Reprinted courtesy of Pacific Affairs
DISCOURSES OF DISCIPLINE: An Anthropology of Corporal Punishment in Japan’s Schools and Sports. Japan Research Monograph, 17. By Aaron L. Miller. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2013. xiii, 245 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$25.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-55729-105-9.
At the beginning of 2013 two separate stories regarding corporal punishment (taibatsu) in sport led the Japanese media headlines. The first involved the suicide of a high school student and captain of the basketball team, allegedly in response to being subjected to relentless and excessive physical punishment at the hands of the team’s 47-year-old coach, who was also a teacher at the school. The second involved 15 female judoka or judo athletes, including competitors from the London Olympics, who filed a collective letter of complaint to the Japanese Olympic committee against two coaches for using excessive physical violence and power harassment. The minister for Education, Culture, Sport, Science and Technology, Shimomura Hakubun, described the situation around these scandals as the “biggest crisis in Japan’s sport history,” stating that it was “necessary for Japan to clearly demonstrate it has eliminated violence from the sports world with its own self-cleansing functions” (Yomiuri, Feb 6, 2013).
The case of corporal punishment in Japanese sport is rendered even more unusual by the fact that it has been banned from educational settings first in 1879, and continuously since 1941. So how and why does corporal punishment persist in schools and sports clubs across Japan? This is the question Aaron Miller sets out to answer in his excellent book Discourses of Discipline. Based on long-term participant observation fieldwork in a university basketball club, grounded further in his experiences of teaching in Japanese schools and working in higher education, and drawing on extensive historical data, Miller has produced a rich and informative analysis of the practices and meanings of corporal punishment in the Japanese context. With a good degree of critical reflexivity, and adopting an anthropological approach to the question, Miller offers an interpretation, rather than an explanation, of corporal punishment, and in so doing avoids the traps of essentialism and cultural comparison.
As the book develops it is clear that the more one tries to understand and define taibatsu the more ambiguous and slippery it becomes. Indeed its origins appear to be a Japanese response to the modernization and engagement with foreign education systems rather than an indigenous concept. Prior to the Meiji Restoration taibatsu was not part of the educational vocabulary and, whilst there were forms of physical punishments in both temple and samurai schools during the Edo period, it is argued that the preference in these settings was for non-violent forms of sanction. Considering the central role of the samurai class in Meiji educational reform, and especially in the establishment of sports clubs in education, it seems likely that corporal punishment would have been absent from educational practice.
From this point onwards Miller provides an extensive historical and ethical contextualization of the practice of corporal punishment in education. He positions corporal punishment within a broader language of disciplining techniques and in doing so highlights the diversity of pedagogical styles at work in Japanese sports, from authoritarian (“bushido”) to liberal (“scientific”) coaches. It is here that the real strength of this book comes through as Miller considers the various cultural explanations for the use of corporal punishment. He addresses the scope of “uniquely” Japanese (samurai ethos, groupism, ascetic practice, character building, etc.) reasons for the continuing practice of corporal punishment and then proceeds to expose such approaches as limited in empirical evidence, being generalizations, and indeed characteristics of sports in many other cultural contexts.
In countering the various nihonjinron explanations of corporal punishment Miller utilizes the work of Michel Foucault to pose an alternative point of view. Corporal punishment is a discourse: linguistic, legal, symbolic and physical. As such it is a power relation that works through the subjectification of the individual bodies it interacts with. Understanding corporal punishment as a form of “bio-power” is effective in explaining, for example, why those who are victims of corporal punishment often do not recognize that they are victims (and may even come to be grateful for their beatings), or how others come to internalize the demands of coaches and adapt their behaviour accordingly.
As promised in the beginning, this book does not pose a solution for the corporal punishment problem. What it does is present a thorough contextualization and rethinking of the issue and in doing so paves the way for others to find the answers. In this sense the book offers policy makers, educators and coaches a way to reconsider corporal punishment and perhaps, as the minister suggests, facilitate Japanese sports’ “self-cleansing functions.” It would be essential reading for anyone interested in Japanese sport and, considering other issues and problems (bullying, school refusal, and drop-out) faced in Japanese education, a way of examining various problematic relationships of power. Finally this book exposes the culturalist shortcomings in explaining violence in a given society. One would contend that this approach could be adapted to other settings and situations where violence becomes institutionalized.
Brent McDonald, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia
