Author Description

Political confrontation is commonplace between nations. Sport is not infrequently a medium for this confrontation. This book concentrates on the East Asian Olympic nations and their use of the London 2012 Olympics to sustain and perpetuate both internally and externally regional and national political concerns with roots in history at a time of momentous, even threatening, East Asian change. The political preoccupations expressed involving China, Japan and Korea (North and South) reveal a relative indifference to London as a medium of western projection or Olympism as a medium of global harmony but rather an eastern focus on competing national and regional problems exposed by events at London 2012. This book is a political prism with sport as a refractile catalyst: possibly even a prescient prospectus of East Asian pasts into futures! This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.