Dragon Balls and Rugby Balls: negotiating cultural identity on the sports field
Written by Elena Kolesova
With the ever growing effect of global popular culture on the performance of national and local or personal identity, these unpredictable interactions are worthy of investigation. The case under discussion here brings together two cultural symbols, one, the well-known Japanese anime, DBZ. The other is touch rugby, a social sport very popular among New Zealanders, and one that is derived from rugby union and rugby league and also contributes towards the New Zealand Rugby culture. It is fair to say that in the last two decades anime has become one of the cultural icons of Japan that leads the list of Japanese soft-power attributes. It is equally right to say that rugby for many New Zealanders is a passion, a religion, and a manifestation of ‘kiwi’. The two symbols of national identity and identification, the Japanese symbol and the New Zealand one, were brought together by a group of young Maori men who became inspired by DBZ to form their touch rugby club in 2000 in the New Zealand city of Hamilton. In the early 2000 these men were in their late teens and early twenties. They moved to Hamilton from Bay of Plenty to study at Waikato University. Not long after that they formed The Saiyans Touch (Rugby) Club. Saiyans is the name of a nearly extinct extraterrestrial race where the main character of the DBZ, Goku, comes from.
In the words Lance, one of the founding members:
"We all saw ourselves as being set apart from others, for a few reasons."
Mainly we were Maori and similar wave lengths at the time i.e. into our sports, social life we did together. We were kind of new to the Hamilton touch scene, we knew about the top two teams ‘X-men’ and ‘Tamatoa’; who also tried to recruit us. But we thought we could make the competition more interesting by putting in our team; and since we all like watching DBZ the ‘Saiyans’ were hatched.
The story continues:
[For the] first two years boys gave it a crack, we were competitive. Also [it created] another reason for us to hang out and socialise, especially after [our practice or game]. Three years along we started getting funding for men’s, woman’s, and mixed. We had our own uniforms with our own unique Maori design, courtesy of Kawharu Greensill. That’s when we realised we had a club and a culture going; we started to make a name for ourselves.
Lance, his brothers and some of their friends, who were also called ‘brothers’ following the tradition of whanau, the Maori word for extended family, were exposed to DBZ since their teenage years. Like most New Zealand children who grew up in late 1990s and early 2000s they watched DBZ rushing home from school as the series was broadcasted on New Zealand television at 3.15pm every afternoon. Lance recaptures the time:
All ‘Da Brothers’ had spare time at 3.15 pm, we all liked a bit of kung fu (Bruce Lee) and DBZ was it. It’s action packed to the extreme levels (special powers), and because it is animated the only limits are the limits of the creator’s mind. ‘Asians – freaky chaps’.
The choice of DBZ was initially determined by a simple reason that there was not much else to watch at this time for kids after school or at least the other programmes were not as exciting. It was basically DBZ or nothing. But when they started watching DBZ there was no way back for these guys as for many other youth around the globe. There was one other factor that also predisposed their love for DBZ. Their father spent some time working in Japan when they grew up. They remembered their father bringing toys and different memorabilia from Japan that included some anime and merchandised products. An additional detail was that the brothers had some Chinese heritage; they had a Chinese great-grandmother. This Asian heritage still can be traced in their physical appearances. However, as they honestly admitted their Chinese heritage did not spread beyond their love for Chinese food (“Grandmother could cook Chinese food!”) and their love for Marshal Arts movies and Japanese anime. There was certain cultural proximity, familiarity with the Japanese popular culture established by them at the early age. But it was really the DBZ that captured their imagination.
My next question is how this global cultural phenomena was included in the local or even personal discourse of identity using the example of the Saiyans Touch Club? This question follows De Certeau’s enquiry about how media texts are used beyond their intended and pre-encoded use. When consumers of popular culture become active “users” of this culture and create their own meaning beyond the author’s or producer’s imagination.
Perhaps it was the alienation that these boys felt coming to study in Hamilton from other parts of New Zealand, mainly from the north of the Northern island, that turn them to the imaginative world of DBZ. Being isolated from their whanau (family) played a role of catalyst in their search for identity. Whanau, extended family, has a particular meaning for Maori people. Through identification with other members of your whanau you become who you are, it provides an institute for socialisation. Such identification provides security, comfort, meaning to your life and also differentiates you from others. Whanau is a place where you grow up, where you know people and they know you and through mutual support you learn to position yourself, firstly, within this particular whanau and later within a larger world. You discover/perform your own identity through identification with your local whanau. In this sense,
Goku’s journey from his childhood to his adulthood, his initial dislocation from his own family and creating his ‘whanau’ through his journey, making new friends, constantly negotiating his own identity, appealed to these Maori men.
(Don’t we all have a certain book, film, song or any other cultural artifact that had a significant impact on us when we were growing up?) But then it was the martial arts, fights, the physicality and often brutality to an extreme level shown in this anime. Young men like this too.
The basic attributes that appealed to the world-wide audience attracted DBZ to these Maori men. However, what set them apart from many other fans of DBZ world-wide including New Zealand, was that they did not want to form just another DBZ fan club in Hamilton, which is more traditional path for fans of popular culture, but made a decision to base their touch (rugby) team on DBZ. In fact, they resisted the notion of ‘otaku’ because it doesn’t capture their essence. This was a form of hybridisation that brought together the DBZ values with whanau identification. Moreover, the worldwide popularity of DBZ seems did not worry them, and they did not want to acknowledge that DBZ was “cool”. They confessed that it did not really matter to them whether DBZ was a Japanese anime, and Japanese popular culture is branded as “cool” first of all by Japanese media these days. According to one of the boy’s sisters:
I think that it was the family story that attracted them. Close relations between people were so appealing to them. As the story developed and the boys were growing up and formed their own families these values presented in DBZ became even more important to them. And this is what I like about it too.
And another sister adds:
"They are all unique different characters in DBZ but they all contribute to the family. I think this family motive was and still remains very important for the boys and for all our family. And the boys are also strong characters in their own right."
Bringing together DBZ and Touch rugby and forming the Saiyans Touch Rugby Club confirms De Certeau’s idea that the meaning of cultural objects is transformed and reinterpreted in order to adapt it to the popular interests of a different social group and to accommodate their personal interests.
I wish to propose that the performing of rugby as a national sport, a national identity with subsequent commercialization of the sport through global advertising often takes Maori culture out of it local context and by doing so degrades the actual meaning of Maori symbols. This encourages young Maori men to search for other symbols of identification. It doesn’t make rugby less attractive for these men, as the All Blacks remain NZ national heroes, but it allows them to experiment with symbols from other cultures that may be more meaningful to them than the national campaign to teach the nation how to be the ‘right’ rugby fans. One of the possible explanations for choosing DBZ as the source of inspiration could be in warrior culture strongly present in DBZ. When their own warrior culture became deformed via international advertising, it started to lose its coolness that is so attractive to young people. The founders of Saiyans Touch Rugby team confessed that Maori culture encourages young men to become warriors. However, they struggled to find real life role models among them and it made them to turn to some fictional warriors. In the early 2000s DBZ was cool. Ten years ago DBZ was still associated with novelty, and Japanese anime and manga were mainly unknown to the main stream New Zealand society. There was Sailor Moon in the 1990s but it was mainly for girls. Although DBZ was rapidly gaining its popularity it was still novel, different and, at the same time, it fulfilled the desire to create their own place in a new location, taught them warriors’ values and assisted with the construction of their own identity –their whanau was different to others but very inclusive to those who were willing to share their interests and passion for touch rugby, and for DBZ.
In the words of one of the founders of the club:
"Every year we were getting Maori and [Poly-]Nesians joining up who were new to Hamilton, and needed a family oriented environment to help as a stepping stone into independence. Especially for those who come to Hamilton on their own. We were a family; [a] home away from home."
The Saiyans Touch Club represents a form of hybrid identity brought together by three or even more different cultures: the imaginative world of the warrior culture constructed by DBZ, the blend of Maori culture centered on whanau and the Touch Rugby culture that is also a part of national rugby culture.
Hence, there is also a predominantly white New Zealand national identity that these men were interacting with through everyday practice. I hope that through discussing this very particular case I have able to demonstrate how people can identify themselves with other culture or cultures. The irony of this case, at least as I see it, is that Maori men in the white country of New Zealand choose to identify themselves with the yellow race of the Saiyans. They did this in a very self-conscious manner through engagement with global cultural flows. They did not simply mimic their cultural idols by creating the conventional fan club, neither did they passively consume popular culture.
