined as a referee: one of coordination or one that appears neutral. Nonetheless, governmentality is not limited to explicating the state or state power: it can illuminate the norms of power-shaping relationships as well as the ways that such relationships shape issues of self and identity. In this vein, governmentality refers both to a “mentality or way of thinking about the administration of society” (Maguire, 2002, p. 307) and to a “matter of knowledge, belief and opinion in which we are immersed” (Dean, 1999, p. 16). Therefore, governmentality concerns the relations between self and self, private interpersonal relations, relations within social institutions and communities, and finally, relations formed by or during the exercise of political sovereignty. By describing governmentality as “the conduct of conduct,” Foucault (1997) presents it as a methodical, rational way of doing things, an art for acting upon the actions of individuals. In his view, government itself is a form of activity that shapes, guides, corrects, and modifies the ways people conduct themselves (Bratich, Parker, & McCarthy, 2003; Burchell, Gordon, & Miller, 1991). Understanding power from this perspective allows us to unveil “the arts and rationalities of governing” (Bratich et al., 2003, p. 4) and “the organized practices through which we are governed and through which we govern ourselves” (Dean, 1999, p. 16). This version of governmentality addresses cultural issues such as values and rules of conduct, in which a norm is not simply a value, but rather a rule of judgment as well as a means of producing the rule. The notion of sporting governmentality is a particularly effective lens through which to analyze changes in the roles of the Korean government in the 1990s and the many ways the government intervened in the broadcasting of MLB. By enabling both micro- and macro-analyses of power relations, governmentality makes explicit the relationships between the governing body and the subject that is governed. Accordingly, the governmentality that surrounded the broadcasting of MLB in South Korea is critically concerned with the three dimensions of power, truth, and identity. First, the dimension of power is concerned with how to govern: it entails such issues as who takes charge of governing, how the roles of government are changed, and how the techniques of governing are transformed. Second, the dimension of truth questions how bodies of knowledge, belief, and opinion are reconfigured into governance and how these norms and practices are rationalized (become taken for granted). This dimension promotes values such as efficiency, discipline,

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responsibility, specialized knowledge, practical know-how, expertise, and skills. Third, the dimension of identity problematizes how truth operates within people’s organized ways of doing things and how it shapes personal behaviors and practices. It is concerned with how subjectivities are formed, and ultimately with the forms of individual and collective identity. Government intervention into the spread of MLB to South Korea falls squarely into the power dimension, as do Korean mass media representations of Park that show collective attempts to constitute specific values, opinions, and norms. The truth dimension is highly operative within the internet community, MLBPARK, where I conducted an on-site ethnography of South Korean fans and attempted to figure out the formation of fans’ individual and collective identities. The dimension of identity will be discussed in Part II. It is necessary to keep in mind that the use of MLB broadcasts as a governing tool is not reducible to social control but rather always involves a compromise between regulation and autonomy. Government Engagement with the MLB Fandom in South Korea It may sound ironic, or even nonsensical, that South Korean governments actively intervened in the process of populating U.S. sports in the late 1990s when the entire country was about to plunge into crippling economic deficits. Nonetheless, the governments in the late 1990s still endorsed overtly nationalist discourses around the broadcasting of MLB, and furthermore, the ways of government intervention in this process clearly exemplified the changing roles of the government in the economic and social sectors. First, public networks, which are either owned directly by the government or operated via subsidies, began to broadcast MLB games for the first time during the 1997 season. KBS, a public network, made a contract with MLB International to be able to broadcast every game in which Park played as a starting pitcher. Because it reaches the largest audiences in South Korea, KBS was able to attract a huge audience to MLB games while Park’s performance was at its peak. As a government agent, KBS initiated the broadcasting of MLB and also contributed to the initial boom of MLB popularity. Despite the surging interest in MLB, however, KBS was unable to renew the contract in 1998 not only because MLB International had increased its fee tenfold but also because the government was concerned about criticism over spending huge amounts of

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money on sports while there was a severe shortage of foreign funds. At the time, the main public opinion among Korean people was that because of the high fees it was a good decision for KBS to give up its MLB broadcasting rights. Ninety-one percent of respondents of a poll conducted by a national newspaper company voted not to pay for MLB broadcasts.15 The public opinion that expressed concern over the economic crisis had stopped public networks from pursuing their own commercial interests through MLB broadcasting. When public broadcasting companies did not pursue another contract, surprisingly, i-TV, a commercial provincial cable company, purchased MLB broadcasting rights from 1998 to 2000. This was unexpected because i-TV was a small broadcasting company whose broadcasting coverage was limited only to the Kyonggi province and the capital area, which includes Seoul, the city of Incheon, and the two cities’ suburban areas. The change in host broadcasters and, specifically, KBS’s decision to relinquish MLB broadcasting rights reveals the limits of the government’s engagement in global sports. After the Korean government announced the end of the IMF era in 2001 by paying back all of the bailout money, another case of government involvement happened in the form of a contract between MBC and MLB. MBC, a subsidized national network, signed a four-year contract with MLB International for $28 million (2001 through 2004). This contract also received strong criticism not only because MBC had broken the tacit agreement among Korean national networks to engage in collective bargaining with MLB, but also because it was widely believed that MBC had overpaid for the broadcasting rights. MBC was able to offer such a generous deal to MLB based on its expectations for potential profits as well as the government subsidies that assisted MBC in investing without having to be too dependent on instant profit. However, this contract turned out to be a disaster for MBC; due to an injury, Park rarely pitched between 2002 and 2004 and ratings for MLB games during these seasons plummeted. As such, the participation of the public networks in broadcasting MLB revealed that their decisions were influenced by economic profit as well as by public opinion and the national economic status. Second, public television networks treated Park’s performances in MLB as a national news item, which presented him as a national figure rather than a baseball player in global sports. The main news programs of the public networks covered news concerning Park along with political and economic topics, particularly when Park had pitched very well or reached a milestone in his pitching records in MLB. It needs to be noted

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that the inclusion of news about Park in the first part of the program is very unusual for Korean news programming. Korean news programs traditionally separate sports-related news from the main news, which are also organized into political, economic, and social segments. Only very important international sporting events such as the Olympics and Football World Cups are mentioned along with the main news. On 2 August 1997, for instance, footage of Park was featured in the main news and was even shown before the news about the Olympics on KBC’s main news program. Even during the off-season, news surrounding Park was covered in the sports news segment. In this vein, to air reportages about Park’s performances in MLB during the main news segment reflected the ways in which Park was treated on public networks. Watching coverage of Park in their homes with their family members enabled South Korean fans and audiences to experience everyday life as a nation of families because the main news programs on KBS and MBC were scheduled for 9 pm, when it was most common for the whole family to be gathered around the TV together. As media technologies contribute to promoting national unity on a symbolic level, the public news programs on MLB linked individuals and their families together as living a national life. Major newspapers with national circulation replicated this pattern by mentioning Park in editorials and essays as well as main news sections, and by placing shots of him on cover pages with eye-catching headlines. Because a season of MLB continues for almost eight months, including the pre-season and postseason, and MLB seasons are repeated annually, broadcasting MLB games and related news on a daily basis in the late 1990s and early 2000s assisted in constructing another layer of banal nationalism (Billig, 1995). Accordingly, Park’s appearance on television news highlighted him as a public figure as well as a sport celebrity. Television, including live broadcasting and news programs, tends to be geared to the project of nation building, which in turn becomes a major component of the effort to construct national identity (Mankekar, 2002). Third, government officials explicitly referred to Park and used his images in conjunction with their own political interests. This was particularly noticeable during the 1997 season when he had his first sensational streak in MLB, as the presidential election was scheduled in December of the same year, and most politicians and presidential candidates wished to utilize him to boost public support. When Park had his first tenth win in the middle of the season, the spokespersons of major political parties

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made sure to publically announce their congratulations. A strong candidate from the government’s party for the upcoming presidential election even made an overseas telephone call to congratulate Park directly for his success. After Park’s successful 1997 season, then-President Youngsam Kim invited him to the Blue House, the presidential residence and executive office, along with his parents and extended family. A similar pattern continued in the 1998 season, when South Korea was undergoing an economically difficult time under the IMF intervention. Several politicians and officials in the government even suggested bestowing Park with a national award for his contribution to national honor and raising the confidence of South Koreans, who were undergoing difficult times. The plan became highly controversial, however, because Park would have to leave the U.S. in the middle of the regular season, albeit temporarily, in order to receive this award. Most fans and many members of the general public, fearing potential negative impacts of a mid-season absence on Park’s record, opposed the idea and loudly criticized its political motives. This issue was resolved when newly elected President Daejung Kim decided to invite Park to the Blue House after the end of the season. In November 1998, President Kim invited Park along with Seri Pak, a female golfer who had performed extremely well in the U.S., and bestowed them with Medals of Honor, calling them national heroes (Joo, 2012). The occasion marked only the third time such an award had been given to athletes in South Korea’s sports history. Also, Park and Pak appeared in a government promotional video for advertising various dimensions of Korea to foreigners, smiling next to the message “Korea with Love.” Both athletes agreed to star in this video without any financial compensation. Coincidentally, Park was drawn into a political issue during the 1997 presidential election, which was held just one month after the government’s announcement of having received the IMF bailout. As he was in the middle of his outstanding season in MLB, the issue of mandatory military service came to the fore. Public opinion increasingly favored Park’s exemption from enlistment, arguing that he was already making substantial contributions to South Korea, and that he therefore deserved the same exemption as medalists in the Olympics and the Asian Games.16 However, others did not agree with this thought, but perceived this situation as a matter of equality: military service is mandatory for all South Korean males. Controversy around the issue mushroomed and became explicitly political once it was disclosed that two sons of a candidate from the government’s party had received illegal exemptions. This candidate, who,

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as mentioned previously, had made a direct phone call to Park during the season to congratulate him, had been strongly favored to win the election, but failed in the end to earn enough votes as this shocking revelation about his two sons turned mandatory military service into the hottest issue during the presidential election. While public calls for Park’s special exemption grew louder, and most political parties agreed to give him this exceptional privilege, the candidate in question, who was the leader of the governmental party at the time, faced an insurmountable conflict of interest. Major newspapers fueled the controversy by commenting about the military exemption issue in their editorial commentaries. National newspapers ambivalently acknowledged Park’s contribution to national interest but also supported the principle of equality (in terms of military service as a public requirement). Although they insinuated the possibility of exemption if handled correctly, they neither fully advocated it nor did they suggest any alternatives. Eventually the Ministry of Culture and Tourism made an official request to the Ministry of National Defense for a change in the mandatory-service laws so that Park could continue his MLB career, but the request was rejected. The political controversy over military exemption in relation to the sons of the powerful politician prevented the Ministry of National Defense from granting special exemption to Park. In the midst of public debates, Park had already garnered public support for himself by announcing that he had no intention of taking advantage of any special privileges and would fulfill his duty as a Korean (male) citizen. In the end, he was legally exempted from military duty in 1998 when Park played for the gold-medal-winning Korean baseball team during the Asian Games. As I discuss further in Chapter 6, the issue of military exemption for members of Korean national teams arose again during the 2006 WBC, in which the Korean team defeated Japan twice and Team USA once. As Joo highlights, the military exemptions of Korean male athletes offer “an example of the ‘graduated sovereignties’ that the state places on media sport industry (and the players within it) and exist as part of the story of global media sport” (2012, p. 102). Clearly, the South Korean government’s engagement in making MLB and Park popular illuminates the changing role of the local government in global sports. Although the government is still important in promoting a particular sport, in the case of MLB, both directly and indirectly, the exact ways it has done so and its levels of impact have changed over time. Compared to direct and initiate ways of interventions in the past decades, in the late 1990s, the government’s involvements turned more

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subtle and seemingly benevolent (focusing mainly on subsidizing public networks and developing nationalistic discourses around Park). Furthermore, it can be seen that the South Korean government’s engagement was limited either by another national concern or by a political scandal. Thus, the role of government intervention in global sports could be described as that of coordinator and manager, whereas its role in the past decades had been that of controller or executive producer. This shift in the government’s characteristics from directing and controlling to orchestrating each component of global sport through negotiation and collaboration is analogous to the general shift in its role in the economic sector that took place during the Asian economic crisis.

Representing a Sport Celebrity as a National Individual Because sports celebrities have already become a ubiquitous presence in media as well as in everyday life, paying attention to the media representation of Park is imperative to understanding sporting governmentality around the MLB fandom in South Korea. As Abu-Lughod (2005) eloquently demonstrated, melodramas are critical in the formation of individual subjectivity, in which national life is naturalized as much by their stars as the serials. Similar to any other sporting leagues, MLB functions very similarly to melodramas or soap operas, which repeat similar premises every year and even every day. The broadcasting of MLB games and news coverages of Park included many heroes and villains who assisted or ruined Park’s pitching and victories, as well as dramatic retellings of Park’s ups and downs throughout the seasons. As discussed, sporting governmentality attends both to changes of the government’s engagement and to particular practices, techniques, and rationales that contribute to shaping people’s thoughts and behaviors (Miller, 1993). By examining the representation of Park in MLB, this section attempts to figure out the specific mechanism of governmentality, with its routines and operations, which include characteristics of visible forms, ways of thinking, acting, and forming subjects (Bratich et al., 2003). As governmentality also refers to the arts and rationality of governing, it is crucial to explore how the broadcasting of MLB contributed to building governance of self or self-governance (Miller, 1993). The media reportages of Park and MLB contributed not only to expanding their popularity and fandom to a national level, but also to spreading certain values, norms,

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knowledge, and even ethics which are compatible with South Korea’s globalism and neoliberal principles. The three major characteristics of media coverage of MLB and Park that contributed to constituting a specific governmentality in the late 1990s can be summarized as follows: a self-governing individual, economic success in global competition, and responsibility for family and nation-state. A Self-Governing Individual Mass media representation of Park strongly emphasized his individual efforts and physicality; in particular, the media complimented his incessant training and preparation for strengthening both his mind and body. At first glance, such attributions of a professional athlete’s success to personal endeavor are not surprising. From a historical and contextual standpoint, however, these descriptions of Park are worth our attention because these are not only markedly different from traditional descriptions of sports athletes in South Korea, but also parallel a growing emphasis on self-management, regulation, and government—the habitual mantras of neoliberal governmentality. In the past, the South Korean governments had invested heavily in the cultivation of what were thought of as elite sports for international sporting events, in a manner similar to other developing countries. Most of this investment went into supplying excellent athletes with facilities and subsidies and organizing domestic and international sporting events. Media coverage was routinely based on the assumption that the success of every Korean athlete in any major sporting event was due to government support, so during interviews after the games, athletes tended to deliver messages of gratitude both to the president and the Korean public for supporting them both financially and emotionally. Accordingly, athletes were urged to do their best as a way of repaying the government for its support. Because this sort of coverage had been a cliché for a long period in South Korea, emphasis on Park’s individual and personal efforts and preparation was rare. The media praised Park for his selfdiscipline, scientific management, and competitive individualism. After his thirteenth Major League victory in 1997, Park was quoted saying that “I pitched today using my willpower, although my physical condition wasn’t very good… Through this season, I learned that I got better results as I tried and prepared more.”17 The attention on his physical training went beyond the regular seasons: Park’s meticulous and scientific training

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regimen during the off-season was also reported as a key to his success. Park was reported to have undertaken excruciating effort to become a top starting pitcher. Along with his relentless efforts, his body is represented as a key site for personal preparation, self-government, as well as technical management. The emphasis on sporting body, bodily discipline, and control is also crucial for exploring the relationships between power, knowledge, and corporeal existence (Loy, Andrews, & Reinhart, 1993). By emphasizing his self-government and its functional connection to his success in MLB, media representations of Park indicated the importance of individual responsibility for one’s own success through discipline. Citing his individual efforts, Park was hailed as a typical Hollywood success story. From his earliest days in MLB, Korean mass media had described him as a wonder boy from a small country town in South Korea who finally became a celebrity both in South Korea and the U.S.—he was even called a global star. Because the media took care to heighten the drama of this success story by noting that Park spent a couple of years as a little-known minor-leaguer, his sudden blossoming formed the Hollywood equivalent of rising from bit player to leading man in his team, the L.A. Dodgers. The media often emphasized that Park had not been considered a top prospect during his amateur days, even in South Korea, compared to other promising talents; instead, he was regarded simply as a competent fastball pitcher. Therefore, to a public that had not been deeply enculturated with rags-to-riches stories based on personal effort, Park’s accomplishments in MLB were surprising. His persistent exercise and training seized and held the spotlight along with his sound professional ethics rather than his innate talents or physical gifts, not to mention government support. Park’s mental strength was routinely described as a “rocky” quality that enabled him to overcome obstacles and become a hero. In his debut season as a starting pitcher, his physique such as his height (6’2’’) and muscularity were often compared to much bulkier and stronger American MLB players. Although his physicality surpasses that of the average Korean, his physical attributes were not evaluated as strong assets for his success; rather, the media credited his mental strength and personal ethics with overcoming his physical “limitations.” For instance, when he pitched a winning game in spite of a stomachache and a cold on 18 August 1997, it was reported that his routine practice and mental preparedness helped him to overcome these physical obstacles. At the same time, he was portrayed as vulnerable to racial prejudice, as one of

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only a few Asian players in a sport regarded as the American pastime. When Park won his tenth victory, the Korean media crowed that he had overcome various kinds of hurdles, which included communication difficulties, loneliness in a foreign land, and racial discrimination. Meanwhile, traditional Confucian culture was emphasized as a way of explaining Park’s success. In news reports, such phrases as “undaunted spirit” and “unyielding courage” were routinely utilized: for example, one headline said, “Park won the twelfth victory through sheer willpower.”18 As a matter of fact, such praise has been habitually applied to sports athletes in South Korea, and Park’s story was also fitted to match this stereotype: among other obstacles he was described as facing in the West, his relatively small stature and consequent physical disadvantages were often mentioned. Thus, his success in the U.S. looked even more outstanding to Koreans, and willpower could be portrayed as crucial to his achievements. His mental strength was also described as something that he acquired through relentless practice and training. This emphasis on the self-governing individual provides a strong clue for uncovering a new relationship between individual and nation, state, and government in South Korea. For decades, under developmental nationalism, individual Koreans had no alternative but to put national interest before personal benefit, and in turn, governments were supposed to act as a patron or guardian. This stereotypical relationship had been well established through sports athletes, who had fought for their nation-state and its glory. However, both this attitude and the mutually supportive relationship it upheld crumbled when Koreans witnessed the national disaster and the incompetence of their government in the face of the economic crisis and the IMF intervention. A new kind of hegemonic ideology was needed, one that could promote the role of individuals who were responsible for their own well-being. Media representation of Park in MLB showcased a responsible and well-governed individual within a new hegemonic ideology that relieved the government of its burden of social welfare by making the concept of self-governing individuals commonsensical, moral, and praiseworthy. Economic Success in Global Competition Korean media representation of Park described him as a winner in global competition, which of course operates on free-market principles. Korean

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media repeatedly pointed out that Park was a survivor in such a limitless contest, and even a true winner because of his economic profitability, i.e., increasing annual salary and promotional income. In so doing, Park was described as an incarnation of global Koreanness, a metaphor which began to be widely deployed in the mid-1990s under the segyehwa (globalization) policy. When Park began to succeed in MLB in 1997, media coverage stated that he had weathered the contest of MLB, in which every player is judged against global standards within the free-market principles. Within South Korea’s emerging concept of global economy, MLB can be easily interpreted as a global arena in which any player, irrespective of nationality or ethnicity, competes against all other players, and can only survive based on his individual capability and market value. Since the 1997 season, Park was hailed as a “global star” who had passed the test amidst the plethora of global talents. His particular version of the American Dream was lived out according to the specific conditions of his experience. On the one hand, his story lent itself to such historic framing because the site of both his performance and his success was L.A., which has the highest Korean population of any U.S. city. Millions of Korean immigrants and KoreanAmericans have striven to attain their American Dream there, so his story echoed previous and ongoing narratives around L.A. On the other hand, the context of his American Dream was new to Americans as well as to Koreans because it was realized in the late 1990s when the U.S. dominated the global economy. While globalization itself came to be seen as a competition that is both endless and borderless, Park was called a global hero, especially among Korean immigrants in L.A. His American Dream thus paralleled the historic path of Korean immigrants to America and also offered a vision to Koreans of how they would be expected to compete and then succeed in global competition. In his American Dream, the dominant criterion of success was economic: namely his increasing MLB salary and additional income from commercials and other auxiliary endeavors. Media speculation about his pay raises, which became especially prevalent at the end of each regular season, framed his earning potential as proof of his status as one of the top pitchers in MLB. By specifying Park’s wealth as “income of foreign currency,” i.e., U.S. dollars, his growing salary from MLB was linked to the national wealth of South Korea. One article proclaimed that his increasing income from MLB was not only contributing to the national wealth of South Korea but that it was even single-handedly saving

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the country from the economic crisis.19 Contrary to such media hype, however, his salary and other income did not actually help the Korean national economy; on the contrary, he was exempted from paying taxes to the South Korean government for his endorsements on behalf of Korean domestic corporations due to special tax agreements between the South Korean and the U.S. governments. Nonetheless, the media was busy projecting their expectations and predictions surrounding his maximum salary based on the salaries of high-profile MLB players at the time. Reports about his salary, which were generally laudatory, were quickly tied to nationalistic interests; for example, it was implied that Koreans should be proud of Park because his salary was predicted to reach $10 million by the 2001 season. This emphasis on an individual athlete’s economic profitability is relatively new in South Korea. Previously, higher value had been placed upon statistics such as numbers of gold medals earned and victories achieved (particularly against Japan and North Korea) in international competitions. Earlier stereotypical characterizations of athletes that focused on winning rather than on monetary success were also reversed when Korean media reported on Park’s success story and his salary negotiations in detail. Also, the news on hiring sports super-agent Scott Boras and their relentless contract negotiations including annual salaries and various options for bonuses were reported as symbolic of a successful consumer who was shrewdly “maximizing opportunities for profit through aggressive contract negotiations” (Joo, 2012, p. 106). When Park became a free agent after the 2001 season, he was regarded as the top starting pitcher on the free agent market. The media was busy guessing his next team as well as the total amount of the contract that Park would sign for the first time as a free agent. Along with his agent, Scott Boras, Park finally succeeded in signing a mega deal in 2002: a $65 million, five-year contract with the Texas Rangers. At the time, his contract and his average salary of $13 million a season placed him as the sixth most highly paid pitcher. The individual processes of hiring a super-agent, negotiating annual salaries, and acquiring free agent contracts were quite new and sensational to Korean fans, audiences, and the public at large because such a system was unfamiliar not only in the context of sports but also to traditional salarymen. In South Korea, the first free agent system was installed in 2000, but this system still does not allow players to hire professional agents in the process of negotiation (Cho & Chang, 2017).

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Another feature used by the Korean media to highlight Park’s global success was to draw heavily from American and international news sources and media. Dependence on foreign news sources in representing Park in MLB sounds both logical and ironic because, by the 1990s, almost every Korean newspaper and broadcasting network was able to assign their own reporters to attend and report on important sporting events on site. While Korean journalists could relay first-hand observations of Park and fan responses in L.A., South Korean media continued to quote heavily from the U.S. media, particularly ESPN and the Los Angeles local press. For example, on 25 September 1998, a news report during the MBC 9 pm news dedicated three minutes of airtime to recapping an L.A. Times article about Park. Similarly, broadcast news shows often ran interviews with the Dodgers’ general manager and team members, as well as with other Americans, all of whom made favorable comments about Park. These news practices implied that even though South Korean media outlets were capable of gathering their own stories, recognition from U.S. and international media was still necessary to confirm Park’s success in both American and global terms. As the Korean media emphasized Park’s American dream in MLB, coverage of Park’s activities in the U.S. introduced Koreans to neologisms such as free agent, annual salary, negotiating contracts, and so on. Meanwhile, concepts such as unlimited global competition, economic profitability, and free-market principles were legitimized. Even as representations of Park encouraged people to take global competition for granted, however, questions about fair competition and structural inequality were not really raised. This silence was particularly noticeable when the government and local corporations were obviously struggling, but Park’s success in the U.S. was routinely and saliently brought up to suggest, implicitly and explicitly, that any Korean could and should be competitive and successful on a global level and in economic terms. Park provided an ideal prototype for every Korean to emulate: a self-made economic success who relies on hard work, discipline, and shrewd negotiation instead of support and protection from the government, which diverted attention away from social agendas such as minimum wage, public welfare, and regular or permanent jobs (Song, 2009).

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New Ethic of Being Responsible for Family and Nation-State By identifying Park’s success in MLB as a national achievement and by emphasizing his close relationship with his family, Korean media also successfully presented him as an ideal individual who fulfilled his filial responsibility not only to his family, but also to South Korea. The nation-state is identified as an extended form of family and, in turn, family symbolizes the nation-state. Compared to previously nationalistic rhetoric around sports athletes in the Olympics, one notable distinction in Park’s representation is that, as a professional baseball player, Park played primarily for himself and his team, i.e., the L.A. Dodgers, not for South Korea. It is noteworthy how South Korean media successfully repositioned Park as a national figure rather than as simply a star player in MLB, and how such nationalist description drew substantial support from the public. Simply put, South Korean media created a nationalistic discourse by persistently equating Park’s victories in MLB with the triumph of the nation-state as a whole, even going so far as to state that “Chan-ho Park put Korea on the map.”20 The media habitually used the term “national” to describe him and his victories, routinely referred to him as a son of South Korea,21 and continued to use his nickname of “Korean Express” (derived from his fastball) even after other Korean pitchers began to play in MLB. Potent national symbols such as the national flag and historic metaphors were often used in connection with his performances as well. The nationalistic discourse effectively appealed to the public under the condition of the economic crisis. South Korean media directly stated that Park and his performance in the U.S. encouraged national unity and confidence, describing his importance as a form of “national refreshment and vitality” to Koreans who were frustrated and dejected during the national crisis. The locations of the U.S. and L.A. also contributed to rendering him as a national figure who shares Korean immigrants’ experiences. By quoting Korean immigrants in L.A., the news media reported that it was “Park who generated emotional catharsis [and] became a real celebrity or even hero […] and also gave us a vicarious pleasure of beating Americans.” Via numerous appearances in the media, in turn, Park expressed his appreciation to Korean immigrants in L.A. for their support. The mutual support and appreciation between Park and Korean immigrants in L.A. were presented as an exemplary case for symbolizing the Korean ethnic community within the world. The media also cited

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South Koreans calling him things like a cultural ambassador who had made Koreans famous, which showed their recognition of Park’s national efforts and services. By quoting one internet poll, the media also reported that about 70% of participants agreed that Park’s military exemption had been in the “national interest” of Korea. In his identification as a national figure, Park’s relationship with his family was an important element. In Confucian culture, the family symbolizes the nation-state in miniature and the nation-state is regarded as an extended form of family. Such an analogy has its historic lineage in the developmental regime, in which presidents or generals were usually equated with fathers or leaders of a family. The media representation also highlighted Park’s acknowledgment of his family’s emotional support and expectations as critical factors to his success. In this description, the focus was on the role of his mother who spent time with him in L.A.: her contributions lay in providing traditional Korean food and emotional support. For his part, Park seldom neglected to mention his appreciation for his family, consistently crediting their support as essential for maintaining his mental focus. Park often mentioned his family’s support during his successful career streak, in contrast to his more difficult times during his minor-league days when he was on his own. Nowhere were these connections defined as a legal duty: instead, they were described as a cultural norm and an ethical responsibility. In his media representation, Park seemed to be determined to succeed for his family, not because he had received special gifts or financial support from them, but simply because he was a family member, and more importantly, a son. Park’s determination reflects his moral and ethical duty to his family, which is regulated neither by legal duty nor by financial interests. Given the power of geographical and cultural analogy, Park’s role in and relationship to his family illustrates another model for every Korean in the nation-state: in the media, Park was called to “play in the world as a Korean son.”22 Thus, his contribution to South Korea was habitually described as “filial devotion.” In this type of representation, neither familial duty nor the eventual assumption of a paternal role within the family is the main concern: rather, Park’s ethical responsibility to succeed in the U.S. as a son of his family was emphasized. While the equation of nation-state and family is traditionally repeated and culturally rooted in South Korea, the general public showed no discomfort in embracing Park as a national son, as if he was working and fighting for their own Korean families both in South Korea and in the U.S.

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Although his representation in MLB highlights his sense of responsibility to his family as well as the nation-state, it is necessary to pay attention to nuanced changes in the relationship between the individual and the nation-state. Under developmental nationalism, which had been the hegemonic ideology for the past several decades, the South Korean government had stressed the importance of individual sacrifices for the sake of national interest, a rhetoric that underscored the central but authoritarian role of the government. This rhetoric had been utilized for suppressing nonconforming people and groups, but also for underscoring its central roles and credits within economic progress on a national level. In the rhetoric of the late 1990s, however, the government’s or the president’s duty as a head of the family as well as the nation-state was de-emphasized or even absent. As a matter of fact, the government did not contribute anything to Park’s performance and success in MLB, but rather it and its affiliated personnel continued to try and utilize him and his images for their own political purposes. This sidelining may symbolize a shift from or even an abandonment of the government’s duty to its own citizens. Instead, the media representation of Park in MLB actively encouraged people to pursue their own dreams, which, however, should contribute to their family and even to the nation-state as an extended form of the family. Using rhetoric associated with familial affinity, paternal relation, and even patriarchal ethics, the new discourse encouraged people, as individuals, to be responsible for themselves, ultimately fulfilling their filial duty to their family and nation-state. Thus, the media representation of Park forges a model for the ethical responsibility of each individual in the process of accomplishing their visions within global competition. By representing Park and his performances in MLB as an ideal example of a responsible individual, sporting governmentality under the national economic crisis normalized and even moralized the idea of individual responsibility where the government, as a protector and helper of the people, is conveniently absent.

The National Individual: A New Kind of Citizenship This chapter approached the sudden popularity of MLB and Park during the economic crisis from the perspective of governmentality. As the South Korean government struggled to restructure Korean society under the IMF’s guidelines, a particular fandom of global sports, i.e., MLB in

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South Korea exemplified the changing dynamics and relations between local government, domestic and transnational corporations, and transnational agency. While the South Korean government still intervened in the procedures of broadcasting MLB games in which Park played, the ways in which the government engaged with sport revealed considerable changes in its nature. The idea of governmentality shows its theoretical efficiency by describing and explicating changing roles of the government, different power dynamics, and the roles of bio-power. The media representation of Park played the important role of concretizing the ideal and virtues of the new kind of citizenship that Koreans were told they needed, not only to make a place for themselves in a globalized world but also to become winners in limitless contests. Its core characteristics such as the self-governing individual, economic success in global competition, and the ethic of responsibility to family and nation-state epitomize the new norm for a new kind of citizenship, which I refer to as the national individual in a global era. This idea of the national individual in a global era was invented and normalized in the making of sporting governmentality in the turning decade of the new millennium. It resembles the iconic figure of Michael Jordan, who globalized American sports a decade prior to the events described in this chapter. Just as Michael Jordan, who functioned as an embodied exaltation of the twin discourses of late modernity-neoliberal democracy and globalized consumer capitalism (Andrews, 2001), Park became another incarnation of neoliberalism who “travels across borders, a figure caught up in circuits of corporate capital, and an idealized representation of the neoliberal Korean subject” (Joo, 2012, p. 18). At the same time, it needs to be noted that the national individual in a global era is not equated with the norm of cosmopolitanism or even transnationalism. Outwardly, because Park embodied the necessary elements of high mobility, economic affluence, competitiveness, and English proficiency, Park might have functioned as an incarnation of cosmopolitan identity. However, he was constantly labeled as a Korean, a nationalist identity that did not exclude his involvement with domestic issues (such as the political flap over his mandatory military service) and his recognition as an outstanding citizen (such as the presidential honor awarded to him at the Blue House). The media further pushed the image of Park as a national hero by appealing to colonial history and regularly comparing his performances and records to Japanese players in MLB. When Park won his seventeenth game in the 2000 season, the fact that he

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had exceeded the winning record of Japanese pitcher Hideo Nomo was heavily praised. Even though there was no obvious or urgent reason to do so, games in which he had the opportunity to beat Japanese players or exceed their records were always treated as particularly momentous. As Lee and Maguire (2009) concluded, the mediated framing of nations is still important in a highly globalized sporting world. Thus, the idea of the national individual was suggested as the model citizen, which also materialized individual responsibility to the family and nation-state as a moral duty for every Korean, encouraging them to regard personal success as contributing to national success and to be personally invested in the destiny of South Korea as an extended form of familial responsibility. The making of the national individual also successfully shifted the burden of public duty and social welfare from the government to individuals, who ought to be responsible for their own well-being. In the process of building a new sporting governmentality around MLB, the neoliberal elements dovetailed nicely with nationalist discourses in representations of Park, which in turn meant that South Korean nationalist discourses defined new relationships between citizens and the government and between individuals and the nation-state. This kind of sporting governmentality illuminates how, despite the failure of developmental nationalism, an altered form of nationalistic ideology remained strong in South Korea both during and after the national crisis, which I discussed in the previous chapter. This altered nationalism effectively affiliated itself with the idea of purposeful, accepted, valued individuality, such as free-market principles and global competition. Thus, in the representation of Park, the norm of the national individual is suggested as the model for a new kind of citizenship. Instead of contradicting or diminishing emphasis on individuality, in this model, this new nationalistic norm of citizenship stresses the value of individuals who are willing to accept their moral and ethical responsibility in contributing to the nation’s prosperity and well-being. South Korean mass media and government officials fulfilled their roles in constructing a set of norms or virtues in light of a fundamental, structural transformation of the nation’s governmental, economic, and social spheres. In the new nation, the one that would assume its destined place on the global stage, nationalism would still function as a hegemonic ideology. However, for the first time, individuals would be responsible for themselves as well as for their families and the nation-state. Both the new nation and its citizens would, in turn,

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enact uniquely Korean versions of free-market principles and national productivity in their pursuit of global competition.

Notes 1. To overcome this dualism between instrumental and substantial approaches, Feenberg (2002) suggests a critical approach, which says that once a technology has been implemented, it is virtually impossible for people to reject it, so careful consideration should be taken before we take the next step. 2. Satellite services such as the Cable News Network (CNN), Music Television (MTV), and the Entertainment and Sports Network (ESPN) were launched in the United States in the 1980s and eventually grew into global enterprises in the 1990s (Herman & McChesney, 1997, pp. 38 and 45). 3. According to Barker (1997, pp. 52–53), the number of cable connections in Asia increased greatly from 1991 to 1994. In-home subscriptions to cable grew from N/A (1991) to 57,850,000 (1994) and the number of TV households in Asia grew by 19.14%. 4. The numbers of subscribers are taken from Social Index (2000). Nam (2008) also records that the launch of cable TV on 1 March 1995 was hailed by the news media as a “revolutionary day” in Korean television. 5. Besides the case of South Korea, Asian media markets were also targeted by the Fox News Corporation through the satellite delivery systems, including Australia (Foxtel), India (Zee TV), Japan (JSkyB), and pan-Asia (Star TV) (Andrews & Silk, 2005). 6. In 2003, i.e., its first service year, MLB.com charged subscribers $14.95 per month or $79.95 for the whole season. 7. Fox Broadcasting Company, owned by News Corporation, made an aggressive move to acquire National Football League (NFL) broadcasting rights in 1993. By selecting the Fox bid late that year, the NFL stripped CBS of pro football for the first time since 1956. Fox’s coverage began with the 1994 season. News Corporation purchased the L.A. Dodgers organization for $311 million in 1998 and sold it during the 2003– 2004 off-season (Andrews, 2004). According to Andrews (2002), the acquisition of NFL football was crucial to establishing and defining Fox’s network. 8. Until 2000, the SBS sports channel (a local cable channel) owned broadcasting rights to ESPN sports programs, for which it paid $1.8 million per year. However, this right was transferred to MBC in 2001, after MBC launched the MBC-ESPN channel and agreed to pay $2.5 million per year (Hankyung, 1 March 2001).

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9. Mason (2002) reports that transnational corporations must negotiate within the language of the local, which indicates that penetrating new markets must be done with a keen awareness of the traditions and symbolic meanings of the sports. 10. Nakamura (2005) contends that Japanese reactions to Nomo’s debut in MLB ranged from seeing him as a pioneer to seeing him as a selfish rebel. 11. In 1999–2000, for instance, seven young Taiwanese players signed lucrative contracts with American and Japanese teams. For details on baseball in Taiwan, see Morris (2006, 2011). 12. An example would be the Ladies Professional Golf League. After the debut of Seri Pak in the US LPGA in 1997, young Korean and Asian players have dominated the titles, which also elicited some reactionary responses from the organizers. For more, see Joo’s book (2012). 13. Andrews and Silk (2005) use Toyotism to explicate flexible, adaptable, and globally contingent regimes of production within sports marketing and promotional strategies. 14. In his discussion of governmentality, Foucault (1997) assigns three meanings to governmentality: (1) the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, and tactics; (2) the tendency of the ensemble to establish preeminence over all other forms of this type of power; and (3) this process as it played out in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 15. The result of the polls suggested that people should be patient with the minor inconvenience of not being able to watch Park’s games live (SaekyeIlbo, 9 January 1998). One newspaper reported that 91% of participants voted not to pay any money for broadcasting MLB in 1998 (HankookIlbo, 21 January 1998). 16. Male Korean athletes are exempted from military service if they win a gold medal in the Asian Games or a bronze medal (minimum) in the Olympics. 17. I have translated this report into English from the original Korean. Chosun-Ilbo, 23 August 1997. 18. Chosun-Ilbo, 18 August 1997. 19. Chosun-Ilbo, 21 May 1998. 20. Chosun-Ilbo, 20 October 1997 21. Prime Minister Jongpil Kim invited him for breakfast, calling him the pride of South Korea (KBS 9 pm News on 5 November 1998). 22. Chosun-Ilbo, 5 March 1999.

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CHAPTER 4

Glocalization of Sports from Below: Online Communities Among Korean MLB Fans

The existence of online space is crucial to the contemporary global sports fandom because access to such spaces enables fans to rapidly consume, enjoy, and appropriate globally circulated sporting commodities without being restricted to physical location. Online spaces also allow local fans to become acquainted with other fans and to communicate instantaneously with them. These activities render the internet critical to the construction of sports fandom worldwide. In South Korea, as in other countries, Major League Baseball (MLB) fans utilize online spaces to obtain information about numerous subjects associated with baseball, as well as about baseball itself, and to communicate with each other. While global sports fandoms, assisted by the internet, seem to represent the transnationalism and globalization of sports, they nonetheless show strong attachments to local and national issues as well as to their geographical locations. This is undeniably true in South Korea, where widespread internet use and an emerging internet culture are closely connected to the promotion of MLB. As they participate in their online community, Korean MLB fans construct individual and collective identities. This involves continuous negotiations of time, historicity, and locality, a set of activities that also helps establish the materiality of their online community. Such historicity as well as materiality, in turn, is not only intersected by members’ offline lives and their opinions about local and national issues, but they are also embedded in the ambivalence that © The Author(s) 2020 Y. Cho, Global Sports Fandom in South Korea, Palgrave Series of Sport in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3196-5_4

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local fans express about global sports. Ultimately, all of these complications enhance the range of fans’ online identities, from individual to collective and across the continuum of local-national-global. An essential part of this identity formation is fans’ articulations of time and space on the internet, which result in multiple senses of temporality and spatiality that fluctuate between virtual and real, online and offline, and among the local, national, and global. The online community of Korean MLB fans entitled MLBPARK (www.mlbpark.com) does not require its participants to remove themselves from their own places and time zones. In this sense, Korean MLB fans are more than long-distance partisans of global sports: they also use their interest in a global sport to extend their local relationships and facilitate their local affiliations. Contrary to the “long distance love” that Farred (2002, 2008) describes in the South African fandom of English football clubs, the MLB fandom in South Korea is neither an arbitrary nor a psychic spectacle: rather, it is actively engaged with local issues, historic changes, as well as friends’ and families’ memories. By enjoying U.S. sports and interacting with fellow enthusiasts online, these fans have developed their understanding of the national and have constructed a complex sense of locality, shared time patterns, and a unique history. These fluctuations in online communities can be assessed in terms of glocalization. As explained in the introduction chapter, the implications of the U.S. sports fandom in South Korea can be better assessed through the theoretical frame of glocalization as a continuum. While the previous chapter explores the dimension of “glocalization from above,” this chapter examines “glocalization from below,” which refers to the diverse ways that local fans consume and enjoy MLB. In other words, the Korean MLB fandom epitomizes a type of glocalization from below. Online communities as established and enacted by Korean MLB fans demonstrate that the globalization of U.S. sports not only relies upon local responses but is also utilized to re-articulate local and national identity. In global sports, the local is not “the other” of the global, and in South Korea in particular, both the local and the national have actively, enthusiastically responded to the arrival of U.S. sports. This chapter begins with a short history of the Korean MLB fandom on the internet and subsequently elaborates how Korean MLB fans construct individual and collective identities and form a culture. The ways in which South Korean fans develop their own cultures and multiple spatial and temporal senses, as well as constitute fan identities epitomize a singular global

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fandom that is very cosmopolitan and transnational but still local and national at the same time.

The MLB Fandom on the Internet in South Korea Developments in information technology, the expansion of South Korea’s internet infrastructure, and a burgeoning online culture have provided MLB fans with numerous opportunities to diversify the ways South Korean fans enjoy MLB. These factors plus heavy per capita internet use have clearly been important contributors to the MLB fandom in South Korea. Yet another contribution of the internet has been the creation and development of online communities comprised of MLB fans. Many of these have formed around particular players, teams, or clubs. They exist in numerous formats, including blogs, newsreels, listservs, e-zines, and fully developed online communities in which members express their thoughts, share information, develop relationships, and form individual and group identities. Geographical proximity has been a particularly salient contributor to the distinctive online culture of South Korean MLB fans. Online communities of MLB fans in South Korea developed concurrently with the popularity of MLB. In 1997, what was arguably the first Korean MLB fan site (www.yagoo.co.kr) was created; next came MYMLB (www.mymlb.co.kr) and iccsports (www.iccsports.com). These early communities were not stable, either in terms of membership or longevity; however, after use of the World Wide Web became ubiquitous in Korea, new communities such as MLBPARK (www.mlbpark. com), MLBBADA (www.mlbbada.com), MLBKOREA (www.mlbkorea. com), and MLBMAX (www.mlbmax.co.kr) were formed. These were the largest Korean MLB online fan communities as of 2005–2006. Among them, MLBPARK is still active as of 2020. One unique aspect of Korean MLB fan communities is that they began as personal homepages instead of being created by for-profit groups or subsidiaries of newspaper companies. A couple of communities even started out with only one person operating them (MLBBADA by Peabada and MLBKOREA by semi-Chan-ho). Depending on who was in charge, each community had its own culture and rules; this individuality enabled most of them to remain autonomous and minimally commercial. MLBKOREA, for example, neither allows its members to talk about other sports nor to openly idolize any Korean players in MLB.

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Despite the extensive efforts of owners/administrators, it was impossible for them to provide all of the baseball-related information and news upon which the activities and vitality of these communities are based. That the survival of these online communities depended upon the heavy participation of numerous MLB fans implies that these fans are also heavy internet users. Korean MLB fans, as citizens of one of the world’s most wired countries, are particularly active users of such online spaces where they can nurture their interests, contribute, and obtain news and information, and share gossip. Online communities have performed a particularly life-giving function within the MLB fandom since 2002, when Park was experiencing a slump and national networks were broadcasting fewer MLB games. Online, fans supplemented the limited information available from mainstream media with their own thoughts and with information they had gathered themselves from the web and numerous other sources. Their activities also attracted new fans, some of whom had discovered MLB through online communities. Thus, online communities have become the basis both for satisfying the interests of existing MLB fans and for nurturing new fans in South Korea. As previously noted, MLBPARK is one of the oldest and biggest online communities among numerous MLB websites founded and populated by South Koreans. According to one operator,1 the number of registered user IDs in 2006 was approximately 90,000 (it must however be noted that it is always difficult to pinpoint the exact number of actual users because some have multiple IDs). The number of daily users was about 35,000 and 600–700 posts were created on a daily basis. The record for the most page views in one day, nearly 2.5 million, was set on 18 March 2006, the day that the Korean and Japanese national teams played against each other in the 2006 World Baseball Classic (WBC). The majority of MLBPARK’s population consists of people who are MLB fans, South Koreans, native speakers of Korean, and residing in South Korea, although some live in other countries. Compared to the generally short life cycles of online sports fan communities, the venerable MLBPARK was launched on 20 February 2001 and, as previously stated, is still active as of 2020. A number of core members had been participating in other baseball-related websites since the late 1990s, and some of them trace the origin of MLBPARK to previous discussion boards such as Yagoo Korea and MYMLB. These boards, which became active in 1997, were among the very first online fan sites for MLB fans in South Korea.

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MLBPARK includes all types of fans, from novices who only follow Korean players in MLB to maniacs who can recount the records of their favorite teams and players in detail. Many fans still express a full range of opinions about Park and his contribution to the popularity of MLB in South Korea: some have significant memories of watching him during the economic crisis in the late 1990s while others share no such nostalgic connection. Perhaps most significantly, many members of MLBPARK regard this online space as a community in which they can not only exchange opinions and obtain information about MLB but also share personal stories and details of their daily lives. Here, fans often conduct political and nationalistic discussions and are usually very quick to post information about current events and controversies. Their online etiquette is also intriguing: even when they are simply adding replies to others’ comments, their interactions read like conversations. Comments and reactions may be posted while games are being watched, whereas other postings may be spontaneous or the result of long deliberations. After several of MLBPARK’s founders stepped down around 2000, the head moderator in 2005–2006, Seungtag Baek, made a contract with a couple of commercial entities that required him to add a corporate logo to the community’s homepage and to include advertisements in the margins.2 Such conditions are not unusual because a private operator usually cannot afford server-related fees and sufficient bandwidth for long and numerous daily postings and traffic. However, these changes elicited major complaints from MLBPARK members, who claimed that the contents of their community could not be owned, much less sold or put under contractual obligation. Today, MLBPARK is affiliated with Dong-A Ilbo, one of the biggest newspaper corporations in South Korea, which has assumed all of the rights and responsibilities associated with the site, although the bulletin boards are still independently managed by selected participants.3 A couple of Dong-A Ilbo employees (one of whom has been a core member of the community for years), who happen to be sports reporters, are now largely in charge of the website. Although occasional complaints about management still surface, corporate intervention has only ever triggered one mass migration of community members.4 The site’s name implies a public “park” for MLB fans and also functions as a tribute to Chan-ho Park, the most famous Korean player in MLB. Although MLBPARK is not explicitly a fan site for Park, the bulk of its members’ attention is dedicated to him and other Korean players

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in MLB. The site contains numerous bulletin boards where social interactions take place. The most popular of these boards are MLB News, MLB Town, Broadcasting Town, and Bullpen. MLB News is where only official news reporters post their stories and reports, and where regular members are restricted to reading and commenting on these postings. MLB Town consists of the latest stories, gossip, and opinions about MLB. Broadcasting Town is where people can simulcast MLB games— Bullpen, the informal space where people can discuss any issue whatsoever beyond MLB. Bullpen also contains personal blogs, newsreels, and links to listservs and commercial sites. The commercial elements of MLBPARK include an online, MLBrelated shopping mall and the corporate logo and ads mentioned above. However, the latter are not particularly intrusive and do not affect activity on the site. Although the site does not offer a chat room feature, a private message function allows members to exchange messages by clicking on other members’ IDs. This ability to converse directly and informally helps to generate personal relationships and a sense of connectedness, which is critically important because most members do not interact face to face in real time. Because internet use and MLB fandom are mutually dependent in South Korea, the proliferation of online communities devoted to MLB may be a profitable and sustainable way to maintain the MLB fandom in Korea. These communities are not only indicative of fan activity, they are also inherently well suited to the sporting industry and its high-involvement products (as previously discussed, the success and sustainability of global sports in local circumstances depend upon the sports’ insider status among the locals). As long as the expansion of U.S. sports in South Korea is assisted by the collaborative efforts of the government, domestic corporations, and transnational companies, online communities populated by Korean MLB fans will be essential for the popularity of MLB. Along with their diverse opinions and thoughts about MLB, members can and do debate various unrelated issues, including disputatious subjects such as politics and religion.

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Making the Community: Individual and Collective Identities Technology provides myriad possibilities as well as enigmas. People dream of a world in which technology offers unprecedented opportunities or at least relieves the difficulties and inconveniences of daily life, yet are not surprised when they find that technology contributes far less than expected or actually causes unpleasantness. As Jones suggests, our impatience with technology “has arisen not from anxiety, but rather from expectation that technology will, almost nationally, become better” (1997, p. 2). In the present era, no form of interactive media illustrates this conundrum more fully than the internet. Terms associated with the internet that project futuristic images, such as virtuality, novelty, and new frontier, imply a techno-determinism in which technology constitutes a new cultural system that restructures the entire social world. Although the term “virtual community” is often used to describe online spaces or patterns of interactions among online groups based on a shared interest,5 internet terminology generally elides the geographical spatial formations of nation-states. The term “virtual” often cloaks cultural practices on the internet, particularly those related to its geographical affinity. Several primary characteristics of the internet are not drastically different from those of other technologies: the internet is dominated by white, male, middle-class users, and English is its principal language. However, the internet readily supplies the sense of virtual space and the ways that people use online spaces indicate a recursive relationship between online and offline. Nowadays, so many people, including young sports fans, “live” both offline and online so that even the phrase “real life” to refer to offline activities and occurrences is questionable. Due to the strong infrastructure of the internet in South Korea, people increasingly depend on the internet as a way of obtaining information and developing social relationships. Similarly, South Korean MLB fans utilize their particular online community as a main hub not only for satisfying their interest in MLB but also for sharing their thoughts and feelings with other fans. All of their interactions (postings, comments, and private messages) contribute to bringing about a culture unique to each community and also help constitute fans’ individual and collective identities, which in turn help shape these online spaces into communities. These two types of identities are not separate entities, however.

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Instead, a continuum of identity is formed by three elements: information of consumption, alternative ways of communication, and community culture. Information of Consumption Korean MLB fans continue to visit and reside in their online communities for various reasons. The regularity of these activities indicates that searching for, obtaining, and sharing knowledge is crucial to fans’ individual and collective identities. The varieties of ways that MLB fans produce, consume, and distribute information online generate unique features for each community and multiple functions for information within the communities. By applying Lowenthal’s discussion on ideas in the era of mass culture, I refer to the unique features that result from information-related processes as “information of consumption.” Originally, Lowenthal (1961) uses the term idols of consumption to refer to cultural phenomena offered by the manufacturers of mass culture, in contrast to idols of production, which had been maintained in the twentieth century. Similarly, I dub the term “information of consumption” to highlight the nuanced and unique nature of information circulation on the internet. The primary reason that Korean baseball fans visit online communities is to obtain information about MLB, most of which is provided by other fans. Although community administrators regularly update a few news features, hundreds of postings and related discussions are supplied by fans every day. These realities make the metaphors of “quilt” and “porch” apt for this type of online community (Bird, 2003; Jenkins, 1992). Fans produce information by copying it from other websites, translating English versions into Korean, and composing and transcribing their own thoughts. The levels of information also vary. Some postings are immediate, opinion-driven responses while others are the results of long deliberation and effort that may include photos and detailed comments. These diverse products show that Korean fans actively seek out and modify news about MLB from original sources (mainly sportsrelated websites such as MLB.com, ESPN.com, and other U.S. media outlets). These ways of producing information for community consumption seem to follow a pattern of decentralization even as they demonstrate interactivity. If the internet is above all a decentralized communication system based on interactivity, Korean MLB fans actualize, at least in part,

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the practices of decentralized information production for the purposes of interaction.6 Once it is embedded, a distinct feature of information in online communities is that its production and consumption processes overlap to the point that it can be difficult to distinguish between the two. This type of information overlap (in terms of both content and function) can be interpreted in two ways. First, when information is copied or translated into the community from other commercial websites, the act of producing the information is inseparable from the act of consuming it. Fans usually resort to other websites because of geographical and time zone differences and their inability to access other original sources (e.g., American print and broadcast media) in a timely fashion. Consequently, fans can contribute certain kinds of information to the community only by consuming information from other sources, which they are usually careful to identify. Second, postings that demonstrate fans’ creativity also become objects of commodification. In online communities, posts are evaluated by three criteria: how many hits (views) they receive; how many recommendations they generate; and how many comments are posted in response. In MLBPARK, the top five postings in these three categories are displayed as “Today’s Best Posts” in the featured sections. The reward for members whose postings are selected is enhanced recognition; the most prolific posters eventually achieve high profiles with substantial popularity and support. When this happens, the sight of their user IDs becomes a guarantee for numerous hits, recommendations, and replies. In this way, individual fans become popular through the production of their postings, and at the same time, the community relies upon commodification of human interactions both as evidence of its viability and as its major source of content. The process of distributing information in the community intersects with the processes of production and consumption of that information.7 Most of the production processes utilize members’ skills at retrieving and referencing information; the nature of hypertext enables internet users to multiply information on a tremendous scale. At the same time, fans easily synthesize, correct, and even manipulate original news at their own discretion through the actions of cutting, copying, and pasting. For example, fans intentionally select positive bits of records and reports about their favorite players—and then insist that these players are superior based upon this selective information. Occasionally, the original sources of certain postings are difficult to determine because they have been

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copied and pasted so often. On such occasions, the process of distributing information again overlaps with production and consumption. These dynamic processes demonstrate that information in the community is both flexible and vulnerable to sudden changes. Because the community offers so many reasons as well as opportunities to change, rearrange, replace, and even alter information, fans do not always fully acknowledge or accept breaking news and stimulating topics. For example, when a fan updates very astounding, exclusive news such as a mega-trade between two teams, other fans often react by first questioning the accuracy of the news, the credibility of the source, and so forth. Of course, even if a fan specifies the original source, there is almost no way to guarantee the trustworthiness of the attribution, the news reference, or other important markers. Not only does information in online communities lose reliability this way, it also often crosses the boundaries between true and false, real and unreal. To cope with these ambiguities, fans often develop a “cynical reflexivity” that causes them to neither fully discredit nor embrace communitysupplied information but instead to approach it “as-if.” Debates that are specifically about the accuracy of information generally take on a cynical tone. Rather than spending time and effort on determining credibility, fans tend to utilize both approaches to clarify their opinions and entertain themselves. These reciprocal, interdependent ways of producing, distributing, and consuming information are crucial to the development of fan identities within online communities. In MLBPARK, products rendered by fans (postings and replies) are seen as part of the self as well as part of the overall product of the community. Moreover, postings and replies are recognized as elements of a social process (open-ended discussion) through which individual interpretations are shaped and reinforced. Online communities can provide opportunities for personal growth and change, but not for everyone and not in every circumstance. For example, online communities can give fans a site where they can access an unusual amount of information and creativity, but this does not automatically enable them either to discern accurate information or to increase their creativity. Similarly, although fans in an online community can enjoy access to an enormous amount of information and appropriate it by picking and choosing from what is available, their ways of using it are unpredictable.

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Alternative Ways of Communication As postings become part of their individual and collective identities, South Korean MLB fans also display nontraditional approaches to these textbased communications. The approaches fall into three broad categories: postings as both interpersonal and mass communications; language that straddles the line between written and oral; and debate tactics. According to Baym (2000), fans’ postings can be regarded both as interpersonal and mass communication. Through their postings, fans on MLBPARK document personal feelings and thoughts for public sharing and consumption. As they watch the games, particularly when Park is on the mound, fans may post a few sentences spontaneously (mostly emotional outbursts about players and games). These brief communications often draw complaints from other fans, who argue that the community is not a diary or a garbage dump for personal feelings. Nonetheless, this type of posting occurs again and again. At other times, some fans share their personal lives and everydayness beyond the scope of MLB. For example, Ticketman posted detailed updates about a budding romance with a girl in the community. Early on, he expressed some trepidation: “I think that others might be curious about the reason why I put such personal stories on this board almost every day, or they do not like it. Nonetheless, I simply want to leave my stories here and, hopefully, to have a sense of sharing with others.” Although he soon stopped posting these updates, his story elicited huge numbers of hits and both positive and negative comments; some community members even announced that they had become fans of his story. Such ambiguity between interpersonal and mass communication helps some fans develop an emotional attachment to the community. Not only by contributing and obtaining information but also by sharing personal stories, these fans progressively increase their connection to the community and the group identity it offers. Thus, fans’ postings function as a form of personal expression and also as a source of collective identity. Another characteristic of communication in online communities is that written expression becomes a kind of hybrid that combines features of both written and oral language. To explain this combination, Turkle suggests that in internet writing, “speech is momentarily frozen into artifact, but a curiously ephemeral artifact” (1995, p. 183). As discussed earlier, fans use numerous emoticons and images to express their feelings; in addition, they invent new icons and combine letters and images in

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original, inventive ways. Consequently, postings on MLBPARK are often a combination of graphic, phonetic, and textual signs. Similarly to this overlap between oral and written language, postings as alternative ways of communication include both informative and performative elements. In order to be a successful poster, both content and delivery are crucial. Computer screens are the arenas in which fans project themselves onto their own soap operas that they produce and direct, and in which they play the lead roles. In short, fans come to perform themselves through their postings. Texts or literal information is often supplemented with or even replaced by highly stylized and artistic output. Through these performative skills, some members succeed in developing idiosyncratic characters; furthermore, collective identities are generated when groups of fans exhibit the same skills together in collaboration. In this online community, three additional routinely utilized forms of alternative communication that aid in identity building are baiting, zzalbang [bonus photos], and an “aesthetic of skipping.” Here, the term “baiting” refers to a deliberate act of agitation or deliberately initiating a controversial debate (literally, “casting a wide net”; a related term, “phishing,” refers to sending out bulk spam, usually in the form of commercial e-mail advertisements). Baiting differs from another conflictinducing practice, flaming, in that it does not always contain abusive language targeted at particular individuals. In order to elicit as many comments as possible, postings by so-called “shrewd” baiters, who mainly post very controversial ideas and/or opinions, are based on planned but paradoxical or even distorted rationales. Shrewd baiters also often post their personal thoughts as they try to enhance recognition of their user IDs in the community. The more attention they receive, whether positive or negative, the more successful their baiting is and the more gratification they experience. Thus, successful baiters are located in the midst of the most intensive community quarrels and often have at least a few loyal followers. Koo: I am amazed at how brilliant baiters are with their postings. Nowadays, I am often curious whether the biggest baiters on the internet are all gathering to our community [MLBPARK]. It seems that baiters are competing against each other to show off their skills. Rather than being agitated, I try to be cool with such baiting: for instance, I found it very amusing to look for the best among the numerous baiters. Nonetheless, it is true that the degree of baiting has become serious in the community.

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Another popular tactic on MLBPARK is to add zzal-bang [bonus photos], which could be translated as “memes,” at the end of postings, both to increase the amount of comments and to prevent postings from being ignored (no replies or a low number of hits are generally regarded as an embarrassment). Therefore, fans attach unrelated photos either of funny images or sexy female models to their postings. In order to get more hits, fans indicate the presence of zzal-bang in the titles of their postings. This heavy use of images shows the importance of both visual images and performative elements in online communication. The term “aesthetic of skipping” refers to seemingly indifferent or philosophic attitudes toward nasty provocations and baiting. Ambiguities in postings often lead to misunderstandings and the exchange of nasty comments. As mentioned, baiters do their best to provoke others, particularly hot-tempered fans; however, regardless of who initiates such debates, fans who post slanderous remarks risk being banned from the community. Therefore, some members suggest the self-defensive tactic of ignoring intentional provocations or avoiding unnecessary debates altogether. By explicitly mentioning the term, they remind themselves and each other that becoming embroiled in such unnecessary debates is a waste of time and energy. The Culture of Online Communities A Fan’s Farewell Message I have been here since Park opened in 2001. I had lurked in the community, and then… When BK [Byunghu, Kim, Korean leaguer] was on the mound in the World Series, I cannot forget the thrilling moments which I shared with others, including Ghan, Ucksam, Eross. I also remember Ex, and Rex who began to appear in the community in 2002, and Hitman, a teacher, and Oi—all of them are in their thirties—in 2003. …When I look back on the traces I have left here, these are all valuable memories. …I apologize for my previous posting, which reflects my hot temper. I know it is one of my shortcomings, but it is not easy to correct. So…I have to say it is time for me to leave this community. Goodbye my beloved Park! Farewell to all my acquaintances. I have really appreciated my time here. [ChoiTaeHyuck, September 2005]

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Korean MLB fans also shape their online space into a community by building personal relationships and developing social rules and cultural artifacts. These social aspects of members’ activities contribute simultaneously to the construction of individual and collective identities. Fans generate the culture of their particular community by building social relationships or friendships with other fans and by routinizing common rules and cultural artifacts. As previously discussed, there are several stages in the process of Korean MLB fans’ relationship-building with other fans: recognizing others’ user IDs, adding comments to others’ postings, exchanging e-mails or direct messages, and having face-to-face meetings. Relationships in online communities are generally based on members’ online identities, which are represented by their user IDs. By exchanging information about MLB and responding to each other frequently, fans find friends and may even regard other fans as their closest friends. These relationships tend to be based on common interests rather than shared social characteristics. In some cases, fans extend the boundaries of online communities and begin to meet offline, face to face; a couple of interviewees reported having groups of friends whom they initially met online, in the community. Offline meetings indicate that fans strongly desire interpersonal relationships through face-to-face meetings. Such interpersonal relationships and on/offline meetings help fans develop a sense of special affiliation and connectivity, both to each other and to the community. Personal relationships often coalesce into hierarchical or even hegemonic groups, into which members first become incorporated by recognizing other user IDs and understanding whose ID they are seeing. Members who interact in and around these groups often set the overall tone of a community and even dominate individual bulletin boards within it. Although fans participate in MLBPARK on an egalitarian basis, asymmetries or hierarchies emerge based on varying degrees of influence. For example, Mogul asked whether a hegemonic group existed when some fans initiated a campaign to ignore or boycott the postings of certain members. Mogul: I was shocked by the campaign, which encourages others not to add any comments to the postings of three particular fans. I don’t agree with this campaign because we can post any opinions here, and I think none of us have the right to prevent them from adding any opinions which might be different from and even disagreeable to others… Rather, I think such a campaign is a personal attack as well as tyranny of the majority.

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Meanwhile, certain patterns and cultural practices, ranging from ordinary activities to language activities, become social norms and cultural artifacts. As Baym (2000) suggests, being a member of a fan community entails knowledge of interpretive conventions and collaborative meta-text. As discussed above, new writing styles and other tactics become daily practices of fans as they post, and fans construct collective identities as they share similar patterns. Because online communities are both anonymous and virtual, one type of ritual involves messages that reveal the posters as former lurkers and also messages of farewell. Both kinds of messages are usually followed by appropriate comments; as such reciprocal interactions are routinized, they become normative traditions. Commonly shared practices such as baiting, zzal-bang, and the aesthetic of skipping also contribute to constructing South Korean baseball online communities’ cultural elements and a sense of belongingness, as does the recognition of puns and neologisms. Words, styles, and images all contribute to this vocabulary; for example, the acronym OTL (depicting a stick figure on its knees), which symbolizes helplessness and frustration, has been widely adopted. The fans share a common vocabulary, which is unique and thus identifies them as constituting a distinct culture. Similar to other organizations, MLBPARK has a conduct code that includes disciplinary actions such as deleting postings, suspending user IDs temporarily or permanently, and blocking IP addresses. The current code, which was announced by the administrator in May 2005, includes details about the maximum number of postings per day per person and the rule that images of a sexual nature may only be posted at night. It also includes a general outline for social norms in the community because, on a practical level, a handful of moderators cannot vet over a thousand postings per day. Therefore, members usually try to manage community interactions by themselves, either by encouraging each other not to use abusive or “flaming” language or by withdrawing attention from problematic posters. Members often ask the moderators to intervene more in their interactions and to ban spoilers in the community. The fact that a code of behavior exists, and that there is a need for consistent management, illustrate that this community, like other organizations, needs a set of rules and norms (Bird & Barber, 2002).8 The culture of online communities shows that South Korean MLB fans on the internet need not only interpersonal relationships and even

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offline meetings, but also certain rules in order to manage their communities appropriately. By learning commonly used words and expressions and accepting widely understood roles within online communities, members can experience socialization and institutionalization. Participation in the online community as well as the ways that participants constitute their identities as fans of MLB are reliable indicators of fan activity—which, in turn, is in part a result of glocalization from below.

Materiality of Online Communities As technology makes the routine compression of time and space possible, the internet lifts social interaction out of spatial and temporal contexts. At the same time, technological breakthroughs have provided people with numerous options for interacting in cyberspace, such as e-newsgroups, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons), and blogs (web logs).9 Accordingly, people can communicate either simultaneously or asynchronously no matter where they are geographically. Korean MLB fans in online communities are not always just virtual beings, however, nor do they conduct their online lives in isolation from their offline lives. Despite their common interest in MLB, their conversations frequently evoke and intersect with their very local and national ones, such as when they talk about Korean players in MLB or the role of nationalism in the baseball fandom. Fans also habitually mention their personal memories about MLB and mention various aspects of the community’s history. Such uses of time and space online indicate that fans construct multiple senses of temporality and spatiality. These are promulgated not only by the intersection between online and offline existence, but also by the ambivalence that local fans express about global sports. “Timeless time” does not replace chronological time in online communities but rather coexists with it and provides alternative ways of structuring social relations. In this process, spatiality becomes a way to think through the mutual availability and shared coherence of situated practices, interpretations, and accounts. As Castells noted, “[s]pace of flows and timeless time are the material foundations of a new culture” (1996, p. 375). In light of these discussions, I suggest that Korean MLB fans’ uses of time and space online add complexity or duality to their community, which I refer to as its materiality. The duality stems mainly from two notions about online time and space: first, that these are intersected by people’s offline lives and their views on local and national issues; and second, that they are embedded

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in the ambivalence that local posters express about global sports. In so doing, Korean sports fans’ usages of time and space online contribute to constructing multiple senses of temporality and spatiality rather than substituting virtuality for time and space. Community Times: Uneven but Simultaneous Time does not exist in a unitary way on the internet; instead, temporality becomes disordered and a traditional sense of time is often erased. Nonetheless, the multiple temporalities of the internet are portrayed as both highly ordered and highly meaningful by participants. Fans in online communities must constantly construct, navigate, and adjust uneven temporalities that may be virtual, national, global, or a combination of all three. I describe online time as a set of uneven but simultaneous temporalities that can be summarized as the promise of anytime, national time patterns, and convergence between the past and the present. The primary dimension of online temporality is characterized by the internet’s promise of connectivity whenever a user wishes. This description manifests as a timeless, virtual, or even cosmopolitan temporality in the community; fans connect whenever they want and from wherever they are. However, “anytime” does not literally mean that fans are always connected to or reside in the community 24/7. Therefore, the promise of eternal access and connectivity may be more important than actual connection at any given moment. The promise of anytime also signals that the community is always open and welcoming. For fans, this notion supplies a sense of belonging as well as emotional attachment to the community itself. Through the promise of access to a community that never closes whenever they desire it, many MLB fans find solace in the virtual world. In fact, the banner on the MLBPARK homepage announces that it is “the only paradise constructed by internet people.”10 Crav: Here, I can feel a tie with others who have similar emotions, sentiments, and thoughts. I am really thrilled to experience such commonality… I dare say that I will leave [post] my feelings here today even if this place were to disappear tomorrow.

The promise of anytime, however, is not always kept; nor is its impact on fans always positive. When connections are temporarily unavailable due

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to technical problems, fans quickly become irritated and unsettled, and a “connection error” message during periods of heavy traffic always elicits a large number of complaints. The combination of belongingness and a guarantee of eternal accessibility causes some fans to develop a kind of addiction which, as a modern pathology, is closely related to such issues as security, separation, and the desire for communication. Some fans, who find community participation therapeutic, openly discuss their obsession. Keric: This community has become a place where I can fully express my feelings. As I recall, I have logged on to the community every day since July 2005. Well… I have to say that it is time for me to say goodbye to the community and others because I am going to prepare for a big exam which might determine my future career. Nonetheless, I am not sure whether I really can stop coming here because this place is so addictive.

Other fans regret spending so much of their time and energy on MLBPARK. Gorald: We are simply wandering here. I find myself turning on the computer and logging on to this community every night. Such routines seem to be really meaningless and a waste of time. It is so shameful to imagine that someone else studies hard while I lazily spend my time here.

The temporality of anytime can be regarded as an empty signifier. It might epitomize virtual or timeless time, but its actualization is more indicative of members’ emotional attachment to their community. The second temporality in the online community is national time, one of several locally linked time patterns that co-exist with the timeless temporality that generally characterizes Korean MLB fans’ overall perception of online time. One national time pattern is seen in the increased and idiosyncratic community participation on the game days of Korean MLB players. Because of the time difference between the U.S. and Korea, fans stay awake for the start of these games, which for them is either late at night or early in the morning. While they wait, they interact with other fans by chatting, and during the games, they post progress reports to the bulletin boards. Although the broadcasting times force most fans to

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watch the games alone on TV or the internet, many are able to simultaneously reside in the community as they watch games. The latter group can post spontaneous reactions and opinions to the community in real time, a specific use of time that demonstrates Korean fans’ nationalistic attachments to MLB. Another national time pattern is late-night usage. MLBPARK is most densely populated at this time, when fans are at home and generally free from other obligations. Another attraction of this time slot is that members can only post images with adult content between midnight and dawn. These must contain warnings in their titles, such as “No [viewer] under 19 [years old].” This pattern was questioned when a fan who lives in the U.S. asked whether he could post adult content during the night in his time zone, which is 12 hours later than Korea. Rather than stirring controversy, this question was simply regarded as odd by most members, who assume that the community is on local time, i.e., Seoul’s time zone. This inquiry does generate critical questions regarding time, however, such as whether any specific time zone is necessary for online communities, and if so, what the criteria should be for choosing one (the location of the majority of participants or the location of the server, which stores and distributes the content of the community). Responses to the fan’s question posted from the U.S. show that members in Korea assume the community functions in one common time zone, which they regard as a “national” time zone. Although temporal consistency is decided by the community, their sense of local or regional time remains important. The third characteristic is the convergence between the past, as expressed by fans’ personal memories and recollections of community history, and their present discussions. Remembering “the old days,” either individually or on behalf of the virtual community, is not only a practice of reconstruction but is also situated in the present. Storey (2003) succinctly described this nexus as memories bringing the past into the present. Since its founding in February 2001, the growth of MLBPARK’s membership has caused unexpected problems. For example, a sudden influx of new members who are not yet familiar with the community’s codes and patterns makes it difficult to maintain a comfortable atmosphere. Some temporary participants, who do not develop an attachment to the community but only leave contentious postings and attempt to cause flame wars, are also a source of serious disruption. In response to such issues, old members often try to mediate disputes and minimize the negative results of heated discussions. More generally, members try to

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forge a collective narrative through shared nostalgia for the community’s “old days,” including its early stages and prolific posters who may have departed, and by regularly comparing the community’s past and present. These journeys down memory lane become more salient when the community encounters conflicts between old and new fans or is subjected to flame wars instigated by temporary visitors. By suggesting that what the community once was is always better than what it is, some fans have attempted to romanticize its history. Sack Art: In the beginning, MLBPARK was regarded as a ‘paradise,’ although now it has become hard to believe [that such a past existed]. Despite [claims of] “paradise,” it seems that the term “addiction” encapsulates the current condition of this community. Moha: Recently, I came to remember the old days when I shared mundane stories with other members. It was just two years ago: this place was filled with crude but very sincere humor and lots of smiles among close members. However, nowadays, I observe that dryness or fastidiousness has become a dominant pattern here.

The ways that fans bring their personal memories into present discussions indicate that the past and present cannot be completely separated, even in online spaces. This sense of unified time suggests that both evaluating and evoking the past contribute productively to interpreting the present community as well as in grounding its members in the community’s present. Collective efforts to remember are at the very core of these fans’ identity, because memory is as much collective as it is individual. The online activities of fans on MLBPARK demonstrate that online communities perform time, but in a way that is neither free-floating nor traditional. Online temporalities are complicated, uneven, and simultaneous; they are social constructs as well as concrete outcomes of the fans’ practices. Fans are capable of orienting themselves within multiple temporalities such as virtual and real, global and national, past and present, and also of managing this array. In practice, their management of online time indicates that they are not only required to but are capable of maintaining equilibrium between past and present, self and community, and offline and online.

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Community Spaces: Asymmetric but Synchronous In the internet’s space of flows, spatiality refers to more than physical proximity and distance: emphasis is on connection rather than location. In MLBPARK, most fans who reside in South Korea experience baseball vicariously by watching games on TV or the internet and sharing their thoughts with others in their online community. Such internet use clearly helps to break the connection between physical and social spaces. Although fans occasionally construct virtual territory that is neither essential nor linked with real places, and although they clearly recognize the gaps between global and local, virtual and offline, their basic sense of space is still rooted in their local places. In spite of these disparities, fans are able to participate joyfully in online communities with multiple senses of space that do not disrupt their connections to their actual localities. This multiplicity can be described as a set of asymmetric but synchronous spatialities that fall into three categories of location: the U.S. (literally, the field of dreams), Korea (specifically South Korea, to which fans have geographical proximity), and the online community (which has virtual borders and boundaries). First, Korean MLB fans perceive the significance of the gap between where they are (Korea) and where MLB games are played (the U.S.). This perception does not imply that their sense of space is merely removed or disembedded from where they are located; rather, it epitomizes asymmetric relations between two places in terms of both geographical distance and unequal positioning. In the online community, the U.S., home of Major League Baseball, is viewed not as a neutral place but as the object of fans’ desires: their field of dreams. Many interviewees expressed a strong wish to travel to America in order to visit MLB team stadiums and attend live games. This asymmetric spatiality was clearly revealed by the postings of Korean fans living in the U.S. during the first World Baseball Classic in March 2006. When the South Korean national team won several games in a row, members of MLBPARK swarmed the community. Several posted that they were in the stadium during various games, and such exchanges aroused tremendous envy from fans who could only watch in Korea. Mr. Octo: Dear Sseami, I am sorry for not meeting you during the game. I sat in the first-base corner, and felt [as if I was] in Seoul Stadium because the Anaheim stadium was filled with Korean fans. This game was the greatest one.

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Dodger: Oops. Yesterday, I was also in the stadium. My seat was F133. Sami: Really…. Dodger!!! I was in F134. We were so close. Sack Art: It is Mr. Octo [and Dodger] who I think [are] the happiest fans in the community because you were in the stadium twice. It would be the experience of a lifetime to watch such a game on the spot.

Fans in Korea tend to appreciate and even revere any information provided by fans in the U.S., which they call “news on the spot,” and to lavish attention onto the lucky ones who are able to provide it. Translations of English newspaper articles about baseball and personally taken photos of MLB players and stadiums are particularly welcomed. This was my experience when I myself uploaded news about the Chicago Cubs; community members knew that I lived in the U.S., so they thanked me. Ironically, however, they celebrated my residency in the country without realizing that I actually lived in North Carolina—hundreds of miles from Illinois, where the Chicago Cubs played. Other prolific posters are subject to similar misunderstandings; for example, user Ledse lives in Korea but updates news about the Texas Rangers from Dallas newspapers so often that he is assumed to live in Texas. This sort of confusion symbolizes a shared fantasy of place—in this case, the U.S., home of their dream league, MLB. In the online community, links to physical/geographic location are not universally erased but are expressed in specific contexts, which in turn results in highly differentiated senses of space. These examples show a multi-level concept of space among Korean MLB fans, whose geographical location may become less significant as they enjoy MLB via TV and the internet. The U.S., however, is still perceived as the location of their desires. The second feature is the significance borne by fans’ locality and geographical proximity. Although the community exists in virtual space, within it, great emphasis is placed upon sharing ordinary life offline as well as online. Fans in the community are connected to each other through MLB, an American sports league, but are still rooted in their local places. For example, some of them seem to have as much interest in the KBO (Korean Professional Baseball League) as in MLB. I noticed during my face-to-face interviews with South Korean fans that talking about their favorite local teams was an efficient icebreaker. In addition, the interviewees were eager to converse about the latest local news—a tendency shared by other savvy internet users on MLBPARK. Whether or not it is the direct subject of face-to-face conversation, the

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internet community works behind the scenes via the local interests of fans who “draw back cyberspace into offline processes and practices” (Wilson & Peterson, 2002, p. 455). The significance of fans’ localities is influenced by their geographical proximity in South Korea, where almost every fan can meet up with any other fan within a one-day trip. I myself travelled from Seoul to Busan in three hours by train while another fan drove for three hours from a different province; MLBPARK’s official offline meeting, held in Seoul semi-annually, attracts fans from many provinces. Several interviewees also told me that they attend regular, private gatherings besides the official ones. All of these factors (close geographical proximity, easy accessibility, and the frequent possibility of face-to-face meetings) help fans generate a stable, if varied, sense of locality. Fisher: What if we have a chance of meeting everyone offline? Can we shake hands and develop a harmonious mood?

South Korean MLB fans’ online community interactions indicate a recursive relationship between virtual and offline existence. This reciprocal relationship helps fans hold onto older senses of self and place as they constitute new, complex senses of place and locality. Thus, as a result of their geographical proximity, fans with a common attraction to a global sport (MLB) also show strong attachments to local and national issues and a shared sense of confinement. These communally held significances of locality and geographical proximity form the core of the community’s space. Third, spatialities are formed through the construction of a virtual boundary around the online community. MLBPARK members’ delineation of this boundary expresses their desire to preserve MLBPARK as the largest and longest-running online MLB fan community in Korea. As discussed above, remembering the community’s “good old days” contributes to constructing its boundary vis-à-vis other MLB fan websites. As with other kinds of internet communities, MLB fans in South Korea often develop an exclusive loyalty to a particular community and a sense of competition with other sites. One example is the rivalry between MLBPARK and MLBKOREA, whose members tended to show hostility toward each other. Even though no rule prohibits MLBPARK members from visiting MLBKOREA, mentioning its name is not recommended

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on MLBPARK except in the context of criticism. By emphasizing these differences and disagreements, fans set up “our” territory against “theirs.” Some fans openly exhort others to put their commitment into practice, especially by respecting the originality of postings. Because copying and pasting is so easy and routine in online spaces, many postings on MLBPARK are taken from other sites. One fan eloquently protests this practice: Rock&Roll: I don’t like the idea of copying and pasting posts from other Korean MLB fan sites into our community. Such a trend hurts my pride as a member of this community, because it shows me that our community is late to report the latest MLB news compared to other sites. It is shameful to just copy other sites’ content into our community.

The large number of responses this posting received, regardless of how many were in agreement, shows that boundary issues are highly relevant to online fans. However, to call online communities a “virtual territory” might be oxymoronic, because boundaries on the internet are easily blurred and information and issues on specialty websites usually overlap. Most South Korean MLB fans, as prolific internet users, visit and participate in several South Korean MLB sites. Also, a community’s desire to constitute its own territory is undermined by the unpredictable duration of membership. On the one hand, any online community can disappear at any moment; on the other, prolific posters are as likely as temporary visitors to leave an established community. While it is also true that fans, as members of a particular community, constitute that community’s boundaries, community territory ironically becomes a space of denizens, both unidentified and temporary, who are continuously replaced by newcomers once they leave. As a result, the territory of any online community inherently comprises so much ambiguity and ambivalence that are so relentlessly and constantly constructed by fans that it may at any moment evaporate into anonymity, i.e., no-one’s territory. On the internet, as Castells suggested, “localities become disembedded from their cultural, historical, and geographical meaning and reintegrated into functional networks, or into image collages” (1996, p. 375). Such a transformation of spatiality does not necessarily mean that a space of flows can always be substituted for the space of places, however. Instead,

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Korean MLB fans in the online community constantly reconstruct their notions of space, which are inevitably bound by their local places, their perceptions of the gaps between places, and their desire to build their own territory. Therefore, the space of online communities can be constituted as a set of symmetric spatialities that fans perform synchronously.

The Multiplicity of Identities of the Online Community Korean MLB fans construct the online community by sharing information about MLB and by interacting with other fans. How fans use time and space in the community demonstrates that the internet’s virtuality does not replace traditional concepts of time and space, but rather that this virtuality contributes to constructing multiple senses of temporality and spatiality. As Turkle suggests, “virtuality need not be a prison… we don’t have to reject life on the screen, but we don’t treat it as an alternative life either. We can use it as a space for growth” (1995, p. 263). This multiplicity is promulgated not only by the intersection between online and offline, but also by the ambivalence that local fans feel about global sports. Online interactions among members of MLBPARK allow them to develop alternative ways of managing diverse or even contradictory temporalities and spatialities on the internet by fluctuating between anytime and national time, and between global and local (which they equate with the national). These dualities continuously constitute the multiplicity and complexity of online time and space, adding uneven and asymmetric dimensions to them in online communities. The multiple temporalities and spatialities that fans construct through their participation form the source of the community’s materiality. In turn, the materiality of the community allows fans to develop a multiplicity of identities. Participants in MLBPARK constitute their identities not only as MLB fans but also as fans of their local baseball teams and as community members, as well as nationalistically as (South) Koreans. The terms “we,” “fans,” “members,” and “Koreans” are used constantly and interchangeably. At the same time, because technological innovations are influencing the creation of new social and cultural sensibilities in cyberspace, these fans are able to express themselves in personal, intimate ways. This multiplicity enables community members to imagine and inhabit flexible or even fragmented selves and also indicates relatedness among diverse identities as well as the interconnectedness of fans’

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offline identities and social conditions. Certain dualities inherent within the community, as explicated above, highlight the interaction between online and offline via the online identities of fans. In turn, both online and offline interactions help negotiate, reproduce, and index these identities in a variety of ways. Despite the temptation of anytime access, most fans balance their visits to online communities harmoniously with their offline activities. Korean MLB fans do not passively receive cultural elements but instead actively produce, distribute, and consume MLB as a way of pursuing gratification. Of course, the ways that fans utilize online communities as a source of leisure and consumption are complex and ever-changing. Undeniably, the national has emerged as a fluid, relational space wherein local fans constantly negotiate between global products and local/national roots. Online communities evince the same characteristics as members experience them and, in the case of MLBPARK, enjoy MLB within the larger continuum of their offline lives. As Miller and Slater (2000) suggested, it would be misleading to assume that experiences of Korean MLB fans online lead either to only nationalism or cosmopolitanism. Suffice to say that nationalist sensibilities are deeply embedded in the ways fans enjoy MLB and participate in online communities. Their articulations of time and space on the internet demonstrate the possibility of living in temporalities and spatialities that fluctuate not only between online and offline, but also among local, national, and global. In addition, the presence of alternativeness, interconnectedness, and multiplicity within the community suggests that “closer attention [should] be given to deconstructing dichotomies of offline and online, real and virtual, and individual and collective” (Wilson & Peterson, 2002, p. 456). The online community of MLBPARK, in which multiple temporalities and spatialities are traversed, does not require its participants to remove themselves from their own locations and time zones. In this sense, South Korean MLB fans are more than long-distance partisans: they also use their interest in a global sport to extend their local relationships and facilitate their local affiliations. By enjoying U.S. sports and interacting with fellow enthusiasts in online communities, these fans have developed their understanding of the national and have constructed a complex sense of locality, shared time patterns, and a unique history. Online communities as established and enacted by Korean MLB fans demonstrate that the globalization of U.S. sports not only relies upon local responses but is also

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utilized to re-articulate local and national identity. In global sports, the local is not “the other” of the global; particularly in South Korea, both the local and the national have actively and enthusiastically responded to the arrival of U.S. sports. The Korean MLB fans’ articulations of time and space on the internet demonstrate the possibility of living in multiple senses of temporality and spatiality that fluctuate between virtual and real, online and offline, and among the local, national, and global.

Notes 1. From personal correspondence via e-mail on March 20, 2006. 2. Baek’s first contract was with PSG Korea, which operates Park’s official Web site. 3. Bulletin board moderators are chosen by Dong-A Ilbo’s reporters/site managers/community members. 4. In 2008, there were massive protests in South Korea against the government’s decision to import U.S. beef, which was thought to be poorly regulated. Members of MLBPARK used the site to coordinate several of these protests; in response, officials from Dong-A Ilbo moved to suppress such uses of “their” online bulletin boards. As a result, some members of MLBPARK left the community entirely and founded their own website later that year. 5. Discussions on the virtual community began in the late 1990s. For more details, see Bromberg (1996), Jones (1995), Rheingold (1996), and Watson (1997). 6. For its participatory natures, scholars and media activists describe online spaces and various participations as alternative journalism, citizen journalism, open-source journalism, do-it-yourself journalism, and so on. For related discussions, see Atton (2004), Friend and Singer (2007), and Paterson and Domingo (2008). 7. Ross and Nightingale (2003) pay attention to the nature of human communication in which we are simultaneously consuming and producing, sending and receiving. Similarly, Silverstone (1994) suggests a paradox of consumption, in which we consume and are consumed, and consumption depends on production. 8. Bird and Barber (2002) suggest that non-place communities develop norms and institutional memories based on common experiences. 9. Boyle and Haynes (2004) mention that web logs are the latest incarnation of new media spaces, which follow fan websites or e-zines. 10. All quotations are from my ethnographic data on the online community (www.mlbpark.com). To protect the identities of fans in the community,

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I identify them only by their pseudonyms. I have also translated their postings, which were originally written in Korean, into English.

References Atton, C. (2004). An alternative internet. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Baym, N. K. (2000). Tune in, log on: Soaps, fandom, and online community. Thousand Oaks, London and New Delhi: Sage. Bird, S. E. (2003). The audience in everyday life: Living in a media world. New York and London: Routledge. Bird, S. E., & Barber, J. (2002). Constructing a virtual ethnography. In M. V. Angrosino (Ed.), Doing cultural anthropology: Projects for ethnographic data collection (pp. 129–137). Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Boyle, R., & Haynes, R. (2004). Football in the new media age. London and New York: Routledge. Bromberg, H. (1996). Are MUDs communities? Identity, belonging and consciousness in virtual worlds. In R. Shields (Ed.), Cultures of internet: Virtual spaces, real histories, living bodies (pp. 143–152). Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage. Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Farred, G. (2002). Long distance love: Growing up a Liverpool Football Club fan. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 26(1), 6–24. Farred, G. (2008). Long distance love: A passion for football. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Friend, C., & Singer, J. B. (2007). Online journalism ethics: Traditions and transitions. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual poachers: Television fans & participatory culture. New York and London: Routledge. Jones, S. G. (1995). Understanding community in the information age. In S. G. Jones (Ed.), Cybersociety: Computer-mediated communication and community (pp. 10–35). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Jones, S. G. (1997). Introduction. In S. G. Jones (Ed.), Virtual culture: Identity & communication in cybersociety (pp. 1–8). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Lowenthal, L. (1961). Literature, popular culture and society. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Miller, D., & Slater, D. (2000). The internet: An ethnographic approach. Oxford and New York: Berg. Paterson, C., & Domingo, D. (2008). Making online news: The ethnography of new media production. New York: Peter Lang.

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Rheingold, H. (1996). A slice of my life in my virtual community. In P. Ludlow (Ed.), High noon on the electronic frontier: Conceptual issues in cyberspace (pp. 413–436). Cambridge: MIT Press. Ross, K., & Nightingale, V. (2003). Media and audiences: New perspective. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Silverstone, R. (1994). Television and everyday life. London and New York: Routledge. Storey, J. (2003). Inventing popular culture: From folklore to globalization. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the internet. New York: Simon & Schuster. Watson, N. (1997). Why we argue about virtual community: A case study of the Phish.Net fan community. In S. G. Jones (Ed.), Virtual culture: Identity & communication in cybersociety (pp. 102–132). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Wilson, S. M., & Peterson, L. C. (2002). The anthropology of online communities. Annual Review of Anthropology, 31, 449–467.

PART II

Undoing Nationalism: Ethnography of Korean Major League Baseball Fans

CHAPTER 5

The Making of the National Fandom and Its Discontent

Vignette: My First Memory of Watching MLB in 1997 It was in 1997 that, for the first time, I enthusiastically watched the MLB games in which Park was on the mound. As a new employee in a big conglomerate in South Korea, at the time, my daily life was filled with fatigue due to the ten or more working hours per day on average. The lunch hours during which I watched Park’s games with my co-workers were like an oasis. Despite the short period of time that I could watch his games, I was thrilled with his performances as I cheered and shouted at his pitches and celebrated his dominance on the mound with my coworkers. If some exaggeration might be allowed, some of the most exciting moments within my short but relentlessly agonizing career as an office worker occurred while watching his games during lunch.

The year 1997 was incomparably significant to South Korea and its people as their country fell into an economic crisis which was preluded by the government’s proclaiming of “segyehwa,” i.e., a Korean style of globalization in 1994, but was overshadowed by the structural reformation guided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) between 1997 and 2001. Also, the year 1997 was equally crucial to Korean baseball fans because Chan-ho Park, the first Korean player in Major League Baseball (MLB), had a breakout season as a full-time starter: he had a 14-winning and 8-lost record with a 3.38 ERA (earned run average). After his breakout © The Author(s) 2020 Y. Cho, Global Sports Fandom in South Korea, Palgrave Series of Sport in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3196-5_5

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season in 1997, Park enjoyed his heydays as a starting pitcher with the LA Dodgers until 2001, when he was designated as the opening day starter, and was also selected to play in the 2001 MLB All-Star Game. In South Korea, people, either as baseball fans or Korean nationals, celebrated the domineering performance of the very first Korean player in MLB. Also, most of Korea’s sports fans immediately and enthusiastically watched live broadcastings of MLB games and also enjoyed the access to the enormously increased amount of news and information about MLB from a variety of South Korean media. Just as I had watched his games with much excitement, mixed predominantly with national fervor, the majority of Korean MLB fans that I met both online and offline around 2005 and 2006 still recognized the superb performances of Park in the late 1990s as the most significant moments that led them into the world of MLB. Using the example of MLB and its fans in South Korea, I illuminate the multiplicity of natures among global sports fans, which demonstrates both similar and different trends of local or general sports fans. While Korean baseball fans avidly followed MLB game broadcasts and related news about their favorite teams and players, at the same time, many of them were motivated by nationalistic fervor for Korean players in MLB. Consequently, encountering the conflicts between fans’ individual preferences for specific teams and players in MLB, regardless of their nationalities and the nationalistic aura that surrounds the Korean MLB fandom and the online community among Korean MLB fans, was unavoidable. Such a seemingly unfamiliar contour of the Korean MLB fandom is neither an unexpected nor unique outcome of the emergence of global sports. Global sports are habitually connected with new telecommunication technologies and the subsequent emergence of global media, which make the global sports system possible. In his discussion of global sport, Maguire connects the development of the global sport system to “the emergence of global media communications and the contemporary experience of sport is intertwined with global media concerns” (1999, p. 145). In so doing, global sports are often identified with the global expansion of U.S. sports, which raises particularly important concerns about Americanization (Miller, Lawrence, MacKay, & Rowe, 2001). Maguire also raises a similar concern that “the global medial-sport complex can be explained by the reference to the homogenization/Westernization/Americanization strand of the globalization debate” (1999, p. 145). Suggesting football as “one representation—indeed, manifestation—of globalization,” Giulianotti and Robertson also underscore the connection between sport and

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media as well as the impact of global sport (2004, p. 546). In this vein, they also add that “world cartels of satellite, cable and free-to-air broadcasters have emerged to distribute football images globally, such that the game is now an important constituent in the ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ of popular culture” (2004, p. 550). At the same time, the discussion on global sports also calls both for a different dimension of globalization, which is often named glocalization or hybridity, and for serious attention on the local. Because in the process of globalization sport must contend with local circumstances, as discussed in the introduction, global sports also remain intrinsically connected to local roots, and by extension to national roots as well (Andrews & Cole, 2002; Hargreaves, 2002; Howell, Andrews, & Jackson, 2002). Although sport is easily described as “the universal language of entertainment” (Andrews, 2004, p. 100) that can appeal to audiences across cultural barriers, geographic boundaries, and ethnicities, the ways that local fans enjoy global sports demonstrate that global sports are also local and particular. Korean MLB fans offer one singular dimension of global sports fandom that is inevitably global, regional and national. While Part II of this book delves into the daily and diverse ways that Korean MLB fans develop both individually and collectively, in this chapter, I focus on describing a process in which the national is critical to the formation of the Korean MLB fandom. Instead of nationalism, which sounds too ideological, reified and homogeneous, I prefer to use the idea of the national, which includes “everything from the bureaucratic fact of citizenship to the nationalist’s mythical construction of national as an eternal entity” (Taylor, 1997, p. 277). The national is also used to indicate the undivided linkages among nation, nationalism, and nationality. By exploring the intertwined processes of globalizing American sport, i.e., MLB and popularizing its fandom in South Korea, this chapter delves into the active and particular ways of making its national fandom, which inevitably elicited negative, divergent and even reactionary responses from various groups of Korean MLB fans. The evolution of the Korean MLB fandom reflects changing degrees of nationalist fanaticism over global sports as well as its discontent over nationalism as a dominant sensibility through the influence of globalization.

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The Formation of the MLB Fandom in Mid-2000s Korea This section briefly summarizes the developments of the MLB fandom in Korea both online and offline in the mid-2000s. The seasons of 2005 and 2006 can be considered the most burgeoning period of the Korean MLB fandom, during which Park Chan-ho, as a pioneer, still played and many Korean prospects joined various MLB teams to become the next Chanho. Furthermore, the first World Baseball Classic (WBC) was held in early 2006, which contributed to attracting a vast number of sports fans and even the general public toward MLB again (this part will be detailed in Chapter 7). After his breakout season in 1997, Park continued to perform well as a starting pitcher for the L.A. Dodgers, which impressed and inspired Korean sports fans and even the general public. Eager to cash in on the fame of this native son and expand their viewing audiences, several Korean networks and cable TV stations made contracts with MLB International for the exclusive right to broadcast MLB games.1 Also, several sports newspapers that had been popular nationally along with major newspapers reported on almost every news item related to Park, from his preparation process, the details of his reviews, to behind-the-scene stories of his games. During the pre- and regular seasons, he was on the mound on every fifth day for almost eight months, so his stories were repeated widely across various news media. The ways his stories were circulated were very similar to the genre of television soap opera: according to Kelly, baseball “actually accentuates the features of television soap operas in three respects—narrative, emotion, and morality” (2019, p. 17). As the most popular soap opera in the new millennium, Park’s performances as well as his stories were crucial in increasing the numbers and commitment of Korean MLB fans. After the expiration of his contract with the Dodgers in 2001, as a free agent, Park’s professional status continued to grow: in 2002, he signed a highly lucrative contract with the Texas Rangers. His annual income, not including fees from sponsorships and commercials, was $13 million between 2002 and 2006 ($65 million for the five-year period). His salary in 2002 was one of the top ten in MLB that year; after Alex Rodriguez was traded to the Yankees in 2005, Park’s salary was the highest among players in the Rangers. Despite such a huge contract and the intensive hype for Park, his record with the Rangers substantively tested his fans’ loyalty: between 2002 and 2006, he either struggled on

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the mound or suffered from injuries that kept him on the disabled list for months at a time. In particular, during the 2003 and 2004 seasons, he pitched only 29 innings and 95 innings, respectively, and such numbers stood in contrast against his previous records between 1997 and 2001, during which he pitched more than 200 innings on average per season. Once the most high-profile sport celebrity from South Korea, he was in danger of being shamefully labeled a “buster”—a player who collects a big salary without making any contributions to his team. Although Park was eventually able to return to the mound and start regularly, his performance was still not as impressive as in the past: while pitching 154 innings in 2005, his ERA exceeded 5.8 with a 12-8 record. However, his regular presence in games was enough to hold the attention of Korean MLB fans, and his return furthermore provoked nostalgia among the majority of the fans. In the middle of the 2005 season, another big occurrence excited Korean MLB fans: Park was traded by the Rangers to the San Diego Padres, which along with the Dodgers are in the National League (NL). This news drew clamorous responses from his fans because Park had finally escaped from the Ameriquest Field, the Rangers’ home stadium, and from the American League (AL). Both of these are traditionally regarded as unfavorable conditions: for instance, the AL has a designatedhitter system while the NL puts pitchers into the batter’s box. Although the Rangers’ decision of trading Park confirmed his failure there, this news also provoked high expectations from the Korean fans with their reminiscence of Park’s glory days in the NL. Irrespective of his actual performance, his regular pitching and return to the NL were enough to elicit widespread, impassioned fan involvement along with bridging the gap between the Korean MLB fandom of the mid-2000 and the fandom of the late 1990s. In the mid-2000s, Park’s vast influence was also instrumental among elite Korean baseball players, many of whom “want to be “like Chanho” and left Korea for MLB. For their part, hoping to discover the next East Asian superstar, many MLB teams began to scout and sign amateur Korean and even Japanese players. In the 2005 season, five Korean players were active on the MLB team roster and more were playing in the minor leagues. Along with Park were Heesop Choi (1st baseman, L.A. Dodgers), Jaeung Seo (starting pitcher, New York Mets), Sunwoo Kim (reliever/starting pitcher, Washington Nationals), and Byunghyun Kim (reliever/closer, Colorado Rockies). Since Park’s debut in 1994, the 2005

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season had the highest number of Korean players in the MLB, which brought about another renaissance to the Korean MLB fandom. Both the fans and Korean mass media habitually call these players “Korean leaguers,” a term widely used since Park’s minor-league debut in 1994 that highlights the players’ nationality rather than their teams or even MLB itself. While this term serves to evoke national sentiments among Korean fans as well as audiences in general, the increasing number of Korean players in different teams also contributed to diversifying the interests of Korean MLB fans. In the 2005 season, X-sports, a Korean cable network that made a contract with MLBI, structured its broadcasting schedules around the rotation of Korean leaguers, but it was also true that fans could watch different games with diverse teams due to the increasing number of Korean leaguers. Another noteworthy event in 2005 was the announcement of the first international baseball tournament, e.g., the WBC. MLB announced that the WBC would be held in March 2006 at several venues internationally, and that its final rounds would be held in the U.S. The important condition of the WBC was that MLB players would join their respective national teams: for instance, baseball superstars such as Alex Rodriguez, David Ortiz, and Albert Pujols would only be able to participate for their own native countries, and Asian stars such as Ichiro Suzuki and Chan-ho Park would join their respective national teams as well. While the first WBC was in its preparatory stage, however, Korean MLB fans expressed their skepticism about the success both of the event itself and of the Korean team during the event. Within the Korean baseball fandom, expectations for the national team were low—particularly in regard to its chances against its primary rival and the region’s number-one team, Japan. Furthermore, controversy erupted over the inclusion of Cuban players, the dual citizenships held by several Latin American players, and the eventual distribution of the event’s profits. In March 2006, during the first WBC, the Korean team saw unexpected success, winning six games in a row, including against Japan and the U.S. The success of the national team in the WBC became another catalyst for boosting the popularity of the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) as well as MLB while Korean leaguers played as the core members of the national team. Similar to the national frenzy during the 2002 Japan-Korea World Cup, baseball became a central arena through which Koreans expressed their national enthusiasm in the streets, restaurants, and their own homes. For their part, Korean MLB fans happily embodied the characteristics of national pride,

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enthusiasm for the Korean team, and a special sense of accomplishment because Park and other Korean leaguers were leading the national team.

The Making of “the National” Among Korean MLB Fans Modern sports or sports in the modern era have become a form of patriotic game in which particular views of national identity are constructed and represented: one of the best examples would be international sporting events. How then did MLB become an arena in which Korean baseball fans both express and enjoy nationalistic enthusiasm or national identity? Are Korean MLB fans utilizing and experiencing MLB similarly, i.e., by way of boosting their nationalistic satisfaction? As illuminated in the previous chapters, a glimpse at Korean MLB fans tells us that they are far from the typical image of global sports fans who are used to developing their passion for games at a distance. By deploying his own experience of becoming a Liverpool fan in South Africa, Farred (2002, 2008) describes his love for Liverpool as Long Distance Love, which is characterized by arbitrariness and imagination. He says, “I became a Liverpool fan, as the ‘Long Distance Lover’ chapter describes, by accident. It was an arbitrary decision, a choice made by a young boy in apartheid South Africa” (2008, p. 4). Long distance love is “the unusual mode of fandom where loyalties and identifications not only precede spectacle but construct imaginary contests without any conventional notion of spectacle” (Farred, 2002, p. 9). Despite this arbitrariness, however, long distance love is binding, lifelong, and irreversible (Farred, 2002), and, furthermore, because of its dislocated roots, his long distance love is a “story about race” that is a “narrative grounded in the experience of growing up in an apartheid society” (Farred, 2008, pp. 6 and 8). Farred’s story of becoming a long distance fan of Liverpool provides a compelling reference point for Korean fans of MLB, who symbolize another long distance fandom across the Pacific. To a South African fan of the English Premier League (EPL), “national identity is not ontology,” but rather, his long distance love is about race: growing up in an apartheid society, his fandom is “about how race can be temporarily contained, politically undermined, but never fully expressed, by a passion for your long distance football club” (Farred, 2008, pp. 6 and 8). Similarly, but also differently, the ways of popularizing MLB in South Korea show, as I analyzed in Chapter 2, that it is nationalism that

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played the key role to MLB’s success, from the perspectives of Korean governments and transnational corporations, as well as domestic fans and populations. However, it needs to be noted that nationalism or the national does not necessarily play the same role, nor is it unilaterally effective. Due to the complex role that the national played in populating global sports in South Korea, it is imperative to carefully trace how the national has been performed, transfigured, and even been in conflict within the Korean MLB fandom afterward. Because of the complex and even contradictory natures of nationalism, I have mentioned that I prefer to use the term the national, which I find useful in recognizing the multiple, intertwined connotations of national elements by “link[ing] disparate phenomena such as nation, nationalism and nationality” (Taylor, 1997, p. 91). As the Korean MLB fandom illuminates, the national is becoming a site of struggle that puts a variety of identities and voices in contention (Sreberny-Mohammadi, 2002). My participatory observation of MLBPARK, an online community among Korean MLB fans, enables me to treat the making of “the national” as a process in which they constitute their national history, racial boundaries, and national subjects. In so doing, the making of the national fandom among Korean MLB fans shows that the national is still an important criterion, although it is perpetually contested and negotiated. Such continuing centrality of the national, in spite of the changes and modification it has undergone, also attests to the significance of sport’s affective capacities even in a global-national nexus (Andrews, 2006; Lee & Maguire, 2009). Making National Narratives During the 2005 season, it was Park’s return to the NL that mostly excited Korean MLB fans. Although Park did not return to the same team, i.e., the L.A. Dodgers, but to the San Diego Padres, it was not difficult to witness the fans’ gradually increasing expectation that Park would regain the prowess he had previously shown in the NL. Although four more Korean leaguers besides Park played in MLB during that season, the Korean MLB fandom in their online community seemed to be more interested in Park than in any other Korean players. As these fans continued to recall and share their memories of Park particularly from the late 1990s, their stories functioned to perpetuate and reinforce his aura as a national hero. As Morris-Suzuki (2005) eloquently argues, the past is not dead, but instead, it is constantly reimagined and framed by popular media

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and memory. From an anthropologist’s perspective, similarly, persons and events are not intrinsically of the past but are assigned to the past in relation to the shifting perspectives offered by the present (Ingold, 1996). Of course, the nationalistic memories and stories about Park did not always elicit positive responses, but also provoked several controversies as well. These will be discussed in the later part of this chapter and further in Chapter 6. To put simply, Park’s primary function within the Korean MLB fandom in 2005 was as a national time machine. When nationalistic stories continued to flourish around Park, many Korean fans seemed to be more interested in recollecting their memories of Park in the past when he had performed superbly. In particular, this is because his performance still reminded Korean fans of the late 1990s, when his glory days had overlapped with both the emergence of the MLB fandom and the economic crisis in South Korea. According to Maguire (1999), the emotional bonds of an individual with a nation can include sleeping memories that tend to organize around common symbols. As a celebrity, Park and his symbolic images, memories, and representations were literally pervasive in various types of mass media and in all kinds of locations where daily life takes place (Turner, 2004). The MLB events in which Park was pitching still dominated the emotional calendars of Korean fans. Park’s designation by Korean MLB fans as their most important common symbol formed one layer of their interpretation of Korean national history. On Park’s game days, for example, fans felt compelled to recall personal experiences of watching his spectacular performance in the late 1990s. Mysti: Park’s game today reminded me of his golden days. I was only a high-school student then, so I had to ask teachers for permission to watch the games in the classrooms with other students. In the late 1990s, he was really my idol, and still is one.

Korean fans also recalled 5 June 2005, the day of Park’s 100th MLB win. Since his first MLB win in 1996, he had maintained an average of 15 wins per season through 2001. When fans honored and celebrated his new accomplishment four years later, they were inevitably reminded of the days when Park had played a commanding role. Netizan: It seemed to me that it was just a few days ago when, with my co-workers, I cheered for his pitching while watching his games during

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lunch time in 1997. I was happy for a day or even a week over just one victory. I have really missed Park of the past. I really missed you [Park of the 1990s].

Park’s pitching every week for eight months functioned as a dramatic epic theater which brought a personal hobby of Korean fans into the national spotlight. For several fans, memories of Park during the late 1990s were connected with recollections of personally traumatic events during the national crisis, including bankruptcy and unemployment. Lost Days: In 1997 and1998, I was just over 30 years old. I was a guy who could be happy or inconsolable, depending on how well [Park] played. At that time, the company kept firing employees… the mood of my office really sucked. I temporarily forgot this depressing environment through his games… yes, I clearly remember such moments. So, I kept supporting him whether he pitched well or not. Satellite TV : Didn’t your family experience a blow during the IMF intervention? My family and neighbors suffered from the unemployment of family members. My parents had to work part-time in order to maintain our standard of living. Meanwhile, Park became a solace in my personal life, which might be coincidental, but I immensely anticipated every one of his games.

Fans wove images of Park into their personal lives, particularly during the hard times of 1997–2001. Later, their recollections both reiterated and reinvented the national narratives about him that had been ubiquitous during this period. But for Park’s most devoted Korean fans, memories of his glory days are not confined to the dimension of the past. Instead, retelling such memories continues to provide reasons to support him and to display their undiminished loyalty. In a typical example, by emphasizing the fact that “Park was the only Korean in MLB in 1997” one fan encouraged others to “remember what he did for us during the economic crisis.” Building Racial Boundaries Another way of constructing the national occurs when Korean MLB fans delineate racial boundaries while they enjoy MLB in their online community. While Korean MLB fans were more concerned with Korean leaguers,

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many discussions included references to the ethnic minority or racial status of Korean leaguers and how this minority status might affect their relationships with their teams and other MLB players. For a minority group, race is an unavoidable element in sports, just as Farred (2008) acknowledges that his love distance love for Liverpool is about race. At the same time, racism is a pervasive feature of American culture, including in baseball, a national pastime of the U.S.A. (Omi, 1989). In this vein, not only did these discussions often turn into heated disputes, the issues themselves indicated an ongoing awareness of racial boundaries within the Korean MLB fandom. Although it was not easy to conclude whether and how severely Korean leaguers were affected by racial discrimination, fans’ alleged assumptions or anxieties over Korean leaguers functioned as another imaginary pillar of constituting the national in its fandom. One issue repeatedly raised by Korean MLB fans has to do with their conviction that Korean leaguers receive unfair treatment, a perception which originated from the fans’ observation that they are an ethnic minority within the league. Interestingly, it was the general managers of the teams that became the targets of Korean fans rather than the fellow players and spectators of the stadiums. The basis of rationale behind such criticism was that Korean leaguers were often discriminated against by the general managers of their teams, as evidenced by certain managerial decisions to bench Korean leaguers who fans believed to have the potential to dominate games. Most general managers with Korean leaguers on their teams tend to receive similar criticisms: only the intensity of the complaints varies. Although their statements about racial discrimination against Korean leaguers may not be accurate, these controversies allowed me to explore how the fans’ racial perceptions are engaged as the nationalistic attitudes toward Korean leaguers as well as MLB in general are provoked. The debates around Heesop Choi, the first baseman for the L.A. Dodgers in 2005, illustrate how the racial boundary is contested as well constituted within the desires of Korean MLB fans. Choi, the first Korean MLB batter, made his debut with the Chicago Cubs in 2002. In spite of his reputation as one of top prospects in the Cubs organization, unfortunately, he was traded to the Florida Marlins (2003) and later the Dodgers (2004). Because he already showed some hitting prowess in 2004, many Korean fans expected him to shine in 2005. Early in the season, playing under the platoon system allowed Choi to satisfy this expectation (he was rotated as a starter along with one other player, Olmedo Saenz).

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Choi, a lefty, would start only against right-handed pitchers; Saenz was a veteran right-hander. At first, fans thought that this system seemed a reasonable fit for Choi, a second-season starter, because regular nights off would surely help him maintain his stamina and pace. In addition, given that the majority of MLB pitchers are right-handed and that the NL has no designated-hitter rule, Choi would probably have many more at-bats than Saenz. Some of these expectations proved to be justified. Before the season was half over, Choi hit a grand slam and, in one memorable game, three home runs; he also represented Asian MLB players in the 2005 All-Star Game’s Home Run Derby. As Choi continued to perform well, Korean fans increasingly were of the opinion that he should start every game. But their wishes were dashed by Dodgers manager Tim Tracy, who continued to stick with the platoon system. Some Korean fans then began to criticize Tracy’s overall management strategy, often lobbing personal insults at him. Korean fans even gave him the derogatory nickname of “stupid big jaw” by poking fun at his appearance, which ironically imitates a racist attitude. Particularly when Choi’s pace dwindled after the All-Star Game, Korean fans blamed the first-baseman’s slump on “Tracy’s stupid decision to keep the platoon system.” When Choi was sidelined, some fans even rooted for the opposing team: “Today, the L.A. Dodgers need to be destroyed so that there will be massive criticism against Tracy.” These fans expected that enough huge losses would result in Tracy’s firing, which would in turn benefit Choi. Because the fans believed that the manager’s decision was by and large based on racial discrimination, they urged Choi to “take on more of an imperious and swaggering posture by chewing bigger bubble gum in order to erase the submissive and humble image typically associated with Asian players.” Of course, not all Korean MLB fans believed in such a racial articulation of the managers’ decision. Some opposed the idea; others pleaded for the respectful treatment of the minority who supported the L.A. Dodgers and favored Tracy’s strategies. Such complaints and abuse drew vehement objections from the Dodgers fans on MLBPARK who dismissed nationalistic complaints as childish grumblings and supported Tracy’s management, including his use of the platoon system. Hoosan sardonically pointed out that “a great commander in MLB [Tracy] all of a sudden becomes narrow-minded with a ‘big stupid jaw’ because of one Korean player.” Some fans neither supported Tracy’s strategies nor saw a racial element in Tracy’s decisions about Choi.

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Shh: I am not sure whether, given his record, Tracy is a great manager, but I don’t think that Tracy discriminates against Choi because of his Asian nationality.

Another example was found in Sunwoo Kim, a reliever at the Washington Nationals, but with a different twist. Some fans felt that Kim was not given enough chances to be on the mound due to the racial motives of the Nationals’ manager. One fan requested “retiring Robinson [the Nationals manager], who has become slightly senile. He is one of the axes of evil in MLB.” At the same time, a Korean fan criticized Robinson as a “racial discriminator who is unfairly prejudiced against Asians except Japanese players.” One intriguing twist in the fans’ perception is that many of the Korean fans felt that it was only Korean leaguers, not Japanese players, who suffered from racial discrimination as an ethnic minority. In this sense, the Korean fans’ sense of racial discrimination in MLB or the U.S.A. is not only about different skin color but also about the differences in economic capacity between South Korea and Japan: the latter is responsible for the majority of the international profit for MLB. Korean MLB fans’ acute sensibility toward Japan will be analyzed in-depth in Chapter 7. In any case, these allegations and disputes clearly reveal the nationalistic obsession of some Korean fans and also show that a national boundary had been drawn through the perception of racism. By highlighting racial discriminations against Korean leaguers in MLB, these fans tended to divide the world into “us” and “them,” and, of these, the crucial parameter was invariably “us”—the national. Defining National Players Although Korean MLB fans and news media habitually called Park the “Korean Express” and migrating players from South Korea “Korean leaguers,” the decision of who deserved to be a true “national player” in MLB is another recurring topic. The debates on stipulating the conditions of “national players” were closely connected with issues of citizenship as well as the mandatory military service, which is one of the most basic civic duties of Korean males, rather than with ethnicity or originality. As discussed in Chapter 3, Park also had to undergo the same controversy as soon as he received national attention, and he was able to solve it by getting legal exemption from the military service when he contributed to

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winning the gold medal for the Korean national baseball team during the 1998 Asian Games. Because other Korean leaguers migrated to the U.S. before fulfilling their military duties, sooner or later, they faced a similar issue, particularly if they had not yet secured their positions in MLB. The debates on this issue in the online community illuminate how Korean MLB fans construct another dimension of the national, i.e., the definition of a national player who deserves the full support and affection from Korean MLB fans. The debate over citizenship broke out in the middle of the 2005 season with the rumor that Heesop Choi (the first baseman of the L.A. Dodgers) might apply for U.S. citizenship in order to continue his professional career without interruption. In 2005, a period of two years was required for the Korean military service, and spending two years out of play would be a substantial obstacle for Choi and any Korean player in MLB. Becoming a U.S. citizen means the termination of Korean citizenship, which would naturally relieve him from the duty of mandatory military service. Coincidently, at this time, a minor-league Korean player was indicted for attempting to get an illegal exemption from military service, which forced Korean fans to pay even more attention to the rumor around Choi. The rumor caused fans to speculate, actively and fervently, about the possibility that other Korean leaguers might apply for U.S. citizenship. Most of these discussions centered on whether Choi could or should be regarded as a “national player” if he traded his Korean citizenship for U.S. citizenship. Of course, fans seldom reach unanimity. In this case, those with no objections to Korean leaguers acquiring U.S. citizenship argued that any professional, even an athlete, has the right to pursue his or her dream. They particularly emphasized the fact that Korean leaguers earn their living and also spend most of their time in the U.S. Some fans simply felt sorry that Korean leaguers might lose the opportunity of a lifetime (to become major leaguers) simply because they have to perform military service in Korea. DoTak: I will support our players regardless of whether they fulfill their military duties. If they choose to serve in the army, it is virtuous of them; otherwise, I can continue to enjoy their performance in MLB. It would be too harsh for the Korean players to have to give up their dreams just because of the military service. If we blame them for giving

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up [their Korean] citizenship, we have to criticize all the immigrants in the U.S.

Of special interest is these fans’ claim that even if players become U.S. citizens, they can still be excellent Koreans in terms of both ethnic identity and national standards. They insisted that “abandoning citizenship should not be treated identically with betrayal of the country,” adding that such an idea is the result of exclusive nationalism or jingoism. However, several fans suggested that giving up Korean citizenship would prove that such players care only about their own goals. These fans also pointed out that two years are equally precious to other people, including MLB fans, and questioned why only Korean leaguers deserve to enjoy the privilege of exemption. Chado: To acquire U.S. citizenship simply proves that Choi is giving up Korean citizenship in favor of his personal success. Every Korean male has to sacrifice his time to the army for two years. The Korean leaguers are Koreans before they are baseball players. They should be blamed if they opt to get U.S. citizenship through illegal or expedient means.

Disputes over citizenship often revealed contradictory attitudes about nationality within the Korean MLB fandom. Some of the fans who did not object to the acquisition of U.S. citizenship by Korean leaguers announced that they would, however, withdraw their support for Korean leaguers who had become U.S. citizens because they were no longer “our proud national players.” This attitude reflects seemingly contradictory rationales. On the one hand, it indicates that fans were ready to respect players’ personal decisions. On the other hand, however, such respect does not indicate that fans were insensitive to the question of the players’ nationality or to the demands of nationality, such as military service. Instead, their sensitivity manifested into questions about which citizenship is more beneficial to players. According to this rationale, a player who becomes an American citizen is simply an American player of Korean ethnicity, which for Korean MLB fans is not a meaningful identity. These fans would continue to support Korean leaguers on the condition that they fulfill their duty as Koreans just as the fans had to do. One fan succinctly expressed this tolerant but nonetheless contradictory and substantially national viewpoint:

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North: I went into the army without hesitation because I plan to live and work in South Korea. If the Korean leaguers avoid the duty of military service and choose to give up [their] Korean citizenship, I won’t blame them for their choices. But they are no longer my favorite Korean leaguers. Instead they are simply American players who happen to be ethnic Koreans, which does not have significant meaning to me.

In short, the Korean fans’ rationale of defining national players indicates that they fully respect the individual dreams and personal choices of the Korean leaguers, but simultaneously request accountability for their choices or decisions. Only Korean leaguers who fulfill their requirements as Korean citizens such as serving in the military are eligible for being awarded the title of true “national players” who deserve the full support and loyalty of Korean fans. According to this rationale, the basic duties that all the Korean people, specifically men, have to carry out as Koreans are applied to any and all Korean leaguers in the same way. As the news media represented Park as a national individual who pursued his own dream along with fulfilling his requirements both to his family and nationstate, the Korean fans applied a similar logic to Korean leaguers who were pursuing their own dreams—but at the same time, they were expected to fulfill their duties as Koreans. When both requirements were satisfied, these Korean leaguers were finally defined as national players to be favored and respected in the Korean MLB fandom. National Fandom in the Online Community Because national narratives, racial boundaries, and national players all illustrate the detailed navigation of “the national” within the Korean MLB fandom, I have chosen the term “national fandom” to describe the salient characteristics of Korean MLB fans. By interrogating “conventional claims that sport, especially in the shape of mega-media events, is a harbinger of globalization,” Rowe suggests that “sport is rather less sympathetic to globalization than other cultural forms, such as music or film” (2003, pp. 291 and 285). The national fandom of Korean MLB fans is another exemplary case in which “sport may be constitutively unsuited to carriage of the project of globalization in its full sense” (Rowe, 2003, p. 281). As shown, national fandom tends to display a very nationalistic approach to watching and enjoying MLB, i.e., global sports. My use of this term, however, is neither to simply define the Korean MLB fandom

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one-dimensionally nor to divide the community between national fans and non-national fans. Rather, Korean MLB fans, as individuals and as a group, inhabit a strong state of national fandom that inevitably functions as a double-edged sword by eliciting fervent interest and support from the majority of Korean fans as well as negative or derogative complaints. While the majority of Korean MLB fans in their community lean toward national fandom, of course, there always existed gray zones between national fandom and national fans. For instance, several interviewees who did not identify themselves as national fans nonetheless admitted that they were more interested in Korean leaguers and were more deeply thrilled by Park’s victories than those of other players. Thus, on certain occasions, fans whose interest in MLB extends well beyond the Korean leaguers behave as if they, too, fit into the category of national fans. Therefore, the term national fandom is referred to as the salient and particular tendency of Korean MLB fans in their online community to willingly embrace the nationalistic discourse and maintain interest mostly in Korean leaguers. However, it is also important to recognize that national fandom is neither a homogenous nor fixed collective identity but instead varies widely depending on the characteristics of loyalty and constancy which fluctuate depending on how exclusively these fans follow national players in MLB. As identities are complex, multi-layered, and combinatory, sports fandom also demonstrates the multiplicity of identities, which are not fixed, but shift in different circumstances (Whannel, 2002). As Bairner (2002) suggests, sport has the capacity to undermine official nationalism by linking itself to sub-nation-state national identities and providing a vehicle for the expression of alternative visions of the nation. By exploring how national fandom in the online community was diversified and even challenged, the next section explores the shifting and multi-layered nature of the Korean MLB fandom.

Contesting the National: Multiplicity of Korean MLB Fandom Vignette: Encountering a S.F. Giants Fan in 1997 In late 1997, I visited the U.S. for the first time: after quitting my job, I wanted to spend my last holiday there before starting to prepare for graduate school. While I stayed with my friend, a Korean who was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, I encountered another Korean, who was

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one of his friends. At the time, Park, who had been performing sensationally, was making MLB and the L.A. Dodgers popular in South Korea. The Dodgers were treated almost as a Korean national team: all of the Korean fans supported them. Coincidentally, during my visit to Berkeley, Park was scheduled to pitch against the San Francisco Giants, long-time rivals of the Dodgers. My friend’s friend, an orthodox fan of the Giants, began to complain about the Korean media’s poor treatment of MLB teams other than the Dodgers and, without hesitation, declared his support for his team, the Giants, even though Park was on the mound. His position, at that time, was more or less shocking to me, because I took for granted that Koreans would support Park and his team. I said to myself, “How daring of him to announce he is supporting the opponent of Park and the L.A. Dodgers!”

Even as Korean MLB fans demonstrated strong, constant nationalist tendencies, their national fandom was not only far from a unilateral entity, but was also disrupted by other interests and desires. The contestations of national fandom show the multiplicity of the Korean MLB fandom in which the idea of the national was being negotiated, complicated, and even disdained. In the 2005–2006 seasons, the Korean MLB fandom seemed to blossom again as Korean mass media were busy broadcasting and reporting on the performances and news of the five Korean leaguers and the success of the Korean national team at the first WBC event, bringing about a national baseball frenzy. At the same time, the overflow of new and old MLB fans provided a substantial challenge to national fans in their community. National fans often encountered complaints and experienced various levels of conflict with other fans when other favorite teams or players in the Korean MLB fandom were pitted against Korean leaguers. Whenever Park was on the mound, such struggles were most salient: as a national magnet, Park was eliciting both positive and negative responses from Korean fans. Not only did these conditions highly complicate the implications of the national, but the majority of Korean fans still reproduced the national as they continued to enjoy their hobby. Because the Korean MLB fandom is neither homogenous nor fixed, it is necessary to discern how these fans rebutted and alternatively rebuilt their notions of the national. The disputes over fan authenticity or legitimacy and the makeup of specific groups that posted conflicting evaluations of Park provide many clues.

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Who Are the Authentic Fans? Love for the Nation or Love for the Team The idea of authenticity is another recurring issue within Korean MLB fans and the debates within their online community. The focal point of the debates was about the inquiries of legitimacy of national fandom as the dominant rhetoric in their fandom. Of course, debates on authenticity have long been common among sports fans: while a fan as an obsessed individual has an interest in a certain team, celebrity, or similar (Crawford, 2004), it is also authenticity that the fans rarely agree on, as to who and what is not authentic. According to Crawford, any “attempt to define what constitutes a fan will inevitably involve highly complex and subjective codes of ‘authenticity’—i.e., who and what is deemed as ‘legitimate’ patterns of support” (2004, p. 20). In professional sports and in particular global sports, fans’ loyalty to specific teams or special celebrities is usually regarded as the basic and essential assets to being labeled as authentic fans. For instance, fans become loyal either to Michael Jordan or Liverpool, who or whatever magically enthralls the fans and their obsessions. Also, the major characteristic of committed supporters who are eligible for the title of authentic fans is the traditional duty to support their team irrespective of its fortunes (Giulianotti, 2005). As Kelly (2019) shows, in a similar vein, the fans and audiences of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team in Japan have continued to support and be enmeshed in their team despite its unsuccessful and even frustrating records for more than three decades. In a consumer culture, authenticity is often proved through fans’ individual and collective investments of time, emotion, imagination, and money, so other fans accede to an authentic, genuine, and valorized attachment by purchasing and displaying their team’s logo and sporting their merchandise, such as shirts and caps (Crawford, 2004). Similarly, but unconventionally, Korean fans posit various requisite beliefs, activities, and experiences that identify authentic fans of MLB in their online community. To be a national fan became the focal point of the debate on authenticity. As previously mentioned, the return of Park to the mound in the 2005 season sparked wild and vibrant activity in the Korean MLB fandom. While many of the Korean fans deployed nationalist comments with the memories of his heydays, such nationalistic comments and memories of Park did not always elicit positive responses. Some fans even claimed to be tired of the same rhetoric around him. As Pega posted, “I don’t understand what ‘we’2 means when some fans said that ‘Park gave us hope during the IMF intervention [the national economic crisis].

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It sounds too naïve to believe that ‘we’ means all Koreans.” A group of fans also protested against the national fans’ excessive, exclusive interest in Park, often arguing that MLBPARK, the name of their online community is not a fan site just for fans of Park or Korean leaguers, despite the inclusion of his surname—because it also serves as a pun on “ballpark.” Meanwhile, these fans often encountered critical but indispensable contestations between national fans and not-so-national fans. While such contestations demonstrate the unavoidable multiplicity of the Korean MLB fandom, they also illuminate the dilemma as well as the complexity of the national fandom of global sport. One of the clearest examples of how this contestation evolved and was negotiated lies in the disagreement between fans of Korean leaguers and fans of specific teams in MLB, which can be further dissected into arguments between fans of Chan-ho Park and fans of the Texas Rangers, and even into the dissent between fans of the nation and fans of the teams. In the online community, such contestations by and large end without any agreement or formal conclusions, but by attracting so many responses and views, these occasions provide ample resources for proposing a unique criterion for authentic fans of global sports in a local society as a form of long distance love. Intense discussions of this topic pitted fans of Park against fans of the Texas Rangers when Park pitched well but the Rangers lost the game nonetheless. On such occasions, a kind of a blame game emerged: national fans began to blame the team—often with insulting remarks against other teammates or wishing for the Rangers to experience a blowout loss during their next game. Such reactions from the national fandom naturally offended Korean fans of the Rangers, and blaming Park’s poor record with the Rangers on his teammates or the team’s home stadium triggered harsh responses from these Rangers fans: Ledse: I am disappointed by postings that beat others’ heroes severely in order to idolatrize theirs [Park]. Such a trend often emerges in postings among Park’s fans. As a fan of the Texas Rangers Rangers, I have no problem with admiring Park, but I do not agree with some postings that treat other Texas players badly by claiming that my heroes did their best in the games but failed to contribute to a victory for Park. Hero: As an authentic fan of the Rangers, I was happy to see an increase in Korean fans after Park signed with the team. Now, I am concerned by some fans who made disparaging comments about the Rangers and its

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players after his departure. I don’t want to hear abusive language about my beloved Rangers players from others who only support Park.

The Rangers fans who were not solely attached to Park often expressed their frustrations with the national fans and fandom. In several instances, the Rangers fans insisted on their authenticity as MLB fans while talking condescendingly about the national fans, calling out their shallowness and the “national contamination” in their fandom. From the viewpoint of the self-proclaimed authentic Rangers fans, the majority of Korean MLB fans were newbies to MLB whose commitment to any team in MLB was easily swayed by the presence or absence of Korean leaguers. Thus, some of the Rangers fans did not perceive the national fans as authentic fans of MLB. In fact, similar debates followed whenever Korean leaguers, including Park, joined new teams: while the fans of the specific teams accused the national fans of shallowness and nationalistic zeal, the national fans called out the fans of the teams as being elitist. Tensions between the two groups were exacerbated when Park left the Texas Rangers, who traded him to the San Diego Padres. This trade left a huge impact on the Korean MLB fans and their community: the national fans automatically transferred their support to Park’s new team. Also, the clock on the online community was changed from Central Time (the time zone of Texas) to Eastern Time. After the trade, the operators of the community changed its clock to follow the official time zone of www. MLB.com, Eastern Time, and although this was not the time zone of San Diego (Pacific Time), where Park was newly affiliated, this change also gave rise to heated debates. It displeased the Rangers fans, who were already on high alert and kept tabs on any vicious comments about their favorite team and its players. While such chaotic conditions were ongoing, a particularly intense debate erupted between two very prolific posters in the community—Sack Art and Ledse. Both of these users had displayed in-depth knowledge of MLB and singular commitment to the community through their numerous postings, including photos, information, and witty comments on all subjects related to MLB such as its players, games, and even history. It is a testament to their popularity and prominence in the community that both of these users had their own sub-threads on the message board: the postings by Sack Art were grouped into a thread titled “Sack Art’s Galleries,” and the postings by Ledse could be found on “Ledse’s Rangers Report.”3 While Sack Art had posted about various teams, he identified

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himself as a “fan who likes American culture and American sports, having begun as a fan of National American Football, and becoming a fan of MLB by watching Park’s games in 1997 and throughout the economic crisis period.” By contrast, Ledse had consistently posted about Rangers news from local newspapers and media sources since August 2003, and his postings of course attracted particular attention while Park was with the Rangers. The showdown between these two fans was triggered by Sack Art, who posted a long message titled “To have a sense of special superiority among MLB fans as Koreans” on 12 August 2005. This posting elicited about 160 comments and more discussions among other fans. Its central critique against the Rangers fans was that the Rangers fans who anointed themselves as authentic MLB fans were patronizing other fans, particularly by calling national fans “fake Texas fans.” Sack Art: I cannot understand how some fans who mainly support the Korean leaguers are regarded as a low-end group. We similarly enjoy MLB, so why do we need to be taught and enlightened by these socalled maniacs? They preach, “How ignorant and simpleminded you are! How can you even mention nationalism while enjoying THE MLB…?” Now there exists an even more sacred subject than Chan-ho Park in the community, which I think is the Texas Rangers. The authentic Rangers fans do not allow other fans to critique or even say anything negative about their team. Such repeated messages in Ledse’s Ranger Report as “do not attempt to provoke the other fans’ team [the Texas Rangers]” sound like a warning or scolding targeting ‘ignorantly nationalist’ fans.

Ledse responded with a relatively short posting that focused on the personal relationship he and Sack Artist had had for a few years. Rather than directly refuting the initial posting, Ledse modestly yet clearly criticized Sack Artist ’s egoism and his intentional ridicule of others. Ledse also expressed his strong disapproval of the critiques against the Rangers fans that Sack Art had posted throughout Park’s trade. Ledse: I also hope that Park will play better with the Padres, but after his departure from the Rangers, I often found myself unable to tolerate some fans in this community who left completely negative comments on the Rangers and Texas. For instance, they claimed that the newspapers in Dallas are particularly malicious and harsh against players, including Park, along with implying that the ones in San Diego treat them fairly, which means that Park will be able to play more comfortably in his

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new environment. Well…the Rangers simply offered Park a better way to survive in MLB: Park proved he was no longer competent in Texas. So what bothers you so much about the Rangers? What is wrong with you?

This debate epitomized the tension among the competing desires of the community members who wished to proclaim themselves authentic fans. Such claims of authenticity are central to deciding the internal and external status of fans in sports cultures as well as fan hierarchies, which depend on who has more popularity or legitimacy. The disputes over authenticity reveal not only the multiplicity of the Korean MLB fandom but also the conflict of the national fandom with other kinds of fandom and other fans’ desires. The contestation between the national fans and the Rangers fans demonstrates that Korean MLB fans are caught between love for the nation and love for their favorite team. The Polarization of the Korean MLB Fandom: Park-ppa (Pro-Park) Versus Park-kka (Anti-Park) As the debates over authenticity illuminate, the Korean MLB fandom is far from a unilateral entity and also the boundaries between the fans— national or not—are not always clear or fixed. Their long distance love for MLB is not only “born out of multiple transitions,” but also “love, in its full complexity” (Farred, 2008, pp. 6 and 8). For instance, many Rangers fans were, as a matter of fact, also national fans to varying degrees, and the disputes over authenticity often pushed them to cross several thresholds from not-so-national fans to a kind of anti-national fan, the latter often dubbed as “pure” fans of MLB. While the majority of the Korean MLB fans favored Korean leaguers and thus revealed their national fandom, a portion of them proclaimed themselves pure fans. These self-proclaimed pure fans tended to differentiate themselves from national fans by highlighting their long-term loyalty to specific franchise teams or non-Korean players, independent of national fervor. As the national fans and the pure fans cited opposing motives for their attraction to MLB, they often exchanged cynical or negative comments. As Park symbolized the iconic figure of the Korean MLB fandom, two extremes grew out of the national fans and the pure fans, respectively: they were called Park-ppa [pro-Park] and Park-kka [anti-Park] according to their level of veneration for the Korean player. These suffixes, -ppa

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and –kka, began as internet neologisms in South Korea that expressed contempt for shallowness and other negative qualities of youth and fan cultures and denoted opposing attitudes. Therefore, many Korean fans utilized both terms for identifying others who were viewed as equally obsessed fans, though interested in Park for opposing reasons. As neither term was welcomed by fans, both have remained very controversial and were habitually summoned mainly for verbal attacks. One fan summarized their commonly accepted definitions: MeDSax: “ppa” denotes fans who advocate Park despite his poor performance and attribute any fortunate outcomes during the games to his personal abilities. They also never embrace any criticism against Park. On the other hand, “kka” means fans who dare to attack him personally with insults. Meanwhile, “middles” are fans who support Park as much as they cheer for other Major Leaguers, who accept some criticism [of him], and at the same time cheer him on because he is a Korean.

Park-ppa and Park-kka have traditionally engaged in disputes about Park’s pitching on his game days, which also reflects how Park functioned as a national time machine. The former always searched for positive elements while the latter was busy finding fault with him. Their debates were not limited to reviews of Park’s pitching on specific game days, but also expanded to predictions about his future career in MLB and evaluations of Park’s contribution to the MLB fandom as well as to South Korea in the past. From the perspective of Park-ppa, Park was a national hero who provided Koreans with great joy, hope, and refreshment, and his regular pitching was enough for them to be excited about. MLB Fan: Probably, I, now in my mid-30s, belong to the “ppa.” It doesn’t matter to me whether Park performed well or not. It was consoling enough to see him playing in the game. Of course, I was extremely happy if he dominated the opponents, and mistakenly felt that everything around me was going well. I will support him forever. Liberto: It seems that I have watched MLB for almost ten years. I was a “Park-ppa,” although I hated this term, and I am still a kind of “ppa” because I anxiously watch his games. CroCob: During the IMF intervention, everything seemed to be dull and pathetic. Then Park excited us, which some people accepted as hope.

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These people who tasted hope through him still hoped that he would continue pitching in MLB.

While Park-ppa did not hesitate to promulgate nationalistic slogans such as “We, Koreans, owe Park too much, and it is time for us to pay him back by delivering patient and endless support,” Park-kka, in contrast, posted very sarcastic responses to such nationalistic discourses and were often disturbed by the national(ist) aura around him. Citing their lack of connection with what Park accomplished in the late 1990s, this group argued that it is unfair to call them ungrateful. To Park-kka, Park was simply the most infamous buster. Extreme Fortunate: I think that any MLB fans who claim to be authentic fans should not support Park, who only wastes his team’s money. I cannot give Park an exemption for wasting huge amounts of money without any contribution because of the fact that he is a Korean. Devil with Angel’s Mask: Park insisted on putting a specific catcher [Chad Kreuter] in his games, which in the long-term perspective only harmed the L.A. Dodgers. Besides, he did not step up whenever the team desperately needed his contribution. He also had very infamous records such as two grand slams by the same hitter in one inning, giving a home run to Cal Ripken Jr. during his last appearance in the All-Star Game, and allowing Barry Bonds his 71st home run, which tied the record of the most home runs in a single season. He always struggled with bases-on-balls and hit-by-pitches.

Park-kka antagonized Park-ppa by underrating Park’s records and posting picayune details about his pitching. By enumerating his weak points, they attempted to defend themselves and their point of view. In the contestation between love for the nation and love for the team, Parkkka criticized the national fans as opportunists who were not deemed authentic fans of MLB. After Park’s trade to the Padres, Chun lamented that “from now on, the San Diego Padres will become the franchise team of the Koreans like the L.A. Dodgers did in the late ‘90s.” Park-kka’s negativity has also been applied to other Korean leaguers and the patriotic leanings of national fans. Newlife: I am a long-time fan of the Colorado Rockies, and really wished that none of the Korean leaguers would join my team, although it

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happened at last. After Byunghyun Kim and Sunwoo Kim joined the team, some fans who never had any interest in the Rockies suddenly condemned Todd Helton [the team captain], and blamed bullpen pitchers for screwing up Kim’s games. I really hate such shallow and narrow-minded people.

Despite their minority in terms of number and saliency, the existence of Park-kka and their logic were intriguing because they encapsulate the counter-response to the entrenched nationalism in the Korean MLB fandom. Though Park-kka seemed to identify as Rangers fans or fans of specific teams or players in MLB, when following their logic and reactions, it can be posited that Park-kka and Park-ppa are simply opposite sides of the same coin, i.e., the national. In other words, Park-kka were invented in opposition to, and continue to be provoked by, nationalistic rhetoric from both the mass media and other Korean MLB fans. While they expressed discomfort and weariness toward nationalistic rhetoric, their complaints also reflected their obsession with the national, albeit in a negative and distorted way. As one fan wittily described, “People like Park-kka tend to blow off their national affection in a distorted and violent way.” The feud between Park-ppa and Park-kka indicates that the national was contested in the Korean MLB fandom, but nonetheless, this polarization of the fan groups does not indicate diversification and mutual respect among different fans. Instead, both groups are similarly mired in nationalistic obsession; however, their differences lie in their sentiments and their vehemence of expression.

Unlikely Collusion Between the National and the Global At a glance, the Korean MLB fandom might be regarded as a result of interactions between the global and the local, as the umbrella term glocalization indicates. However, the making of the national and consequently the emergence of its discontent in the Korean MLB fandom prompt us to pay closer attention to the simple dichotomy between the global and the local. Is the frame of the global and the local effective or even appropriate for explaining various phenomena of global sports fandom? Andrews and Ritzer already warn that “blinded by the

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political potentialities of the sporting local, many researchers cannot extricate themselves (even if they wanted to) from the binary logic of the global-local relation” (2007, p. 148). Rather than simply disregarding the global-local frame, i.e., the glocalization thesis, Andrews and Ritzer urge us to “view the ‘complementary and interpenetrative’ relations linking homogenization and heterogenization, universalism and particularism, sameness and difference, and the global and the local” without “a priori elevating the significance of one or more and denigrating the importance of others” (2007, pp. 136 and 149). As discussed in the Introduction, such a limitation of the global-local frame is more salient within the sports realm because of the ambivalent position of sports in globalization. By advocating the phrase “sport and the repudiation of the global,” Rowe eloquently suggests that “sport’s compulsive attachment to the production of national difference may, instead, constitutively repudiate the embrace of the global” (2003, p. 292). As the success of global sporting events largely depends on other local roots, my analysis of the making of national fandom and its contents around the Korean MLB fandom clearly demonstrates that the local is not necessarily the other side of the global. Instead, the popularity of MLB in South Korea is the result of negotiation, compromise, and even co-optation between the local and the global, in which the process of popularizing MLB in South Korea adequately reflects ESPN’s slogan of “Think globally, but customize locally.” As a salient phenomenon of global sports fandom, therefore, the Korean MLB fandom succinctly highlights the limitations of the globallocal frame, which does not adequately explicate its entrenchment of nationalist sentiments as well as its diverse digressions, including aversion to national fandom. The fans’ disputes over authenticity suggest that fans continue to divide their world into “us” and “them” (Crawford, 2004), and here, the crucial parameter of who and what is authentic is the national. While nationalism has been a hegemonic ideology in modern Korean history—which is discussed in detail in Chapter 2—the national still functions as another principal source of people’s emotional attachment in the making of the global sports fandom in South Korea (Andrews, 2006). In this vein, I suggest that a global-national frame rather than the global-local frame contributes to providing a better understanding of the Korean MLB fandom as a phenomenon of global sports fandom. As Andrews and Silk (2005) state, the nation is of central and pre-figurative importance in global promotional imperatives. In other

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words, the cultural practices of Korean fans must be examined in terms of the premise that the national (which includes governmental intervention, nationalistic discourses, and nationalism) is a de facto parameter that is contested, negotiated, and reconstituted by globalizing trends. In particular, the interplay between fans’ remembrance of Park during the economic crisis and their frenzy over the Korean leaguer illustrates that sports can serve as the most emotive vehicle for harnessing and expressing bonds of national and cultural affiliation (Silk, Andrews, & Cole, 2005). The impact of Park as a national time machine on the community shows that the past and the present are always interdependent and inter-determined as long as the fans contain multiple memories, experiences, and representations of the historicity of a particular people (Ohnuki-Tierney, 1990). To fully understand the specific characteristics of global sports fandom, it is imperative to study global flows of sports “in relation to, or in interaction with, local histories, political culture, and institutions that create specific ‘path dependencies’” (Ben-Porat & Ben-Porat, 2004, p. 426). In a way of concluding the discussion of the making of the national in the Korean MLB fandom, I would like to add that the nation is not necessarily positive or negative in this global-national frame, and also that the national is far from unilateral or reified. Similar to what Andrews and Ritzer (2007) point out in their critique against the idea of the glocal, we should not falsely polarize the global and the national in a manner that tends to privilege and romanticize the national. As nationalism is still critical to the success of global popular culture, different attitudes to the national fandom and diverse approaches to national profit suggest that the national fandom has constantly been contested, complicated, and even blurred. Korean fans often generated cynical responses not only to the naïve ideas of national fans but also to nationalistic rhetoric in the mainstream media. These changes in the national do not imply that the idea of the national has been eradicated or changed into the transnational or cosmopolitan. For instance, the examples of Park-kka and their rationale illuminate how the national or national sentiments are entrenched in socalled anti-national fandom, which paradoxically reflects its obsession with the national. Various discontents with the national fandom indicate that the national, through its transformed implications, is closely connected with the diverse ways that Korean fans enjoy and consume MLB: the complicated and contradictory processes by which the national is intertwined with the global, particularly under the neoliberalization of the

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society, will be explored in the next chapter. As Crawford (2004) suggests, it is more useful to adopt a more fluid model of understanding the Korean MLB fandom which allows us to view national fandom and its discontent not only as fluid and dynamic but also as a process.

Notes 1. The following networks made contracts with MLBI: KBS (a public national network) in 1997; ITV (a provincial cable network), 1998–2000; MBC (a public national network), 2001–2004; and X-sports (a cable sports network), 2005–2008. 2. In their community, Korean MLB fans habitually use “we” even when expressing his or her personal thoughts. According to Miller and McHoul (1998), sports fans generally rely on the categorical “we” whereas “we” refers to a social or cultural category of persons. 3. To have their own personal threads named after them reflected both the popularity and privilege of these members. As of 2005, only five members had their own threads on the MLB message board.

References Andrews, D. L. (2004). Speaking the ‘universal language of entertainment’: News Corporation, culture and the global sport media economy. In D. Rowe (Ed.), Critical readings: Sport, culture and the media (pp. 99–128). Maidenhead: Open University Press. Andrews, D. L. (2006). Introduction: Playing with the pleasure principle. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 105(2), 269–276. Andrews, D. L., & Cole, C. L. (2002). The nation reconsidered. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 26(2), 123–124. Andrews, D. L., & Ritzer, G. (2007). The grobal in the sporting glocal. Global Network, 7 (2), 113–153. Andrews, D. L., & Silk, M. (2005). Global gaming: Cultural Toyotism, transnational corporation and sport. In J. Steven & D. L. Andrews (Eds.), Sport, Culture and Advertising: Identities, commodities and the politics of representation (pp. 172–191). London and New York: Routledge. Bairner, A. (2002). Sport, sectarianism and society in a divided Ireland revisited. In J. Sugden & A. Tomlinson (Eds.), Power games: A critical sociology of sport (pp. 181–195). London and New York: Routledge. Ben-Porat, G., & Ben-Porat, A. (2004). (Un)bounded soccer: Globalization and localization of the game in Israel. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 39(4), 421–436.

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Crawford, G. (2004). Consuming sport: Fans, sport and culture. New York: Routledge. Farred, G. (2002). Long distance love: Growing up a Liverpool football club fan. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 26(1), 6–24. Farred, G. (2008). Long distance love: A passion for football. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Giulianotti, R. (2005). Sport: A critical sociology. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. Giulianotti, R., & Robertson, R. (2004). The globalization of football: A study in the glocalization of the ‘serious life’. The British Journal of Sociology, 55(4), 545–568. Hargreaves, J. (2002). Globalisation theory, global sport, and nations and nationalism. In J. Sudgen & A. Tomlinson (Eds.), Power games: A critical sociology of sport (pp. 25–43). London and New York: Routledge. Howell, J. W., Andrews, D. L., & Jackson, S. (2002). Cultural and sport studies: An interventionist practice. In J. Maguire & K. Young (Eds.), Theory, sport & society (pp. 151–177). Amsterdam: Jai Press. Ingold, T. (Ed.).(1996). Key Debates in Anthropology. London and New York: Routledge. Kelly, W. W. (2019). The sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers: Professional baseball in modern Japan. Oakland: University of California Press. Lee, J. W., & Maguire, J. (2009). Global festivals through a national prism: The global-national nexus in South Korean media coverage of the 2004 Athens Olympic games. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 44(1), 5–24. Maguire, J. (1999). Global sport: Identities, societies, civilizations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Miller, T., Lawrence, G., MacKay, J., & Rowe, D. (2001). Globalization and sport: Playing the world. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Miller, T., & McHoul, A. (1998). Popular culture and everyday life. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage. Morris-Suzuki, T. (2005). The past within us: Media, memory, history. London and New York: Verso. Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (1990). Introduction: The historicization of Anthropology. In E. Ohnuki-Tierney (Ed.), Culture through time: Anthropological approaches (pp. 1–26). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Omi, M. (1989). In living color: Race and American culture. In I. Angus & S. Jhally (Eds.), Cultural politics in contemporary America (pp. 111–122). London and New York: Routledge. Rowe, D. (2003). Sport and the repudiation of the global. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 38(3), 281–294. Silk, M., Andrews, D. L., & Cole, C. L. (2005). Corporate nationalism(s)? The spatial dimension of sporting capital. In M. Silk, D. L. Andrews, & C. L.

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Cole (Eds.), Sport and corporate nationalisms (pp. 1–12). Oxford and New York: Berg. Sreberny-Mohammadi, A. (2002). The global and the local in international communications. In K. Askew & R. R. Wilk (Eds.), The anthropology of media: A reader (pp. 337–356). London: Blackwell. Taylor, D. (1997). Disappearing acts: Spectacles of gender and nationalism in Argentina’s Dirty Wars. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Turner, G. (2004). Understanding celebrity. London: Sage. Whannel, G. (2002). Media sport stars: Masculinities and moralities. London and New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 6

The Emergence of Individuated Nationalism

Vignette: Encountering a S.F. Giants Fan in 1997 In 1997, I visited the U.S. for the first time: after quitting my job, I wanted to spend my last holiday there before starting to prepare for graduate school. While I stayed with a friend, a Korean who was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, I encountered another Korean who was one of his friends. At the time, Park, who had been performing sensationally, was making MLB and the L.A. Dodgers popular in South Korea. The Dodgers were treated almost as the Korean national team: all of the Korean fans supported them. Coincidentally, during my visit to Berkeley, Park was scheduled to pitch against the San Francisco Giants, long-time rivals of the Dodgers. My friend’s friend, an orthodox fan of the Giants, began to complain about the Korean media’s poor treatment of MLB teams (other than the Dodgers) and, without hesitation, declared his support for his team, the Giants, even though Park was on the mound. His position, at the time, was more or less shocking to me, because I took for granted that Koreans would support Park and his team. I said to myself, “How daring of him to announce he is supporting the opponent of Park and the L.A. Dodgers.”

As much as nationalism does matter in South Korea, it is also crucial to the making of the national fandom within Korean Major League Baseball (MLB) fans. As discussed in Chapter 2, nonetheless, nationalism has

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been neither monolithic nor fixed despite its hegemonic status: its multiplicity is observed in terms of its concrete ideals, supporting groups, and different relations to the governments in South Korea. Particularly when South Korea underwent an economic crisis as the result of rapid globalization in the late 1990s, developmental nationalism as the hegemonic form in South Korea faced significant challenges, but it has survived despite the critical disruptions to people’s perceptions and mind-set. In Chapter 3, I employed the notion of sporting governmentality to trace how sports, i.e., American baseball in this context, contributed to de- and re-constructing nationalism in South Korea, which underwent extensive neoliberalization under the guidance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). As a consequence of sporting governmentality in this particular conjuncture, I suggested the idea of the “national individual,” which functions as a model for new citizenship that both encouraged and forced sports fans, audiences, and the general populace to adhere. This national individual is one of the outcomes of complicated and seemingly contradictory compromises among transnational corporations, national governments, and public desires. As I participated in the Korean MLB fan activities in the mid-2000s and observed their online community, the recurring questions that I continued to ask were whether this sporting governmentality functioned as the key ideological force, and if so, how it influenced Korean fans. In other words, I was curious about how Korean MLB fans responded to the call of becoming national individuals, which would require them to be responsible, profitable, as well as accountable for nation and family— the set of roles, norms, and standards this new governmentality in South Korea imposed. As Dean (1999) suggests, understanding power in terms of the functions of governmentality does not presume that the regimes of government determine forms of subjectivities; instead, they elicit, promote, facilitate, foster, and attribute various capacities, qualities, and statues to particular agents. At a glance, one might expect that nationalism would no longer function as it had done at the start of the new millennium, but as we observed in Chapter 5, the national fandom still existed as a dominant stream in the Korean fan community. In approaching the Korean MLB fandom, I am reminded that nationalism or the national sentiment does not necessarily oppose globalization or even neoliberalization. As Pickel notes, the globalization process could “reinforce the relationship between national identity and the economics, and even neoliberalism has become one form of economic nationalism”

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(2005, p. 2). Also, the diverse ways of constructing their fandom do not occur in a vacuum, but rather they are unconsciously and significantly influenced both by the structural changes of Korean society and by historic pasts and their reimagined ways (Morris-Suzuki, 2005). The ways in which Korean fans consume and appropriate MLB, e.g., global sports in their own spaces, conditions, and experiences shed light on how the national was transformed in South Korea in response to the state’s processes of globalization and neoliberalization. This chapter illuminates how the structures of the national change as Korean fans enjoy MLB in their online community, a.k.a. MLBPARK. Here, I pursue the rationales through which these fans articulate their national fandom with seminal logics of globalization and neoliberalization. Following Williams’ idea of the structure of feeling (1977), I refer to “the structure of the national” to encompass both dominant and emerging forms of the Korean MLB fandom in the mid-2000s. I employ this term to indicate meaning and values actively lived and felt, which are “social material, but each in an embryonic phrase before it can become fully articulated and defined” (Williams, 1977, pp. 130–131). The structure of the national also serves to better grasp their activities, thoughts, and opinions—not simply as individual incidents, but as traces of structural changes in their complex identities and national imaginations. After exploring the procedures both of constructing and of transforming the structure of the national, I suggest the term “individuated nationalism” to capture the specific characteristics of the global sports fandom in South Korea. In describing the construction of the Korean MLB fandom, I intend to show how global sports are central to the reconstruction of national imaginations by Korean fans. Therefore, I argue for individuated nationalism as an allegory for Korean people and Korean society in general in the conjuncture of its national globalization and its failures, which was expanded in the form of intensive neoliberalization. This particular globalization of South Korea was associated with increased liberalization, which could be identified as part of “neo-liberal globalization” (Lee & Hewison, 2010). Individuated nationalism, as the salient stream of the structure of the national within the Korean MLB fandom, effectively demonstrates that the national, including nationalistic sentiments, rhetoric, discourses, and fervor, is still crucial or at least endemic, but simultaneously, the national is perceived as a set of individual preferences, in which the idea of the national is clearly articulated by personal choices, consumer rights, and free-market principles.

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Sporting Governmentality Under Neoliberalization It is commonly accepted as fact that South Korea has been undergoing extensive neoliberalization since the economic crisis of the late 1990s and its ensuing structural reforms, but it has also been observed that nationalism is still intense and acute, these developments notwithstanding. By highlighting that the neoliberal theoretical framework is not entirely coherent, Harvey points out that “we have to pay attention, therefore, to the tension between the theory of neoliberalism and the actual pragmatics of neoliberalization” (2005, p. 21).1 As I will briefly review in the next part, South Korea’s procedures of neoliberalization were neither identical to those of the West, nor did they adhere to the ideals of neoliberalism. In short, South Korea’s neoliberalization was also full of contradiction and arbitrariness, while the state governments played a significant role and motivated public desires for national wealth. In this vein, implications of the national individual as the new model citizen of South Korea need to be placed in these wider perspectives. The norm of the national individual is clearly linked to an emerging sensibility of neoliberalism, primarily the normative value placed on qualities such as individual efficiency and accountability in terms of their enhancement of the market and an emphasis upon individualism and consumer sovereignty. As discussed in Chapter 3, the media representation of Chan-ho Park, the first Korean MLB player, highlighted his disciplined body, economic success, and responsibility to his family. At the same time, the tone of South Korean mass media reporting on Korean players in the U.S. sports leagues, particularly in baseball and golf, was highly nationalistic. Meanwhile, Park came to be hailed as an ideal man and spouse along with being represented as the symbol of a new Korean masculinity in the global era, in which “his own status as ‘metacommodity’ was enabled by the economic changes that occurred in the neoliberal reforms that followed the crisis, including media liberalization” (Joo, 2012, p. 105). In order to understand how the sporting governmentality in the late 1990s worked in the mindsets of Korean MLB fans down the line, it is useful to highlight several characteristics of the neoliberalization of South Korea in the new millennium. Rather than thoroughly defining the nature of neoliberalization of South Korea, which would go beyond this book’s scope, this part underscores its three distinctive characteristics.

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Firstly, neoliberalization in South Korea has been pursued as a political project rather than an economic pursuit only. In 1998, when President Daejung Kim was inaugurated, his administration was able to regain its political leadership by executing the structural reform requested by the IMF. In particular, the Kim-Daejung government expanded semi-public sectors and NGOs and also increased public support and participation in them, which in turn provided the government with growing influence in the public sectors and civil societies. In rebounding from the national economic crisis, the Kim-Daejung government played the role of either a catalyst or even a sincere partner of the IMF. According to Harvey, developmental states in Asia “rely on the public sector and state planning in tight association with domestic and corporate (often foreign and multinational) capital to promote capital accumulation and economic growth,” as was the case during the Asian economic crisis of 1997–1998 (2005, pp. 71–72). Under the next presidency (between 2003 and 2008), President Moohyun Noh, who succeeded the Kim-Daejung government, actively pursued Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) as a decisive tool for accomplishing the state’s ideal future. Beginning with an FTA with Chile in 2002, South Korean governments sought further FTAs with Europe in 2006 and the U.S. in 2007 respectively. While all of the governments pursued FTAs, the Noh-government was particularly active and even aggressive about making FTAs with as many partners as possible, including economically powerful and large countries and regions. The procedures of preparing and publicizing FTAs in South Korea revealed that FTAs were more than a mere economic strategy. Several neoliberal policies, including FTAs, were advertised as the compulsory path for catching up to the First World or the global standard and, ultimately, as the only way to make Korean citizens rich and competitive. In so doing, the Korean governments were actively engaged in implementing neoliberal policies, expanding market freedom, and deregulation. Secondly, the term neoliberalism was used implicitly rather than explicitly during Korea’s neoliberalization. In other words, many of the policies and propaganda that originated from neoliberal ideals captivated people’s desires individually and collectively, mostly without referring to neoliberalism or any associated terminology. In the late 1990s, when the Asian economic crisis hit Korean markets and the IMF substantially implemented neoliberal transformation, as a matter of fact, neither the term neoliberalism nor neoliberalization was familiar to the Korean public.

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Also, South Korean mass media rarely deployed neoliberalism and its associated terms explicitly during the state’s rebounding process. Instead, the restructuring procedures during and after the IMF intervention period (1997–2001) were described with other terms such as global standardization or the state’s advancement strategy. While many policies were implemented in relatively short periods of time, the neoliberal transformation was saturated as a dominant trend and even taken for granted in people’s everyday lives. Furthermore, such a transformation could appeal to people’s minds and mobilize the popular desire to become wealthy by adopting neoliberal ideas and tactics without anyone recognizing their neoliberal origins. In so doing, neoliberal discourses were imagined as being the motivation for the increase of personal income, investment of capital, and personal discipline. One of the representative cases of this is the extensive investment in private education after the IMF bailout, such as sending children abroad to study and birth-tours (parents who give birth to their child while abroad in order to obtain dual citizenship in countries with more prestigious schools). Neoliberalism and its ensuing discourses were circulated as a powerful mantra or a ladder through which Koreans could reach the status of people in developed or advanced countries, namely the U.S. Meanwhile, Korean neoliberal discourses did not allow people to ponder over the implications and impacts of neoliberalization in their actual lives—at least not until the first decade of the 2000s. Thirdly, the trend of neoliberalization reached its peak both in governing power and in dominant ideology in 2008 when Myung-Bak Lee, former CEO of Hyundai conglomerate, was elected as the new President of South Korea. It is also after 2008 that neoliberalism was widely utilized both in the mainstream mass media and in academia. Neoliberalism became “something of a catch-all for a range of supposed market-oriented ideas and interests and an ideological position on the role of market and state in economic life” (Lee & Hewison, 2010, p. 183). However, as soon as it gained hegemonic status, neoliberalization or neoliberalism also came to face significant challenges and discontent from the general public. President Lee and the MB-government had actively deployed neoliberalism as his main pledge during his presidential campaign. Advocating his motto of being “business friendly,” he highlighted his long-term career in a big conglomerate and his experience with diverse economic business activities. After a landslide win, the newly elected government promised to implement neoliberal policies such as

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deregulation, privatizing public sectors, as well as tax cuts for companies. However, this government also did not adopt truly market-oriented or neoliberal policies: instead, it still intervened in foreign exchange markets during the 2008 global economic crisis, and initiated a huge public project titled “a project of reviving four rivers,” a massive construction project to provide public funds to construction companies. Under the name of neoliberalism, the MB-government and its policies were still embedded in developmentalism, which characterizes South Korean economic development between the 1960s and 1980s. Such a contradiction indicates that neoliberalism in South Korea is less about market fundamentalism and its actualization and more about political propaganda and market populism. The inauguration of the MB-government seemed to signal the triumph of neoliberalization in South Korea, but, ironically, neoliberalism immediately became the object of criticism. While the procedures of neoliberalization have become dominant and pervasive in the past decade, income gaps have grown; the number of temporary workers and unemployment has increased, particularly among the youth; and the South Korean middle class has plummeted (Sonn, 2006). The widespread discontentment with neoliberalism erupted into massive protests against the government’s decision to deregulate the rules of resuming the importation of beef from the U.S. in 2008. It is fair to say that the neoliberalization of South Korea has become a continuous path, but public perception to neoliberalism has diversified, affecting the political sphere in such a way that a seemingly socialist agenda of “economic democratization” was capitalized upon during subsequent political campaigns. As such, the evolution of neoliberalization as well as the adaptation of neoliberalism in South Korea did not result in truly market-orientated governments and policies: instead, South Korean governments continued to make uncomfortable alliances with neoliberal market centrism while still being intrinsically developmentalistic. By tracing the Korean state’s changes since the end of the 1980s, Choi also suggests that “neoliberalism as a logic oriented toward free-market ideal typically coexists with elements from developmentalism and the development state in the discourse, strategies and organization patterns” (2007, p. 224). Furthermore, neoliberalism was populated in the name of the nation, or national wealth, and in so doing, neoliberalism was not necessarily contradictory to nationalist sentiments among South Koreans. As a response to neoliberal globalization, the Korean governments in the 1990s initiated the

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second round of modernization discourse, which included high growth and national competitiveness as its core ideas (Kang, 2000). This seemingly contradictory compromise within the neoliberalization of South Korea and its society could be described as “neoliberal mask and developmental skin.” Neoliberal mask and developmental skin refer to a condition in which a domestic government still fulfills a crucial role in bringing about economic changes while neoliberalism is pursued as another developmentalist project and the object of people’s desires. As the actualization of neoliberalization differs from place to place, the roles and functions of neoliberalism have assumed different guises in different places and times. Rather than taking neoliberalism as a unified concept, it is important to explore its variegated discourses and practices in a specific conjuncture, and therefore, disambiguate its actual effects and transformations. As Pickel suggests, “economic nationalism and neoliberalism are not the necessary opposite they are usually taken to be” (2005, p. 1), it is imperative to pay attention to relations between nationalism and neoliberalism in South Korea and East Asia. In this vein, Harvey also argues that “the neoliberal state needs nationalism of certain sort to survive… nationalism around sports competitions between nations is a sign of it” (2005, p. 85). Therefore, we also need to pay attention not only to the changes in the economic and political sectors, but also to their intertwined relationships with popular desires, public discourses, and ideological changes.2 In relation to the latter, I am delving into figuring out the changing structure of the national, including resonances of the national individual, in the Korean MLB fandom. The introduction of the national individual as the model citizen combined with transformations in South Koreans’ understanding of nationalism itself provided a reasonable circumstance in which the new sporting governmentality could be actualized and concretized. As the norm of the national individual is presented as a component of neoliberalism in combination with nationalism, it remains an attractive and effective rhetoric around which populations can be mobilized. The collaboration between nationalism and individualism could sound inconsistent and even contradictory. However, just as Hall (1988) suggests the term of “authoritarian populism” for explicating the cultural politics of Thatcherism in 1980s British society, this idea of the national individual provides a clue for understanding how this new sporting governmentality functioned to connect seemingly contradictory ideas, norms, and

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dynamics, and eventually succeeded in constructing a new overdetermined social structure. Refuting a narrow understanding of Foucault that employs neither simplistic functionalism nor pessimistic determinism, Maguire argues that “knowledge, institutions, and power relations do not determine the form of our subjectivity” (2002, p. 303).3 Such recognition, which also echoes Grossberg’s rejection of any kind of determinism in cultural studies, helps us to turn our attention to more detailed discussions on cultural politics as well as an ethnographic approach on the specific society and its people (Cho, 2008). The following analysis attempts to answer how Korean MLB fans responded to the sporting governmentality in the late 1990s and re-rationalized the relationship between nation and individual while enjoying, consuming, and sharing global sports with their fellow fans.

The Changing Structure of the National in the Korean MLB Fandom Even as Korean MLB fans have demonstrated strong, constant nationalist tendencies according to both individual tastes and their collective identity, their fandom is continuously being transformed on a structural level. As discussed in Chapter 5, this transformation is illustrated first by contestations of the national fandom in MLBPARK, where its multiplicity shows that the national is constantly being negotiated, complicated, and contested. This chapter delves into how the fans’ consumption and appropriation of global sports contributes to the reconstitution of national imaginations, particularly under the country’s extensive globalization and neoliberalization. Because a national fan(dom) is neither a homogeneous nor fixed collective identity, it is necessary to discern how these fans alternately rebuilt and contested their notions of the national. As mentioned previously, Korean MLB fans enjoyed the renaissance of baseball and the MLB fandom in the mid-2000s due to Park’s return to the mound and the surprising success of the Korean team during the 2006 World Baseball Classic (WBC). With the resurging popularity of MLB, the internet fan community was flooded with new members and different thoughts and positions toward MLB and Korean leaguers. National fans often encountered complaints and even experienced inner conflicts when other favorite teams or players were pitted against Korean leaguers. Not only did these conditions highly complicate the implications of the national,

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many Korean MLB fans also reproduced the national as they continued to enjoy MLB online. These changes in the structures of the national among Korean MLB fans encapsulate the complexity or contesting nature of the glocalization of MLB in Korea. Fans’ online opinions also strongly imply that glocalization does not necessarily cause them to develop identities that are cosmopolitan or even hybridized. Instead, their cultural practices indicate that many are still national fans even when their choice in fandom, national, or otherwise, is strongly contested by other fans. Among Korean MLB fans, cynical responses to both the naïve ideas of national fans but also to nationalistic rhetoric in the mainstream media show that implications of the national have been contested, complicated, and even blurred. Fans also appropriate or reinterpret the term “national” in diverse ways, according to their interests and the degree to which they identify with the concept of consumer rights. These changes in standard ideology and individual orientation take place via contestations and negotiations of three concrete subjects: articulation of personal choices, exploitation of consumer rights, and acceptance of free-market principles. The National with Personal Choice: Disputes Over “Objective Position” One salient way that Korean MLB fans appropriate the national is by rationalizing their nationalistic fandom, whether positive or negative, as a set of personal choices. Relying on individual memories and experiences, these fans articulate their national fandom as a matter of individual taste. Such rationalization indicates that, for them, the national or nationalism no longer functions as either governmental propaganda or even as a collectivist ideology. Fans’ disputes over being objective elucidate their leanings. As shown in the previous chapter, this dispute was inevitably connected with the fans’ different and even polarized attitudes toward Korean leaguers and, specifically, Chan-ho Park. In the mid-2000s, one of the problematic issues in the online fan community was how they dealt with diverse perspectives by calling for an “objective position” as MLB fans. A group of fans who upheld this objectivity as a prerequisite for MLB fans advocated such values as productivity, profitability, and self-discipline for evaluating individual MLB players. Above all, this group prioritized the productivity of each player and evaluated their value in terms of numbers: the basic criteria for pitchers being their number of wins, losses, and ERAs (earned run averages), and for

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batters, their batting averages and number of home runs and RBIs (runs batted in). In the world of baseball, myth always grapples with statistics and documentation for acknowledgment as the game’s true historical foundation (Bjarkman, 2005). Particularly after the Oakland Athletics’ pioneering use of sabermetrics in the 2002 season, more delicate statistics were developed for measuring players’ activity and contribution to the team’s wins. For instance, certain fans showed off their knowledge and frequently compiled new statistics, including OBP (on-base percentage) and OPS (on-base + slugging percentage) for batters, and DIPS (defense independent pitching stats) and WHIP (walks + hits) for pitchers. By deploying a wealth of sports knowledge, statistic formulas, and relevant data, they often attempted to dominate conversations in the online community. Such displays can be regarded as a typically masculine characteristic of sport participation. In sports fan culture, this subgroup of fans, despite its small percentage, tends to apply an elitist approach to their favorites, just as experts do in art and high culture (Crawford, 2004), and such an elitist tendency is widely observed in the cultures of glocalization, despite the intensified commodification of sports (Giulianotti & Robertson, 2004). While advocating an objective position as a prerequisite for all MLB fans, these particular fans also added that “true” MLB fans should be free of the “contamination” of nationalism. In their opinion, national fans in the community were simply shallow or narrow-minded fans who lacked objective parameters in choosing players and teams to support. Of course, one of the major targets in this dispute was Park-ppa (pro-Park) fans and their strong nationalistic tendency.4 Very Lucky: I don’t think that true MLB fans should defend such an unproductive player as Park just because he is a Korean. Only fans who don’t care about a player’s nationality deserve to be called MLB maniacs.

Also, this group of fans emphasized players’ individual profitability, and this profitability is judged in terms of whether a player’s performance is worthy of his annual salary. Their rationale is that a good player that deserves the loyalty and admiration of fans is decided not by his heroic performance, impressive story, and high salary, but by his ongoing productivity or net value to his team. According to this rationale, a player with a high salary should maintain a better performance and higher numbers. As discussed in Chapter 5, Park had become a buster

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after making a huge contract with the Texas Rangers in 2002, which was indisputable even to national fans and Park-ppa. By the standard of profitability, therefore, one fan argued that “it is nonsense for real MLB fans to support Park because he was overwhelmingly overpaid between 2002 and 2005.” In addition, the fans who advocated an objective position were adamant that a good player should manage and train his body well to prepare for games. By targeting Park, whose injury compromised three years of his career, one fan posted, “How pathetic so-called national fans are. They unequivocally keep supporting Park despite his injury and low productivity.” This comment is typical of the objective position of “true MLB fans” who consider a player’s productivity in combination with how well each player manages and disciplines his body. Their emphasis on self-discipline as a core virtue of professional athletes was echoed in the discourses of the New Right, which views health and well-being in terms of personal and moral responsibility (Loy, Andrews, & Rinehart, 1993). This salient trend that advocated fans to be objective was obsessed with numbers, profitability, and even the glorification of the body. In essence, this group of fans, who claimed to be objective, insisted that all MLB fans must select their favorite players based on productivity, profitability, and the discipline of body rather than on their nationality. Also, this objective position as global sports fans reflects the changing cultural sensibility that encourages individuals not only to become consumers (of objects and experiences), but also to recognize themselves and their bodies as commodity signs in which they invest materially, ideologically, and effectively. Not surprisingly, the concept of objectivity was not accepted at its face value in the Korean MLB online community. Many fans who did not even self-identify as national fans expressed their discomfort with the notion of objectivity and its advocates: they criticized the objective position for being elitist or indicative of self-serving logic. Some fans also expressed particular offense at the condescension employed by these self-proclaimed objective fans, who tended to snub other fans by labeling them as deficient and unprofessional. King: I do not agree either with the idea of “objective fans” or with those who argue that they are the only “original” fans because they have a lot of information about a specific MLB team and have supported the team for a long time. People who simply like a player or a team are also MLB fans, no matter how long their support lasts or how thorough their knowledge of MLB is.

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Him: If you really are objective, watch the games without judging! But never post such opinions to enlighten us! You are not supposed to enlighten us. This space is not your personal diary—it is a community of people who like and enjoy MLB.

At the same time, more substantial challenges against the objective position were easily found in their dialogues. Others problematized the idea of fan objectivity by arguing that the very idea is an oxymoron: some fans even denied the idea of original or orthodox fandom, which is closely connected with the objectivity position. Him: I wonder when the notion of being objective changed. I assume that objective comments come from people who are experts, with sportrelated jobs. But in this community, I am skeptical about how many fans who claim to be objective really have such qualifications. Before using the label ‘objective,’ we should admit that we are not experts… We know that Park, now, is one of the busters. So what? Be objective about him? Vegat: I do not find fans who express, as Koreans, more than “objective and rational” responses to Park strange or unusual. Why are Korean fans who support Park treated as parochial or exclusionary?

In response to the criticism from the objective position, the majority of Korean MLB fans defended national fandom by arguing that all fans are necessarily subjective. One fan declared: “I will watch MLB in my own style whether or not others criticize it for being too national or irrational.” They argued that there is nothing wrong with MLB fans being subjective, emotional, or even partisan, whether they support Korean leaguers or reserve their loyalty for particular teams and players irrespective of their nationalities. Berbosa: It is natural as fans to be subjective rather than objective and to be emotional rather than rational. I despise the hypocrites who pretend to be real MLB fans by looking down on other fans who like the Korean leaguers. Hippo: To be an MLB fan is different from being a fan of local teams. MLB is a U.S. sporting league, so there is no reason to be a locally rooted fan in order to become an MLB fan. Why is it problematic for me to follow my favorite Korean leaguers rather than a specific franchise team?

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As the dispute over the objective position illuminates, the Korean MLB fandom by and large opposed the idea that taking an objective position is the only rational or accountable way to be an MLB fan. Rather, they rationalized that their tendency for nationalist sentiment was also a personal choice, so their strong and emotional affiliation with Park, for instance, was not fundamentally different from the objective position. According to this rationale, these fans also tended to make strategic and calculative choices in being national fans. For them, to be national would be the most exciting and even most reasonable manner to be a MLB fan. While rejecting the prerequisite of being objective in order to be an authentic fan, many Korean MLB fans neither accepted national fandom as a moral imperative nor as the only way to enjoy MLB as Koreans. The rationales of Korean MLB fans would be impossible without the direct exposure to global sports that enables local people to interpret global culture according to their own values, and to reformulate and use global culture according to their interests. They also clearly recognized their unique position as long distance fans who lack local attachments, but at the same time have the freedom or arbitrariness of being fans of any player they choose. They continue to rationalize even their personal choice of being national fans for the Korean leaguers and Park. Also, the rationales reflect that such values as productivity, profitability, and self-discipline emerged as important criteria within the Korean MLB fandom. In the fandom dispute over Park, a player’s accountability both for his own body and for his team was highly problematized. As of the mid-2000s, these Korean MLB fans did not accept these values as indispensable, but the disputes over objectivity demonstrate that the Korean MLB fandom was inevitably conflicted over these neoliberal values. The National with Individual Rights: Disputes Over “National Interest” The second change within the structure of the national involves contestation against Korean MLB fans’ idea of “national interest.” This transformation can be inferred from fans’ reactions to the nationwide call that went out to Korean leaguers in MLB to join the Korean team for the first WBC in 2006. In 2005, a controversy erupted within the Korean MLB fandom over the process of selecting members for the Korean team for the WBC and Korean MLB leaguers’ different responses to the national call. While Park announced that he would join the national team, Jaeung

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Seo, a pitcher for the New York Mets, did not accept the invitation at first because he feared he was not physically prepared for the WBC. After going through severe controversy, however, Seo finally decided to join the Korean team and then proved to be a valuable member with strong performances during the WBC. As I examined in another study, traditionally, sports athletes used to be described as national warriors or even soldiers who “represent the destiny of South Korea and […] fight with their best effort for national honor” (Cho, 2009, p. 356). While such a habitual identification of sports athletes as national warriors is no longer tenable in South Korea, Korean MLB fans’ debates focused on whether or not Korean leaguers in MLB should risk their preparation for the regular MLB season by joining the national team for the WBC, which was held during the spring training period of MLB. The debates swirled not only around individual rights versus national interest, but also over different positions on individual rights. Korean MLB fans’ individual rights collided with advocating for the players’ individual rights to decide whether or not they would join the Korean team. Here, Korean MLB fans’ rights were intertwined with the issue of which players are deserving of their wholehearted support as legitimate Korean leaguers, as well as with their desire to see more Korean leaguers in MLB. This desire basically originated from their self-interest as fans and consumers of MLB and its broadcasting. Nonetheless, this desire places them in the category of national fandom because their favorite MLB players are limited to those Korean leaguers who would fulfill their national duties, including the mandatory military service. In this way, Korean MLB fans reveal a contradictory association of the national with individual rights, for both players and consumers. As the news broke out that Seo had initially refused to join the Korean team in late 2005, Korean fans expressed a variety of opinions about his decision-making. A group of fans who generally embraced typical nationalistic rhetoric insisted that Seo should play for the national team. As long as Seo is Korean, according to their reasoning, the national call should be prioritized regardless of his position or condition in MLB. Mombobo: I can understand why Seo hesitates with the decision of participating in the national team. I think, however, that Seo needs to reconsider this issue on a macro level because the nation-state is essential to every individual’s existence.

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Also, the fans’ insistence was related to the mandatory military service, a topic that is always raised within the discussion of citizenship and its requirements in relation to Korean athletes overseas. Along with calling him shameless, some fans suspected that Seo may not be willing to play for the national team because he had already been declared exempt from mandatory military service as a result of playing on Korea’s national team in the 1998 Asian Games (as was Park). Because of this privilege that Seo was granted by playing with the national team, these fans further argued that it was time for Seo to repay the Korean team and the nation-state. Hochinta: Doesn’t Seo, as a Korean, think about the time when he will retire from MLB and return to South Korea? Doesn’t he expect a true welcome from his mother country? If he refuses to join the national team, many Korean fans will also withdraw their support for him. And he should acknowledge how fortunate he was to have the privilege of exemption from mandatory military service. I hope that he is willing to play for the nation-state.

Not all of these fans, however, agreed that national interest must always supersede personal choices; instead, some defended Seo, saying that each player’s right to choose for himself must be respected. This group of fans agreed that pressure for Seo to join the national team was the result of misguided nationalism. Coolguy: Such rhetoric as “enhancement of national prestige” or “for the public interest” intentionally ignores the freedom of personal choice. The situation seems to pressure Seo to accept the national call. The scapegoats are always the players themselves.

Some felt that joining the national team might be too burdensome for Seo because the 2005 season was the first in which he had pitched more than 200 innings. Seo needed to put all of his effort into preparing for the next season in order to secure his future career in MLB. Also, some fans even suggested that Seo should forgo joining the Korean team because he would not be physically prepared for the event. One fan posted that “his membership might even be detrimental to the Korean team if his body is not prepared for playing during the off-season.” Regarding his exemption from the military service, some fans defended Seo by arguing that “Seo himself attained the privilege [of military exemption]. It is not just a gift

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from the nation-state, but the result of his effort, so he does not need to feel sorry for not participating in the national team.” Yet another group of fans claimed their right as fans and consumers of global sports as they urged Seo to join the Korean team. They insisted that Seo should set an excellent precedent for Korean MLB leaguers in the process of selecting members for the national team for international events. If Seo and Park, who had already been exempted from the military service, would join the national team again, their actions would eventually generate more positive images of MLB both to the selection committees and to Korean society. In turn, such excellent images of Korean MLB leaguers would eventually generate more opportunities for other Korean leaguers to be selected for the national team with the possibility of continuing their careers without interruption. Then, these MLB fans would have more domestic broadcasting of MLB games as well as more Korean leaguers to cheer for in MLB. Keeping in mind the fact that the only way for Korean leaguers to be legally exempted from the mandatory military service is to play on a national team that wins a medal in an international event such as the Olympics or Asian Games, some also expressed concern that Seo might set a bad example for future Korean leaguers. Picolo: If Seo does not become part of the national team, his choice might be regarded as a decision typical of Korean leaguers, which would ultimately contribute to conceptualizing a selfish image for Korean leaguers. My concern is that such images might influence the selection process so that other Korean MLB players would not be invited to the national team anymore. Then, we will lose the chance to see more Korean leaguers who successfully continue their career without the interruption of military service.

In this sense, these Korean fans urged Seo to join the national team, but their eagerness for Seo’s participation was an expression of their desires as fans and consumers of their favorite global sports, i.e., MLB, not of nationalist sentiments. While they did not prioritize national interests over players’ individual rights, they supported Korean leaguers’ participation in the national team in order to defend their individual rights as fans and consumers. The diversity of the responses to the national call demonstrates that Korean MLB fans no longer prioritize national interest over individual rights. In reference to the word “national,” one group advocated a sense of national responsibility for the national team while another supported Korean players’ individual rights. Fans’ overt support of players’ rights

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as individuals reflects a shift in their perception of the national interest from a sacred concept to a complex term contested by individual desires and ambitions. Also, their advocating for players’ rights often conflicts with their own rights such as their desire to enjoy more MLB games and to see the performances of more Korean leaguers in MLB. In this vein, we can observe that the fans’ sense of individual rights is not uniform, and furthermore, also associated with the national in that they advocate their rights as fans and consumers. As the sporting governmentality of the late 1990s pushed for a new kind of citizenship which fulfills individual goals for the nation-state, the fans’ sense of individual rights urged Korean MLB leaguers to join the national team. According to this rationale, these fans’ requests for Korean leaguers were inevitably connected with a changing perception of the national. Here, the national can be calculated or converted either into the individual rights that Korean leaguers as the legitimate national player were supposed to receive by joining the national team or the consumer benefits that Korean fans would expect to get by having more Korean leaguers in MLB. As Korean leaguers increased their fandom and came upon financial benefits by fulfilling their national duty, these fans also appropriated or reinterpreted the idea of the national based on their own interests as fans and consumers of global sports. The National with Market Principles: Disputes Over “National Profit” The changing structure of the national can be also been in Korean MLB fans increasingly approaching the national from a set of economic perspectives rather than from a political dimension. Historically, sports in Korea have been developed and organized by governments in order to fulfill their political purposes (Kwak, Ko, Kang, & Mark, 2018). As Ha and Mangan (2002) observe, the postwar development of Korean sport was politically driven, resourced, and endorsed. Baseball in Korea has also always had strong political ties in its introduction (Reaves, 2002, 2006). Reaves suggests that “the most distinguishing element of Korean baseball is the level of political involvement” (2006, p. 225).5 As global sports have become a part of the new world economy, however, sport is a powerful vehicle for transnational corporations and their advertising and promotional divisions (Jackson, Andrews, & Scherer, 2005). As such, baseball in Korea has been immersed in the logic of global industry and influenced by global sports agencies and corporations. The Korean MLB fandom is one of the best examples of how the logics of global industry

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collide with domestic corporations and the national sentiments of MLB. Within the Korean MLB fandom, reconfiguration is insinuated into implications of the national by associating the national with economic values (which are interpreted in terms of personal interest) rather than referring to it in simply ideological terms (which are linked with a purely patriotic form of national interest). As a matter of fact, the discussion over national profit in relation to broadcasting MLB games began as early as the end of 1997 and the beginning of 1998. In the midst of the national economic crisis, public opinion expressed concerns over renewing the broadcasting contract between Korea Broadcasting Station (KBS) and MLB International. Because KBS is a public company, operating through public subsidies, there was concern that foreign currency, in this case U.S. dollars, would be wasted by purchasing MLB broadcasting rights. At the time, the national imperative to maximize national profit prevented KBS from pursuing MLB broadcasting rights (more details on this have been discussed in Chapter 3). In the 2005 season, there was another dispute over broadcasting MLB games in a different setting in which a commercial cable company owned the rights of broadcasting the games. A newly launched cable network named X-sports made a contract with MLB International, agreeing to pay $10 million a year for four seasons of games (2005–2008). Before the start of the 2005 season, this contract was seen as too risky and even reckless to Korean MLB fans because the previous contract by Munhwa Broadcasting Company (MBC), another public broadcasting company, between 2001 and 2004 proved to be a failure in terms of ratings and economic loss.6 Many fans assumed that without Park’s revival, X-sports would not be able to turn a profit. Fortunately, the popularity of MLB grew and ratings soared in 2005 and 2006 because Park continued to pitch regularly and other Korean leaguers were active as well. The superb performance of the Korean team during the 2006 WBC also served to boost the popularity of MLB. As the 2005 season unfolded, many Koreans complained about the exclusive contract between X-sports and MLB, which strictly prohibited re-broadcasting games or any game footage—even images. Contrary to KBS or MBC, which are free public broadcasting channels, X-sports is a commercial cable channel, so fans had to subscribe to cable networks that included X-sports. Although fees for cable networks were not expensive in South Korea, not every fan was subscribed to cable networks, and for some fans, it was impossible to even subscribe to X-sports due to its

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limited coverage or because of technical reasons. The sudden dearth of MLB live broadcasting, game images, and its Korean leaguers on public networks was embarrassing to MLB fans. As discussed in Chapter 3, mass media and television news programs in the late 1990s were saturated with uplifting reports on Park and MLB. Complaints against X-sports soon poured out in their online community, because those without access to Xsports no longer had any way to watch the footage and live broadcasting of Korean leaguers’ performances. The sharpest debates erupted over the issue of whether MLB games should be regarded as public (sports) events. In the disputes over “national profit,” Korean MLB fans displayed dissonance over whether broadcasting MLB games in South Korea should be regarded as a public affair or whether it needed to be operated purely on market principle. The issue of regarding the broadcasting of sporting events as a public matter is also discussed in other places: according to Boyle and Haynes (2004), in the UK, the issue over free-to-air TV coverage of sporting events erupted when media and telecommunication companies began to utilize new technologies such as digital and pay-per-view TV in the mid1990s. Compared to international sporting events such as the Olympics and the Football World Cup, it may sound bizarre and even irrelevant to discuss the same issue over broadcasting MLB games, which are held in the U.S. as an American professional league and appeal not to the general public but to a specific group of people, i.e., MLB or baseball fans. However, Korean fans could not reach an agreement over whether public interest or the free-market principle should be the decisive factor regarding the broadcasting of MLB games and sharing images of them. This dilemma was aggravated when Park was pitching for his 100th win in MLB, a huge career milestone: Park earned his 100th victory in a game against the Kansas Royals on 5 June 2005. This achievement was a first for Korean leaguers and the second as an Asian player after Nomo Hideo, a Japanese player. As a Korean pioneer and national player in MLB, Park’s games had been treated as public events. Most MLB fans and even the general public wanted to see his games live and clips of his performance celebrating his milestone. Due to the exclusive contract with X-sports, however, many people missed such opportunities of seeing Park in action. Ramon: Today, the MBC sports news did not mention Park’s nice pitching at all. It is too frustrating for me as a fan of Park and as a loyal watcher of MBC news. It is pathetic for MBC as a national public network to leave out news about Park. MBC is just a very selfish corporation.

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Sack art: It seems that not only MBC but also other national networks by mutual consent have decided not to mention Park in their news programs. All the networks are jealous of X-sports. In the past, they sent correspondents to the baseball stadiums in the U.S. to report on news about Park.

Some fans emphasized the responsibility of public networks to satisfy public or national needs (in this case, the desire to watch Park’s games). According to them, Park’s games should be treated as national sporting events. They criticized the public networks for not paying fees to X-sports and even suspected that these networks intentionally ignored X-sports, which was a comparatively small and new network. As a result, no clips of Park’s performances were broadcast in any news programs, which caused these fans to accuse the public networks of abandoning their public duty. As tensions rose between X-sports and other networks on negotiating the fees of retransmitting MLB games, some fans also began to blame Xsports for allegedly demanding unreasonably high fees for the use of clips from Park’s games. Because of their conviction that MLB games, particularly Park’s games, should be treated as “public property,” these fans even asked X-sports to release these clips for free. When their request was denied, they claimed that X-sports was holding a national desire hostage in order to make an enormous profit. Mets1: I am sure that the popularity of MLB will diminish if the national networks keep being silent about the Korean leaguers. As a right of public access, X-sports should provide clips of MLB games to the national networks. Hey, officers of X-sports: Please offer news material to the national networks! Ultimately, increased interest in MLB will be helpful to your company.

Other fans, however, asserted that decisions about broadcasting MLB games and news clips should be made according to free-market principles. Their detailed, varied suggestions included asking the public networks to pay higher fees to X-sports because “the public networks are attempting to exploit X-sports in the name of public right of knowledge.” They particularly targeted MBC’s attitude, which they saw as hypocritical because the contract between MBC and MLB four years earlier had been primarily responsible for the increase in broadcasting fees. Uhm: The problem is that, under the pretext of public interest, the national networks tried to get a free ride when obtaining MLB footage from

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X-sports. MBC should have been more aggressive about purchasing broadcasting rights if it wanted to advocate for the public right.

Another group of fans who adhered to the free-market principle suggested that X-sports provide MLB clips to national networks at a discount, which would ensure profit for X-sports while sustaining the public’s interest in MLB. The logic here was that delaying news coverage of MLB on KBS or MBC, merely over money issues, would ultimately damage the reputation of X-sports and harm its profit margin. Even if it provided clips for free, X-sports would “get more financial gain because the public interest in MLB would be increased through coverage of MLB and Korean leaguers on the news programs of the public networks.” Along with advocating economic values and market principles, these fans reasoned that fee adjustments by X-sports would ultimately increase the overall media coverage of MLB games. Korean MLB fans’ diverse opinions about national profit showed that, even though the national was repeatedly invoked, they did not accept national profit as a sacred, monolithic concept. Such a multilayered understanding of the national also indicates that implications of the national within the Korean MLB fandom are obviously coterminous with economic philosophies such as the free-market principle. On the one hand, this growing emphasis on economics implies that traditional nation-statehood has been effectively replaced by late capitalist corporatenationhood. As Silk, Andrews, and Cole (2005) argue, the nation can be corporatized and reduced to a branded expression, which lets global capitalism commandeer collective identity and memory. In global sports, the concept of the nation is “increasingly reimagined, represented and articulated by the process of ‘corporate nationalism’” (Kobayashi, 2012, p. 43). As much as the global sports industry has sought to manipulate the national to engage with local consumers and fans, global sports fans have also responded to the corporate strategy of glocalization. As discussed, Korean MLB fans neither advocated unilaterally for the public’s right to watch MLB games nor supported the networks’ use of free-market principles regarding the broadcasting of MLB games in South Korea. To some fans, broadcasting MLB is still discussed in terms of public rights because MLB, and particularly Park’s games, could be treated as public events. This means that the performances of Korean leaguers would be treated as national matters, not simply as individual careers or achievements. These rationales demonstrate the complex relationship between national profit

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and free-market principles, and between national interests and consumer rights.

The Emergence of Individuated Nationalism Investigation of the role of global sports shows that structures of the national have been transformed among Korean MLB fans according to their ways of appropriating the global product of baseball. The variety of ways Korean MLB fans responded to the national fandom coalesces into a group style that exists above the level of the individual. Online interactivity among Korean MLB fans clearly shows the presence of glocalization from below, compared to glocalization from above, i.e., the collective efforts of globalizing sports by utilizing local sentiments and elements.7 In the disputes over objective position, national interest, and national profit, these fans rationalize their fandom as matters of taste and choice based on individual experiences, memories, and desires involved in their consumption of MLB. In so doing, not all of them take nationalist rhetoric for granted or prioritize national fandom above individual taste and choices. The idea of the national is thus reinterpreted and perceived as a set of individual preferences in which the structures of the national are articulated by personal choices, consumer rights, and market principles. To theorize this particular structure of the national within global sports fandom, I propose the concept of individuated nationalism, which explains this complicated and even contradictory merging of the national with the idea of individuality. Individuals appropriate nationalistic discourses that have deep personal significance in the active process of self-making. The way Korean MLB fans use baseball to rationalize their national interests in tandem with personal choices, consumer rights, and market principles suggests that their understanding of the national is diversified and expanding. In their fandom, the national is still salient and influential, but its significances and implications are continuously filtered through global and neoliberal values. In the process of rationalizing the multiplicity of the MLB fandom, these fans are able to articulate the changing meaning of the national as part of their individual preferences. Within the Korean MLB fandom, the presence of individuated nationalism indicates that the national is still embedded as a reference point, but can be chosen and justified as an identity based on personal choices, consumer rights, and market principles, rather than

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being routinely embraced as a moral imperative or the result of government enforcement or ideological manipulation. In this vein, individuated nationalism provides a partial answer to how MLB fans responded to the call to becoming national individuals, i.e., sporting governmentality in the late 1990s. This notion of individuated nationalism is meaningful in terms of differentiating the political and governmental from the personal dimension of nationalism. In this vein, individuated nationalism shares seminal ideas with personal nationalism, which Cohen (1996) attempts to theorize in his study of Scottish nationalism. Cohen (1996) also argues that it is necessary to interpret how an individual personalizes nationalism and to recognize its personal nature, which needs to be separate from a more partisan political program or political nationalism. In his theorization of personal nationalism, Cohen succinctly states that “the nation is one of the resources on which individuals draw to formulate their sense of selfhood,” and, in so doing, “the national is depicted as the realization of individuals’ aspirations for their selves” (1996, pp. 803 and 810). As personal nationalism remains persuasive to so many Scottish people, regardless of their political convictions (Cohen, 1996), individuated nationalism continues to be compelling to many global sports fans in selecting their favorite games, leagues, teams, and players in South Korea. Furthermore, individuated nationalism provides a clue for understanding how globalization and neoliberalization are filtered through national sentiments or nationalism in South Korea. Korean MLB fans definitely understand and partly accept certain hallmarks of neoliberal values as the qualifications of professional individuals that are worthy of their sincere support and loyalty. For instance, productivity, profitability, self-discipline, individual rights, and the free-market principle are taken seriously in their evaluations of MLB players, including Korean leaguers. However, their fandom is not entirely based on these criteria. While some fans still justify and maintain their national passion, others rationalize and relativize national fandom. Some fans even justify national fandom in order to maximize their individual desires, so that the free-market principle is not necessarily contradictory to national fandom. These fans’ disputes over objectivity, national interest, and national profit clearly demonstrate how these fans justify the relationship between the national and their enjoyment of MLB as Koreans, including explicit allusions to co-optation between individual rights and national interests, as well as

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conflict between free-market principles and national profit. Also, individuated nationalism indicates that the national, including nationalism, is increasingly approached in terms of economic value rather than political or ideological purposes. Finally, I argue that individuated nationalism is emerging as a substantial force in globalizing and neoliberalizing South Korea. Individuated nationalism is different from ethnic nationalism, which Shin suggests as a key organizing principle and considerable force in Korean society and politics in which “belief in ethnic homogeneity is not simply a myth or a fantasy… it has real social and political significance” (2006, p. 3). While I fully agree with Shin’s presumption that “Korean nationalism is not a rigid ideology and adapts to changing situations,” I certainly do not agree with his suggestion that “Korea needs to find constructive ways to use ethnic nationalism” (2006, p. 183). This is not only because many South Koreans recognize that its society is no longer homogeneous in terms of race, ethnicity, and nation, but also because ethnic nationalism does not adequately explicate changing sentiments as people undergo extensive neoliberalization and experience its consequences in their daily lives. The notion of individuated nationalism describes how globalized products and experiences in South Korea (specifically, MLB and the popularity surrounding it), are mediated and contested by, and at times conflict with, local structures—including the nation-state and nationalistic discourses. It is still too early to ask whether individuated nationalism is better or worse than oppositional or developmental nationalism, which for decades were the hegemonic discourses of Korean nationalism. It is also too early to conclude that individuated nationalism indicates the emergence of neotribes (loose, fluid groups in which individuals move in and out of several times a day).8 Nonetheless, individuated nationalism among Korean MLB fans is clearly a result of their long, self-reflexive deliberations and intense debates about the relationship of the national and the MLB fandom, and the nature of the MLB fandom as something apart from government enforcement or ideological manipulation.

Notes 1. In a similar vein, Brenner, Peck, and Theodore (2010) suggest the “variegated” character of neoliberalization, which highlights uneven developments of neoliberalization and neoliberalism as a chaotic conception.

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2. From a similar perspective, Song (2006) approaches “neoliberalism as a social ethos of economic-moral value that gains its explanatory power through a wide variety of social agents” (p. 55). Also, see Song’s book (2009) on South Korea’s transformation into a neoliberal welfare society in the national crisis. 3. Contrary to the notion of technologies of self, Maguire also contends that technologies of domination assume modes of knowledge production and organization that “determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject” (2002, p. 299). 4. See Chapter 5 for the discussion on Park-ppa (pro-Park) versus Park-kka (anti-Park). 5. Regarding the government’s intervention in baseball, Reaves (2002, 2006) points out that the Korean government unabashedly established professional baseball in the 1980s as a diversion and channel for political and social unrest in South Korea. 6. In a congressional hearing, one senator claimed that MBC lost $9 million between 2001 and 2004 (Pressian, 11 October 2004). 7. See Introduction for a detailed discussion of glocalization from above and glocalization from below. 8. Crawford (2004) proposes that it is more profitable to view sport fans as a “neo-tribe.”

References Bjarkman, P. C. (2005). Diamonds around the globe: The encyclopedia of international baseball. Westport, CN and London: Greenwood Press. Boyle, R., & Haynes, R. (2004). Football in the new media age. New York: Routledge. Brenner, N., Peck, J., & Theodore, N. (2010). Variegated neoliberalization: Geographies, modalities, pathways. Global Networks, 10(2), 182–222. Cho, Y. (2008). We know where we’re going, but we don’t know where we are: An interview with Lawrence Grossberg. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 32(2), 102–122. Cho, Y. (2009). Unfolding sporting nationalism in South Korean media representation of the 1968, 1984 and 2000 Olympics. Media, Culture and Society, 31(3), 347–364. Choi, B. D. (2007). Beyond developmentalism and neoliberalism: Development process and alternative visions for Korean geography. Journal of the Korean Geographical Society, 42(2), 218–242. Cohen, A. P. (1996). Personal nationalism: A Scottish view of some rites, rights, and wrongs. American Ethnologist, 23(4), 802–815.

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Crawford, G. (2004). Consuming sport: Fans, sport and culture. New York: Routledge. Dean, M. (1999). Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society. London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage. Giulianotti, R., & Robertson, R. (2004). The globalization of football: A study in the glocalization of the ‘serious life’. The British Journal of Sociology, 55(4), 545–568. Ha, N.-G., & Mangan, J. A. (2002). Ideology, politics, power: Korean sport— Transformation, 1945–92. In J. A. Mangan & F. Hong (Eds.), Sport in Asian society: Past and present (pp. 213–242). London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass. Hall, S. (1988). The hard to road to renewal: Thatcherism and the crisis of the left. London and New York: Verso. Havery, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Jackson, S. J., Andrews, D. L., & Scherer, J. (2005). Introduction: The contemporary landscape of sporting advertising. In S. J. Jackson & D. L. Andrews (Eds.), Sport, culture and advertising: Identities, commodities and the politics of representation (pp. 1–23). New York: Routledge. Joo, R. M. (2012). Transnational sport: Gender, media and global Korea. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kang, M.-K. (2000). Discourse politics toward neo-liberal globalization. InterAsia Cultural Studies, 1(3), 443–456. Kobayashi, K. (2012). Corporate nationalism and glocalization of Nike advertising in “Asia”: Production and representation practices of cultural intermediaries. Sociology of Sport Journal, 29, 42–61. Kwak, D. H., Ko, Y. J., Kang, I., & Rosentraub, M. (2018). Introduction. In D. H. Kwak, Y. J. Ko, I. Kang, & M. Rosentraub (Eds.), Sport in Korea: History, development, management (pp. 1–11). London and New York: Routledge. Lee, S. J., & Hewison, K. (2010). Introduction: South Korea and the antinomies of neo-liberal globalisation. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 40(2), 181–187. Loy, J. W., Andrews, D. L., & Rinehart, R. E. (1993). The body in sport and culture: Toward an embodied sociology of sport. Sport Science Review, 2(1), 69–91. Maguire, J. S. (2002). Michel Foucault: Sport, power, technologies and governmentality. In J. Maguire & K. Young (Eds.), Theory, Sport & Society (pp. 293–314). Amsterdam and Boston: JAI. Morris-Suzuki, T. (2005). The Past within us: Media, memory, history. London and New York: Verso. Pickel, A. (2005). Introduction: False oppositions. Recontextualizing economic nationalism in a globalizing world. In E. Helleiner & A. Pickel (Eds),

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Economic nationalism in a globalizing world (pp. 1–17). Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Reaves, J. A. (2002). Taking in a game: A history of baseball in Asia. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Reaves, J. A. (2006). Korea: Straw scandals and strong arms. In G. Gmelch (Ed.), Baseball without borders: The international pastime (pp. 89–114). Lincoln and London: University Nebraska Press. Shin, G.-W. (2006). Ethnic nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, politics, and legacy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Silk, M., Andrews, D. L., & Cole, C. L. (2005). Corporate nationalism(s)? The spatial dimension of sporting capital. In M. Silk, D. L. Andrews, & C. L. Cole (Eds.), Sport and corporate nationalisms (pp. 1–12). Oxford, NY, USA: Berg. Song, J. (2006). Family breakdown and invisible homeless women: Neoliberal governance during the Asian debt crisis in South Korea, 1997–2001. Positions, 14(1), 37–65. Song, J. (2009). South Koreans in the debt crisis: The creation of a neoliberal welfare society. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Sonn, H. R. (2006). The post-Cold-War world order and domestic conflicts in South Korea: Neoliberal and armed globalization. In V. R. Hadiz (Ed.), Empire and neoliberalism in Asia (pp. 202–217). London and New York: Routledge. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Articulation of the National, Regional, and Global

Vignette: Asian MLB Fans Watch a Yankees Game at Old Dominion University In September 2005, I traveled to Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia to see an interviewee, Chub, who I had first met during the summer. Chub was an exchange student at Old Dominion for the fall semester, and we planned to go to RFK Stadium in D.C. to watch an MLB game. Before our departure, on Friday evening, we happened to watch a Yankees game on TV with his Japanese friend, who was also a Major League Baseball (MLB) fan. While most of the American students were busy going to parties, only the three Asians kept watching the MLB game in the dorm lounge. What an awkward picture this made! Then a passing American student yelled when he recognized a Japanese player with the Yankees. “He is a Japanese… I know him, Maa…stu…” Chub’s Japanese friend quickly responded, saying, “Thank you. Thank you!” But the American did not stop, and named a couple more Japanese players in MLB, which seemed to please the Japanese friend. It was fun to observe a really gauche conversation between two strangers about MLB. During the rest of the trip, however, certain questions kept haunting me: “Why did or should the Japanese guy say ‘Thank you’?” and “Was I jealous that the American only remembered Japanese MLB players, but no Korean leaguers?”

© The Author(s) 2020 Y. Cho, Global Sports Fandom in South Korea, Palgrave Series of Sport in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3196-5_7

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The game of baseball, long considered America’s “national pastime,” is indicative of American hegemony elsewhere. According to Kelly, “at least by the 1860s, baseball was already explicitly ‘nationalized’ as the American pastime” (2007, p. 188). The globalization of baseball as part of American hegemony seems to imitate the pathways of cricket that not only followed the line of the British Empire but also reflected “the inequalities evident within and between the outsider colonies and the established mother country” (Maguire, 1999, p. 214). While this is particularly the case in Latin America (Klein, 2006), baseball as American hegemony is also observable in East Asia, which is not typically regarded as a former American colony.1 The introduction of baseball began there during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, and “was promoted in highly nationalistic terms as embodying American values and inculcating an American character” (Kelly, 2007, p. 193). From its earliest days, baseball in East Asia was embraced as a symbol of the modern (Cho, 2016). The earliest teachers and supporters of baseball in Asia included missionaries, educators, YMCA staff, and merchants (as well as military personnel). However, this trans-pacific trajectory of baseball does not mean that the continuing popularity of baseball in East Asia is merely a reflection of American hegemony or a result of American military occupation. By tracing the game’s circulation through Asia, Reaves suggests that “baseball across Asia appears to be the same as the U.S. version – but it isn’t,”2 as long as “baseball is an important tool of cultural hegemony and a powerful weapon to fight that hegemony” (2002, p. 3). In the process of expanding baseball in Asia, Kelly adds that “local players and promoters responded with considerable creativity and even irreverence” (2007, p. 193). Baseball in East Asia became distinct from the U.S. version because the first country to which it was introduced, Japan, immediately asserted its national character with the slogan “Japanese sprit, Western sport.” While baseball “had become a symbol of the nation’s progress in its efforts to catch the West,” the ways of managing and practicing baseball were crystallized through Bushido, the way of the samurai (Whiting, 2003, p. 34). As such, the Japanese style of baseball is also dubbed samurai baseball (Whiting, 2003, 2005), which highlights “team-spirited, cautious, self-sacrificing, deeply deferential, intensely local samurai with bats” (Kelly, 2007, p. 195). Furthermore, it was Japan that actively mediated and promoted baseball in its colonies: its first games were played as Imperial Japan began or

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was about to occupy Korea and Taiwan. As these occupations continued, both official policies and personal enthusiasm for the game on the part of Japanese soldiers, administrators, and educators ensured baseball’s popularity and even “japanized” it (Morris, 2011; Reaves, 2002). While it was American missionaries who first introduced baseball to East Asia, “the Japanese are, and have been for decades, the dominant missionaries of baseball in Asia,” spreading the sport to its former colonies such as Korea and Taiwan (Reaves, 2002, p. 3). As Japan did with the U.S. in the Ichiko-Yokohama series in the early twentieth century (Roden, 1980), baseball often provided the colonized a way to negotiate with and contest the Japanese. For instance, young Koreans welcomed the game as an intriguing outlet through which they could oppose the militarism of their colonizers (Kim, 2008), and for the Taiwanese, beating a Japanese team on the baseball field provided a rare opportunity to prove their superiority despite their subordination (Lin & Lee, 2007). As much as Imperial Japan utilized baseball as a tool for controlling and governing its colonial subjects, baseball has sometimes functioned to crystallize anti-colonialist sentiments and to provide an organizational framework for a movement of national liberalization (Guttmann, 1994). In this sense, these colonial societies in East Asia “embraced the game imbued upon them by their colonizers—Japanese and American,” but again “found a way to put its own cultural imprint on the game” (Reaves, 2002, p. 9). These historical patterns foreshadowed the development of East Asian baseball in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. The game remained popular after World War II (particularly in countries that had hosted a large American presence) and during the Cold War (in countries that had undergone American intervention). During the Cold War, there was a revival of baseball, and it was frequently played in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan under American military, political and economic influence (Kim, 2008; Reaves, 2002). The parallel development of professional baseball and burgeoning American culture is also evident in East Asia, where the nation’s skyrocketing economic growth nurtured regional fascinations with various elements of American consumer culture, including Hollywood films, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, etc. Today, baseball is actively played both at amateur and professional levels in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. In these societies, baseball has become one of the region’s leading sports through the popularity of its high school leagues and national professional leagues. In fact, Taiwan was very successful on the international level at the International Little League in Williamsport, U.S.

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during the ‘60s and ‘80s (Bjarkman, 2005). In Korea, baseball was revived under American hegemony after World War II, and the first professional league by the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) was inaugurated in 1982 under the military government. Since then, baseball and the KBO have become the most popular sport and league in Korea (Kim, 2008; Reaves, 2006). In the postcolonial era, baseball in East Asia continues to function as an arena in which national and regional identities are negotiated and contested(Cho, 2016). Beginning in the 1980s, some ethnic Koreans residing in Japan returned to South Korea to sign up with the newly formed KBO. The 1990s saw hotly contested matchups between allstar teams from the KBO and the Japanese Professional League (Nippon Professional Baseball Organization, NPB). In the early 2000s, several elite Korean and Taiwanese players became players in the NPB. During the changing decades of the new millennium, baseball fans in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea have loyally followed MLB. As discussed in the previous chapters, one of the most effective strategies employed by MLB to attract Asian fans has been to associate U.S. sports with national sentiments and local resonance by recruiting Asian players. In other words, the MLB debuts of their own national players contributed to boosting the popularity of MLB in each country: Nomo Hideo and Ichiro Suzuki from Japan, Chan-ho Park from Korea, and Chien-ming Wang from Taiwan are representative cases (Chen, 2012; Nakamura, 2005). While marketing these players’ ethnicity has been a smart move for MLB, by making it to MLB, such players prove that Asians can be competitive among Americans. In addition, regional alliances and rivalries continue as groups of players from one country form an expatriate group (such as the Korean leaguers) and former colonizers encounter their former colonized (e.g., Nomo and Park in the L.A. Dodgers). The latter type of encounter emphasizes Japan’s obligation to deal with other Asian countries on equal footing, as modern rivals. This chapter delineates how Korean MLB fans constructed their regional and global perspectives via consuming and enjoying baseball in their online community, i.e., MLBPARK. In particular, I discuss how the fans’ national desires are further complicated by colliding with regional rivalries such as Japan and Taiwan, and by navigating MLB’s strategy of globalizing its league. How did those who enjoy global sporting events respond to or embrace their nationalist sentiments and regional contentions? Were the identities they constructed by consuming another

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sports mega-event more nationalistic or more cosmopolitan? The MLB fandom in Korea as well as the national frenzy over the first World Baseball Classic (WBC) in 2006 provide an exemplary case for exploring how global sports and sporting events such as MLB and the WBC have intersected with re-constituting both national identities and regional relations among local fans. An analysis of these communications demonstrates how national, regional, and global sensibilities combine and conflict within the Korean MLB fandom. Today, perhaps more than ever, baseball is an important avenue along which Koreans not only navigate historical relationships with Japan and the U.S., but also articulate hierarchical relationships among their identities as Koreans, Asians, and citizens of the world.

National Fever for the 2006 World Baseball Classic As America’s pastime, baseball is a very parochial, i.e., American sport. Beyond U.S. territory, baseball is a popular practice mostly in the East Asian and Latin American countries that are or have been under American hegemony (Szymanski & Zimbalist, 2005). In this vein, Kelly comments that “baseball has never developed the global character of soccer” as it is a symbol of American hegemony (2007, p. 188). Along with its efforts of recruiting Asian players, MLB launched a global network, MLB International (MLBI) in the 1990s, which aimed at generating foreign revenue in order to compensate for shrinking domestic profits at the time. The first attempt at globalizing MLB through MLBI was to launch an international tournament, similar to soccer’s World Cup. Titled the World Baseball Classic, it was planned for March 2006.3 The WBC, however, was not intended to promote or augment baseball’s popularity around the globe but rather to graft MLB into longstanding, multi-level baseball organizations and competitions in various countries. Klein described the WBC as “another Major League Baseball production, politically and economically, crafted by and for MLB, with an international cast” (2006, p. 246). Despite all the concerns and hype, Korean MLB fans as well as the general Korean public were hooked on the 2006 WBC, during which the Korean national team performed unexpectedly well, watching the consecutive victories, including against Japan and Team USA, with gleeful fascination. Despite the time difference between South Korea and California, U.S.A, where the second and final rounds were hosted, many

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Koreans fervently watched these games both at home and in public spaces, which seemed to reignite the national fever during the 2002 Japan-Korea World Cup. From its preparation process to its closing, the first WBC in 2006 resulted in various and even contradictory consequences both to its organizer, MLB, and to its global fans, audiences, as well as consumers, including Korean MLB fans. On the one hand, its preparation revealed the event’s provincial intentions under the guise of international play, which was dominated by the U.S.’s power. On the other hand, the results of the first WBC were better than expected: while Team USA struggled, East Asian teams and some Central American teams showed strong performances. In its initial stage of planning the event, MLB made its purpose clear by refusing to involve existing international baseball organizations. A model of cooperation, the Baseball World Cup (BWC) and its matchups of national teams had existed since 1938.4 This model was rejected by MLB, however, because the BWC was organized by the International Baseball Federation (IBAF) and competition was limited to amateur or professional minor league players. MLB’s decision to invent its own world championship was intended to proclaim a single center of the baseball world—the MLB Commissioner’s office in New York City, rather than the IBAF headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland. MLB was equally uninterested in cooperating with the International Olympic Committee (IOC). In the past, MLB had always refused to excuse players from its regular season or to suspend the season every four years in favor of the Summer Olympic Games. The IOC’s vote in 2005 to revoke baseball’s medal status as of the 2012 Summer Games was in part a reaction to this resistance.5 This ruling also stemmed from the inadequate global popularity of baseball, which in turn meant a shortage of international teams for Olympic competition. MLB’s lack of effort to salvage baseball’s Olympic medal status was forgotten on 11 July 2005, however, when Commissioner Bud Selig announced the inaugural WBC championship. Furthermore, the ways in which the event was planned and held illuminated that “the hegemony of the U.S. organizational power revealed world baseball’s skewed landscape” (Kelly, 2007, p. 189). For 17 days in March 2006, the first WBC took place in numerous venues with 16 teams participating, and with the league’s blessing, many MLB players joined their own national teams. While the first round was held regionally, the second-round and final-round games were mostly held in the U.S. In

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addition, new rules were installed to protect high-profile MLB players, particularly pitchers: the WBC employed strict limits on the number of pitches per game and a mandatory rest day after a game,6 which is unheard of in MLB and other professional leagues. Clearly, MLB planned and executed the WBC as an American event to be supported by the rest of the world. In spite of international participation, U.S. domination in its organization and operation made the WBC global in form but parochial in essence. On the other hand, the results of the 2006 WBC were surprising: East Asian teams gave an excellent performance for global and national fans. In particular, Japan won the first WBC championship with South Korea placing third: the latter’s final standing was six victories and one loss (the most wins). Meanwhile, local baseball fans in Japan and South Korea were excited about the event and their national teams, which had exceeded their expectations. To the surprise of many, Team USA was ranked eighth among 16 teams and scored 3 wins, 3 losses. Irrespective of the outcomes, the tournament proved to be quite popular: attendance during first-round games was high and even set records at the Tokyo Dome (for Pool A of the Asian teams) and San Juan’s Hiram Bithorn Stadium (for Pool D of the Central American teams). Even though the U.S. team had already been eliminated, the final games at PETCO Park in San Diego attracted an average of over 42,000 attendees. Team USA’s ranking was disappointing for MLB, but the unexpectedly strong performances of Japan and South Korea made the WBC an overall success. Compared to Team USA, the three top teams (Japan, Cuba, and South Korea) included a fewer MLB players in their rosters. MLB’s likely original goal of attracting global fans to MLB by showing off the superb performances of Team USA turned out to be a failure in this sense. Ironically, however, the U.S. team’s relatively poor results contributed to the high levels of interest shown in countries whose teams exceeded expectations (Japan and South Korea in East Asia and several Central American countries). In South Korea, the national team’s excellent performance fueled a major fever for the event—in addition, of course, to the national imperative to beat Japan. The two teams faced each other three times from the first round to the semifinal, with the first two games going to South Korea. Neither MLB nor Korean MLB fans had anticipated this sudden, dramatic rise of South Korean interest, either in its own events or baseball in general. Such superb performances by East Asian teams and

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the resulting high levels of interest in the WBC in the respective countries indicated that East Asia both as practitioners and consumers would emerge as another powerhouse in global baseball.

Entanglements of the National, the Regional, and the Global To many of the Korean MLB fans, MLB signifies the field of dreams, as the U.S. or America is the place where their ultimate desire resides. As the previous chapters have shown, however, the Korean MLB fandom is more complex and cannot simply be characterized by long-distance partisanship. As a form of national fandom, many Korean fans constructed a collective narrative by recollecting their personal memories of watching MLB games. In addition, MLB is seen as an arena in which players from East Asian countries compete. The WBC provides another venue in which South Korean MLB fans navigate national sentiments, regional rivalries, and global tastes. During the 2006 WBC, the online community of Korean MLB fans was swamped with new MLB fans. Nationalism as a Global Strategy: Fans’ Penetration and Limitations Arguably, international sporting events such as the Olympics or the World Cup are key sites in the discursive construction of nation, national belongingness and national pride (Cho, 2009; Hogan, 2003). The most concentrated, powerful intersections of nation and sport occur during the media-saturated, time- and space-compressed international competitions. The effort to explicate the reshaping of cultural spaces of identity within the new global media is crucial to understanding the interplay between global and national forces (Andrews, Carrington, Jackson, & Mazur, 1996). In this vein, Korean MLB fans’ responses during the WBC provide useful resources for exploring global sports fans’ articulation between the global and the national. These fans were no longer so naïve as to overlook MLB’s intention of utilizing the national elements as a strategy for globalizing itself, but as their national team won more games, this understanding was tempered by increased national fervor. Rather, these fans seemed to be willing to be swayed by MLB’s true intentions as long as they could enjoy the games, the WBC, and also the national fever for baseball.

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During its beginning, however, Korean fans’ responses to the WBC were not generally animated. News of the WBC spread throughout their online community in early July of 2005. Ironically, at about the same time, the IOC voted to drop baseball from the Summer Olympic Games starting in 2012. Not only because of their unfamiliarity with the WBC, which was after all a new event, but also because of this news about the Olympics, fans were furious with MLB’s lukewarm response to the IOC and treated the launch of the WBC with much skepticism. They pointed out that MLB (which they called shamelessly selfish) would have cared more about the IOC vote if it had had any real intention to globalize baseball to begin with. Lonely: The issue is that the MLB Commissioner’s Office has paid too little attention to the IOC and the Olympics. If baseball is ousted from the Olympics, MLB deserves the blame. If it holds the WBC and ignores the Olympics, I think that MLB is not interested in expanding baseball itself, but aims only to make money. Luna: The U.S. probably does not have any interest in globalizing baseball because it doesn’t quite look profitable. The U.S. aims at increasing the popularity of MLB in possible markets such as Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. The WBC is simply an improvised event to promote MLB itself.

Regarding the operational aspect of the WBC, similarly, fans also pointed out MLB’s hypocritical aspects, particularly how it seemed to be skewed so that Team USA would advance to the final round. As it was structured, two teams from each of the four regional groups would advance into the second round, but both teams would be part of the same group in the second round. Then, the two best teams from that second-round group would advance to the semifinals. The U.S. team seemed to be intentionally placed into a group with teams from Asia in the second round. This system clearly favored the U.S., which could avoid facing other strong contenders such as Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela until the final game. More importantly, such hostile responses to the WBC were closely related to Koreans’ low expectations of their national team in the event. Many fans predicted that the teams that had more MLB players, such as the U.S. and Central American countries, would dominate the event. They were also concerned about the games against other Asian countries, particularly Japan, which was of course a major contender for the

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championship, and Taiwan, which had become a threatening opponent. Even as fans readily perceived that MLB was overtly utilizing nationalism to expand its popularity, they became anxious over the dismal predictions of their national team’s performance. Many presumed that wins by any national team would result in glory not only for MLB but also for that team’s home country. These assumptions added to their already fervent wishes for the South Korean team’s success: wins would increase the popularity of their beloved game in their home country, as well as bringing international renown to their team and thus their country. Their worries were augmented by realistic projections about the South Korean team’s chances, which were seen as slim compared to other countries such as Team USA, Central American countries, and especially Japan. Some even predicted that the South Korean team would lose big, and by doing so increase the popularity of MLB worldwide without doing anything for South Korea. In response to this ambivalence, some fans stated that they looked forward to the tournament no matter what the outcome. They were particularly excited about the opportunity to enjoy the games and performances of their favorite MLB players during the off-season. These proponents refuted speculations that the WBC would be a way to promote baseball via a meaningless national frenzy. Some fans were simply pleased that they could enjoy watching MLB players even during the off-season, and they hoped that the WBC would contribute to expanding baseball throughout the world. Sheed: The WBC seems to be set for success in terms of commercial ends because it will be held in March, so many MLB players can join their own teams. Based on the earnings ratio, the U.S. will get the most money because it will probably win the event. Nonetheless, I am excited for this event. Pjh0000: It sounds ironic to me that the WBC is not a pure event for baseball. People who simply enjoy the games and baseball do not talk like that. I think baseball has nothing to do with patriotism, nor with anti-Japan or anti-U.S. sentiments. I am excited enough to enjoy games with MLB leaguers. If you are pure fans of baseball, you would not be disappointed by the fact that you can watch the best performances by the best players.

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Similar opinions and related discussions indicate both that fans shrewdly assessed the complexities of international sporting events and that the South Korean MLB fandom is characterized by conflict between fans’ commitment to baseball in general and their national identification with their country’s team. These nuanced understandings, however, were suddenly and completely overwhelmed once the WBC started, and the Korean team proved to be surprisingly successful. Nationalistic fervor mounted on MLBPARK, the Korean online MLB fan community, as well as throughout the country, as the South Koreans won two victories against Japan and one against the U.S. The online community was flooded with fans who expressed deep catharsis brought on by the games and commented in detail on the Korean players and their performances. Not only fans in the internet community, but also Koreans in general as well as the Korean mass media became increasingly enthusiastic. As it turned out, three of Korea’s six games were against Japan (in the regional, second, and semifinal rounds): the two victories against Japan proved to be the most significant incidents in promoting nationalism to its fullest extent in Korea. Even before the first match, the leader of the Japanese team, Suzuki Ichiro, who played with the Seattle Mariners, had already incited the traditional rivalry by claiming that it would take 30 years for the Korean team to surpass the Japanese team. This faux pas not only offended many Korean fans but also became an object of mockery after Japan lost its first two games. During the first match between South Korea and Japan, Korean fans gleefully watched as Ichiro was hit by a pitch in the middle of the game and was called out as the final batter on an infield fly. Korean MLB fans were overjoyed to see the matchup between Ichiro and Park, who were the representative figures for Japan and for South Korea respectively, especially when the win was credited to Park. Again: The cream of the crop in today’s games was the situation with two outs in the final inning. Park was against Ichiro, which was a really dramatic scenario! Anyway, Park crushed the pride of Japan, i.e. Ichiro, and closed out the game. What a victory!!!

After the second win in Anaheim, Jaeung Seo, a Korean pitcher for the New York Mets, planted the Korean national flag on the mound, and the image traveled worldwide over the internet. Fans were quick to point out that the mental strength and national commitment of the Korean team

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was the basis for this unprecedented accomplishment in Korean baseball history. As Joo suggests, “the loyalties and allegiances, as well as the emotions and passions inspired by sport, blend well with the emotional requisites for nationalism in the global era” (2012, p. 13). As the image of Seo and the national flag spread quickly across the internet, MLBPARK was filled with exclamations of pride. Rose: United through patriotism, the Korean team is able to dominate the Japanese team. Baseball is called a mental game, and the Korean players demonstrated that they are not intimidated by their opponents and showed their mental superiority over Japan. I am so very proud of our players: at least for today, the Korean players are the best in the world. Simon: Unbelievable and incredible!!! What a moment this is, to plant the Korean national flag in the Angels stadium!

Korean MLB fans were quick to point out that the South Korean team’s unprecedented success was due to its players’ exceptional combination of personal determination and national commitment. Many thanked the team for the opportunity to enjoy such exciting moments as well as to feel a sense of national confidence and self-esteem as Koreans. Some even suggested that the government should award all the players with military exemptions for their contributions as cultural ambassadors. Their pride in their national team was increased by the perceived satisfaction that the team had made the world recognize the capacity not only of Korean baseball but of Korea itself. Fans’ excitement and nationalistic comments revealed the role sport has played in constructing a new nationalism (Levermore, 2004), and how national identity can be remobilized through an international sporting event. For the semifinal, which pitted the Korean team against Japan for the third time, organized “Mass Street Support” took place in South Korea, with cheerleaders and performers such as popular singers on stages all across Seoul. Munhwa Broadcasting Company(MBC), a national broadcasting company, joined in the baseball fever and pre-empted an entire day of programming to broadcast the third game against Japan as well as pre- and post-game shows. Also, many public and corporate sponsors erected a large street stage and video screen in Seoul for people to watch and celebrate the games together, as had happened during the 2002 Korea–Japan World Cup. The Korean

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mass media broadcast not only the game but also updates on the street support festivities throughout the day. The case of the WBC shows that a global entity such as MLB fully recognizes nationalism as a tool for selling or globalizing itself. As observed in the sudden fervor in Korea, nationalistic discourses still serve to stimulate a significant interest from people and the media in MLB, a global commodity. National and global sensibilities were obviously combined during the WBC as it utilized nationalism to expand its parent corporation’s popularity. As Andrews and Silk (2005) explain through the concept of cultural Toyotism, transnational corporations also seek to engage the nationalist sensibilities of local consumers to expand their markets and consumers. At the same time, Korean fans recognized MLB’s intentions but responded to and enjoyed the event and their national team’s victories for their own (nationalistic) purposes. As Giulianotti and Robertson already discussed in the case of football, “the apparently more exploitative, economic motors of globalization may be contested at local level through populist yet divisive discourses such as explicit nationalism” (2004, p. 557). These seemingly contradictory responses show that the globalization of sports does not necessarily oppose the national but is allied with it despite contesting it at times. In other words, such responses necessitate more attention on how “nationalism and globalization are intertwined” in order to capture the “complex interplay between global and national identity politics in global sporting culture” (Lee & Maguire, 2009, p. 8). Baseball and Fans’ Sense of Regionality Japan has been the biggest rival of Korea at almost every sporting event. Such obsessive competition with Japan exists not only because Korea was colonized by Japan for 36 years but also because sports is a way for Korea to both compete against and emulate Japan (Ok, 2007). As another former colony of Japan, Taiwan also had its fair share of regional tensions to deal with on the mound. Baseball is much more popular and meaningful in the Republic of China (ROC or Taiwan) than in the People’s Republic of China (Mainland China) (Yu, 2007). Baseball is something special in Taiwan: according to Morris, the assertion of independent Taiwanese identity is reflected in baseball, which is “central to the story of Taiwan’s rapid and traumatic transition from wartime to decolonization

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to a new oppression” under Guomindang (2006, p. 181). During preparations for the WBC, the dispute over the official title of the Taiwanese team sparked regional tension: when the ROC team was originally billed as “Taiwan” and planned to march under the ROC national flag, immediate pressure from the People’s Republic compelled MLBI to change the listing to “Chinese Taipei” and to use its Olympic flag as its national flag.7 As baseball is still reconfiguring a sense of regionality, old regional conflicts were revived by the WBC but with a new twist: the presence of Asian players in MLB enabled athletes, as national representatives of formerly colonized nations, to face national representatives of their former colonizers on supposedly neutral ground. In doing so, the WBC became a postcolonial theater in which the former colonizer (Japan) and the former colonized (Taiwan and Korea) of East Asia competed against each other in front of American and global audiences who were able to watch the games live. Korean MLB fans’ sense of regionality during the WBC was augmented by the unconventional way the tournament was formatted. First-round pools, each containing four teams, were organized according to geographical proximity. As a result, Pool A (the Asian region) consisted of China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan and took place in Tokyo. Regional tensions within this pool were predictably immense. Formatting and scheduling caused other tensions as well. The top two teams from each pool advanced from Round 1 to Round 2, where the teams from Pools A and B were combined into a new Pool 1 and the teams from Pools C and D formed a new Pool 2 in a round robin way. This unconventional arrangement forced some regional teams to face each other again in subsequent rounds. Next, the winners and runners-up from each pool were to face each other in the semifinals in a single-elimination bracket. Interestingly, the best two teams from the same pool reached the same semifinal instead of being re-assigned to different pools as they advanced. In the end, Korea and Japan played each other three times—in Rounds 1 and 2, and during the semifinals, with Korea winning the first two games and Japan winning the semifinals. As the games unfolded, Korean MLB fans looked upon this unconventional bracket setup with increasing suspicion because they thought the lineup was skewed in favor of the U.S. and Japanese teams. Nor were their objections diminished by the assignment of numerous highly ranked teams to the same pool (Pool 2 included Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba; Pool 1 included the U.S. and Japan), which meant

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that, for example, the U.S. and Japanese teams would avoid facing other contenders before the championship game. While the fans were relieved that the Korean team would not immediately face the teams in Pool 2, they seemed to be more worried that the Korean team, by losing games against Japan and Team U.S.A. in Pool 1, would merely serve to propel their rivals, and in particular Japan, into the finals. ChanGo: Given several controversies such as exhibition games and the weird schedule of the WBC, I think the Korean team seems to have fallen victim to the WBC’s scheme. I am quite sure that the U.S. and Japan are the main actors in this event while Korea is simply a supporting actor. I only hope that there is no favoritism by the referees for the U.S. and Japan.

During the regional round, Korean fans were particularly concerned about the results of the games against regional rivals such as Taiwan and Japan. In the preceding 10 years, Taiwan had defeated South Korea in only a couple of international events. Since most Korean baseball fans regarded South Korean baseball as second-best in Asia, just after Japan (Bjarkman, 2005; Reaves, 2006), they worried that a Taiwanese victory against their national team would damage the status of Korean baseball region-wide. Thus, when South Korea beat Taiwan in their very first match, fans were not only ecstatic about the victory but uniformly delighted to save face against the other regional team. Penelope Cruz: It seemed that Taiwanese players were a bit daunted by the name of Park, a veteran player of MLB. They continued to have guess-hitting without having any decent hitting-eyes. Higsgrace: Thanks to MLB leaguers, the Korean team was able to beat the Taiwanese team, which had prepared for the event for several months… Several Korean pitchers did their duties excellently. Nonetheless, we will no longer overlook Taiwanese baseball: Taiwanese hitters who faced Korean MLB leaguers experienced many troubles, but, at the same time, Korean players [from KBO] did not see much success against the Taiwanese pitchers.

After the Taiwanese team had been eliminated in the first round, South Korean fans’ attention automatically turned to their team’s games against Japan: in Round 1, Round 2, and the semifinals. In Round 2, another

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controversy emerged with both the Korean and Japanese teams: some South Korean fans suspected discrimination against the Korean team. Although the Japanese team had reached only second place in the Asian regional pool, its members were given hotel rooms and were allowed to play in exhibition games that should have been awarded to the first-place team—which was, of course, South Korea. While the practical differences between the hotels and schedules were not significant, such favoritism toward Japan infuriated Korean fans and made them believe even more firmly that the WBC was biased in favor of the U.S. and Japan. On top of all this, as noted, the regional games were only held in Tokyo, the capital city of Japan. Elvis: What? This is really crazy. Such news really makes me upset. How shameful the Japanese are! Uzuguri: Whatever! Neither the U.S. nor Japan, as so-called power-holders in the world, have even a bit of dignity. Stuff : Well, Korea has been exploited by other powerful countries. Such news is no longer surprising: it would be better if we advanced as the second-place team. Mr. October: Nonetheless, I am relieved that such treatment is not a big disadvantage. I hope that the Korean team performs well again in the second round, so we get better treatment in the case of a second WBC, if applicable.

Regardless of who was playing against Japan, consequently, Korean fans reacted to the Japanese team with hostility. During the game between Japan and the U.S., which Japan lost because of a bad call in the eighth inning (made, of course, by an American referee), some Korean fans sympathized with the Japanese team by pointing out the American team’s home-field advantage, but such a response was not made in unison. Other fans expressed their excitement upon observing unfair treatment against Japan in the WBC, and others even commented that Japan deserved any unfair treatment because it had treated South Korea unfairly for several decades. Fire: It was clearly a bad call by American referees. But we don’t need to get upset. I think Japan has to suffer the same unfairness that we have experienced for decades because of Japan.

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Pojols: This incident made me smile grimly because I remembered what Japan had done to us in the past.

While sharing their experiences of watching the games of the WBC in their online community, individual recollections led to a collective construction of regional relations with Japan, which were still connected with national experiences and memories of Japanese colonial occupation between 1910 and 1945. These memory-initiated activities bridged fans’ personal experiences of watching the WBC and their national experiences as Koreans, whether personal (the IMF intervention) or collective (Japan’s colonial occupation). Korean fans’ responses to Japan attest that sport was used to reinforce the invention of a nation’s selective mining of history (Levermore, 2004). As mentioned, regional tensions were brought to a fever pitch by Ichiro’s declaration during a press conference that it would take 30 years for Korea to be as competitive as Japan. After Japan’s first loss against Korea, however, Ichiro quickly became an object of mockery. Arimang73: I want to hear Ichiro’s comment on the game. How dare he announce that the Korean team needs 30 years to catch up with the Japanese team? I expect his snobbishness was hurt by this loss. Dr. G.: I am really impressed by Park’s gesture of victory at the end. Following him, subconsciously, I clenched my fists.

The climax of the first round, for the final count of the final inning, was a face-off between Ichiro batting and Park pitching. When Park triumphed with an infield fly, the fans exclaimed that their hero had crushed the pride of Japanese baseball. Moreover, they savored the perfect ending supplied by Park and Ichiro, who represented South Korea and Japan, respectively, in MLB. Next, both the Korean and Japanese teams flew to the U.S. for the second-round pool and South Korea again beat Japan. After this victory, many fans expressed their gratitude to the Korean team for giving them the opportunity to enjoy such an exciting game as well as to experience intense national confidence and self-esteem as Koreans. They were proud of the Korean team, which had made the world recognize the capacity of Korean baseball as well as Korea as a whole.

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Minnesota: It was a great pleasure to witness the wonderful victory by the Korean team. What a great day it was!!!

The two consecutive victories over Japan enabled some Korean fans to proclaim Korean baseball as superior. These were bold statements, considering Japanese baseball’s long history, extensive domestic infrastructure, number of high school teams, and the size of its professional league (Whiting, 2003). Japanese baseball is generally evaluated as the best in Asia, and the Japanese professional league has been treated as the second best in the world just after MLB. Their celebratory and nationalistic mood, however, caused some Korean MLB fans to underestimate Japanese baseball in general. Some fans suggested that it was time to pop the bubble of Japan’s baseball level and its professional league. CobyBraza: For sure, Japan’s baseball is overrated. Although Japan’s baseball is still better than ours, I think, it is not a big gap. Tim: I don’t agree that the Japanese baseball league is the number two after U.S. baseball. Cubs651: I am quite irritated and even disgusted with Japan and the Japanese, who regard themselves as the best in Asia.

Soon after this, the Korean team experienced its first WBC loss in the semifinals, at the hands of Japan, who went on to beat Cuba in the final round and claimed the first WBC title. Korean fans were not only disappointed with this result, but also reluctant to recognize the magnitude of what Japan had accomplished. Some fans called Japan a lucky winner, and some even commented that the Japanese team did not deserve the title. Park61: None of the teams in the event will acknowledge the Japanese team as the first champion of the WBC. Only the Japanese team and people regard its team as the champion. The true champion is the Korean team whose record (6 wins and 1 loss) was the best in the whole event.

After the Japanese team was awarded its championship trophy, complaints from Korean fans deteriorated into expressions of frustration and envy. South Korean fans did not express any satisfaction over the fact that a fellow East Asian team had, after all, beaten the world, even though their national team had lost. The rationale behind these postings, that Japan did not deserve the title because it had lost twice against the

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Korean team, combines fans’ disappointment in their national team with their longstanding hatred of the Japanese. As one fan declared: “Despite [the fact that we are all] Asians, I [a Korean] don’t want to be connected with the Japanese. To be honest, I am disgusted with the Japanese who regard themselves as the best in Asia.” Whether intentionally or as an automatic expression of their collective national consciousness, Korean MLB fans have repeatedly intensified regional rivalry and projected postcolonial anxiety onto the WBC by perpetuating the historic animosity between their nation and Japan. Their frustration illustrated how deep their regional sensibilities truly were. MLB and the U.S. as the Field of Dreams As America’s pastime, baseball symbolizes American hegemony, and, according to Bjarkman (2005), baseball (an entertaining spectacle) and professional MLB (a profit-oriented business) are often synonymous. On their online community, i.e., MLBPARK, Korean fans regarded MLB as a “field of dreams,” and most Koreans were excited when Korean leaguers, i.e., their national players in MLB, were successful there. Such Korean leaguers are stereotypically called “World Stars” who have achieved the “American Dream.” During the WBC, this status of MLB came to be challenged due to the poor record of Team USA and even some Korean fans started to question MLB’s sacred status. These contestations over the MLB and its status illuminate the diversity of fans’ desires and identification as Korean baseball fans, MLB fans, and even fans of baseball in general. At the outset of the WBC, the linkage of MLB with the Superior Other was not only strong but also uncontested in the minds of Korean baseball fans. When the Korean team beat Taiwan and Japan in the regional round, fans did not hesitate to credit these victories to the presence of Korean leaguers. It was particularly noted that most of the dominating Korean pitchers played in MLB, not the KBO. However, this image began to be questioned when Team USA lost to Canada 8-6 in the first round. When the Korean team faced Team USA in the second round, some fans noted that Team USA was no longer invincible. Normally, as a matter of sportsmanship as well as national pride, the Korean team would have faced Team USA without question. But since its two wins were enough for the team to advance to the semifinals, the general manager of the Korean team insinuated that perhaps a forfeit was

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in order so that the team could prepare as much as possible for subsequent games. Although this strategy might have been successful, fans objected: “The Korean team should do their best against the U.S. team, the best team in the world, even if we have only a slight chance of winning.” Finally, with Korea’s 7-3 victory over Team USA, the former invincible sanctity of MLB was shattered, releasing a flood of praise for the Korean team in the fans’ online community. Pitcher Love: Before the game, I had expected that the Korean team would be blown out by Team USA. I realize now how ignorant I was. This game gave me the opportunity to take a new look at Korean baseball leagues. Rose: It is really true that the baseball skills of South Korea have been much improved. Korean players seem to have mastered the “defense” skill, which is the most basic element of baseball. It is no longer a big surprise that we [the Korean team] beat Team USA.

The fans’ excitement with the victory and their identification with the national team effectively illuminate how “sporting events and sporting images contribute to the making of a global Koreanness” (Joo, 2012, p. 3). Some fans complained, however, that South Korean commentators had utilized excessively nationalist rhetoric by emphasizing America’s home field advantage and the umpires’ supposedly pro-U.S. bias. These fans were also upset about comments in Korean mass media that downplayed Korea’s brilliant victory. Rather than resorting to nationalist rhetoric, these fans proposed simply enjoying and honoring the superb performances of the Korean players. Mauer: The Korean team beat Team USA with its own ability. But I am quite irritated with articles and commentators that highlight how the umpires made decisions favorable to Team USA. I did not find any substantial flaws in the umpiring of the game, and I don’t understand why the mass media always tries to provoke the audience in such a way.

Team USA’s image of absolute prowess, which also extended to MLB, was further reduced when the U.S. was eliminated from the tournament at the hands of Mexico. This outcome was so shocking that some fans even suggested that the hierarchy between American and Korean baseball

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could be reversed. Although the majority of fans rejected this idea as too simplistic or nationalistic, it did touch upon the community’s tendency to automatically and unquestioningly idealize MLB. In the face of Korea’s unexpected victories, fans were quick to problematize this tendency by contending that it was in fact an enforced delusion. Specialist: I couldn’t believe that many Korean fans still thought of MLB as the field of dreams after witnessing these games. I assume that such fans have been manipulated by the images and media that praise MLB and its players. I really wish that people could snap out of the fantasy around MLB.

Some fans also pointed out that fawning over MLB resulted in an implicit disparagement of the KBO and its players, saying that they had been blinded by the aura of MLB and were therefore ignorant about the KBO. Idea: I thought that some Korean MLB maniacs who ignore the Korean baseball league need to reflect on their thoughts about the KBO. Some American players who are big names in MLB made the same foolish mistakes during this game. Kan: After the game [Korea vs. the U.S.], I had to reflect why I spent so much time watching MLB. I might subscribe too much to the fantasy around MLB as the field of dreams. MLB is still a league of a foreign country [that includes] competitions among many U.S. cities. I couldn’t believe how much time and energy I had spent watching their league.

These challenges to the status of MLB and the communitywide fantasies about MLB continued after the end of the WBC. In addition, a long-running community dispute about who should be named the best Korean baseball player remained unresolved. Chan-ho Park was the leading candidate, of course, because he had so brilliantly represented South Korea in MLB in the past and had also performed well in the WBC. The other possibility was Dong-yeol Sun, who had spent most of his career in the KBO between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s, had then moved to the Japanese baseball league, and retired from it after another four seasons. Interestingly, most fans agreed that both deserved to be called the best but could not agree on which one was actually better than the other.

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This conflict basically originated from the differences between the two players’ locations (the U.S. vs. South Korea and Japan) and their peak eras (1997–2001 vs. 1985–1999). Because these conflicts directly related to comparisons between MLB, where Park played, and the KBO, where Sun mostly played, the issue of idealizing MLB in the community was also relevant. One rationale of the fans who advocated Sun over Park is that Sun would have succeeded in MLB and that joining an MLB team had never been completely impossible for him (when Sun played in the KBO, the league had no specific rule for free agency, so players could not participate in decisions about where they were assigned or traded). Considering Sun’s dominant records both in amateur international competitions and in Asian professional leagues, fans projected that his achievements in MLB would have been similar to Park’s. Four seasons: I still think that Sun might have blossomed in MLB if he could have gone to MLB and been trained there in his early stage. Although Park is better than Sun in terms of ball speed, on the other hand, Sun is better than Park regarding ball command and controlling ball location. I am sorry that Sun missed the opportunity of advancing to MLB. There, he might have maximized his abilities.

Some fans emphasized that Sun was a much better player than Park in terms of managing or disciplining his body and condition. By highlighting that Park’s injuries from 2002 badly hampered his subsequent performance, and repeating the common wisdom that a good player should be responsible for his or her body, they presented Park’s relatively short career as evidence that he could not be called the best player. These fans also pointed out that Sun had performed well for a longer period in both the Korean and Japanese leagues. A-rod: As professionals, baseball players should be responsible for their bodies. It is not enough to compare the best seasons between two players, and I think in this vein that Sun is much greater than Park because he continued to dominate on the mound for 15 years while Park was only excellent for four to five years. Park failed at maintaining his physical condition as a great pitcher. The underlying reasoning for supporting Sun over Park was that the best KBO players could theoretically be competitive in MLB—just as the Korean team had shown its competitiveness against Team USA in the WBC. In turn, this rationale enabled criticism against the community’s

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tendency to prioritize MLB and be condescending towards “our league,” the KBO. On the other hand, fans who advocated Park over Sun made it clear that it was unfair or even impossible to compare pitchers who played in totally different leagues, at totally different levels of play. Even a player who had dominated the KBO for many years was less accomplished, they argue, than a pitcher who had dominated MLB for even just a few years. Bobo:

If Park decides to return to the KBO this year [2006], he could dominate KBO very easily.

Instead of focusing on each player’s records, they suggested watching the actual games. Cornea:

In his heyday, Park was listed in the group of the most elite pitchers: only 10 or so are ranked higher. Fans who watched KBO and MLB together cannot argue that Sun might be equal to those top pitchers in MLB. If fans have common sense, it is not that difficult to compare pitchers.

This rationale implies that MLB, as the field of dreams, cannot possibly be compared to other leagues, and so Park, as one of the best players in MLB, deserved the title of being the best Korean baseball player to date. This debate implies that such comparisons are not merely about which player is better; rather, they are more about how to perceive MLB and how to situate the KBO in relation to it. As discussed, images of the U.S. and MLB as the field of dreams were deconstructed to a certain degree by the Korean team winning many games including one against Team USA during the WBC. Although Korean fans continue to revere Korean leaguers, MLB’s sacred status was questioned and challenged by the comparison to Korean baseball and its players. These reactions show that Korean fans are not simply followers of an American sports league and that their fandom is not merely the result of having absorbed American culture via global media. Just as “cricket is no longer ‘an English mystery’” (Rumford, 2007, p. 207), this case showed that baseball has become indigenized, nationalized, and even regionalized among Korean fans. At the same time, the fans’ responses reaffirm that “sport national identity is discursively produced, reproduced,

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and sometimes deconstructed as a result of the globalization juggernaut” (Jun & Lee, 2012, p. 112). Korean fans’ admiration as well as disappointment of MLB as the field of dreams both affirm and challenge the idea that baseball is an epitome of the modern, the advanced, and therefore, the Western. And, these diverse and even contradictory desires signal the multiplicity of the Korean MLB fandom, including its potential of overcoming baseball as the symbol of America and its parochial characteristics.

Baseball and the National-Regional-Global Nexus Despite its title, the World Baseball Classic was initiated and organized by and large by MLB: MLB tailored the WBC not only to attract MLB fans but also to attract fans of the game itself, as well as sports fans in general, from around the world. MLB’s primary intention was to present this international baseball event as a form of patriotic game that would expand its own market around the world. The decision of dropping baseball from the Olympics as well as the organizing process of the WBC showed that, unlike the case of cricket, the administrative power still remains in the West, specifically the U.S. However, an analysis of Korean MLB fans during the WBC indicates that the global-local frame is not adequate for explicating these fans’ active engagement with regional rivalry, especially Japan, its former colonizer. Rather, the national-regional-global frame is useful for this particular global sports fandom whose interests are always and have long been intertwined with the intervention of the regional other. The rise of East Asian teams as powerful contenders signaled that the WBC is not simply a showcase by and for MLB, and that baseball is no longer just a symbol of American hegemony or cultural imperialism. In the 2006 WBC, two Asian teams showed their prowess to baseball fans worldwide: Japan became the first champion and Korea recorded the most wins (6 victories and 1 loss). Even more strikingly, Team USA was eliminated in Round 2 by these two teams. Such an unexpected outcome not only proved that Asians could play high-caliber baseball but also indicated that the East had emerged as another powerhouse in global sports. Similar to cricket, the globalization of baseball “consists in the struggle between Asian cricket [baseball] countries (especially India [Japan and Korea]) and the traditional centres for control of the game” (Rumford, 2007, p. 206). Furthermore, the enthusiasm and various desires among

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local fans illuminate the development of their own ways of enjoying baseball and the event. As it was originally envisioned, the WBC was meant to localize the global commodity of MLB. The level and intensity of proliferation and spatial reach by a transnational sporting league, however, do not necessarily eradicate nationality or transcend local or national loyalties. In particular, national fandom and regional consciousness played strong roles in orienting their interests for and evaluating the game. The responses of Korean MLB fans during the WBC show their multiplicity and the irreverence of the local fandom with American baseball. These fans not only penetrated MLB’s strategy of utilizing nationalism as a marketing tool, but also challenged the sacred status of MLB as the field of dreams. At the same time, Korean MLB fans’ responses did not show a strong possibility of constructing regional connectivity or identity in the form of East Asian fan solidarity or an East Asian (MLB) fandom. In other words, there was neither unity in the “East” nor a common Asian view as long as national sentiments and national fandom worked strongly in their support for the Korean team. As Bairner (2002) notes, rival identities are constructed in (international) sporting events; not surprisingly, the WBC seemed to repeat the old and new regional rivalries in East Asia. Instead, the Korean MLB fandom during the WBC demonstrates the diverse and complicated interconnections among the national, the regional, and the global. The WBC provides a venue in which Korean MLB fans reconstruct a more specific regional triad of “Korea-Japan-U.S.” Fans accept the traditional model by idealizing MLB or the U.S. as a Superior Other and branding Japan as the Number One Asian baseball power. At the same time, according to the outcome of the event, fans challenge this triad and substitute their own by questioning the image of MLB and the U.S. as the field of dreams and also by repudiating both the history and current infrastructure of baseball in Japan. These complex and even contradictory responses show that the national-regional-global nexus as a significant frame is never static, but challenged and transformed within the global sports fandom. As they solidify and dispute this interconnection, Korean MLB fans approach and re-imagine their relationship both to their regional counterparts and to global others. In turn, these diverse desires and contentions demonstrate that becoming an MLB fan in Korea includes having to deal with national sensibilities (expressed as nationalist fervor for MLB), regional sensibilities (in particular, rivalry with Japan and Japanese teams/players), and

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cosmopolitan sensibilities (global sport fandom). These three sensibilities are uneven, sometimes hierarchal, and always simultaneous. None of them operate as the default. Instead, Korean MLB fans are required to cope with, negotiate with, and compromise among three different sensibilities: national, regional, and global. As Morris (2006) argues in his study of baseball in Taiwan, baseball is still an important avenue by which Asian people navigate the historical relationships with nationalists, Japanese, and Americans. The intense and diverse regional consciousness in this case requires us to develop a more nuanced understanding in explicating the globalization of baseball and baseball within East Asia as well. The statements and responses of Korean MLB fans in the online community MLBPARK indicate not only that these fans readily perceive the existence of regional and global hierarchies but also that they routinely contest their own and each other’s perceptions. Moreover, their relationships are both historically constructed and imagined. Their articulations of the national, regional, and global are far from being fixed or unidirectional: they are constantly under construction. To trace and analyze such a national-regional-global nexus contributes to understanding global sports fandoms that exist in different places and regions.

Notes 1. It needs to be recognized that U.S. occupying forces had controlled and reformed parts of East Asia after the end of World War II: between 1945 and 1948 in South Korea and between 1945 and 1952 in Japan. 2. This phrase originates from Robert Whiting and his writing on Japanese baseball in The Chrysanthemum and the Bat (1977). 3. Since then, the WBC was held a total of three times, in 2009, 2013, and 2017, and the next one was planned for 2021, but has been cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. 4. The Baseball World Cup was also called the Amateur World Series until 1988. These events were held annually until 1974, and were then held as bi-annual events until 2011, when the last tournament was held. After the 2011 tournament, the BWC was discontinued, and in 2015, Premier 12 was launched as the flagship international baseball tournament organized by the World Baseball Softball Confederation. 5. Baseball will be featured at the 2020 Summer Olympics (which has also been postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic), and the 2019 Premier was used as a qualifying tournament. 6. During the games of the WBC, pitchers were held to a pitch count of 65 pitches in the first round, 80 pitches in the second round, and 95 in the

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semifinals and championship rounds. Also, a 30-pitch outing needed to be followed by one day off, and a 50-pitch outing by four days off. No one was allowed to pitch for three consecutive days. 7. Instead of the official titles for the two Chinese teams, this study uses “Taiwanese team” for the Republic of China and “Chinese Team” for People’s Republic of China. See Guoqi (2008, pp. 75–116) for details on the two-China question in sports.

References Andrews, D. L., & Silk, M. (2005). Global gaming: cultural Toyotism, transnational corporation and sport. In J. Steven & D. L. Andrews (Eds.), Sport, Culture and Advertising: Identities, commodities and the politics of representation (pp. 172–191). London and New York: Routledge. Andrews, D. L., Carrington, B., Jackson, S. J., & Mazur, J. (1996). Jordanscapes: A preliminary analysis of the global popular. Sociology of Sport Journal, 12(4), 428–457. Bairner, A. (2002). Sport, sectarianism and society in a divided Ireland revisited. In J. Sugden & A. Tomlinson (Eds.), Power games: A critical sociology of sport (pp. 181–195). London and New York: Routledge. Bjarkman, P. C. (2005). Diamonds around the globe: The encyclopedia of international baseball. Westport, CN & London: Greenwood Press. Chen, T.-H. (2012). From the “Taiwan Yankees” to the New York Yankees: The glocal narratives of baseball. Sociology of Sport Journal, 29(4), 546–559. Cho, Y. (2009). Unfolding sporting nationalism in South Korean media representation of the 1968, 1984 and 2000 Olympics. Media, Culture and Society, 31(3), 347–364. Cho, Y. (2016). Double binding of Japanese colonialism: Trajectories of baseball in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Cultural Studies, 30(6), 926–947. Giulianotti, R., & Robertson, R. (2004). The globalization of football: A study in the glocalization of the ‘serious life’. The British Journal of Sociology, 55(4), 545–568. Guoqi, X. (2008). Olympic dreams: China and sports 1895–2008. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Guttmann, A. (1994). Games and empires: Modern sports and cultural imperialism. New York: Columbia University Press. Hogan, J. (2003). Staging the nation: Gendered and ethnicized discourses of national identity in Olympic opening ceremonies. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 27 (2), 100–123. Joo, R. M. (2012). Transnational sport: Gender, media and global Korea. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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Jun, J. W., & Lee, H. M. (2012). The globalization of sport and the mass-mediated identity of Hines Ward in South Korea. Journal of Sport Management, 26, 103–112. Kelly, W. W. (2007). Is baseball a global sport? America’s ‘National Pastime’ as global field and international sport. Global Networks, 7 (2), 187–2001. Kim, B.-C. (2008). Professional baseball in Korea: Origins, causes, consequences and implications. The International Journal of the History of Sport, 25(3), 370–385. Klein, A. M. (2006). Growing the game: The globalization of Major League Baseball. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Lee, J. W., & Maguire, J. (2009). Global festivals through a national prism: The global-national nexus in South Korean media coverage of the 2004 Athens Olympic games. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 44(1), 5–24. Levermore, R. (2004). Sport’s role in constructing the ‘inter-state’ worldview. In R. Levermore & A. Budd (Eds.), Sport and international relations: An emerging relationship (pp. 16–30). London and New York: Routledge. Lin, C.-Y., & Lee, P.-C. (2007). Sport as a medium of national resistance: Politics and baseball in Taiwan during Japanese colonialism, 1895–1945. The International Journal of the History of Sport, 24(3), 319–337. Maguire, J. (1999). Global sport: Identities, societies, civilizations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Morris, A. D. (2006). Taiwan: Baseball, colonialism, and nationalism. In G. Gmelch (Ed.), Baseball without borders: The international pastime (pp. 65– 88). Lincoln and London: University Nebraska Press. Morris, A., D. (2011). Colonial project, national game: A history of baseball in Taiwan. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Nakamura, Y. (2005). The samurai sword cuts both ways: A transnational analysis of Japanese and U.S. media representation of Ichiro. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 40(4), 467–480. Ok, G. (2007). The transformation of modern Korean sport: Imperialism, nationalism, globalization. New Jersey: Hollym. Reaves, J. A. (2002). Taking in a game: A history of baseball in Asia. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Reaves, J. A. (2006). Korea: Straw scandals and strong arms. In G. Gmelch (Ed.), Baseball without borders: The international pastime (pp. 89–114). Lincoln and London: University Nebraska Press. Roden, D. (1980). Baseball and the quest for national dignity in Meiji Japan. American Historical Review, 85(3), 453–464. Rumford, C. (2007). More than a game: Globalization and the postWesternization of world cricket. Global Network., 7 (2), 202–214.

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Szymanski, S., & Zimbalist, A. (2005). National pastime: How Americans play baseball and the rest of the world plays soccer. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Whiting, R. (2003). You gotta have wa. New York: Vintage Books. Whiting, R. (2005). The Samurai way of baseball: The impact of Ichiro and the new wave from Japan. New York and Boston: Warner Books. Yu, J. (2007). Playing in isolation: A history of baseball in Taiwan. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

CHAPTER 8

Postscript: The “Here-and-Now” of Global Sports Fandom

Epilogue: The Global Sports Fandom in 2019 During the 2019 season of Major League Baseball (MLB), South Korean media and Korean fans once again had something to be excited about thanks to the sensational performance of Hyunjin Ryu, another Korean leaguer who played for the LA Dodgers since 2013. In 2019, Ryu pitched very well, with his best records of 14 wins, 4 losses, and 2.32 in ERA, which is the lowest number among in the history of Asian pitchers in MLB, including Chan-ho Park, Yu Darvish, Daisuke Matsuzaka, and Chien-ming Wang. Toward the end of the regular season, Ryu was even mentioned as a strong contender for winning the Cy Young Award, which is bestowed to the best pitcher of each regular season.1 As I also enjoy watching MLB games, including the LA Dodgers and Ryu’s pitching, the debates among Korean MLB fans in their online community, MLBPARK, appeared to me as a déjà vu, as they reminded me of debates around Chan-ho Park’s record over a decade ago. Their opinions on Ryu were divided and conflicted over whether his record deserved the Cy Young Award. One group of fans wholeheartedly supported Ryu, speaking highly of his lowest ERA (2.32, the best in the league), his number of quality starts (22 times, 2nd in the league), and his number of four-balls within 9 innings (1.18, 1st in the league). Simultaneously, another group of MLB fans strongly disagreed with Ryu’s fans, and they further argued that Ryu’s performance was not that impressive because © The Author(s) 2020 Y. Cho, Global Sports Fandom in South Korea, Palgrave Series of Sport in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3196-5_8

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he was not dominant in the league’s recent trends, such as his number of strike-outs, total innings, and several new record formulas such as WHIP, WAR, and FWAR.2 This group expressed their discomfort and even condescension toward Ryu’s fans, who, as another type of national fan, are blind to or behind on the new trends of the league. Meanwhile, Korean MLB fans also debated who the best pitcher from South Korea is, i.e., whether Ryu is a better pitcher than Chan-ho Park, and even discussed whether Ryu’s record in 2019 could possibly be regarded as the best among all Asian pitchers in MLB. As the L.A. Dodgers ended the season by losing to the Washington Nationals in the National League finals, the fans were already busy estimating the projected sum of Ryu’s salary and contract for the next season. Because Ryu is qualified as a FA (free agent) for the 2020 season, his fans are expecting another big contract for him and were busy speculating the strategy of his agent, Scott Boras, who has been a big name agent in MLB for decades, and was also Park’s agent during his heydays. The patterns of debate and intense hype over Ryu in the online community seem to be a repeat of the debates and interactions of Korean MLB fans about 15 years ago, when I had actively participated. Coincidentally, both Ryu and Park played for the L.A. Dodgers, who have been regarded as the unofficial Korean national team for many Korean fans for a long time, and both were expected to sign a massive contract as FAs with the same agent. Many Korean fans seem to be perpetual nationalists when cheering for and supporting Ryu, but simultaneously, their unilateral support has also elicited some negative reactions. Having said that, I do not intend to suggest that Korean fans and their cultural identities in 2019 are the same as those of the mid-2000s. To suggest any decisive conclusion on this end, I would presumably have to conduct another study, but at this moment, I am fully content with occasionally reading their posts and catching glimpses of several hotly debated issues in the community. While working on this book in 2019, I came to encounter a question about sport as a research topic: in particular, how significant sport is in the transformation of the cultural and national identity of global sports fans in South Korea, which has undergone extensive cultural and economic globalization since the 1990s. This is the question that I had to ask and answer repeatedly since the initial stage of this project: from my qualification examinations and the final defense of my dissertation to the reviews of my journal articles, special issues and book proposals, and even my job

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interviews, some of which turned out to be very successful and rewarding while others were disappointing and frustrating. For more than a decade of my postgraduate career, I have had to defend the legitimacy and seriousness of my research topics such as global sports, fans, and online communities of South Korea to academic audiences. For cultural studies and Asian studies scholars, for instance, sport often sounds too banal and one-dimensional, and for sports studies scholars who mostly study Western contexts, South Korea is too small and unheard of except for in the context of a couple of sports mega-events such as the 1988 Seoul Olympics and the 2002 Korea-Japan Football World Cup. However, such challenges appeared to me as bittersweet hurdles and enticing thresholds that repeatedly enthralled and pushed me into another round of deliberation and enlightenment. If some exaggeration is allowed, the publication of Global Sports Fandom shows not only that my academic efforts are being acknowledged, but also that studies on sport in Asia have come to be more recognized and established to certain a degree. In answering the above question, Global Sports Fandom shows the importance of the local in the circulation and consumption of global sports in the world. In the case of the South Korean MLB fandom, the local is by and large translated and formulated into various forms of the national. By participating in their online communities, Korean MLB fans have been able to articulate the seemingly contradictory combination between the national and the global, which illuminates the changing structure of the national in globalized and neoliberalized Korea. The changing structure of the national among Korean MLB fans reflects not only baseball history and its developments in East Asia, but also historic experiences such as the colonial occupation, rapid industrialization during the Cold War, and, finally, globalization in the new millennium. Korean MLB fans actively and repeatedly invoke their personal and collective memories of the sudden popularity of MLB in the late 1990s but also the recurring rivalries against Japan in sports. In so doing, this book demonstrates that sports as a serious cultural form in everyday life contributes to developing both individual as well as collective identities. Korean MLB fans are also long-distance fans who enjoy and consume sports via various types of media from across the Pacific. In the age of the internet, these fans actively search for their favorite sports leagues, teams, and players, which helps them develop relationships with others both online and offline. In particular, global sports occupy a complicated or even contradictory position between globalization and national

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identity: global sports can be a new pioneer as well as a symbol of the repudiation of globalization. For that reason, the success of global sports in the world depends on maintaining the balance between the global and the local, national or regional: in this vein, in the world of global sports, national sentiments can function as a facilitator that nurtures organic or locally rooted fans despite the long distance, and the local governments and domestic companies are willing to cooperate with transnational corporations and agencies. Lastly, this book highlights both the necessity and possibility of conducting ethnographic research on sports fans. By engaging with fans’ participations in their online community both online and offline, I as a researcher was fully able to be involved in these fans’ thoughts and approaches, comradeship and tensions, and the building of collective discourses and identities. My research plan and approach can be used as an example model of designing research methodology for researching various types of global sports fans. I have no doubt that sport studies and particularly studies on sports fans and fandoms could benefit from adopting an ethnographic approach more actively. Simultaneously, I am compelled to answer another question about this project on the MLB fandom in South Korea: how this study contributes to expanding the understanding either of various global sports fans and their fandoms in different times and spaces. As I have already confessed, the publication of Global Sports Fandom itself means a lot to me personally, on both an academic and emotional level, but I also keep pondering over the applicability of this book to future research. Since the phenomenal success of the National Basketball Association (NBA)– Michael Jordan–Nike nexus in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, scholars have paid a lot of attention to the globalization of sports and its influences on people groups and societies around the globe. In South Korea and Asia, there exist vastly different groups of global sports fans for the NBA, MLB, and the English Premier League (EPL). I expect that my analysis of Korean MLB fans will provide a useful reference point for understanding various dimensions of the significance of global sports and their fans in South Korea and East Asia. In so doing, further research on global sports fans in different times and spaces would evince recurring, similar, but simultaneously variegated, diverse, and even contradictory implications and consequences to this study. Such increased referencing and comparison within sport studies would bolster and buttress the importance and necessity of studying different societies and cultures through

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global sport. In this vein, my observations of Korean MLB fans in 2019 and in Seoul could function as an alibi for the time gap between the period of field research (2005–2006) and the point at which I am finalizing this manuscript. As I said, the fans in 2019 are not the same exact people as the fans in 2005 (although a small percentage of members might have continued to participate in the online community with different user IDs). My experiences with Korean MLB fans in 2005 helped me discern recurring patterns, but there are clearly different nuances in the 2019 support of national players. Using Kelly’s words, I was also “relieved and surprised to find an expected value in the long interval between primary fieldwork and its final publication” (2019, p. xi). As Global Sports Fandom illuminates, I further argue that sport is a useful tool in engaging with the complexity of a society of a certain period of time, which can be called conjuncture. In other words, sport could be another significant area in which we can expand our understanding of various conjunctures and develop an alternative framework, which can be called conjunctural analysis (Ahn, 2018). Following Grossberg’s advocacy of radical contextualism, I approach the global/neoliberal sports transition in South Korea as a conjuncture that is “constituted by specific articulations of these different modalities of contextuality” (2010, p. 40). Because sports is an area in which both the governments’ and people’s desires are intersected and overlapped, sports studies is effective at exploring the macro- and micro-dimensions of sports and its surrounding society. In this book, for instance, I suggest the term sporting governmentality to explore how the sudden popularity of global sports was constructed by and contributed to both statecraft and personal conduct during South Korea’s transition to globalization and neoliberalization. The changing structures of the national among Korean MLB fans are regarded as the concrete consequences of globalization of the society, and this concept can be utilized for exploring other global sports fans in a particular moment in East Asian societies that have similarly experienced rapid economic growth as well as political and social turbulence throughout their condensed modernizing processes. The analysis of the Korean MLB fandom in the first decade of the new millennium provides an idiosyncratic yet compatible model in understanding different groups of global sports fandoms and their inhabited societies. As such, sports studies attempts to understand how the cultural politics of sports is articulated, disarticulated, and re-articulated during a certain conjuncture by

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reading multi-dimensional, complicated and even seemingly contradictory cultural practices, engaged by diverse agents. As a way of accelerating discussion on global sports and its fandom, finally, I would like to briefly address the following three questions: Is the global sports fandom a harbinger of post-Westernization? Is the global sports fandom a trigger for inter-Asian connections? Is the global sports fandom a potential for political empowerment? The first question is whether global sports fandom is a harbinger of post-Westernization. Arguably, modern sports such as baseball, basketball, rugby and football represent Western culture, and the expansion of modern sports into the global during the twentieth century goes along with the Westernization of the sportscape (Cho, Leary, & Jackson, 2012; Guttmann, 1994). Specifically, baseball as the American national pastime symbolizes American hegemony throughout the globe including, of course, East Asia and South Korea. However, the recent development of global sports in Asia seems to indicate the end of Westernization in sports. Asia’s growing political and economic power enables it to “become increasingly central to the political economy of global sport” (Little, 2012, p. 173): vast numbers of Asians enjoy global sports as practitioners, spectators, and fans; the Asian markets have emerged as powerhouses for broadcasting global sporting events and related goods, and many of these events have been hosted by Asian cities. In this vein, the global sports fandom in Asia, such as the Korean MLB fandom, could be considered substantial evidence for post-Westernization in global sports. As I have discussed, various glocalizing procedures of MLB populating in East Asia attest to the substantial level of post-Westernization: MLB not only recruited Asian players into its league, but also held some of their pre-season and even regular season games in Tokyo. Also, the increasing number as well as vast diversity of global sports fans in South Korea seem to confirm the era of post-Westernization in the sporting world. While MLB depended on local and national sentiments in popularizing MLB, Korean MLB fans are able to penetrate MLB International’s commercial strategy of nationalism in recruiting Asian players and in launching the first World Baseball Classic in 2006. Rather than following big name celebrities and teams, many Korean MLB fans advocate their

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own nationalist way of consuming, remembering and utilizing MLB games within their fandom. However, it is also true that global sports fans do not guarantee post-Westernization to its fullest degree. In explicating the globalization of cricket, Rumford summarizes three key dimensions of postWesternization: (1) the lack of unity in Western countries, (2) no single global modernity, but different modernities, and (3) the emergence of a new East capable of shaping global affairs (2007, pp. 205–206). Given the specificity of baseball, it is unlikely for these key dimensions of postWesternization to be substantially witnessed in the Korean MLB fandom. The baseball world has its dominant center in New York at the MLB Commissioner’s Office (Kelly, 2007), and MLB is organizing international baseball events such as the WBC. While Korean fans forge their own national pastime through baseball and the Japanese nationalize baseball into the Samurai way of baseball, baseball is not yet truly global (Cho, 2012; Kelly, 2007; Whiting, 2005), and the popularization of baseball still symbolizes American modernity and hegemony (Cho, 2016). In South Korea, furthermore, many MLB fans still continue to revere the U.S. as the field of dreams while constructing another global hierarchy via baseball. Hosting sports mega-events in East Asia does not necessarily indicate reverse power in the sports world (Besnier, Brownell, & Carter, 2018). The creativity, diversity, and activity of sports fans consuming, enjoying, and appropriating global sports in Asia indicate the possibility and certain degrees of the post-Westernization of sports, but it must also be noted that the world of global sports is far from being egalitarian, multi-directional, or even democratic in its nature. Secondly, is the global sports fandom a catalyst for inter-Asian connections? On the one hand, I would answer “yes” to this question with my emphasis on an alternative frame that goes beyond the global-local thesis. As explored in this book, the Korean MLB fandom necessitates deploying a national-regional-global framework in order to fully understand Korean sports fans and their interactions in East Asia. While the global is and has always been part of the Korean MLB fandom, Korean fans are also closely connected with regional rivalry, particularly with Japan as its former colonizer. Nonetheless, it can be easily seen that such concepts as glocalization and hybridity are relentlessly deployed in explicating the local consumption, adaptation, and appropriation of global sports as well as various pop cultures. Whereas this global-local thesis proves its applicability with most of the global flows of pop culture, its universal usage often devalues its

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effectiveness and specificity as a theoretical tool (thus, I used to compare it to a panacea in a sarcastic way). Furthermore, the global-local thesis seems to repeat another dichotomy between the West and the East, and in so doing, it tends to be trapped in Euro-American centrism (Dirlik, 2011). In this vein, the national-regional-global nexus that is drawn from the analysis of the Korean MLB fandom would be a positive hint not only for initiating inter-Asian connections but also for overcoming EuroAmerican centrism. It needs to be noted that the regional is as much inherent as the global in the national sports fandom, particularly in East Asia. On the other hand, the inter-Asia connection via global sports does not necessarily advance into solidarity, comradeship, or even mutual respect among regional members. Similar to any international sporting events, global sports also function to elevate national unity and pride despite their facial values in transnationalism or even cosmopolitanism. As illuminated in this book, this is not only because global sports such as MLB understand and utilize the power of nationalism in expanding its rooted fandom in Asia, but also because global sports fans habitually recall nationalist rhetoric and intensify regional rivalries or even hatred by comparing their own national players to other Asian players. For instance, any competition between Korean players and Japanese players tends to draw massive interest through which Korean fans exude their nationalist fever and emotions: such a trend is not limited to baseball, but rather can be found universally. As Ching demonstrates, anti-Japanism as a salient stream of sentiments in postcolonial East Asia represents a “symptom of unsettled historical trauma of the Japanese empire and its legacy” (2019, pp. 2–3). Despite their increasing number and power in Asia, the majority of sports fans follows or reveres Western sports leagues, their teams and players, rather than making connections to Asian sports leagues, teams, players, and fans. While more Asian athletes migrate to other Asian countries, such inter-Asian migration of professional athletes does not lead to a salient stream of inter-Asian connections within the sports fandom. Thirdly, it is necessary to ask whether the global sports fandom via the internet has potential for political empowerment. We can find positive elements in enhancing global sports fans’ active engagements with social and cultural issues from their active participation and close interactions with other fans in their online community. In South Korea, at least, sports fans and their experiences are suggested as having potentiality for political participation. In her conclusion on transnational sport

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in Korea, Joo suggests that media sport “can be an arena for progressive social change. Media sport can inspire political action by offering the powerful experience of participating in collective action with a shared purpose” (2012, p. 250). As evidence, Joo suggests that the experiences and memories of the public during the 2002 World Cup “shaped a kind of affective memory that was recalled during large-scale protests in 2002 and 2008” (2012, p. 251). In exploring new social movements through online communities, Kang also highlights that “the intense, cathartic gathering that soccer fans experience[d] during the [2002] World Cup, [are] paralleling the vigil participants’ corporeal and affective memories of ‘assembly’ and ‘unity’” in 2008 (2016, p. 88). As a matter of fact, Korean MLB fans actively participated in and even mobilized social movements via their online communities, e.g., MLBPARK, during the anti-US-beef rallies in 2008. As I discussed elsewhere, these MLB fans “contributed to engendering counter-public spheres by associating online and offline spaces for building solidarity and for expressing people’s discontent against mainstream media” (Choi & Cho, 2017, p. 15). In the South Korean context, it is true that these global sports fans are very shrewd in sharing, expressing and articulating their thoughts and opinions on public issues via their online space, and in so doing, they often demonstrate their power and influence offline by gathering together for candle vigils or by placing an advertisement in the newspaper (Choi & Cho, 2017). These global sports fans show political empowerment and even their progressive beliefs, particularly concerning domestic political issues. However, the global sports fandom can also be very conservative or even illiberal concerning other issues, particularly when it comes to gender and race. As far as I have observed on MLBPARK, Korean MLB fans who express relatively progressive thoughts on domestic and national issues easily take a very negative and even hostile stance against feminists, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bi, and trans-sexualities) groups, immigrants, and refugees. In other words, these fans staunchly support nationalist, heterosexual, and even patriarchal positions, while also, in general, expressing relatively progressive attitudes toward education, political partisanship, and social issues. This seemingly contradictory stance may be due to the community’s age and gender composition: MLBPARK members are mostly males of younger generations in their 20s and 30s, or even internet culture-savvy teenagers. The ways in which Korean MLB fans are populating their anti-feminist rationales, images, and rhetoric are very

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much similar to how banal misogyny deploys its strategy, concepts, and campaigns via the internet and popular culture. According to BanetWeiser, popular misogyny that instrumentalizes, devalues, and dehumanizes women as objects is “networked, an interconnection of nodes in all forms of media and everyday practice” including death threats, doxing (revealing personal information), online harassment, and revenge porn (2018, p. 2). As a matter of fact, I am often stunned by the duplicity or schism between the two polarizing stances coming from the same group and from one online space. Such duplicity seems to be intensified through extensive neoliberalization as well as the increasing precariousness in the lives of the relatively young male members of the global sports fandom. Various answers and diagnoses are possible for each question because the present as well as the future of the global sports fandom are also in progress and depend on the intervention of various subjects, agencies, and changing social structures. Though as of now, I can only offer provisional answers to these three questions, I conclude this book with the wish that further studies on global sports fandoms will provide more positive and hopeful conclusions.

Notes 1. On 13 November 2019, the result of the 2019 Cy Young Award was revealed: Jacob deGrom at New York Mets won the National League Cy Young Award with 207 points and Ryu was voted as the second with 88 points, which is also a huge success for him. 2. WHIP meaning “Walks Plus Hits Divided by Innings Pitched”; WAR, “Wins Above Replacement Player”; FWAR, “Fangraphs Wins Above Replacement Player.” These numbers have been newly developed from sabermetric baseball statistics in order to evaluate a player’s total contributions to his team.

References Ahn, J.-H. (2018). Mixed-race politics and neoliberal multiculturalism in South Korean media. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Banet-Weiser, S. (2018). Empowered: Popular feminism and popular misogyny. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Besnier, N., Brownell, S., & Carter, T. F. (2018). The anthropology of sport: Bodies, borders, biopolitics. Oakland: University of California Press.

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Ching, T. S. L. (2019). Anti-Japan: The politics of sentiments in postcolonial East Asia. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Cho, Y. (2012). Major League Baseball as a forged national pastime: Constructing personalized national narratives in South Korea. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 13(4), 532–547. Cho, Y. (2016). Double binding of Japanese colonialism: Trajectories of baseball in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Cultural Studies, 30(6), 926–947. Cho, Y., Leary, C., & Jackson, S. J. (2012). Glocalization of sports in Asia. Sociology of Sport Journal, 29(4), 421–432. Choi, S. Y., & Cho, Y. (2017). Generating counter-public spheres through social media: Two social movements in neoliberalized South Korea. Javnostthe Public: Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture, 24(1), 15–33. Dirlik, A. (2011). Culture & history in post-revolutionary China: The perspective of global modernity. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Grossberg, L. (2010). Cultural studies in the future tense. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Guttmann, A. (1994). Games and empires: Modern sports and cultural imperialism. New York: Columbia University Press. Joo, R. M. (2012). Transnational sport: Gender, media and global Korea. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kang, J. (2016). Igniting the internet: Youth and activism in postauthoritarian South Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Kelly, W. W. (2007). Is baseball a global sport? America’s ‘national pastime’ as global field and international sport. Global Networks, 7 (2), 187–2001. Kelly, W. W. (2019). The sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers: Professional baseball in Modern Japan. Oakland: University of California Press. Little, C. (2012). Sports history, culture, and practice in Asia. In J. Nauright & C. Parrish (Eds.), Sports around the world: History, culture, and practice (pp. 173–184). Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. Rumford, C. (2007). More than a game: Globalization and the postWesternization of world cricket. Global Network, 7 (2), 202–214. Whiting, R. (2005). The Samurai way of baseball: The impact of Ichiro and the new wave from Japan. New York and Boston: Warner Books.

Index

A America American hegemony, 194, 196, 197, 211, 216, 228 American pop culture, 8, 11 Andrews, D.L., 76, 158–160 Ang, I., 16 Asian economic crisis, 10, 38, 48, 53, 84, 169 Autoethnography, 17, 18, 30

B Baseball, 2, 4, 9, 28, 62, 75, 76, 97, 101, 104, 115, 116, 121, 122, 136, 138, 143, 150, 166, 168, 173, 175, 182, 185, 187, 190, 194–200, 202–207, 209–213, 215–218, 225, 228–230, 232 Baym, N.K., 111, 115 Bird, S.E., 127 Boras, Scott, 89, 224 Boyle, R., 127, 184

C Chen, K.-H., 63 Chua, B.H., 63 Citizen/citizenship, 3, 6, 15, 27, 43, 54, 60, 62, 83, 93–95, 104, 135, 138, 145–148, 166, 168–170, 172, 180, 182, 197 Cold War, 29, 40, 195, 225 Colonial colonial experience, 6, 41 colonization, 39, 44, 60 Conjuncture conjunctural analysis, 227 conjunctural ethnography, 16–18

D Dean, M., 166 Developmentalism developmentalist project, 172 developmental nationalism, 44–47, 58, 87, 93, 95, 166, 189

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 Y. Cho, Global Sports Fandom in South Korea, Palgrave Series of Sport in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3196-5

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INDEX

E East Asia, 12, 63, 74, 172, 194–196, 199, 206, 217, 218, 225, 226, 228–230 Empowerment, 28, 228, 230, 231 Entertainment and Sports Network (ESPN), 3, 14, 73, 90, 96, 159 Ethnography, 4, 16–20, 22, 23, 26, 30, 79, 127, 173, 226 F Fan authentic fan, 28, 151–153, 155, 157, 178 original fan, 176, 199 pure fan, 155, 202 Farred, G., 102, 139, 143 Foucault, M., 77, 78, 97, 173 Free agent (FA), 89, 90, 136, 224 Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), 169 G Giulianotti, R., 134 Globalization, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8–13, 16, 19, 26, 27, 30, 37, 38, 47, 48, 54, 57, 62, 67–69, 77, 88, 101, 102, 126, 133–135, 148, 159, 166, 167, 171, 173, 188, 194, 205, 216, 218, 224–227, 229 Global sports global sports fan, 15, 16, 26–28, 134, 139, 176, 186, 188, 200, 224, 226–231 global sports fandom, 5, 9, 12, 16, 25, 27, 28, 101, 135, 158–160, 167, 187, 216–218, 225–232 Glocalization as continuum, 13, 14, 102 glocalization from above, 13, 14, 74, 102, 187

glocalization from below, 13–15, 102, 116, 187 Government, 3, 9–12, 26, 27, 30, 38, 41–46, 48–55, 58–60, 62, 63, 69, 74, 76–87, 90, 93–95, 106, 166, 169–172, 188, 189, 196, 204 Governmentality, 14, 15, 26, 68, 69, 77, 78, 84, 85, 93–95, 97, 166, 168, 172, 173, 182, 188, 227 Grossberg, L., 173, 227 H Hardt, M., 53, 62 Haynes, R., 127, 184 Hine, C., 18, 22, 25 I IMF intervention (1997), 27, 170 Individuated nationalism, 28, 167, 187–189 Inter-Asia connection, 28, 228–230 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 2, 8–10, 48–54, 56, 59–61, 63, 69, 80, 82, 87, 93, 133, 151, 166, 169, 170 Internet, 4, 16–20, 22, 24, 26, 27, 71, 79, 92, 101–104, 106–109, 111, 112, 115–117, 119, 121–125, 156, 173, 203, 225, 230, 231 internet space, 102, 126, 127 Internet ethnography, 16, 19–22, 25, 26 J Jackson, S., 70, 135, 182, 200 Japan, 28, 38, 40–42, 44, 57, 60, 68, 73–75, 83, 96, 138, 145, 151, 194–197, 199, 201–211, 216–218, 225, 229 Joo, R.M., 83, 204, 231

INDEX

K Kelly, W.W., 4, 136, 151, 194, 197, 227 Kim-Daejung government, 52, 53, 58, 59, 169 President Kim, Daejung, 52, 55, 58, 82, 169 Kim-Youngsam government, 49, 52, 57 President Kim, Youngsam, 52, 82 Korea Broadcasting Station (KBS), 70, 73, 79–81, 183, 186 Korean Baseball Leagues (KBO), 2, 3, 46, 62, 122, 138, 196, 212–215 Korean leaguer, 75, 138–140, 142, 143, 145–150, 152–155, 157, 160, 173, 174, 177–179, 181–186, 188, 211, 215, 223

L L.A. Dodgers, 3, 4, 8, 61, 72, 74, 75, 86, 91, 136, 137, 140, 143, 144, 146, 157, 196, 224

M Maguire, J., 95, 134, 141, 173, 190 Major League Baseball International (MLBI), 14, 73, 76, 79, 80, 136, 138, 183, 197, 206, 228 Mandatory military service, 82, 83, 94, 145, 146, 179–181 Mankekar, P., 18 Mignolo, W.D., 29, 39, 40, 62 Military service military exemption, 83, 92, 180, 204 Miller, D., 126 Miller, T., 15, 161 MLBPARK, 4, 19–22, 24, 25, 27, 79, 102–106, 109–115, 117–127,

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140, 144, 152, 167, 173, 196, 203, 204, 211, 218, 223, 231 Morris, A.D., 205, 218 Morris-Suzuki, T., 140 Multi-sited ethnography, 16–18 Munhwa Broadcasting Company (MBC), 72, 73, 80, 81, 90, 96, 161, 183–186, 190, 204 N Nation national identity, 3, 9, 11, 20, 28, 46, 81, 102, 127, 139, 166, 204, 205, 215, 224, 226 national individual, 27, 67, 84, 93–95, 148, 166, 168, 172, 188 national interest, 10, 41, 46, 59, 83, 87, 92, 93, 178–181, 187, 188 national profit, 52, 145, 160, 182–184, 186–189 National Basketball Association (NBA), 13, 30, 74, 226 National fandom national memory, 41, 141, 142, 151 national narrative, 140, 142, 148 national player, 28, 145–149, 182, 184, 196, 211, 227, 230 Nationalism developmental nationalism, 44–47, 58, 87, 93, 95, 166, 189 economic nationalism, 10, 29, 59, 61, 166, 172 ethnic nationalism, 189 oppositional nationalism, 46, 47 personal nationalism, 188 Nation-state, 9, 11, 12, 27, 29, 37, 38, 40, 41, 48, 53, 54, 57, 59, 63, 67, 85, 87, 91–95, 107, 148, 149, 179–182, 189

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Negri, A., 53, 62 Neoliberalism/neoliberal/ neoliberalization, 6, 27–29, 37, 48, 51, 52, 54, 59, 61–63, 68, 69, 77, 85, 94, 95, 160, 166–173, 178, 187–190, 227, 232 O Objectivity, 174, 176–178, 188 objective fan, 176 Olympics, 41, 45, 46, 55, 67, 81, 82, 91, 97, 181, 184, 200, 201, 216, 218, 225 Online community, 4, 9, 16, 19–23, 25–28, 101, 102, 107, 108, 110, 112, 116, 118, 121–127, 134, 140, 142, 146, 148, 149, 151–153, 166, 167, 175, 176, 184, 196, 200, 201, 203, 209, 211, 212, 218, 223, 224, 226, 227, 230 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 49, 52 P Park, Chan-ho, 2, 27, 28, 38, 68, 71, 75, 91, 105, 133, 136, 138, 152, 154, 168, 174, 196, 213, 223, 224 Park-kka (anti-Park), 155–158, 160 Park-ppa (pro-Park), 155–158, 175, 176 Postcolonialism, 3, 5–7 Postcolonial theory, 5–7 Posting, 21–25, 105, 106, 108–115, 119, 121, 124, 128, 152–154, 157, 210 Post-Westernization, 28, 228, 229

R Reaves, J.A., 182, 190, 194 Region/regional regional hatred, 230 regionalism, 27, 37 regional rivalry, 211, 216, 229 Robertson, R., 13, 134, 205 Rowe, D., 67, 148, 159

S Salary, 61, 88–90, 136, 137, 175, 224 salary negotiation, 49, 89 Segyehwa, 52, 57, 88, 133 Seoul Olympics (1988), 46, 225 Slater, D., 126 Smith, A.D., 9, 37 Sporting governmentality, 77, 78, 84, 93–95, 166, 168, 172, 173, 182, 188, 227 Sporting nationalism, 27, 185

T Taiwan, 14, 71, 75, 97, 195, 196, 201, 202, 205–207, 211, 218 Texas Rangers, 75, 89, 122, 136, 152–154, 176 Transnational corporations (TNCs), 9, 51, 60

W Whiting, R., 218 Williams, R., 28, 167 World Baseball Classic (WBC), 28, 76, 83, 104, 121, 136, 138, 150, 173, 178, 179, 183, 197–203, 205–211, 213–218, 228, 229 World Trade Organization (WTO), 9, 49, 52, 63