I investigated the status of corporal punishment in Japanese high school athletic clubs and the students' evaluative awareness of this practice. I also examined the relationship between this awareness and the emotions and thoughts resulting from experiencing corporal punishment from instructors during club activities. One hundred eighty-eight female college athletes volunteered to participate in the study. They were asked to complete retrospective questionnaires about the details of their corporal punishment, their tolerance of corporal punishment, the need for it in athletic club activities, and so on. Descriptive statistics, t-test, and one-way analysis of variance revealed that: more than half of all female college athletes had experienced corporal punishment during high school club activities; the principal punishment they had received was to be painfully slapped or beaten, or both, with tools (e.g. a strategy board, stopwatch, or PET bottle); corporal punishment occurred more in team-sport-club activities than non-team-sport-club activities; many athletes considered corporal punishment to be permissible, but they had no clear thoughts regarding the need for it; after receiving corporal punishment, the athletes who had a positive view of its value developed affirmative feelings and recognized that such treatment was necessary; it was likely that the frequency of corporal punishment experiences was irrelevant to the team performance level in competition.

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Historical materials for this study were acquired from the List of Personnel of Secondary Schools (published in 1921, 1926). In the late Taisho Era the number of schoolgirls increased while at the same time the number of male teachers who taught gymnastics at girls’ high schools outpaced the number of female teachers. The average number of both male and female teachers who taught gymnastics per school was less than one, with fewer still at practical girls’ high schools. Those numbers were less compared to the late Meiji Era. The Girls’ High School Syllabus of 1903 states that: “We will, to the best of our ability, have girls’ gymnastics taught by female teachers.” This was to be gradually realized in the late Meiji Era. However, by 1921 female teachers who taught gymnastics had not been assigned to 43.3% of girls’ high schools and 68.7% of practical girls’ high schools. By 1926 that percentage had fallen to 25.0% of girls’ high schools and 57.9% of practical girls’ high schools. Female teachers who taught only gymnastics at girls’ high schools increased to 65.8％ by 1926. There were higher numbers of female teachers who taught two subjects compared to male teachers. For teachers who taught two subjects in conjunction with gymnastics, music was the most common second subject. From 1911 to 1937, no female physical education teachers were trained at National Women’s Higher Normal School. Instead, the National Sixth Provisional Teacher-Training Institute assumed that role and female physical education teachers were trained there beginning in 1915. In last years of the Taisho Era two new private schools opened which brought the number of private schools that trained female physical education teachers to four. Teachers who graduated from private schools and taught only gymnastics or music and gymnastics in conjunction, became normal.

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This study aims to clarify how women’s swimming became widespread at the dawn of women’s sports in Japan, by focusing on the systematization of women’s swimming. When the constitution of the Japan Amateur Swimming Federation (JASF) was revised in 1932, a women’s committee was established, while the Japan Women’s Amateur Swimming Federation (JWASF) was already in existence. Establishment of the Women’s Committee in the JASF was intended to integrate swimming organizations for men and women. The primary historical materials used for this investigation were the periodicals ‘Swimming’ (1930-1939) and ‘Swimming Regulations’ (1925-1939), both published by the JASF. The following three issues are examined: 1) The position of women’s swimming in the JASF from the perspective of its constitution. 2) The background to establishment of the Women’s Committee in the JASF. 3) The changes resulting from establishment of the Women’s Committee. The results of this paper are summarized as follows: The JWASF, which was managed by former female athletes and its members played a significant role in the process of organizing women’s swimming in Japan. When the JWASF was established, the JASF already had the rights to dispatch delegates and to recognize official records of female athletes． After 1932, the JASF changed its working policy to promote swimming by men and women of all ages nationwide. Following this policy, the Women’s Committee in JASF was established. The members of the Women’s Committee were all women. The JASF made a commitment to improve female athletes’ performance and promote women’s swimming. The JASF held competitions, training camps, and training sessions under the leadership of former female athletes. The establishment of the Women’s Committee gave many women the opportunity to serve as organizers and coaches. This study shows that the systematization of women’s swimming in Japan was led by former female athletes.

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Achievements of modern science is not necessarily led to human well-being. Aim of this paper is to find the way to collaborate and create a new science field related to “Sport and Gender” including human biology or human life science of our body, which consists of sixty trillion cells. Gender research has been done in the field of social science and humanities. On the other hand, rapidly growing life science became element reductive and has been directed to develop drugs for curing various diseases. Sports and physical activities/exercise activate whole body including brain and intervene directly to the cells that constitute our body. Although there was accumulation of evidences from the studies on physical training and learning, it was very difficult to give a mechanistic explanation. I had been looked for long time to try to solve the adaptation mechanism of physical exercise/activities of human system and met the flow of genetic information to structured/functional protein via RNA within a cell biological system called “central dogma” first stated by Francis Crick. In addition, both cell and body follow the rule of activity-dependence. Human effort is guaranteed by molecular chaperone system. Sport and gender studies will explore the new era by integrating sciences for human life, which are activated by dual activation of cell and body, and human’s will together.

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Plato’s Laws (Nomoi) is among his works the best for the understanding not only of Plato’s reflections upon education, performance, and music etc., but also of the aims of physical education from the perspectives of sports and gender. Plato argues that the law should help to keep the good condition and balance not only in society and polis but also in body and mind (soul). The means of keeping and promoting the good condition is not only the enforcement and punishment but rather the control of one’s emotion by allowing pleasure (hedone in Greek). Education is the best way of controlling the emotion. The one of two ways of education is gymnastike in Greek and the other is mousike in Greek (music in wider sense). In this paper the auther argues that the teaching and research of sports and gender lies in the same line with Plato’s idea of education.

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In recent years yoga has experienced a global boom. More than 80% of the population is said to be women. Yoga is a material that is indispensable in understanding the women who live in modern society. Most notably, in women-only yoga studios and lessons with the aim of female sexual function improvement, the focus of yoga has actively centered on the woman’s body. In this study, we use participant observation and interviews to examine the way yoga advertises improvement in female sexual function, and considered a new dimension of politics on the appearance of the female body. First, we looked at how a space for women only has been created. The yoga teacher opened a yoga class for pregnant women as she wanted to teach what she had experienced as a woman. Then women with infertility came to the place. Second, we examined how the ideal female body is defined in yoga. This is a body where “sexual function that supports the health and beauty, youth as a woman” works like “normal”. This way refer to the body’s ability to achieve pregnancy or childbirth, healthy menstruation, the sex hormones that are secreted normally, which is important when there is a sexual relationship with a partner. Moreover, along with the focus on physical health, in order to proactively live a positive diverse life, spiritual growth is also emphasized. Third, we considered how methods for realizing female body image and the image of the ideal are understood or practiced. They advise dietary such as brown rice. But in reality they compromise and concession instead of keeping it perfectly. Fourth, we asked whether these practices can be evaluated from the point of view of women’s empowerment, self-determination and liberation. Although the parties living with stigma of infertility tend to have lower selfevaluation, they were able to have an experience in the classroom that is life-affirming.

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Modern yoga in Japan specializes in certain factors after having experienced three booms in its popularity, including the tendencies of feminization, consumer culture, fashion, medicine, and spirituality. Specifically, feminization is an outstanding characteristic of yoga in Japan as some yoga studios will only permit females to participate. On the other hand, yoga in Japan excludes a religious and/or philosophical element, which is present in yoga practice in other countries. As such, this paper examines how Japanese yoga has been feminized through the elimination of religious factors. For this purpose, this study analyzed the article, autobiographies, and data from the fieldwork. This study found that incidents of religious cults in Japan once damaged the whole yoga community so severely that most yoga studios were banned as a result. One yogi decided to focus on the female population in order to eradicate the stigma attached to yoga, and the social background of “spiritual culture” and “consumer culture” assisted in his arbitrary decision. Finally, the images and the way that yoga is “consumed” in Japan reflect the gender norms of today. Modern yoga in Japan places importance on “healing/relaxing” for beauty, and never mentions enhancing sexual ability like in other countries.

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“Gender equality” has been a critical issue among some ideas of equality, as well as “racial equality,” and has long been pursued through our modern history. It could be said that “Gender Studies,” which has been actively explored since the latter part of the 20th century, is trying to reach its destination these days. Analysis and recognition of human existence not only from a viewpoint of racial idea as ever but from of gender idea mean that more extensive research about human diversity has become to put in practice. It is no exaggeration to say that in our modern society we cannot understand a wealth of human existence without a viewpoint of gender idea. Therefore gender idea has become an active area of academic research so that we in this society feel a much greater sense of equality than any humans in history, in which there was no such thing as “equality.” In our daily life, however, actually do we have a mature sense of proportion for “equality”? It is possible to say that sexual difference between male and female become pronounced especially in sports fields. Most sport events are played separately by sex, which means men and women are never the same in their physical forces. But some cannot separate the sexes, whose best examples are motorsports. The reason simply comes from the fact that there are few female racing drivers so that race events could not be done in separating the sexes. This paper presents an analysis of the gendered bodies in motorsports, especially a sexual minority driver as well as females. A concrete sample here is Terri Leigh O”Connell, who is a former racing driver for NASCAR in the USA. She was born as an intersex individual, not feeling like man although being raised as a male, resulting from having a sex reassignment surgery in 1994. I conducted research about the receptivity for her and her own experiences in the field, showing the results in this paper. And a final purpose of this paper is to argue that how gender difference between the sexes is primordially recognized in motorsports field.

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