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MARATHON JAPAN: Distance Racing and Civic Culture. By Thomas R.H. Havens. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2015. xi, 227 pp. (Illustrations.) US$47.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-4101-0.
I like running. I also like reading about running, including academic writings, so what else would it need to warrant a highly sympathetic account of the first and therefore highly welcomed history of distance running in Japan? Certainly a bit more than the run-of-the-mill narrative of modernity that the renowned historian of modern and in particular twentieth-century Japan offers, with his incessant quoting of athletes' names, running times, and rankings. Readers who are thrilled by an almanac of annual finishing times and records will find their bible in this book. For me, reading page after page about who ran the fastest marathon in Japan in 1967, how the follower-up did in 1968 at the Mexico Olympics in relation to the fastest times of the year, and what times Japan's top runners delivered in 1969 and what their respective ranking was in 1970, was a bit like the dreary stretch between kilometres 32 and 36 of a marathon: hard to enjoy but necessary to slog through on the way to the finish. So if you want to get a feel for the meaning distance running has and had for the Japanese, or if you want to know what civic culture may have to do with the fascination Japan obviously has with running, you will have to wait for another study-maybe one more interested in body culture, the anthropology of running or fieldwork among runners than in the assemblage of facts. But this would be exactly the opposite of what Havens promises in the opening lines of his study.