Drawing on P. David Marshall's understanding of the celebrity, 1 David Andrews and Steve Jackson delineated sport celebrities as 'significant public entities responsible for structuring meaning, crystallizing ideologies, and offering contextually grounded maps for private individuals as they navigate contemporary conditions of existence '. 2 This interpretation alludes to an important role for sport celebrities in linking the public projection of particular values, desires, and personalities and the private experience in association with, or consumption of, such values, desires, and personalities in everyday life. Like classic celebrity figures in cinema and films, the sport celebrity is constructed through the historical development of mass media including newspapers, radio, television and, now more pervasively, the internet. While the sport celebrity has become a popular topic in sport studies, 3 there has been little attention devoted to an understanding of the commonality and difference in how Asian athletes may embrace, embody, reproduce, or re-code the notion of sport celebrity. With the emergence of more than a few world-class Asian athletes in the twenty-first century, this phenomenon demands scholarly attention. As such, Asian Sport Celebrity provides the first collection of its kind to take an in-depth and holistic look at a range of socio-cultural issues related to the Asian sport celebrity including globalization, transnationalism, migration, post/coloniality, gender politics, spectacle, citizenship, and nationalism.Three considerations illustrate the importance of studying the Asian sport celebrity. First, there are variegated and diverse stories of globalization. As products of Western modernization, the institutions of sport and celebrity were both disseminated from the West to Asia. In the same vain, sport celebrities have been produced and represented as part of the transformation of Asian societies in an accelerated and non-linear fashion through globalization. However, the ways in which the sport celebrity is embraced and (re-)articulated by the Asian contexts, experiences and interpretations have been underexplored. Second, Asian sport celebrities have become more and more salient across national, regional, and global levels due to their increasing visibility via the media as well as the recent rise of sport mega-events CONTACT Koji Kobayashi