2021 Volume 43 Issue 2 Pages 81-95
This paper examines the consideration of “amateurism” in philosophy of education, referring to the death of Kokichi Tsuburaya, a long-distance runner who had won the bronze medal at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. He committed suicide in 1967 just before the selection of the Mexico Olympics.
Although the Olympic at that time was nominally regarded as an amateur festival, many of athletes in those days actually worked and attended the Games professionally. Tsuburaya belonged to Japan Self-Defense Forces Physical Training School, a national training institution for athletes, and many people believe that he chose to die due to the pressure of the organization.
However, this paper tried to provide the new perspective for the affair and to gain an educational philosophical awareness, not only by considering the social significance of his death, but also what kind of changes occurred in his mind as a human being.
First, the paper examined his and other athletes’ life and mind at that time. And then it reconsidered the definition of “amateurism” using the theories of Higuchi, Imamura, and Hannah Arendt. The conclusion of this paper is that he chose to die himself because he could not withdraw into the “private territory” as a human being where his family and lovers are, neither he could not appear to the “public territory” as an individual who escaped from the evaluation by others. In other words, he was not an “amateur” and a “hero”, in Arendt’s words, who lived his own story and who created unexpected things in “the space of appearance”.
This is possibly one of the significant modern educational issues, not only in sports. This viewpoint would propose another possibility of public education that every person can be accepted “just being that person in the world”, not only “coming to be able to something”.
