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The Hard Work of Working Out

Defining Leisure, Health, and Beauty in a Japanese Fitness Club

Edwin O. Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies at Harvard University

The author has taken the fitness club as the institutional focus through which to explore how health, beauty, and leisure are constructed, consumed, and challenged in late-capitalist Japan. Given the cultural emphasis on effort and the pervasive and narrow standard for female beauty in Japan, the fact that most fitness club members do not want to work at working out is surprising. This grounded analysis will expose the fitness club as a contradictory space where the tensions between labor and leisure, and between health and beauty, prove to be irreconcilable.

Journal of Sport & Social Issues, Vol. 24, No. 3, 260-281 (2000)
DOI: 10.1177/0193723500243004


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