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

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.

Oriental Witches, Tokyo Olympics, NHK, Shōwa nostalgia, women’s volleyball