Japanese Sports

7. Rising from the Ashes

7 Rising from the Ashes PLAY BEGINS AGAIN: SPORTS Apart from Kyoto, which had not been bombed, Japan’s urban centers were a postwar wasteland. Despite the devastation, children played among the ruins and adults began, tentatively, to rebuild the organizations and the material infrastructure of Japanese sports. Like their grandparents in the Meiji period, they wanted not only the opportunity to participate in traditional and modern sports but also international recognition of their athletic achievements. For the leaders of Japanese sports, if not for rank-and-file athletes, readmission into the global sports arena was an enormously important goal. During the Occupation, kendōand other traditional martial arts were banned and the Dai Nippon Butokukai was abolished, but sumō, whose practical military application was less obvious, was allowed to resume before the end of 1945. General Douglas MacArthur’s advisors actively encouraged participation in baseball and other modern sports.1 On September 23, 1945, barely three weeks after Japan’s political leaders boarded the U.S.S. Missouri and signed the documents that formally acknowledged their nation’s defeat in war, the students of Tokyo University had their first postwar rugby game. Younger boys had already begun to play baseball and a National Students’ Baseball Organization was quickly organized. That autumn the Japan Basketball Association was resurrected.2 On January 21, 1946, the Asahi shimbun carried a notice announcing the revival of the national middle-school baseball tournament. While recognizing the dire straits the country was in, the newspaper asserted its belief that “baseball will help mend young souls twisted by war, and 163 contribute to the development of democratic spirit . . . and the reconstruction of Japan.”3 Ideology changed; rhetoric did not: sport was for the good of the nation. In January 1946, the Japan Physical Education Association (Nihon Taiiku Kyōkai) was reestablished as a private entity whose task was to supervise amateur sports. By 1999, this entity, which now calls itself (on its English-language home page) the Japan Amateur Sports Association, included fifty-four sports federations and had forty-seven prefectural sports associations as additional affiliated members.4 One of the most important goals of the JPEA’s revived or newly founded national federations was to gain acceptance by their respective international sports federations in order to be eligible to participate in the Olympic Games and other international competitions. Some member nations of the international sports federations were initially reluctant to welcome back their wartime foes, but the basketball and volleyball federations voted for readmission in 1950 and 1951 and the other federations followed. With the coming of spring 1946, the horses began to race again at Japanese tracks (and gamblers once again rushed to bet on them).5 Speedy horses shared the headlines with human runners. In 1946, the Mainichi shimbun resumed its prewar role as a sponsor of sports events; the newspaper staged a footrace around historic Lake Biwa (near Kyoto). The Mainichi’s longtime rival, the Asahi shimbun, responded in 1947 with the Fukuoka Marathon, which ranks today as one of the world’s most important road races.6 In light of Japan’s prewar enthusiasm for baseball and General MacArthur’s belief that the game instilled a democratic ethos in its players , it was hardly a surprise that the professional game was also revived in 1946. In their first season eight teams played a total of 105 games.7 In order to raise money for postwar urban reconstruction, the government enacted a law in 1948 that allowed “local public bodies” to hold bicycle races (and to sell tickets to spectators eager to bet on the outcomes ). The first races were held that November at the Ogura City Race Track in Kyushu. Observing that Ogura City took in nearly 20 million yen during the first four days of racing, other local governments scrambled to organize their own races and keirin (cycling competition) soon rivaled horse races in popularity.8 During the first days of November 1946, barely a year after the surrender , a national sports meet was held in Kyoto and at facilities in the surrounding prefectures. This was the first Kokumin Taiiku Taikai, the official English translation for which is “National Sports Festival” (showing 164 | Postwar Sports once again how the term “taiiku” can mean “sports” as well as “physical education”). Unlike the Meiji Shrine Games, which the new national meet was meant to replace, the National Sports...