The purpose of this study is to analysis the discourse of purity education.

In Japan, sex education was first included in the public school system under the framework of “purity education,” which required children to maintain chastity. The “purity” prescribed therein has since been criticized as a gender-oppressive moral norm that was considered more important for women than for men. However, it has also been noted that “gender-equal purity” was the dominant theme in the discourse on sexuality at that time.

When only the 22 major publications on purity education were analyzed, the discourse was found to contain no clear emphasized indications of a double standard in gender norms. Conversely, nine publications noted that under the postwar democratization policy, the concept of purity was one that applied to both sexes, and three of these actively sought to redress social inequalities and promote “gender-equal purity.” Nevertheless, promotion of “gender-equal purity” was not discussed in publications issued by the Japanese Ministry of Education, and discourse critical of the double standard aimed at promoting “gender-equal purity” did not come to dominate. Instead, the dominant discourse was one that treated the female body as a “childbearing, child-rearing body.”

Through the incorporation in physical education of eugenics, population problems, and this discourse in purity education of the “childbearing, child-rearing body,” a course of Health and Physical Education was created that had “biopolitical” as well as “anatomo-political” power. However, the separation of “physical purity” and “spiritual purity,” which was part of the discourse on purity education, also served as an opportunity to develop a counter-discourse. That is to say, the more prominent the discourse on purity education became, the more it undermined its own foothold to become a factor that facilitated the shift to sexology-oriented sex education.

This study focused on Roger Cailloisʼ “Man, Play and Games” and aimed to examine the meanings and significances of sports in the context of this work.

In the field of physical education and sports studies, Cailloisʼ work has been frequently referenced as providing a theoretical basis for the definition of sports. Based on his description, several definitions have been presented, such as sports being play, or, more specifically, play with a competitive character. However, in the field of physical education and sports philosophy, the view that sports and play have a subsumption relationship has often been questioned. This paper attempts to answer a pertinent question, that is, what is sports according to Caillois?

To achieve this purpose, we reread Cailloisʼ work to better understand his logic. By focusing on terms, such as “sport (s)” or “sportif (ve) (s)”, we aimed to interpret each context where they are placed in relation to the theme of the work as a whole.

Findings revealed the following points.

Caillois does not consider sports as the subordinate concept of play. Rather, it is a concept that refers to the activities incarnated by the “agôn (competition)” that drives various activities not limited to play. In addition, he emphasized that sports plays a unique role in the process of transition to modern society or in modern society itself, as a model or norm for other activities, which cannot be replaced by others. It is for this reason that sports is repeatedly mentioned throughout his work, and not just in the taxonomy of play.

This research aims to relativize the sports industry with contemporary society, with its continually-increasing pressures from the state and capital, through an analysis of German sports based on Habermas’ typology of publicness.

Habermas, insisted that the realization of the democratic state relies on the function of public discourse within the public sphere, sees civic public sphere of the late 18th century as its model. The clubs responsible for literary and artistic publicness (Verein) created “places for equality and public debate practice.” The bourgeoisie, the “debating masses,” with the backing of a spirituality that came from the intimate sphere that is the household, planted the seeds of critical publicness and political publicness against the public authority that regulated commodity trade, thus forming a unique public sphere within civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft). Calisthenics and sports in 19th century Germany also spread through their support by clubs that acted as “places for equality and public debate practice.”

However, there was a structural shift from critical publicness to receptive publicness as the 19th century wore on, and German football clubs also became incorporated into state and corporate advertising. A shift back to critical publicness happened in the second half of the 20th century, which is when Habermas recognized the potential of sports clubs that supported the new civil society (Zivilgesellschaft). Their dialogue with their Nazi and commercialism past gained energy from a system where the administration, corporations, and local residents negotiated centered on the non-profit registered associations (eingetragener Verein) that originated in these clubs. Even today, as the pressure of capitalism increases, an arena where receptive publicness and critical publicness struggle for supremacy is being formed in the Bundesliga.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the possibility of establishing citizenship education in Physical Education（PE）through the perspective of Biestaʼs criticism of citizenship education, and specifically from the viewpoint of political subjectification . Interest in citizenship education has been increasing in recent years, and its importance has also been pointed out in the study of PE. However, little study has been done about incorporating citizenship education into PE, with the only previous studies being Takahashi (2021) and Kurata and Tamaki (2021). Takahashi attempts to show the possibility of citizenship education in PE by arguing that the values that citizenship education aims for can be found in previous studies and practices of PE. But through the Biesta’s discussion, the problem of this study seems to lie in the fact that the citizenship education theory that Takahashi uses as a premise is problematic, as well as the fact that he considers ‘citizenship’ a concept that can be easily understood by PE scholars and practitioners. We can see his effort to make citizenship education comprehensible, especially for practitioners. On the other hand, in doing so, it has undermined the very opportunity for them to encounter their fellow citizens as “Others” . Therefore, this paper re-constructs citizenship education in PE through Biesta’s argument, which brings the horizon of questioning to the notion of “Otherness” itself, and attempts to reread the discussion of PE in these studies from this perspective. Some studies claim that “Other-ness” can be seen as “the impossible”. In these studies, we can find arguments that enable us to ask important questions in order to think about citizens as political subjects, that is, where, how, and who appears as a subject. Thus, this paper insists that these studies have the potential to establish a form of citizenship education in PE.