Sports and Language

This paper gives a report on a research project on “Sports and Language”, which was conducted by this academic society for a two-year period from 2003 to 2004.<br>We first discuss the characteristics of live sports commentary. We then analyze the differences between the live television commentary of the ski jumping events at the Sapporo and Nagano Olympic Games. While the commentary for the Sapporo Games tended to be in full sentences (subject+predicate), at Nagano we found a conspicuous repetition of the predicate. From this and other differences, we postulate that there was a change in the practice of live commentary between 1972 and 1998.<br>In order to explain this change, we next address the question of professional wrestling and the former announcer Furutachi Ichiro. Professional wrestling is on the margins of the world of sport. It embodies elements which were rejected by modern sports when they chose to pursue legitimate competition. In the early 1980s, Furutachi developed a unique, overboard style of commentary to express the ambiguous world of professional wrestling. After retiring from professional wrestling broadcasting he was active in the entertainment industry, and broke new ground with his on-stage “talk show” monologues, before becoming a newscaster, where he now keeps a tight rein on his former extravagant style of speech.<br>Finally, we discuss the post-modern context of the popularity of the New Japan Pro-wrestling company and Furutachi's commentary in the 1980s. As is well known, in the 1980s wrestling broadcasts once again found an important niche in Japanese TV culture. Although pro wrestling no longer had the mass-culture appeal of the Rikidozan era, it became a subculture of mainly young men and boys.<br>In the 1980s, Japanese youth culture, or “info-consumer” culture, had yet to enter full-fledged post-modernity. And as Azuma Hiroki points out, Japanese youth culture entered a new stage of post-modernity from 1996. In recent years, the original equation of Furutachi with pro wrestling has faded along with the so-called “snob culture” of the 80s, and for the sub-culture of today's fans it just functions as another source of excitement.