This article discusses the considerable significance that ‘school club activities’ play in Japanese culture.
School Club Activities
With the extremely high percentage of students enrolling in high schools (more than 97 percent in 2010, reported by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan)(1), it can be reasonably assumed that the life of Japanese youth is substantially synonymous for the life of Japanese high and junior high school students: the youth’s life as a student occupies a large part of his/her life. In these circumstances, Japanese manga and anime have put a great emphasis, presumably perplexingly too great for non-Japanese audience, on school activities as their topics, especially those of school sports clubs.NAKAZAWA Atsushi enumerates five inexplicable things about the Japanese school activities system:(1)they are organized on a tremendous scale that cannot be observed in other countries, in spite of the fact that (2) they are extracurricular activities and not obligatory; and (3) they are not student-led activities but teacher/school-led, while (4) they are managed at the great expense of schools and, more importantly, of teachers involved; therefore (5) there have been attempts to transfer the responsibility to local communities, but in vain(2). It is a result of the complicated history of Japanese educational system after WWII. According to Nakazawa, the history of Japanese school (sports) club activities was that of amalgamation of, in short, democratism/egalitarianism and elitism/control-oriented education(3). In other words, extracurricular (especially sports) activities have been formally imposed upon students to nurture a liberal, fair spirit of sportsmanship in youth on one hand, and to control their ethics and lives in group (i.e., social) activities on the other. These apparently contradictory goals, interestingly, have served to provide a suitable stage for fierce competitions by good and earnest young students in Japanese juvenile narratives.
Sports Manga and the Battle Narrative
This cultural soil has furnished other types of school club activities with opportunities to be featured in battle-narrative style stories. An epochal work for Japanese society was TAKAHASHI Yoichi’s Captain Tsubasa (or Flash Kicker, 1981-88 in Weekly Shonen Jump), which not only has left an unforgettable mark in the history of sports manga but also greatly helped football gain recognition among Japanese children and allegedly formed a basis for the establishment of the Japanese professional football league in 1991 [fig.1].Fig.1. Captain Tsubasa, vol.1, cover page, by TAKAHASHI Yoichi, Shueisha 1989A football genius, Ozora Tsubasa moves to Nankatsu City and joins the football team of Nankatsu Elementary School to meet a series of formidable opponents and rivals. Though the stage is set in the world of elementary school clubs in the 1980s, the overall system is apparently taken from the Koshien narratives. It is interesting, however, that Captain Tsubasa, as ‘the’ predecessor of the football manga, utilizes some unrealistic superplays to entertain the target readers as did early baseball manga.Another genius can be found in KONOMI Takeshi’s Tennis-no Oji-sama (Prince of Tennis, 1999-2008 in Weekly Shonen Jump and a new series 2009 to present in Jump Square). The protagonist, Echizen Ryoma, who has proven his abilities by winning junior championships in the US, comes back to Japan to join Seishun Junior High School tennis club and aims for the national championship with his teammates[fig.2]. Significantly, for our purpose, the games described in the work are exclusively those of team competition: each player plays as a member of the school he/she belongs to.
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