Remembering the Oriental Witches: Sports, Gender and Shōwa Nostalgia in the NHK Narratives of the Tokyo Olympics

Iwona Merklejn

Social Science Japan Journal, 2013, vol. 16, issue 2, 235-250

Abstract: The phrase Oriental Witches (Tōyō no Majo) was used in the mass media to describe the Japanese women’s volleyball team that won 22 games in a row during their tour of Europe in 1961; they became even more famous when their impressive career was crowned with a gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. In this paper, I investigate media representations of the Oriental Witches in the retrospective programming of the NHK Japanese public broadcaster. I analyze the Oriental Witches success story as a part of ‘Shōwa nostalgia’—a cultural trend idealizing Japan of the 1950s and 1960, especially the years of high economic growth that led up to the Tokyo Olympics. I argue that NHK actively promoted ‘Shōwa nostalgia’ in the first two decades of the new Heisei era, and the Oriental Witches were a prominent feature of this programming. The NHK representations of the Olympic team, although seemingly non-gendered, provide normative notions of gender roles that ‘proper’ Japanese women should conform to in the idealized Shōwa era.

Date: 2013
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