A Study on the Political Process of Physical Education and Sports Concerning "Oppress" of Student Baseball under Total War Regime in Japan Tetsuya NAKAMURA (Graduate School of Social Sciences, Hitotsubashi University) Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the political process that Ministry of Education (MOE) intensified the control over student baseball after the outbreak of Second Sino- Japanese War in 1937 and "oppressed" it in 1943. At the same time, the paper examines the political aspect of the discourse about student baseball insisted by Tobita Suishu in that period. Two sets of axes, "appeal-edification" and "autonomy-compulsion", are set to ana- lyze the discourses of physical education and sports during the war.    The conclusions of this paper are as follows. 1. School administrators, teachers and others who were involved in physical education and    sports insisted on proceeding the unification of their administration, and reorganizing it    into a top-down system in order to adjust it to the total war regime at that time. As a    result, the Greater Japan's Promotion Society for Student's Physical Training (Dai Nippon    Gakuto Taiiku Shinkou Kai) and the Greater Japan Physical Education Association (Dai    Nippon Taiiku Kai) were established after the breakout of the Pacific War. 2. Tobita insisted on establishing the student baseball control organization to remove the    "maladies" of student baseball, and to edify players through baseball. His opinions were    highly evaluated because they were well-accorded with the ideal of New Order Move-    ment. 3. In 1943, as the tide of the war got worse and supplies were lacking in Japan, MOE com-    pulsorily obliged students to join athletics and physical trainings such as marching and    bayonet drills. Those trainings were to prepare students for a draft and also to train    them to be workers who would support the industry. Student baseball, which was deter-    mined as inappropriate, was "oppressed" as a result 4. The word "oppressed," which is used to describe student baseball at that time, is not    only a simple adoption from Tobita's perspective, but underneath the word, there were    stories of the "innovative" aspect of Tobita's discourses and the contribution to the war    by participants of student baseball.