Bushido vs. Science: Beyond Conflicting Pedagogies of Japanese Basketball Coaching
Outside Japan, most people do not know that Japanese people play basketball. Even within Japan, the sport does not enjoy the same level of domestic popularity as other ‘Western’ sports like baseball, soccer, track and field or volleyball, nor does it garner much media attention. Few people know the names of Japan’s most famous professional basketball players, and few people know that Japan has been playing basketball for over a century. Moreover, Japanese basketball has not had much international success. To those involved in it, this lack of success and popularity is considered proof that Japanese basketball is a ‘minor’ sport in ‘crisis’, crisis often blamed on the coaches who coach it and the pedagogies they employ. At the school level, corporal punishment, violence, and indecent acts have highlighted the fact that there are many untrained coaches; indeed, most coaches in Japan are unpaid and uncertified volunteers. In response to this ‘crisis’, coaches are said to employ one of two pedagogies: the ‘Bushidō’ or the ‘scientific’, the former invoking a traditional and emotional ‘Japanese’ spirit and the other symbolizing the importance of ‘Western’ scientific rationalism and thinking in sports. Though many authors writing about Japanese sports have catalogued the ‘spiritual’ way that sports are battled in Japan, amply noting how authoritarian coaches reign over teams and how Japanese athletes play sports like samurai, until now there has been little scholarship on the alternative ways that sports are played or coached in Japan, let alone the alternative pedagogies coaches bring to bear on such instruction. This thesis fills that void by detailing – and transcending – two Japanese basketball pedagogies, describing how they are constructed to be seen as dominant and conflicting, showing what they symbolize, and explaining why they are imagined in cultural terms.
