The task assigned to the author is to discuss the issues surrounding sports and violence, focusing on Japanese martial arts. Therefore, this article based on the Norbert Elias’s theory, specifically addressing civilization, self-restraint, and sportisasion.
　When examining civilization in Japan as a case study, the three periods of interest are the early modern period, the Meiji Restoration, and the period of occupation by GHQ. Various policies were involved in the monopoly of violence by the shogunate in the early modern period. One of the most serious issues was how to curb the violence of the samurai, who were the main actors in the monopoly of violence. The Shinkage-ryu was the technique that encouraged the warriors to exercise self-restraint. In order to achieve this, Shinkage-ryu, which is based on the principle of not cutting and not being cut, required the students to suppress their emotional ups and downs. When violence was temporarily eliminated in the limited space of practice, they obtained the beginnings of self-restraint.
　During the Meiji Restoration, there was a conflict between the volunteer military composed of samurai clans and the government’s conscript army. However, the identity of the samurai was shaken after the Sino-Japanese War, in which volunteer soldiers were banned and conscripts won the war. The Dai Nippon Butokukai was established to restore the honor of the samurai and integrate budo into the Emperor’s state. At the same time, Jigoro Kano established the Kodokan, a judo school, in the field of education. Although neither the Butokukai nor the Kodokan had given up the martiality of budo, from the 20th century onward, budo became a sport in the Eliasian sense of the word, centering on student budo.
　After the GHQ occupation, budo was forced to revive itself as a sport, but in the midst of this, budo’s martiality declined, and it became a sport in the Eliasian sense of the word.

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　Certain public interaction rituals structure the edges of the social order, including actions designated as violent. The French language has an array of notions that distinguishes the intensity of face-to-face conflict, such as bagarre (a moderate conflict, a fight), and rixe (an upscale conflict, a brawl). These are ritualized stages preceding the stage where the only purpose is the total physical destruction of the opponent. In this framework, punches, slaps and headbutts convey a strong imaginary. They are an essential dimension of the Western culture of violence. An ethnography as a bouncer in a town in western France enabled an approach to conflict in action. The observation of 78 situations involving blows revealed the symbolic significance of these attacks. The analysis of these attacks shows that while an action may be performed in pursuit of martial efficacy, it often distances from it in response to the desire for social victory, achieved through demonstration of courage and commitment in the action. An analysis of attacks allows to underline this social dimension. If these rituals are intended to limit the risks of physical damage, if they are structured interactions, presenting norms of action that respond to a social arbitration that can lead to victory or defeat, can we speak of a ritual structure close to a sport?

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　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.

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　This study clarifies how the influence of individual backgrounds and efforts are portrayed in gakushumanga(considered appropriate for use in school education) that depict efforts and success in fields outside of academia. Sports manga was in its heyday in the 1960s, and earnest efforts were highly valued, but by the 1980s, such efforts were ridiculed and declined. Generally, there is a tendency in manga since the 2000s, to value the protagonist's talents and rationalized efforts against the background of the sense of hopelessness that contemporary youth feel. We selected and analysed ‘Dance Dance Danseur’, a gakushumanga with sports as its theme, and ‘Blue Period’ which focuses on art. Both protagonists are depicted as having high communication skills and choosing to make efforts of their own volition. In gakushumanga of the 21st century, effortism(earnest efforts), which is said to have declined, continues to persist, but changes are observed in how efforts are made and how evaluated. Forced efforts are denied, and selfinitiated (preferably enjoyable) efforts are affirmed. Furthermore, while the protagonist is positioned at the top in the evaluation culture of schools that value communication skills (hyper-meritocracy), they are also required to deny conformity pressures when choosing the object of their efforts. By emphasizing the protagonist's subjective choices, the hopeless and choiceless situation is invisibly rendered. Therefore, it is easy to conclude that these gakushu-manga tend to fall into a self-responsibility theory that affirms the current situation as a result of their own efforts.

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This paper is an attempt to examine match-fixing (yaochō) in professional sumo from a moral perspective. Match-fixing has been a practice since the Edo period, and the morality of that action has been brought into question through various sumo matches in the practice’s long history. This paper focuses on the process by which moral views are formed as evident in public discourse on match-fixing as well as the realistic motivations for match-fixing by sumo wrestlers. While citing anthropological research on morality, this paper discusses the multiple dimensions and aspects of the morality of match-fixing. This perspective means that this paper focuses on (1) morality as a dynamic related to the reciprocal changes in the institution and practice of sumo wrestling and (2) the moral logic that underlies the interpersonal relationships between sumo wrestlers. With regard to the former, I will explain the process by which match-fixing was rebuffed and eliminated due to the moral influence of “Bushidō/Sumō-dō,” which was created with the trend toward modernization and nationalism during the Meiji period, and a series of institutional reforms in professional sumo. With regard to the latter, I reexamined “mutual assistance” among sumo wrestlers, which has often been pointed out in previous studies on match-fixing, and I present the varied meanings of match-fixing, which is based on different morals that cannot be reduced to the logic of exchange and reciprocity.

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