‘Cultivating Character’: The Association of British Athleticism with the Educational Value of Japanese Football in Shūkyū Monthly Magazine (1931–41)

Abstract

A unique aspect of Japanese football culture is that educational institutions have remained its primary exponents since its introduction in the late-nineteenth century. This paper analyses why educational institutions became so influential in Japanese football, utilizing articles published in the inaugural nationwide football magazine, Shūkyū, between 1931 and 41. Through a comprehensive analysis of various articles, selected essays provide evidence of (1) the eligibility of organized games to ‘cultivate character’; (2) Japanese football’s embrace and re-interpretation of the tenets of amateurism inherent in public school games; (3) the association of football participation in schools with the educational ideology of individualism; (4) the perception of sports by the educated elite as a fundamental element of Japanese education, rallying against the public perception that sports and schoolwork could be adequately balanced. Additionally, articles highlight the prominent role played by the Japanese ‘educated elite’ in promoting and disseminating the values of English association football as components of Japanese football culture, influenced by their ability to translate overseas sports media. This paper concludes that Japanese football literature was influential in disseminating the role of sport and education, which came to personify the institutionalization of the sport throughout the country.

Keywords:

• Japanese football
• education
• athleticism
• individualism
• character

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Allen Guttmann and Lee Thompson, Japanese Sports: A History (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 1.

2 Jikichi Imamura, ‘Honshi no shimei’ [Mission of this magazine], Shūkyū [Football], October 1931, 1.

3 Gen Iwasaki, ‘Dokusha no koe ichi dokusha ni kota fu’ [Reader’s Comments: A Response to a Reader], Shūkyū [Football], October 1935, 30.

4 Great Japan Football Association, ‘Kaimu hōkoku orimupikku daihyō senshu kōen-hi ōbosha meibo’ [Committee Report: List of Applicants for Sponsorship of Olympic Athletes], Shūkyū [Football], July 1936, 16–8; Great Japan Football Association, ‘Kaimu hōkoku orimupikku daihyō senshu kōen-hi ōbosha meibo – zoku’ [Committee Report: List of Applicants for Sponsorship of Olympic Athletes – Continued], Shūkyū [Football], September 1936, 11.

5 Great Japan Football Association, Shūkyū nenkan Shōwa nana-hachi nendo [Football Annual, 1932–33] (Tokyo: Great Japan Football Association, 1933), 97–129.

6 Great Japan Football Association, ‘Zenkoku ni “shūkyū” shikyoku o tsukure’ [Establishing “football” Branch Offices All Over the Country], Shūkyū [Football], January 1936, 29.

7 John Horne and Derek Bleakley, ‘The Development of Football in Japan’, in Japan, Korea and the 2002 World Cup, ed. John Horne and Wolfram Manzenreiter, (London: Routledge, 2002), 91–2.

8 Guttmann and Thompson, Japanese Sports, 190.

9 Dale Whitfield, ‘Education and Football: A History of the Cultural Accommodation of British Association Football into Japanese Society’, Sport in History 42, no. 1 (2022): 2.

10 Keiko Ikeda, ‘The History of Modern Sport in Japan: The British Influence through the Medium of Sport on Imperialism, Nationalism and Gender with Reference to the Works of J. A. Mangan’, in Manufacturing Masculinity the Mangan Oeuvre Global Reflections on J.A. Mangan’s Studies of Masculinity, Imperialism and Militarism, ed. Peter Horton (Berlin: Logos Verlag Berlin, 2017), 140.

11 Guttmann and Thompson, Japanese Sports, 81.

12 Ikeda, ‘History of Modern Sport in Japan’, 140.

13 Whitfield, ‘Education and Football’, 16–7.

14 Ikeda, ‘History of Modern Sport in Japan’, 146.

15 Ibid., 140; Guttmann and Thompson, Japanese Sports, 81.

16 ‘Sokaiya Foundations and History’, Japanese Economy 26, no. 3 (1998), 42.

17 Hiroshi Kagawa, ‘Kazoku de kizoku-in giin. Berurin gorin e daihyō o okuri seika o ageta, dai 2-dai JFA kaichō Fukao Ryūtarō’ [A Member of the House of Lords. Ryūtarō Fukao, the Second JFA President, Who Sent a Team to the Berlin Olympics], Gekkan Guran [GRUN Monthly], June 2008.

18 Ikeda, ‘History of Modern Sport in Japan’, 142.

19 Chōjirō Hayasaka, ‘Bengaku to undō to no kankei’ [The Relationship Between Schoolwork and Physical Activity], Shūkyū [Football], December 1935, 21.

20 Juntendo University’s Faculty of Physical Education, ‘Ryakureki (Noguchi Genzaburō kyōju tsuitō)’ [Biography (In Memory of Professor Genzaburō Noguchi)], Bulletin of the Faculty of Physical Education, Juntendo University 10, (1967–12): 1–2.

21 In addition to translating foreign works for publication in Shūkyū, in 1934, Konagaya published Daigaku no shimei [The Mission of the University] Based Primarily on a Translation of the Contents of Martin Heidegger’s Die selbstbehauptung der Deutschen universität [The Self-Assertion of the German University]. Ryōsaku Konagaya, ‘Daigaku no shimei’ [The Mission of the University], The Japanese Journal of Educational Research 2, no. 12 (1934): 1513–21.

22 ‘Gōka sukejūru sekai shūkyū seiha e gaikoku san chīmu shōhei’ [Invitation of Three Foreign Teams to Conquer World Football], Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, March 3, 1937.

23 Hiroshi Kagawa, ‘Tengoku no shūto no meijin to no kaiwa’ [Conversation with the Master of the Heavenly Shot], Sakkā Magajin [Soccer Magazine], July 1998; Japan Football Association, ‘JFA Hall of Fame Inductee: KAWAMOTO Taizo’, Japan Football Association, https://www.jfa.jp/eng/about_jfa/hall_of_fame/member/KAWAMOTO_Taizo.html (accessed January 23, 2022).

24 William W. Kelly, ‘The Spirit and Spectacle of School Baseball: Mass Media, Statemaking, and “Edu-tainment” in Japan, 1905–1935’, Senri Ethnological Studies 52, (2000): 107.

25 Yuji Ishizaki, ‘Yakyū gaidoku ronsō (Senkyūhyakujūicbinen) saikō: ‘Kyōiku ronsō’ to shite no kanōsei o tegakari to shite [Reconsideration of “Baseball Canker Controversy (1911): “As the Key Practice Toward the Possibilities of Educational Controversy]’, Japan Journal of Sport Sociology 11, (2003): 116.

26 Inazō Nitobe, ‘Yakyū gaidoku ron’ [Baseball Canker Controversy], Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, August 29, 1911.

27  J. A. Mangan, ‘Empires: West and East—Curious Conjunction and Contemporary Consequences, Complexity and Circumstances’, in Japanese Imperialism: Politics and Sport in East Asia, ed. J. A. Mangan and others (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 15.

28 Ibid., 20.

29 J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (London: Routledge, 2000), 9.

30 Ibid., 55; Gideon Dishon, ‘Games of Character: Team Sports, Games, and Character Development in Victorian public schools, 1850–1900’, Paedagogica Historica 53, no. 4 (2017): 366–9.

31 Gerald Redmond, ‘The First Tom Brown’s Schooldays: Origins and Evolution of “Muscular Christianity” in Children’s Literature, 1762–1857’, Quest 30, no. 1 (1978): 4–18.

32 Hayasaka, ‘Bengaku to undō to no kankei’, 21–2.

33 Genzaburō Noguchi, ‘Supōtsu to bengaku no mondai’ [Issues of Sport and Schoolwork], Shūkyū [Football], June 1936, 19.

34 Mangan, Athleticism, 56.

35 Ryōsaku Konagaya, ‘Shidō ni kansuru dansō’ [Reflections on Teaching], Shūkyū [Football], December 1937, 25.

36 E. P. Hughes, ‘The Ethical Ideal of the English Public School Boy’, Kokushi [Patriot] 5, no. 41 (1902): 4–7; E.P. Hughes, ‘Eikoku gakusei no rinriteki shisō’ [A Japanese Translation of ‘The Ethical Ideal of the English Public School Boy’], Kokushi [Patriot] 5, no. 42 (1902): 6–9; Keiko Ikeda, ‘British Cultural Influence and Japan: Elizabeth Phillips Hughes’s Visit for Educational Research in 1901–1902’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 31, no. 15 (2014): 1931–2.

37 Ikeda, ‘History of Modern Sport in Japan’, 140–2.

38 Ryūtarō Fukao, ‘Kojin no chikara’ [Individual Ability], Shūkyū [Football], September 1935, 3.

39 Mangan, Athleticism, 9.

40 Japan Football Association, ‘JFA Hall of Fame Inductee: FUKAO Ryutaro’, Japan Football Association, https://www.jfa.jp/eng/about_jfa/hall_of_fame/member/FUKAO_Ryutaro.html (accessed January 19, 2022).

41 Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies for UNESCO, Shiryō oyatoigaikokujin [Materials Relating to Government-Employed Foreign Experts] (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1975), 493.

42  W.G. Beasley, The Rise of Modern Japan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000): 88.

43 Olive Checkland, Britain’s Encounter with Meiji Japan, 1868–1912, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), 17.

44 Dishon, ‘Games of Character’, 364.

45  J. A. Mangan, ‘Grammar Schools and the Games Ethic in the Victorian and Edwardian Eras’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 15, no. 4 (1983): 322–3.

46 Hayasaka, ‘Bengaku to undō to no kankei’, 24.

47 Ibid., 22.

48 Taizō Kawamoto, ‘Mudai’ [Untitled], Shūkyū [Football], August 1940, 30.

49 Paul R. Deslandes, Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 5; John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 2005), 34.

50 Mangan, Athleticism, 9.

51 Yoshimitsu Khan, ‘Schooling Japan’s Imperial Subjects in the Early Shôwa Period’, History of Education 29, no. 3 (2000): 219–22.

52 Kawamoto, ‘Mudai’, 31.

53 Ibid., 30.

54 Ibid.

55 Keiko Ikeda and J. A. Mangan, ‘Towards the Construction of a New Regionalism? The End of East Asian Colonialism: Japanese Responses and Reactions to the Games of Asia’, in Japanese Imperialism: Politics and Sport in East Asia, ed. J. A. Mangan and others (London: Palgrave, 2018), 340–1.

56 Daniel Gorman, ‘Amateurism, Imperialism, Internationalism and the First British Empire Games’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 27, no. 4 (2010): 613.

57 For further reading regarding the Islington Corinthians and their 1937–38 world tour, see Rob Cavallini, Around the World in 95 Games (Surrey: Dog ‘N’ Duck Publications, 2008) and R. B. Alaway Football All Round the World (London: Newservice, 1948).

58 Japan Football Association, Nihon Sakkā no Ayumi [The Progress of Soccer in Japan]. (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1974), 108.

59 Shoji Ohashi [大橋正路], ‘Eigun no yokogao’ [Profile of the British Team], Shūkyū [Football], June 1938, 15.

60 Ibid., 18.

61 Noguchi, ‘Supōtsu to bengaku no mondai’, 20.

62 Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 87.

63 Richard Holt, ‘Amateurism and the English Gentleman: The Anatomy of a Sporting Culture’, Japan Journal of the History of Physical Education and Sport, no. 27 (2010): 75.

64 Ibid., 81.

65 Noguchi, ‘Supōtsu to bengaku no mondai’, 18–9.

66 Holt, ‘Amateurism and English Gentleman’, 77.

67 Konagaya, ‘Shidō ni kansuru dansō’, 24.

68 Following the aftermath of World War Two and prior to the establishment of the professional J. League in 1992, jitsugyō-dan (corporate-amateur clubs), extra-curricular football teams organized and funded by prominent Japanese companies for their employees, slowly began to emerge and challenge the domination of universities in Japanese football. These organizations were classified as ostensively ‘amateur teams’ since the payments received by players were designated for their work duties within the company. However, the reality is that such arrangements had more in common with the British pre-professionalism period during the late 1870s and early 1880s, when players would dedicate extensive amounts of time to footballing activities and relatively little time to their actual work duties. This concept of ‘corporate-amateur’ teams continues to endure within the structure of Japanese football today. Whitfield, ‘Education and football’, 11.

69 Kazumasa Suzuki, ‘Kindai kyōiku seido to Taishō shinkyōikuundō: Kyōikugaku ni okeru sho gainen no kentō o chūshin ni’ [The Modern Educational System and the Taisho New Educational Movement: An Examination of Concepts in Pedagogy], Kyōiku kenkyū jissen hōkokushi [Journal of Educational Research and Practice] 1, no. 1 (2017): 34–6.

70 Keiko Miyauchi Ikeda, ‘The Body from the Perspective of the Historical Phase in Society’, in Sport Science and Studies in Asia: Issues, Reflection sand Emergent Solutions, ed. Michael Chia and Jasson Chiang (Singapore: World Scientific, 2010), 224–5.

71 Katsumi Irie, Taishō Jiyū Yaiiku no Kenkyū [The Study of Liberal Physical Education in the Taisho Period] (Tokyo: Fumaido Publishing, 1993), 131.

72 Konagaya, ‘Shidō ni kansuru dansō’, 25.

73 Ricardo Duarte, D. Araujo, V. Correia and K. Davids, ‘Sports Teams as Superorganisms’, Sports Medicine 42, no. 8 (2012): 633.

74 Cyril Norwood, The English Tradition of Education (London: John Murray, 1929), 143.

75 Fukao, 3.

76 Ibid, 3.

77 Ibid, 3.

78 Kanji Nishio, Yōroppa no kojin shugi: Hito wa jiyū to iu shisō ni tae rareru ka [European individualism: Can people stand the idea of freedom?] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1969), 114–27.

79 Stefan Collini, ‘The Idea of ‘Character’ in Victorian Political Thought’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 35, (1985): 48–9.

80  J. A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (London: Frank Cass, 1998), 18.

81 Mangan, Empires: West and East, 20.

82 Hayasaka, ‘Bengaku to undō to no kankei’, 22–3.

83 Ibid., 23.

84 Whitfield, ‘Education and Football’, 17.

85  J. Gomez, J. Bradley, and P. Conway, ‘The Challenges of a High-Performance Student Athlete’, Irish Educational Studies 37, no. 3 (2018): 330.

86 Hayasaka, ‘Bengaku to undō to no kankei’, 22.

87 Noguchi, ‘Supōtsu to bengaku no mondai’, 19.

88 Kawamoto, ‘Mudai’, 30.

89 Noguchi, ‘Supōtsu to bengaku no mondai’, 18–9.

90 Graham Curry and Eric Dunning, Association Football: A Study in Figurational Sociology (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 33–4; Dishon, ‘Games of character’, 366–7.

91 Chie Nakane, Japanese Society (California: UC Press, 1972), 45.

92 Mangan, Games Ethic and Imperialism, 48; Peter Cave, ‘Bukatsudō: The Educational Role of Japanese School Clubs’, The Journal of Japanese Studies 30, no. 2 (2004), 390.

93 Mangan, Athleticism, 132.

94 Daishi Funaba, ‘The Pervasion of ‘The Spirit of Civilization’ through the Invented ‘Bushido in Meiji Era – the Role of Inazo Nitobe and the Japanese Trade Company, Jitsugyo-no-Nihon-sha’, Journal of East Asian Studies 13 (2015); Daishi Funaba and Keiko Ikeda, ‘Britain and the Development of Modern Japanese Sport: from Sporting Amateurism to Fascism during the Period of Japanese Imperialism’, Pan-Asuan Journal of Sports & Physical Education 3, no. 1 (2011); Ikeda and Mangan.

95 Whitfield, ‘Education and Football’, 3–5.

96 Atsushi Nakazawa, Undo¯-bu Katsudo¯ no Sengo to Genzai: Naze Supo¯tsu wa Gakko¯ Kyo¯iku ni Musubitsuke Rareru no ka [Athletic Club Activities – Postwar and Present: Why are sports tied to school education?]. (Tokyo: Seikyu¯sha, 2014), 50–1.

97 Sam Bamkin, ‘The Taught Curriculum of Moral Education at Japanese Elementary School: The Role of Classtime in the Broad Curriculum’, Contemporary Japan 32, no. 2 (2020): 8; Mayumi Nishino, ‘The Challenges of Developing Meaningful Curriculum Initiatives for Moral Education in Japan’, Journal of Moral Education 46, no. 1 (2017): 48.

98 Masahiro Sugiyama, Selina Khoo, and Rob Hess, ‘Grassroots Football Development in Japan’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 34 (2017), 1855.

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Dale Whitfield

Dale Whitfield is currently a PhD student studying at the Graduate School of Education, Hokkaido University. His research area includes Japanese football history and identity formation in sports development environments.