More Than Medals

A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan

Dennis J. Frost

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501753091
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

How does a small provincial city in southern Japan become the site of a world-famous wheelchair marathon that has been attracting the best international athletes since 1981?

In More Than Medals, Dennis J. Frost answers this question and addresses the histories of individuals, institutions, and events—the 1964 Paralympics, the FESPIC Games, the ?ita International Wheelchair Marathon, the Nagano Winter Paralympics, and the 2021 Tokyo Summer Games that played important roles in the development of disability sports in Japan. Sporting events in the postwar era, Frost shows, have repeatedly served as forums for addressing the concerns of individuals with disabilities. More Than Medals provides new insights on the cultural and historical nature of disability and demonstrates how sporting events have challenged some stigmas associated with disability, while reinforcing or generating others.

Frost analyzes institutional materials and uses close readings of media, biographical sources, and interviews with Japanese athletes to highlight the profound—though often ambiguous—ways in which sports have shaped how postwar Japan has perceived and addressed disability. His novel approach highlights the importance of the Paralympics and the impact that disability sports have had on Japanese society.

Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

CHAPTER 1

Tokyo’s Other Games

The Origins and Impact of the 1964 Paralympics

That it has been possible to hold the 1964 International Stoke Mandeville Games for the Paralysed in Tokyo is due greatly to the understanding of our Japanese friends, who had the vision to recognize the significance of these Games not only as an important sports Movement but as a beam of hope for disabled people all over the world. The Japanese Organizing Committee, under the Chairmanship of Mr. Y. Kasai, have undertaken their great task with an enthusiasm, efficiency and generosity which commands our admiration and gratitude. It is gratifying to know they have had the full support of their Government and many leading Japanese organizations.

Ludwig Guttmann, 1964

In his words of welcome to the competitors in what became known as the Tokyo Paralympics, Ludwig Guttmann, founder of the Stoke Mandeville Games for the Paralysed, offered high praise for the vision and enthusiasm of the host country. Four years earlier, however, when the Paralympic Games concluded in Rome on September 25, 1960, a mere handful of people in Japan were aware of their existence, and even though preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics were already underway, few people in Japan or elsewhere would have believed that Tokyo would ever host this international sporting event for athletes with physical disabilities. At the time, Olympic venues were not required or even expected to host the Paralympics, and Japan was not a country renowned for progressive treatment of the disabled. Indeed, many in Japan dismissed the very notion of sports for those with disabilities as a preposterous and even dangerous idea.¹ Yet only a few years later, Japan became the third country—and the first outside Europe—to host the Paralympic Games.² This chapter explores how this remarkable turn of events came about.

With Tokyo’s selection as the host for the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the city was set to be the first in the world to hold the International Paralympic Games on two occasions, a development that inspired increased interest in Japan’s earlier experience hosting the Paralympics.³ Despite this renewed attention and the obvious significance of the 1964 Games to the history of disability sports more generally, Japan’s first Paralympic Games have remained little known, especially for those without access to Japanese-language materials.⁴ Japanese accounts themselves tend to fall into two categories: official or institutional reports and general overviews of the Tokyo Paralympics; both focus almost exclusively on key organizers whose vision and effort helped overcome various obstacles to bring the Paralympics to Japan.⁵ Although these individuals played pivotal roles, closer consideration of the events leading up to the Games reveals a more complex picture involving intersecting personal, local, national, and transnational actors and motivations, all of which culminated in intense pressure to hold the Games in Tokyo immediately following the Summer Olympics.

In the end, the 1964 Tokyo Paralympics attracted hundreds of athletes, thousands of spectators, widespread media attention, and major sponsorships. They were widely hailed as a success and credited with giving “hope, courage, and self-confidence to Japan’s physically disabled.”⁶ As the first Paralympic Games held outside Europe, they also had a profound impact on the emerging Paralympic Movement by demonstrating its growing international appeal, strengthening its association with the Olympic Games, and promoting an expanded multi-disability approach to disability sports. Nevertheless, analyses of the Games themselves and especially the ways in which Paralympic organizers sought to present them in Japan point to the need for a more nuanced understanding of their impact that goes beyond simple claims of success and progress.

Given the relatively limited nature of existing scholarship on the Tokyo Paralympics, it is not surprising that there has not yet been proper attention to how these Games, and especially their participants, were represented in Japan. Studies of more recent Paralympic coverage have highlighted the importance of close examinations of such representations, because it has become increasingly clear that the amount of attention these events receive can be less significant than the ways in which the Games and their athletes are portrayed. As a number of scholars have demonstrated, representations of Paralympic athletes, especially those appearing in the mass media, have often relied on images and descriptions that reinforce medicalized understandings of disability. Athletic involvement and achievement have tended to be framed in terms of “overcoming” disability through sports, a reductionist approach that presents Paralympians as victims who warrant pity or as “super-crips” who merit attention because they have not allowed their disability to prevent them from pursuing and achieving success.⁷ Research has also shown that nationalism, gender, forms of impairment, and the types of sport also play a significant role in shaping representations of disability sports.⁸

As explored later in the chapter, the representations of athletes participating in the 1964 Tokyo Paralympics share several similarities with those from more recent disability sports events. But analyses of the materials associated with the 1964 Games also offer insights that go beyond adding a “non-Western” perspective to the existing scholarship. For one, an examination of what the Japanese public was seeing in the early 1960s serves as a useful reminder that the representations we often encounter today have a history. Because Japan was among the earliest countries to host the Paralympics and did so at a time when few in the country were familiar with disability sports, the Tokyo Games provide a unique vantage point for exploring how a large population was introduced to the Paralympic Movement and its ideals. In other words, a study of these Games can help explain how patterns of representation and stereotypes took shape.

The history of the Tokyo Paralympics clearly demonstrates that the perceptions and approaches that Paralympic organizers adopted were pivotal in shaping these early representations. Their emphasis on sports as a means of rehabilitation ultimately helped re-inscribe preexisting medicalized views of the disabled body, views particularly apparent in official reports and promotional commentaries. At the same time, disability advocates and Paralympic athletes were able to take advantage of the prominence of the Tokyo Paralympics to articulate and display alternate understandings of disability to a large audience, laying the groundwork for Japan’s domestic disability sports movement and a broader, gradual shift in perceptions of disabled athletes in postwar Japan. At the core of these efforts was a form of co-constitution, a negative nationalism of sorts, that praised the “brightness” of foreign Paralympians while at times demeaning Japanese athletes to highlight the flaws in Japanese approaches to disability in an attempt to initiate changes. Although these efforts ultimately seem to have helped foster such changes, they also complicate any effort to see the Tokyo Paralympics as a clear-cut “beam of hope for disabled people all over the world.”⁹ Analyses of the writings of Paralympic promoters from the periods before, during, and after the 1964 Paralympics also make it clear that for many, the significance of the Paralympics as a “beam of hope” was also secondary to their role as an arena for evaluating Japan’s standing in the global community.

“The De Coubertin of the Paralysed” Looks to Japan

Before turning to an examination of the Tokyo Paralympics themselves, it will be useful to situate them in the broader history of the Paralympic Movement, which in 1964 was still in its earliest stages. Without a doubt, Ludwig Guttmann, the man Pope John XXIII once described as “the De Coubertin of the paralysed,” is a critical figure in that early history.¹⁰ Guttmann, a respected Jewish neurologist, hospital director, and full professor of neurology, fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and resettled in England. After he spent several years at Oxford University, the British government commissioned him in 1943 to be the director of the newly established National Spinal Injuries Unit at the Ministry of Pensions Hospital, Stoke Mandeville, which was located roughly 65 kilometers outside London. Guttmann’s well-documented activities as director at Stoke Mandeville and his revolutionary emphasis on movement and activity for people with severe spinal injuries quickly led to the integration of sports as a critical component of his patients’ total rehabilitation programs.¹¹

Competitive sports were part and parcel of Guttmann’s approach at Stoke Mandeville from the beginning, but the origins of the Paralympics are often dated to July 29, 1948, when Guttmann helped organize the first Stoke Mandeville Games. What began as a small public archery competition between two teams of paraplegics quickly became an annual tradition. With each passing year, the Stoke Mandeville Games (which used varying names during these early years) attracted more competitors and added new sports. In 1952, a Dutch team participated, making the Stoke Mandeville Games truly international.¹²

As many, including Pope John XXIII, have observed, Guttmann’s Stoke Mandeville Games were often associated with the Olympic Movement. Whether intentional or fortuitous, the first Stoke Mandeville Games occurred in 1948 on the same day as the opening ceremony for the London Olympic Games.¹³ Throughout the early years of the Stoke Mandeville Games, Guttmann repeatedly referenced the Olympic Movement, citing it as both an inspiration and a goal: he hoped paraplegics would one day compete in the Olympics. After the International Olympic Committee awarded the Fearnley Cup to the International Stoke Mandeville Games “for actions in keeping with the true spirit of Olympism,” Guttmann and other organizers began exploring the possibility of holding the ninth International Stoke Mandeville Games in Rome immediately following the 1960 Olympics.¹⁴ The result of their efforts, an event that is now officially recognized as the first Paralympic Games, involved nearly 370 athletes from twenty-two countries competing in twelve different events and using many of the same facilities that the Olympic athletes had used only a few weeks before.

With the success of the Rome Paralympics and the ongoing growth of the annual Games held at Stoke Mandeville, it might seem only natural that Guttmann and other organizers of those Games would look to Tokyo, the host for the next Olympics, as the site for the thirteenth International Stoke Mandeville Games. In fact, one brief English-language account describing the origins of the Tokyo Paralympic Games notes that Guttmann was “keen to stage the Games again at the same venue as the Olympic Games in 1964, in Tokyo.”¹⁵ Another account comments specifically on the “self-assurance” of Stoke Mandeville organizers and their widespread belief that the “International Games really could be exported to any country.”¹⁶

Japanese sources reveal much less optimism. In 1960 there was, in fact, very little reason for anyone, including the organizers in Rome, to believe that Tokyo would be willing or able to host the Paralympics. For one thing, no Japanese athletes or official observers had ever participated in or attended the International Stoke Mandeville Games. Although the International Paralympic Committee website claimed that support for Guttmann’s plan to hold the Paralympic Games in Tokyo “was boosted by the positive reactions of Japanese observers who visited the 1960 Games in Rome,” the sole Japanese who actually witnessed these Games was Watanabe Hanako, whose presence at the Paralympics appears to have been partly accidental; she was there because she was married to the chief of the Rome bureau for Japan’s Kyōdō News Service.¹⁷ Fortunately, Watanabe was also a scholar of labor and welfare policies, and she took an avid interest in the Games.¹⁸ She reportedly spoke with Guttmann about the possibility of holding a similar event in Tokyo, but this discussion was certainly not an official commitment.¹⁹ Perhaps it goes without saying, but a conversation with an enthusiastic individual spectator hardly seems like the best foundation for planning a major international sporting event in a foreign country. There is also good reason to suspect that Guttmann may have been skeptical of Watanabe’s statement of interest. Only a few months earlier, in February 1960, Nakamura Yutaka, a 32-year old doctor from southwestern Japan, traveled to Stoke Mandeville to observe the facilities and study Guttmann’s methods. According to Nakamura, Guttmann greeted him rather harshly: “So you’re Japanese? Several Japanese have come here already. All of them have said that they want to imitate what we are doing here, and then they go back to Japan. So far, not one of them has followed through and done it.” Nakamura acknowledged that Guttmann’s statement was probably accurate, and Watanabe herself indicated that Guttmann had offered similar complaints when she spoke with him about her interest in bringing the Paralympics to Japan.²⁰ If Guttmann had so little faith in Japan’s medical professionals, the very people who would seem most likely to share his ambitious goals, it raises an important question: Why was he so “keen” to hold the International Stoke Mandeville Games four years later in a country that seemed to have minimal interest in or commitment to sports for the disabled?

In many respects, Guttmann’s desire to hold the Games in Tokyo makes perfect sense; these Games were simply the next logical step in his broader agenda. If the Paralympics were to continue to grow, develop, and gain prestige, then they had to go to Tokyo: they had to follow wherever the Olympics led. It also seems plausible, given Guttmann’s record, that Japan’s seeming lack of interest in disability sports itself would make it a particularly appealing host site. He was certainly not one to avoid a challenge, and if the Paralympics could be held successfully in Tokyo, it would demonstrate that the Stoke Mandeville Games could, in fact, be exported anywhere—even outside Europe or to countries without a strong history of involvement in disability sports. Moreover, Guttmann’s encounters with the various Japanese doctors who had visited Stoke Mandeville pointed to latent interest in his approaches to sports and rehabilitation. A large-scale event such as the Paralympics could garner greater attention for his ideas and help them take root in Japan.

Japanese source materials also indicate that Guttmann and his Stoke Mandeville Games were not the only forms of disability sports attracting attention in Japan in the years before the first Tokyo Games. Sporting events in Japan for those with...

Table of contents

• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Note from Author
• Introduction
• 1. Tokyo’s Other Games
• 2. Lost Games
• 3. Japan’s “Cradle of Disability Sports”
• 4. A Turning Point
• 5. Athletes First
• Coda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index