ABSTRACT
This chapter shows why corporal punishment in Japan illustrates the pressing need for a sophisticated scholarly field such as physical cultural studies (PCS) to guide us forward. Few issues may gain more from the perspective of PCS than the issue of corporal punishment, the punishment of the body. The moving body has increasingly become a key subject of academic inquiry in social science and humanities literature in recent years, including among scholars of sport, physical education, and the martial arts in the East. According to Sugimoto, Japanese began to see their sports as part of their 'physical culture' as early as the 1980s. While some Japanese view their sporting bodies as unique and similar only to each other, not all Japanese sporting bodies are the same. Foucauldian theory may explain the societal mechanism by which people come to normalize, accept, and even approve of such 'violations' of individual bodies.
