Abstract
According to documents at the Iwate prefectural record office, 24 local people went to Tokyo for the purpose of getting training in gymnastics during 1884-1892. The purpose of this paper is to clarify what kind of people they were and what kind of background they had, based upon the personal resumes among the documents at Iwate prefectural record office. Most of them were elementary school teachers, and they continued their jobs after their training in gymnastics in Tokyo. That is to say, this period brought gymnastics to elementary schools all over Iwate prefecture. However, most of the places in Tokyo that allowed the trainees to enter were crude private gymnastics schools. So most of the trainees could not acquire the arts of gymnatics sufficiently, and consequently they did not seem to play as active a role as had been expected of them when they returned to their own districts. The reason why they entered such schools was that the National Gymnastics School(Taiso Denshujo) had been abolished in 1886. So the national policy for educational training in gymnastics was not suitable for elementary schools in Japan at that time.
