Abstract
Eliminating violence from sports is an urgent issue with no easy answers. This paper sheds new light on the current debate concerning sport and violence by addressing one of its underlying assumptions: the dualism that considers sport and violence as mutually exclusive categories, according to which the “purification” of sport by adherence to its rules should necessarily eradicate violence.
While we are ready to accept Norbert Elias’s theory of the civilizing process, according to which social norms – including the rules of sport – curb the direct expression of aggression, we note that impulsive infraction of rules accounts for but a part of occurrences of sport violence. Numerous studies on extracurricular athletic club activities (bukatsu) in Japanese schools demonstrate that corporal punishment is used and justified as a means to improve athletic performance required by the rules. If such violence is not a means to violate the rules but to adhere to them, we have no choice but to identify the rules as the root cause of substantial cases of sport violence.
In order to understand how sport rules produce violence, we build on Shigeki Kawatani’s observation that sport inevitably exercises violence in the form of producing losers. We then identify two elements that constitute this violence: spatiotemporal confinement of the body and its being subjected to visual domination. I will then argue, drawing on Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, that these elements were crucial to the historical emergence of sport. I will further argue, drawing on Allen Guttmann and Bernard Suits, that these elements enable the enjoyment of sport both as play and as a game. I then examine how violence produced by these elements is transformed into physical violence, drawing on the example of corporal punishment in bukatsu.
To explore the possibility of a physical activity that subjects the body neither to spatiotemporal
confinement nor visual domination, we will examine meetings held for the technical exchange of “push hands (suishu in Japanese, tuishou in Chinese)”, one of the interpersonal practice methods of tai chi (taikyokuken in Japanese, taijiquan in Chinese), notable for its emphasis on the sense of touch rather than sight. These meetings have been held regularly in Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe, and the author has participated in them since 1997 up to the time of writing in 2024. We focus on how the participants, coming from many martial styles and combat sports, are able to keep violence at bay and enjoy the game of push hands despite the lack of fixed rules.
