Session: Physical Education & Social Justice

Gender and Sexual Politics in Sport-based Japanese Physical Education
There has been a considerable amount of research accumulated around the issues of homophobia, transphobia, and binary gender in school sport environments in North America. This issue, however, only began to receive small public and scholarly attention in Japan in recent years. This is one of the first studies to explore the experiences and expressions of discrimination, violence, and exclusion based on gender expression and sexual orientation in physical education in Japan. Through this research, we hope to gain insight into the gender and sexual politics of Japanese physical education, which is largely sport-based.
    Because little data exists about these issues in Japan, our research includes quantitative and qualitative surveys and semi-structured interviews. These were administered in three Japanese universities in 2017. Based on 953 survey responses and 15 in-depth interviews, we present a preliminary analysis of students reported experiences of discrimination and exclusion in sport-based physical education in Japan. Included in our presentation is a discussion on the gender and sexual politics of Japanese physical education which reproduces and reinforces binary gender and heterosexism often through silence and ignorance, rather than the explicit violence or verbal abuse frequently cited in North American studies.


Networking Dissent Voices: Korea-Japan Civic Alliance for Olympic Resistance

Over the last few years, Asian civic activists’ alliance has grown through Olympic events. This paper illustrates recent elaboration of Japan and South Korean cooperation networks for anti-Olympic movements. Social, environmental and sport-related NGOs and activist groups in Japan and Korea have collaborated for their anti-Olympic agenda around 2018 PyeongChang and 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. It draws on Japanese and Korean NGOs’ collaboration history including Japan’s earlier transpacific alliance with Rio Olympic resistance groups. We also collected the pressure groups’ public messages/performances, and interviews with the activists Ichimura and Lee. We examine and highlight previously neglected non-Western Olympic resistance, the alliance networks’ diverse forms of public opposition, protest, criticism, and their discursive strategies in Korea and Japan on the staging of the sport mega-events.