21st Annual Hall Lecture given by William W. Kelly
On January 23, the Council on East Asian Studies presented the 21st annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies at the MacMillan Center. The lecture, titled “The 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games: Why are they important, even for people who don’t like sports?”, was given by William W. Kelly, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Sumitomo Professor Emeritus of Japanese Studies at Yale University.
The first John W. Hall Lecture was held in 1999. It was established with generous support from Mrs. Robin Hall in memory of her husband. A specialist in the history of the Ashikaga through Late Tokugawa periods, John Whitney Hall (1916-1997) was named A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History at Yale in 1961. His scholarly career, which spanned numerous influential volumes on Japanese history, as well as his service as chair of several local and national committees (including the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, the Association for Asian Studies, and the American Council of Learned Societies-Social Science Research Council Joint Committee on Japanese Studies) are testaments to his contributions to the study of Japan.
It seemed fitting, then, that this past week marked the first time the Hall lecture was given by a Yale faculty member, for Professor Kelly’s career brought what Daniel Botsman (Professor of History, Yale University) called when introducing him “an institutional and intellectual vitality” to Yale and the study of Japan. As for Professor Kelly, he remarked that Professor Hall was an “intellectual hero” of sorts and had the esteemed scholar of Japanese history in mind when he thought about why the Olympic Games might matter even to those who wouldn’t find interest in any of the 33 sports held at the games.
The topic of Kelly’s lecture spoke to his voluminous research and writing on the significance of sport and body culture in modern Japan. His recent works include publications with support from the Council on East Asian Studies, including The Olympics in East Asia: The Crucible of Nationalism, Regionalism, and Globalism (2011) and The New Geopolitics of Sport in East Asia (2014).
In his lecture, Kelly interrogated the connections one could make between the upcoming Tokyo Olympic Games (exactly seven months from when he gave this lecture) and the Tokyo Olympic Games back in 1964. The former, purportedly, seeks to revive the spirit of the latter, which was presented as Japan’s political gesture to “rejoin the international order” following its postwar reconstruction. Kelly unpacked and brought nuance to this political desire, revealing the underlying anxieties a global city like Tokyo might have had in its bid for hosting the Olympics (and the economic and social consequences therein) as well as the transnational tensions which find expression in the Olympics through philosophical pageantry.
More broadly speaking, Professor Kelly brings attention to the “rhetorical entrapment” of the Olympic Games in which the event undermines the sureness we have about our conceptions of human existence. The sex binary, artificial boundaries between the natural body and technology, the eroding distinctions between ability and disability—all these sites of human conceptualization we in the past have regarded as self-evident are reshuffled and recast in an arena as public as the Olympics.
So why do the Olympic Games matter? Professor Kelly quipped at the end of his talk, “Fun to watch, good to think.”