Sports mega-events and cosmopolitan nationalism: A critical discourse analysis of media representations of Japan through the 2019 Rugby World Cup

Sports mega-events, like the Rugby World Cup, are often considered as a major platform for the celebration and reinforcement of nationalism. However, there is an emerging strand of research which contends that the host nations are increasingly presenting themselves with diverse, inclusive and cosmopolitan characteristics and, in turn, forms of nationalism have undergone some noticeable changes in more recent times. In this paper, we pursue an argument that Japan as the host of the 2019 Rugby World Cup projected the nation with a cosmopolitan outlook ultimately to sustain or even strengthen national interest and identity through the process of ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’. Methodologically, the research deployed critical discourse analysis to examine media representations of Japan as the host nation in general, and its national team in particular, within one of the leading Japanese newspapers as well as a range of other publicly available resources and materials in relation to the Rugby World Cup. In result, the study reveals the ways in which the discourse of ‘One Team’, embracement of foreignness and incidents of international exchanges during the event were mobilised to generate ‘thin’ cosmopolitan moments and, at the same time, were incorporated into the narratives of Japan's success on the world stage through conditional acceptance of foreignness and diversity. Consequently, this paper offers both a theoretical underpinning for and empirical evidence of the emerging linkage between sports mega-events and cosmopolitan nationalism.


Introduction
Sports mega-events are often regarded as the epitome of the mutually reinforcing relationships through which the domains of economy, politics, culture and social life are all infused into one package to showcase sport as a universal language and "'official' versions of public culture" (Roche, 2000: 1).As one of such eventsindeed generally perceived as the third largest global event, the Rugby World Cup (RWC) represents a pinnacle of competitions among over 100 nations participating in the sport and attracts viewership from over 200 countries, albeit concentrated within the Commonwealth (Jackson and Scherer, 2013).Much like the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Japan and Korea which marked its first-ever entry into Asia and helped accelerate the globalisation of association football (Horne and Manzenreiter, 2002), the 2019 RWC was anticipated by World Rugby, the global governing body, to follow suit.In the end, the 2019 RWC exceeded any accounts of expectation by breaking the domestic broadcast record with 54.8 million viewers (for the pool match between Japan and Scotland), selling 99 percent of over 1.8 million tickets and attracting more than one million attendees to the public viewing events held across the country (Reuters, 19 October 2019).
Sports mega-events, like the RWC, are often considered in the literature as a major platform for the celebration and reinforcement of nationalism.This is particularly evident in host nations as they historically mobilise the occasions to promote their national interests and unity among members of the nation-states internally as well as to raise their international profiles as cultural-economic superpowers externally (Horne and Manzenreiter, 2004).However, there is an emerging strand of research that contends that the host nations are increasingly presenting themselves with diverse, inclusive and cosmopolitan characteristics and, in turn, forms of nationalism have undergone some noticeable changes in more recent times.For instance, assessing the changing sense of English national identities expressed through cricket, Malcolm (2009) concludes that there is "a growing perception that the openness and tolerance characteristic of benign Englishness is more palatable (to many English people)" (p.624).Likewise, on the British media's representations of the 2012 London Olympics, Vincent et al. (2018) note an increasing emphasis on positioning "Britain as welcoming, progressive, inclusive, and cosmopolitan" (p.916).Building on this strand of knowledge, we aim to pursue an argument that Japan as the RWC host projected the nation with a cosmopolitan outlook ultimately to sustain or even strengthen national interest and identity in the form of 'cosmopolitan nationalism' (Beck, 2006;Brett and Moran, 2011;Savage et al., 2010).In order to explicate the complex relations between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, we further draw on Giulianotti and Robertson's (2007) conceptualisation of 'thin' and 'thick' cosmopolitanism and illuminate the ways in which cosmopolitan nationalism was mobilised by the generation of 'thin' cosmopolitan moments.In particular, the discourse of 'One Team' and incidents of international exchanges during the event were widely celebrated and, at the same time, incorporated into the narratives of Japan's success on the world stage through conditional acceptance of foreignness and diversity.As such, this paper aims to offer both a theoretical underpinning for and empirical evidence of the emerging linkage between sports mega-events and cosmopolitan nationalism, which to the best of our knowledge has not been closely scrutinised elsewhere.
Methodologically, the research deployed critical discourse analysis to examine media representations of Japan as the host nation in general, and its national team in particular, within one of the leading Japanese newspapers as well as a range of other resources and materials in relation to the RWC.In doing so, it reveals how Japan was discursively represented with cosmopolitan characteristics through the hosting of the 2019 RWC.For the structure of the paper, it is organised as follows.Following the introduction, a literature review is provided to locate this study within the theoretical discussion on sport mega-events and cosmopolitan nationalism.After briefly outlining the methods deployed, key themes and findings are presented and discussed.Lastly, the conclusion discusses and highlights the study's contribution to the literature by examining the findings from theoretical perspectives.

Sports mega-events and cosmopolitan nationalism
Across the globe, it is well-documented that sports have been embraced, adopted and indigenised to reflect the particularity of local cultures, identities and expressions (Bairner, 2001;Giulianotti and Robertson, 2009).Likewise, while sports events have grown to cut across different nations and continents, even the largest kinds of sports mega-events such as the Olympic Games are nonetheless heavily oriented towards, and structured by, the national interests of athletes, teams, organisers, politicians and consumers (Horne and Whannel, 2020;Roche, 2000).The hosting of sports mega-events, in particular, has been viewed and deployed by national governments as a strategic means to showcase their cultural-economic supremacy and develop 'soft power' (Grix, 2014).It is also evident that sports mega-events provide an opportunity for the hosting nation to narrate and re-interpret its national myths, re-build its cultural identity and re-shape meanings of belonging in order to unite and re-unite otherwise heterogeneous members of 'the nation' (Baker and Rowe, 2014).Accordingly, much of the previous literature on sports mega-events, media and nationalism has been devoted to understanding the ways in which sports events have been mobilised to promote interests of 'the nation' as a unified and integrated community as well as the role of the media in representing and reproducing national pride, narratives and achievements.For instance, Scott et al.'s (2018) work on the media framing of the 2015 RWC across the newspapers of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa confirms the centrality of the home nations and nationalism in coverage and a lack of interest in foreign teams and multiculturalism.
As the previous studies on sports mega-events predominantly focused on the side of nationalism, this has resulted in the relative neglect of the other side of the same cointhat is their cosmopolitan possibilities.Among a few scholars who examined sports mega-events from the lens of cosmopolitanism, Roche (2011) asserts that "simultaneously and contrapuntally, through the multi-national character of their organization, they also carried and disseminated more internationally and universalistically-oriented values" (p.73).Notably, cosmopolitan idealsoriginally inspired by the thoughts of Immanuel Kantwere infused into the formal principles and ideological foundations of Olympism as well as the promotional rhetoric of various sports mega-events throughout history (Roche, 2000(Roche, , 2011)).For instance, the Olympic Charter, which was devised by Pierre de Coubertin, stipulates the principles and values of Olympism with respect to the realisation of a peaceful society, protection of human rights and promotion of 'universal fundamental ethical principles' (Horne and Whannel, 2020).Although the original formulation of cosmopolitan ideals may have been preserved and upheld in their central meanings, Calhoun (2008) asserts that "[c]osmopolitanism has become an enormously popular rhetorical vehicle for claiming at once to be already global and to have the highest ethical aspirations for what globalisation can offer" (p.427).Given the disparity between its original aspiration in theory and its promotional rhetoric in practice, Giulianotti and Robertson's (2007) distinction between 'thin cosmopolitanism' and 'thick cosmopolitanism' offers a nuanced approach to understanding cosmopolitanism without conflating the meaningful differences within.According to Giulianotti and Robertson (2007), thin cosmopolitanism involves "a rudimentary politics of recognition" (p.172) as in the instrumental and banal use of cosmopolitanism as promotional rhetoric, whereas thick cosmopolitanism registers a much deeper level of learning from, and engagement with, other cultures, thereby promoting "the cross-fertilization and hybridization of social practices across a transnational terrain" (p.173).In justifying its existence and extravagant costs associated with hosting, organisers and proponents of sports mega-events such as the Olympic Games have continued claiming benefits of the events for international cooperation, peace, diplomacy and cultural exchange (Horne and Manzenreiter, 2004;Lee, 2021).However, little is known about how thin and thick cosmopolitanism are manifested through the hosting of sports mega-events.
More recently, some scholars begun unveiling a notable shift in the construction of nationalism to more inclusive, diverse and cosmopolitan forms.For instance, deploying the concepts of 'benign' and 'malign' forms of nationalismoriginally introduced by Edmunds and Turner (2001), Malcolm (2009) elucidates the shift in the discourse of English cricket from a malign form characterised by being closed, insular, earnest, masculine, reactive before and during the 1990s to a benign form characterised by being open, cosmopolitan, ironic, feminine and creative after the 1990s.While heuristically useful, there is a pitfall, as Malcolm (2009) himself acknowledges, in the conceptualisation of the benign and malign forms to replicate "the somewhat false dichotomy of ethnic (malign) and civic (benign) nationalisms" (p.616).From this critical point of view, we may add that what seems to be a 'benign' form of contemporary nationalism is no less powerful in essentialising core constituentsand stereotypesof national culture and reinforcing national pride, unity and identity, which may promote conservative and insular rhetoric and supress differences within.In this study, we refer to this recent phenomenon as 'cosmopolitan nationalism' (Beck, 2006;Brett and Moran, 2011;Savage et al., 2010), which is deployed to denote an idea that the cosmopolitan ideals and characters are mobilised, re-defined and 'glocalised' within the framework of nationalism or the legal-political entity of a nation-state.Speaking of the future outlook for how global society can be cosmopolitanised, Beck (2006) advocates cosmopolitan nationalism, or nationalism 'equipped with a cosmopolitan eye', in contending that "[w]ithout the stabilizing factors that nationalism provides in dealing with difference, cosmopolitanism is in danger of losing itself in a philosophical never-never land" (p.49).However, Calhoun (2008) counters Beck by pointing out its ramification on the formation of a transnational elite class and growing global inequality because "cosmopolitanism commonly reflects the experience and perspective of elites and obscures the social foundations on which that experience and perspective rests" (p.441).From this critical point of view, a cosmopolitan outlook and discourse can also be deployed and mobilised by national elites to advance their interests and power in legitimising domestic politics and social control of their citizens.
From empirical research on sports mega-events, there seems to have been a higher propensity for host nations to embody and display a cosmopolitan outlook through the events' promotion, ceremonies and cultural activities.For instance, by examining representations of the British in the 2012 London Olympics, Vincent et al. (2018) noted the shift of an emphasis by British newspapers in positioning "Britain as welcoming, progressive, inclusive, and cosmopolitan" (p.916).Although the conservative rhetoric of 'us versus them' had its place in the newspapers with respect to such cases as the Welsh and Scottish football players in Team GB refusing to sing the national anthem and recently-turned-into-British athletes being labelled as 'plastic Brits', the success of Great Britain being placed third in the number of medals contributed to "emphasizing discourses celebrating the success of selective multi-ethnic, hybrid, loyal British athletes" (Vincent et al., 2018: 917).Consequently, Britain's national outlook of the twenty-first century was re-positioned (at least at the time) with "the cosmopolitan ideals of a fully integrated Olympics and the socially inclusive themes" (Vincent et al., 2018: 917).The use of a sports mega-event as a vehicle for the shift to a more cosmopolitan version of nationalism is certainly not restricted to the UK.In their study of a public viewing event in Sydney, Australia, for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, Baker and Rowe (2014) found that the event was used to endorse "an image of multiculturalismas an integrated nation comprised of 'diverse [multi]cultural groups'that reflected broader political interests complementary to the city's bid to host prospective World Cup tournaments" (p.301).Nevertheless, little is known about how this political mobilisation of cosmopolitanism through sports mega-events has been disseminated in non-Western societies.

Japan, rugby and cosmopolitan nationalism
Rugby union is one of the most illustrative sports that embody cosmopolitan globalisation.While developments such as professionalisation and commercialisation dramatically changed the world of rugby after 1995, its social and cultural foundations originally cultivated among English elites continue to underpin its residual emphasis on an amateur ethos and moral purpose of the game (Collins, 2015).According to Harris (2010), the game of rugby union was developed initially by the 'core' group of eight nations (Australia, England, France, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa, and Wales) and only then disseminated to other nations such as Japan on the 'periphery'.Since its inception during the late nineteenth century, the development of rugby in Japan was centred in the early years on competitions among elite private universities and then semiprofessional competitions among company-owned clubs, which eventually evolved into a league format called the Top League in 2003 (Besnier, 2012;Richards, 2007).In contrast to American-centred baseball and more globally-oriented football as two of the most popular sports, rugby has come to signify its middle-and upper-class origin and ethos as a 'quintessentially English' sport in lieu of cricket within the Japanese sporting landscape.As Collins (2015: 334) notes: Rugby's popularity in Japan reflected the similarities between British and Japanese cultures.The Japanese zealously guarded the principle of amateurism, in contrast to the professionalism of Japanese baseball, and many of English club rugby's rituals were replicated.For many Japanese men in the interwar years the game was the perfect introduction to the culture of the empire that still dominated the globe.
As such, the ideals of 'noblesse oblige' and 'one for all, all for one' have been ingrained within the lexicon of Japanese rugby and embodied within its culture from the early years (Kuroda et al., 2017).Accordingly, we contend that the socio-historical origin and development of rugby as a distinctive cultural space being more readily consumed for the celebration of its cosmopolitanism have played a role in contributing to the formation of what Beck and Sznaider (2006) call 'cosmopolitan conditions'.
The most notable cosmopolitan condition for the host nation of the 2019 RWC was the ethnic diversity of its national team, which was made possible by the International Rugby Board's regulation for allowing foreigners to be eligible to play for the nation through consecutive three or more years of residency in addition to citizenship.This marks a stark contrast to other sportstypically those included in the Olympics (e.g., rugby sevens) that draw a clear line between a citizen and a foreigner, and this distinction was even more sharply reinforced by Japan's single-citizenship policy that underscores the importance of blood ties over civic and cultural associations (Chiba et al., 2001).This unique eligibility rule of fifteen-a-side rugby broadly meant that players from the 'core' nations such as New Zealand, Australia and South Africa are more likely to be 'imported' by 'periphery' nations (Jackson and Scherer, 2013).As a 'periphery' nation, Japan has attempted to take full advantage of this eligibility rule and embraced the inclusion of foreigners.Much like Giulianotti and Robertson (2007) regard football in Japan as a fitting example of thick cosmopolitanism, the development of rugby reflects such characteristics of extensive engagement with other cultures as establishing strategic relations with world leaders, organising international tours, sending domestic players to international training camps and hiring foreign coaches and players. 1 The presence of foreigners was particularly notable for the Japanese team in the 1999 RWC including Japan's first foreign-born captain, Andrew McCormick (Sakata, 2004).However, the disastrous results of the 1999 campaign, losing all three pool matches by large margins, led the domestic media to criticise the team for being 'not Japanese enough'.To this, the head coach and rugby legend (and surely cosmopolitan) Seiji Hirao responded in The Guardian (9 October, 1999): "This team is united around common objectives, visions and desires rather than race, blood or nationality".Although Hirao's cosmopolitan vision for the Japanese team and society did not come to fruition at the time, his legacy was inherited by the head coach of the 2019 Japanese team, Jamie Joseph, who had played as one of five New-Zealand-born players in the 1999 team.

Methods
This study draws on an overarching comparative research project on the mediation of sports mega-events and media events in Japan during 2019. 2 From the larger project, we identified that there was a noticeable number of narratives within the Japanese media on the sports mega-events with respect to diversity and international exchanges.Given the predominant focus on national identity and nationalism in the previous literature on sports mega-events, this unusual celebration of cosmopolitan moments caught our attention as a worthy site of further investigation into the often-conceived-as dichotomous relations between cosmopolitanism and nationalism.As part of the larger project, this study deployed critical discourse analysis of cosmopolitanism and nationalism as manifested in a Japanese newspaper, overseas newspapers and publicly available materials produced for the 2019 Rugby World Cup.Critical discourse analysis was considered suitable for studies of cosmopolitanism and nationalism because it allows researchers to interpret texts as forms of social practice and their dialectical relations with specific situations, institutions and social structures (Fairclough, 2010).For instance, nationalism is a popular topic for this methodological approach to be applied in studies of sport and media (e.g., Kelly, 2020; Shin et al., 2022).On the other hand, there has been far less attempt at applying it to analysis of cosmopolitanism, let alone cosmopolitan nationalism, to which this study contributes.As Fairclough (2010) identifies, dialectical relations between discourses are one of the focal areas for critical discourse analysis, and the study was geared towards understanding the contestation and interaction between discourses of cosmopolitanism and nationalism.
The data collection and analysis were conducted in two phases, with the first phase involving primary data and the second phase involving supplementary data.In the first phase, one of the leading Japanese newspapers, the Asahi Shimbun, was used as the primary data source for this study.The Asahi Shimbun is published by the Asahi Shimbun Company and was founded in 1879 as one of the first modern newspapers in Japan.In terms of nation-wide circulation, the Asahi Shimbun has ranked second only to Yomiuri Shimbun over the decades.It is widely known that the Asahi Shimbun has a left-leaning political orientation as it frequently covers topics concerning social issues in contrast to Yomiuri Shimbun which is more business-focused and conservative in its political orientation.The selection of this national newspaper was informed by the following considerations: (1) despite the development of social media, newspapers in print or online remain powerful authoritative texts and voices of the nation; (2) from the larger project, the researchers had obtained prior insight about an extent to which international exchanges and ethnic diversity were discussed by the newspaper; and (3) as the Asahi Shimbun is generally regarded as the most progressive and liberal in its political orientation, it was likely to feature a sufficient number of narratives that illustrate cosmopolitan sensibilities.To search for relevant articles for this study, the keywords "Rugby World Cup" and "Japan" were used.Certain news items were excluded when: (a) they were essentially about sporting contests and their results; and (b) their main topics were not about the 2019 RWC.The collection of the primary data was carried out pre-, during and post-event from July 1 st to December 31 st of 2019.From this process, a total of 69 news articles were included for the analysis.After the data were gathered, they were then examined by three-step thematic analysis involving both inductive and deductive coding practices (Braun and Clarke, 2006).For the first step, each of the relevant articles was inductively categorised using open coding (i.e., "coding the data without trying to fit it into a pre-existing coding frame, or the researcher's analytic preconceptions" (Braun and Clarke, 2006: 83, emphasis in original)).The second step ensued that the identified codes were grouped into a number of themes including deductively-informed theoretical themes cosmopolitanism and nationalismthat served central theoretical inquiries of the study.During the process, the key sub-themes were identified under the main theoretical theme of cosmopolitanism.The third step then involved an interpretation of relationships between the two main theoretical themes of cosmopolitanism and nationalism to identify key sub-themes with respect to cosmopolitan nationalism.
In the second phase of the data collection and analysis, the primary data were supplemented by other data sources including the international newspapers from the larger project, press releases, promotional materials and official websites of the RWC.This was regarded as only appropriate for critical discourse analysis as it advocates for the integration of multiple sources for comparisons and examination of intertextualities and contextual inferences (Fairclough, 2010).In other words, supplementary data were collected and analysed to examine the 'interdiscursivity' (Fairclough, 2010) of the discourses from Asahi Shimbun with other relevant texts in terms of how they were articulated together within a broader context.Based on the themes and sub-themes identified in the first phase, the researchers therefore looked for texts that complement, strengthen or contradict the findings from the first phase in a way to test their credibility and reliability.For instance, the sub-theme, "Discourse of 'One Team'", was complemented by presenting a contrasting view from the other media to the Asahi Shimbun's celebratory discourse of the ethnic diversity of the Japanese team.The analysis of the same theme was also strengthened by presenting a table that collates profiles of players from multiple sources including the official websites of the RWC, Japan Rugby Football Union and professional clubs of their affiliation.As most of the texts were produced in Japanese, it should be noted that they were translated by the authors when the data are presented in this paper.

Findings
Key themes of cosmopolitanism Discourse of 'One Team' and multicultural Japan.The high proportion of foreign, foreignborn or foreign-looking players in the Japanese national team caught sizable attention from the Japanese mass media and social media even before the event took place.In contrast to the rather critical tone of social media about the foreigners (e.g., 'It feels too odd to call it a Japanese team when a half of it consists of foreigners [gaikokujin]' quoted in Bunshun Online, 6 September, 2019), the Asahi Shimbun was quick to promote the cosmopolitan outlook of the Japanese team and the inclusive nature of rugby and its eligibility rules.For the 2019 RWC, in addition to the head and assistant coaches being New Zealand citizens, the roster of the Japanese team had 16 foreign-born players out of 31 registered players while 7 of them were eligible through residency (see Table 1).
It is noteworthy to point out the varying degree of Japaneseness and foreignness represented by these so-called 'foreign-born' players.At one end, there are foreign-born but naturalised citizens of Japan, such as Michael Leitch and Luke Thompson, who spent longer than a decade playing for Japanese high school, university, company or national teams while acquiring Japanese language skills, customs and cultural values.At the other end, there are those, like Pieter Labuschagne and James Moore, who came to play for Japanese companies in time which was convenient for qualifying as members of the Japanese national team through residency.What is also notable from the list is the major labour-migration-to-naturalisation pattern of New-Zealand-born (five including four naturalised) and Tongan-born players (five including three naturalised).
The affirmation of the diversity was only amplified over the course of the event as the Japanese team went on to record a series of historic wins.Following Japan's first win against Russia, the Asahi Shimbun (21 September 2019b) referred to the team as 'multinational (takokuseki) Japan' and celebrated how the players of diverse backgrounds came together through the match by featuring an interview comment from Kotaro Matsushima: "I feel we came together well and made the try by One Team".The references to 'One Team' were then proliferated in interviews and commentaries during the sensational campaign by Japan upsetting the then world's No. 2 ranked Ireland and higher-ranked Scotland in advancing to the knockout stage as the first Asian nation.The success of the Japanese team was attributed to its unity in diversity, which was encapsulated within the team slogan 'One Team', and turned into an unprecedented celebration of the cosmopolitan quality represented by the team.At the end of the year 2019, the term 'One Team' was nominated and then chosen as one of the winners of the annual Buzzword Award (Ryu ̄ko ̄go Taisho ̄)-achieving a nation-wide recognition of its popularity.Notably, The Japan Times (2 December 2019) picked up this story for its English-speaking readers and reported its impact not just on Japanese sports but also on Japanese society as a whole: The term 'One Team' has since caught on in areas outside the realm of sports, including in business.During a Nov. 18 news conference on the merger between Yahoo Japan and Line Corp., for example, Kentaro Kawabe, president and CEO of Z Holdings, Yahoo Japan's parent, said, "We are aiming to build a powerful 'One Team'".
As such, the discourse of 'One Team' along with the powerful display of unity in diversity embodied by the Japanese team are considered to have played a major part in constructing the 'cosmopolitan moment' (Beck and Sznaider, 2006) in Japan during the RWC.Global celebration of Japan's success and absence of the usual regional rivals.While the discourse of 'One Team' has been intra-nationally mobilised to contribute to the formation of the 'cosmopolitan moment', it needs to be acknowledged that this has also been reinforced by the overseas media's unreserved celebration of Japan's fairy tale success.For example, Japan's decisive win against Scotland prompted The New Zealand Herald (14 October 2019) to offer perhaps the highest praise that the Japanese team had ever had in RWC history: "After all the finger pointing and legal threats, no one can deny Japan are not only worthy of their place in the final eight, but one of the best teams to watch at this tournament.When Japan are at their attacking best, rugby is a beautiful game.When Japan plays, they inspire others to follow."Even The Scotsman (13 October 2019), a newspaper of the nation that was forced out of the competition by the loss, offered a compliment to the opponent: "Scotland's Rugby World Cup is over after they were emphatically beaten by rampant hosts Japan, who celebrated their first ever quarter-final and topped Pool A following a brilliant display of pace and clinical finishing that Gregor Townsend's side couldn't match for most of the game".As the Asahi Shimbun reported the coverage of the Japanese triumph by The New Zealand Herald, The Irish Times and BBC, such unreserved praise and celebration from the overseas media only reinforced a sense of appreciation and respect towards the international (rugby) community.
The global celebration of Japan's success was also amplified by an absence of intense regional rivalries for Japan in rugby, which served another of the cosmopolitan conditions.While international events for baseball and football have often been turned into substitutive contests for inter-regional geopolitical disputes between Japan and its neighbouring countries (e.g., China, North Korea and South Korea), this is not the case for rugby because the sport has been much less embraced in other Asian countries.In fact, from the data from the larger project, there were just five news items referring to the RWC in the Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo during the entire event period.Of the five items, only one contained coverage of an actual rugby match while three of them explained cultural and historical issues related to rugby as a Commonwealth sport and a game of the Southern hemisphere.Despite the presence and notable performance of Jiwon Koo, his name was mentioned only once: "Korean Jiwon Koo is also part of the Japanese squad.As the heaviest man in the team, he plays a pivotal role in a scrum" (Chosun Ilbo, 10 October 2019).Perhaps not surprisingly, no news related to the performance of the Japanese national team appeared in the South Korean press.Partly because of this lack of interest in the RWC in South Korea and East Asia more generally, the Japanese media and public were able to direct their attention only to the bright side of internationalism without agonising over political tensions with their regional neighbours and comparing their own standing in the world with their rivals.
Celebration and embracement of foreignness.Apart from the celebration of the ethnic diversity of the Japanese team, the Asahi Shimbun also featured a number of articles that promoted and celebrated foreignness in the form of cosmopolitanisation.One of the most celebrated aspects of foreignness-as featured multiple times-was the haka, or a war cry or ceremonial challenge of Māori, the indigenous population in Aotearoa New Zealand. 3For instance, 5 days prior to the opening of the RWC, the Asahi Shimbun dedicated a section to introduce different types of haka (e.g., Ka Mate and Kapa O Pango) with quotes from All Black TJ Perenara explaining its power to unite the players of diverse roots.The most notable news item on the haka which denotes the extent of cosmopolitanisation was the so-called 'Kashiwa haka'-an adopted and localised version of the haka in Kashiwa in Chiba prefecture.As the Asahi Shimbun (21 September, 2019a) reported: The New Zealand national team arrived at Narita Airport on the evening of 9 th [September].The heavy traffic on the way to Kashiwa city delayed their arrival by more than one and a half hours.At an open space in front of their staying hotel were about 2400 fans.In response to a sudden request from the city council staff being worried about the delay, the city's rugby union staged the Kashiwa haka performed by 50 kids from Kashiwa Rugby School… The Kashiwa haka was composed by Karl Pokino who is Māori and a coach of Auckland Rugby Union that the city's rugby union has a relationship with.
The video of the kids performing the Kashiwa haka at the airport was shared on the World Rugby official YouTube account and viewed more than two million times within a span of 2 weeks.While adaption of the haka outside of its original context is often regarded problematic as cultural appropriation or commercial misuse (Jackson and Hokowhitu, 2002), the Kashiwa haka uniquely demonstrated how the haka can be glocalised and mobilised as a sign of hospitality and respect in welcoming the All Blacks while simultaneously producing a 'cosmopolitan moment' for the Japanese society to celebrate its embodiment of foreignness and share its sense of friendship and solidarity between Japan and New Zealand, and the international (rugby) community more generally.
Another aspect of cosmopolitanism was the celebration and embodiment of volunteering, which was perhaps more profoundly associated with the promotion of ethical principles and realisation of a peaceful society.On 13 th October 2019, Typhoon Hagibis forced the match between Canada and Namibia in the city of Kamaishi to be cancelled.Kamaishi, home to one of the Japanese Top League rugby clubs, was devastated by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami and selected as a host city of RWC matches with a newly built stadium as a symbol of disaster recovery.After the cancellation of the match was announced, some of the Canadian players initiated an action to help out with disaster recovery by shovelling the dirt and carrying furniture and debris out of the affected areas.As the Asahi Shimbun (14 October 2019) reported: In the morning when a city official visited their accommodation to discuss re-scheduling, the players offered an idea of volunteering.Conor Trainor said "it reminded me of the importance of protecting a family and friends during a disaster", and Masao Hatano who looked surprised by getting help with carrying out his furniture said "it was unbelievable that national players came to help".
The volunteering act of helping with disaster recovery was then followed by Vinny Hammond, strategic analyst of Ireland, and five Japanese players in Chiba prefecture which was also affected severely by the typhoon.Perhaps, the chain reaction of volunteering from the Canadian team to others was the most powerful global display of international solidarity and cosmopolitanism through the RWC.As manifested in various forms, celebration and embracement of cosmopolitan characteristics through the RWC were widely reported and shared.However, more nuanced analysis of these cosmopolitan moments reveals their seemingly contradictory impacts on the reinforcement of nationalism, to which we now turn.

Key themes of cosmopolitan nationalism
Representation of foreign-born players as 'more Japanese than the Japanese'.According to Kobayashi and Jackson (2020), global or foreign ideas are accepted mostly via selective incorporations and subject to glocalisation or nationalisation upon its adoption in Japan.This was consistent with the ideas of the diversity, internationalism and cosmopolitanism that were celebrated and incorporated through media representations of the RWC.Perhaps the most illustrative case in point was the media's attempt at Japanisation or legitimisation of foreign-born players as representatives of Japan.More specifically, even though the diversity of the Japanese team was celebrated and promoted, their Japaneseness was nonetheless emphasised.The foreign-born captain, Michael Leitch, was at the centre of this discursive construction as in an interview featured in the Asahi Shimbun (20 September 2019): After entering Tokai University, he joined the Japanese national team at the age of 20… Although there were paths for him to choose a representative team of powerhouse New Zealand or maternal home nation Fiji, it was natural for Leitch to choose the Japanese team, "because I grew a lot in Japan".He got married in 2012 with Satomi who was a classmate at his university and gained Japanese citizenship in 2013.In the 2015 RWC, he was one of the heroes from 'the biggest upset in the history of sport' by winning against South Africa.For Leitch, the World Cup is where he can return the favour to Japanese rugby, "Foreigners look down on Japanese rugby.I have worked hard to get Japan stronger and win respect".This narrative is significant at multiple levels of legitimisation as it subtly asserts a range of Leitch's 'credentials' as Japanese: (a) he was educated in high school and university in Japan; (b) he chose to represent Japan as his nation over other choices; (c) he demonstrated a firm commitment to Japan by playing for the Japanese team over 10 years; (d) he is married to a Japanese woman; (e) he is a naturalised citizen of Japan; (f) he contributed to one of the most historic national achievements of any Japanese sports teams through the 2015 RWC; (g) he is not a foreigner because foreigners (gaikokujin) are the ones who look down on Japan and he is in fact trying to win respect for Japan-and therefore loyal to the nation.
The media's emphasis on Japanese quality, virtue and taste demonstrated by foreign-born naturalised Japanese athletes has been identified previously.For instance, Chiba et al. (2001: 215) discussed the Brazilian-born naturalised Japanese players of the men's national football team being depicted as "more Japanese than the Japanese" in the 1990s.However, in contrast to the presence of a few ethnic minorities represented within the Japanese national football team at any given time, the prominence of foreign-born players including Japanese residents in addition to naturalised citizens in the 2019 RWC Japanese team far exceeds the scale and extent of cosmopolitan discourse and subsequent mobilisation of it into a narrative of a Japanese triumph and progress in the form of cosmopolitan nationalism.
In relation to the media's effort in Japanising representations of the foreign-born players, another relevant illustration of how the diversity and cosmopolitan ideals were nationalised is the aforementioned discourse of 'One Team'.When the team slogan was introduced by Jamie Joseph at the press conference, it was referred to in full as "One team for Japan, all attitude" (Japan Rugby Football Union, 28 October 2016).As such, while being used mainly to celebrate the diversity and inclusion of the foreignness, the term nonetheless signifies that it is ultimately and collectively for Japan.The underlining assumption here is that Joseph and his team were well aware of the fact that diversity and foreignness could be accepted only if they contribute to a Japanese national success-as the opposite was proven true for the disastrous 1999 campaign in which Joseph participated as one of the players.This more-nationalist-than-cosmopolitan attitude of Japan's embracement with diversity is encapsulated in the comment by Sinali Latu, a Tongan-born former Japanese national rugby team player, featured in the Asahi Shimbun (26 November 2019): There are two key factors that led to the success of the Japanese team at this event.First, they overcame the language barrier.All the players at least understood the common language [in English] used during the matches.Second, there was a leader like Michael Leitch who was able to bring together the players of different nationalities.These factors are also the key for Japanese society to be stronger.In the country that will see more elderly people and less children in the future, there is a clear need for support from foreigners… This time, the Japanese team made it to the last eight, but if it did not, the inclusion of many foreign-born players may have been criticised.This discourse of the need for foreigners in filling the shortage of labour has been prevalent in discussions by Japanese politicians and business leaders across a range of industries.Here, the concept of One Team, along with the multi-cultural Japanese team, was mobilised by the media to promote a vision of how cosmopolitan and diverse Japan could look like as a functional and successful nation on the world stage.
Japanese identity and culture being complimented by foreigners.Apart from the sensational campaign by the Japanese team, celebrations of national culture and identity were also invigorated by comments from visiting foreign teams and players in appreciating Japanese hospitality or omotenashi.One such incident was highlighted after the match between Uruguay and Fiji on 25 th September: Before the match, a boy from Tokyo who was chosen as a 'mascot kid' to accompany Uruguayan players upon entry to the pitch sung Uruguay's national anthem in Spanish with its players.After the match, Uruguay's Captain Gaminara spoke to the press that "the kid who entered with us sung our national anthem.I felt like I was in my home nation…" and ended his comments with thanks in Japanese "arigato ̄"… The trend of mascot kids singing national anthems for other [foreign] teams has since been spreading, and there are praises on the internet saying that "this is wonderful omotenashi" (Asahi Shimbun, 4 th October 2019).
Since omotenashi was famously featured in, and promulgated by, Christel Takigawa's speech at the International Olympic Committee session as part of the bid to host the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games and later selected as one of the winners of the 2013 Buzzword Award, the word has been elevated and promoted by the Japanese tourism sector as a signifier of the distinctively Japanese way of hospitality, thereby encapsulating a fusion of cosmopolitanism and cultural nationalism.The news article continued to endorse a view that Japanese omotenashi has drawn cosmopolitan gestures of the visiting teams and players in returning the favour: The overseas teams have also expressed appreciation to Japan's welcoming through their actions… Once the World Cup began, after-match bowing by New Zealandthe team aiming to win three consecutive championshipsdrew public attention, and this has been further emulated by other teams.The Captain of New Zealand Read told the press "Japanese people love the All Blacks.We wanted to return the favour.It would be great to connect with as many people as possible" (Asahi Shimbun, 4 th October 2019).
The assertion that Japanese hospitality inspired foreign visitorsespecially three-time world champions the All Blacksto respect and embrace Japanese culture and customs such as bowing reinforces a sense of national pride and moral righteousness for Japanese readers.Consequently, cosmopolitan ideals of being inclusive and respectful to local sensibilities as shown by the foreign teams and fans were turned into a source of nationalism within the process of cosmopolitan nationalisation.

Discussion/Conclusion
The hosting of the 2019 RWC offered an ample opportunity for Japan to cultivate its own version of a cosmopolitan vision and promote this among its citizens through media representations of diversity, ethnic inclusion and respect towards the foreign Others.In particular, the fairy tale story of the Japanese 'multicultural' national team and its elevated slogan of 'One Team' served as a key condition for cosmopolitan moments to arise and thrive.Our study firstly identified the celebration and embracement of foreignness in the Asahi Shimbun as evidence of 'thin' cosmopolitanism, which was reinforced by the unreserved praise of the Japanese team's performance from the overseas media and the absence of usual regional sporting rivalries in rugby.From our analysis, the most illustrative example of intercultural exchanges was found between Japan and New Zealand.As several players and coaches of the Japanese team were affiliated with New Zealand in one way or another, their foreignness was mobilised to represent the symbolic ties between the two nations.Such an example of 'thick' cosmopolitanism was most profoundly embedded within the narratives of New-Zealand-born and naturalised-as-Japanese captain Michael Leitch.Another theme that contributed to the generation of cosmopolitan moments was international cooperation arising from foreign players' initiatives to volunteer for the disaster recovery after Typhoon Hagibis forced some matches to be cancelled.This powerful display of international solidarity and a chain reaction of volunteering among the foreign teams further strengthened the sense of thick cosmopolitanism that the event promised to bring to the host nation.In a theoretical vein, both of these thin and thick cosmopolitan conditions led the Japanese media and public to embody "the principle of peaceful coexistence" which "requires moral agents to tolerate the actual or potential embodied co-presence of non-threatening others and their participation in a sharable world" (Roche, 2011: 81).
Our study secondly identified how the celebration of cosmopolitanism was then incorporated into narratives of Japan's success on the world stage through acceptance of foreignness and diversity in the form of cosmopolitan nationalism.In contrast to the negative public reactions to the ethnic diversity of the Japanese team in the 1999 RWC, the realisation of cosmopolitan moments through the 2019 RWC is likely to have been derived less from the two decades of growing thick cosmopolitan attitudes and values in Japan than from the differing results of the two national teams on the pitch.In other words, inclusion and acceptance of foreigners or the foreignness was conditional to their contributions to the cultural-economic prosperity of Japan.This echoes the findings from previous studies that the acceptance of foreign-born head coaches hinged strictly on their merits and on-field success (Blackett, 2022;Skey, 2015).Moreover, core constituents of Japanese national culture and customs were largely preserved and defended as exemplified by the media's reporting of foreign players bowing to Japanese spectators as a form of showing respect to the local culture.To further illustrate this point, the foreign-born players of the Japanese team, such as Michael Leitch, were subjected to media scrutiny of their 'credentials' as Japanese, or their extent of being Japanised, including competency in Japanese language, knowledge of national culture and loyalty to the nation.Although such representations may be perceived as 'benign' in the eyes of the public, they also function to further essentialise the idea of what it means to be Japanese, suppress individual differences within and, in turn, exclude those who do not fit in from an imagined community of the nation.Consequently, far from full realisation of a cosmopolitan vision for a multicultural, diverse and inclusive society, we contend that the temporary celebration of thin cosmopolitan moments through conditional acceptance of foreignness was nonetheless underpinned by the primary interests of national unification, prestige and advancement.Therefore, the study revealed the vulnerability of thin cosmopolitanism to be appropriated as a source of nationalism while demonstrating the conceptual utility of thin and thick cosmopolitanism for the analysis of cosmopolitan nationalism as a central framework.To interpret this finding from the lens of critical discourse analysis, discursive texts and practices of cosmopolitanism produced in relation to the RWC were subsumed into latent yet powerful discourses of nationalism within the 'order of discourses' (Fairclough, 2010).
This article has offered a point of contrast with previous research on sports mega-events which were almost exclusively viewed as a platform for nationalism and nation-building without sufficiently taking into account their cosmopolitan possibilities.This is not to deny the significance of the coverage on the national team, characters and achievement-as there are certainly more data linked with these than cosmopolitan desires and displays in our analysis-but to point out that cosmopolitan manifestations need to be vigorously discussed, analysed and theorised.On cosmopolitan nationalism, Beck (2006) painted an optimistic picture of it as a realistic pathway to eventually achieve the full extent of cosmopolitanisation.Likewise, Eckersley (2007) advocates that "instead of welcoming the weakening of nationalism as a force that constrains cosmopolitan goals, cosmopolitans should be searching for ways to rescue, reframe and harness nationalism so that it takes on a more cosmopolitan character" (p.676).If they are right, the hosting of the RWC and the representations of ethnic diversity and inclusion must have contributed significantly to the making of cosmopolitan society in Japan.Nevertheless, as our analysis demonstrated, cosmopolitan moments and displays cannot be celebrated unreservedly as they also function to mask the struggles and discriminations that foreign migrants face in their everyday life and may merely promote the conditional inclusion of foreigners.
The study was meant to open up new avenues of inquiry regarding an under-researched topic of cosmopolitanism rather than to offer definitive answers to the dialectical relations between cosmopolitanism and nationalism.In this sense, it should be noted that the study was limited by the selections of the Asahi Shimbun as the primary source and other relevant, publicly available texts as supplementary sources of data for critical discourse analysis.Further research may benefit from setting up comparative analysis of: (1) liberal and conservative newspapers (such as Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun); (2) mass and social media; or (3) different events or nations.In particular, it is anticipated that further research on this topic would assist in revealing whether the extent of cosmopolitan engagement through the 2019 RWC in Japan was an exceptional case, what determines the conditions for cosmopolitan moments to arise and thrive, and how cosmopolitanism, of either thick or thin variants, can be embodied to weaken or strengthen nationalism.

Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article.

Table 1 .
Profiles of foreign-born players in the 2019 RWC Japanese team (compiled by the authors).