Abstract
Japanese competitive eaters first arrived at the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest held annually on July 4 at Coney Island, New York, in the late 1990s, transforming the event from a local curiosity into a modern sport in the process. From 1997 to 2006, Hirofumi Nakajima, Kazutoyo Arai, Takeru Kobayashi, and other Japanese eaters redefined the quest for records in competitive eating and introduced new training and competition techniques to their American counterparts. By leaning into jingoistic rhetoric to market a series of regional qualifiers and form the International Federation of Competitive Eating, Nathan's organizers used the Japanese as a foreign rival around which to construct and expand the sport's bureaucracy. Japanese intervention at Coney Island catalyzed the popularity of competitive eating and sparked processes of sportification that transformed the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest from a boardwalk sideshow into a global spectacle.
