Competition Killed a Captain

It is fun for sports watchers to see an emotional head coach who screams, rebukes his players and desperately holds his head. It’s a part of sports show. What if hitting or kicking or taunting his players? It’s not a show, but an exercise of violence or even a crime. In Japan, it sometimes happens in a sport team, typically in a high school or a college. One basketball player in a high school in Osaka city killed himself after severely hit by his head coach. Political leaders criticize the coach and emphasize the necessity for educational reform. “If you introduce your educational reform plan, we will see more tragedies like that,” I would say.

A captain of basketball club of Sakuranomiya High School in Osaka city killed himself last December. The day before the suicide, the head coach of the club hit him four or five times during a practice match, because he was not good at taking loose ball. The hitting is supposed to be routine matter and done on each of club students. Parent of the captain, however, remembers his son saying “I was hit thirty to forty times today again.” Moreover, the coach indicated, to the captain’s desperation, that he might be relegated to the second team.

On the background of that violence, there is a belief that corporal punishment makes a team strong. Sakuranomiya High School has one of the strongest basketball teams in Osaka. The coach has been in the school last eighteen years, longer than usual. As long as the team had been strong, no one cared for his way of discipline. With that circumstance, no one in the club can resist his corporal punishment, and the club was occupied by a dictatorship. It is close to the situation of Japan’s Imperial Army during World War II, in which sergeants hit privates without any specific reason everyday.

The mayor of Osaka City, Toru Hashimoto, denounced the high school and the Osaka Board of Education of leaving the problem behind. But Hashimoto is also responsible for the incident as the top leader of Osaka city. Instead of expressing his responsibility, he emphasized of the necessity of the reform of the Board. He looks like taking advantage of this incident for his political goal.

The purpose of the reform is to introduce competitive concept in education. Letting the students competing each other, he tries to raise score in examinations. But harsh requirement in top-down system only send problems from the top to the bottom. It is likely that teachers will force their students hard work to fulfill the requirement from the top. With physical or unphysical violence, it is worried that more suicides of students happen by the educational reform.

The same can be said to the educational reform of Abe administration, because it welcomes more competition in education. Looking at world college ranking in which Japanese university’s position is getting low, political leaders encourage schools to study hard. But the problem is not about how much students study, but how. Without changing from traditional input-oriented, or memory enhancement, study method to balancing input and output, Japan cannot produce many winners in the world and the competition creates more losers.