Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн
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By 1970, surfing was already firmly established in Japan. As was true of a number of places around the world, it arrived as an indirect by-product of American military power. Japanese fishermen had ridden ita-go, which were a primitive form of bodyboards, since at least the second decade of the twentieth century (and perhaps as early as the twelfth century), and there may have been people stand-up Surfing on Honshu as early as the late 1920s. But it was, by all accounts, American servicemen stationed in Japan after World War II who planted the seeds of the sport’s modern growth and popularity. They brought surfboards with them to Japan, where they shared their equipment and pointers with a number of curious locals. These locals began building their own boards and forming clubs, and, by 1964, the clubs were competing against one another. In 1965, the Nippon Surfing Association was founded.49 Word of Japan was getting out. Surfer reported sailors’ accounts of “perfectly formed” waves in 1962 and ran an eight-page spread on Bruce Brown’s Japanese travels for The Endless Summer in 1964.50 Petersen’s Surfing Yearbook followed up with a short piece in 1966, and Surfer published a ten-page feature on the country in 1968.51 As they had with baseball, Japanese indigenized the aquatic pastime, developing a vibrant surf culture that, by the early twenty-first century, encompassed an estimated 750,000 surfers, seven surfing magazines, some nine hundred surf shops, and a professional surfing association.52 Women were particularly well represented. Japan, wrote Michael Scott Moore in 2010, “may have a higher proportion of female surfers than any nation in the world.”53