During the Meiji period, the ancient ball game of kemari-in which participants use their feet to keep a small ball aloft-and its few remaining enthusiasts received governmental support as part of performative efforts to connect the new modern state with an authentically "Japanese" past. Most commonly remembered as a favorite pastime of Heian court nobles, kemari has been played by modern aficionados adorned in "traditional" costumes throughout the 20th century at numerous state events. These athletic performances repeatedly have reconnected Japan for outside observers and its own citizens with an image of perduring tradition and cultural uniqueness. In this paper, I will explore how kemari has been reconsidered and celebrated for a different purpose in recent years. Efforts by the Japan Football Association (JFA) to first secure and then ensure the success of the 2002 World Cup co-hosted with South Korea occasioned a new role for kemari. In the years leading up to the World Cup, government authorities, JFA officials, and kemari supporters have positioned kemari as the oldest precursor to the modern game of association football or soccer. Through an examination of the often carefully choreographed museum exhibitions, media releases, and public stagings of kemari produced around and during the World Cup, I will contemplate the ways that history is used to claim legitimacy and authenticity in the present. I will consider ideas about the relationship between past and present inherent in claims by scholars from Japan and elsewhere, who have contributed to contemporary narratives of continuity and connection between kemari and modern soccer. Lastly, I will suggest how new understandings of kemari may be altering individuals' understanding of Japaneseness and Japan's place in, and relationship with the rest of the world.

Amira Sonbol specializes in women, gender, and Islam and is the author of several books including The New Mamluks; Women, Family, and Divorce Laws and Divorce in Islamic History; The Creation of a Medical Profession in Egypt: 1800-1922; The Memoirs of Abbas Hilmi II: Sovereign of Egypt; and Women of the Jordan: Islam, Labor and Law. Professor Sonbol is co-editor of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, a quarterly journal co-published with Selly Oak Colleges (UK) and the forthcoming HAWWA: Journal of the Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World to be published by E.J. Brill, 2003. She teaches courses on the History of Modern Egypt, Women and Law, and Islamic Civilization.

Ahmad Dallal taught at Yale and Smith College before joining Stanford's History Department in 2000. Professor Dallal earned his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from Columbia University, and his academic training and research covers the history of the disciplines of learning in Muslim societies, including both the exact and the traditional sciences, and early modern and modern Islamic thought and movements. He is currently finishing a book-length comparative study of eighteenth century Islamic reform.

About the speaker: Ethan Segal is an SSFJS Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Stanford. His dissertation, an economic history of medieval Japan, is based on research he conducted while a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Tokyo. His other areas of research and publication include proto-nationalism, historical methodology, and textbooks narratives in the U.S. and Japan.