(The original article in Japanese was posted on June 10, 2022)

On June 6, a meeting of experts from the Japan Sports Agency known as "Study meeting on the transfer of school sports club activities to the community bases" compiled a proposal with a gist that the operation of in-school club activities of public junior high schools on holidays will be transferred to private sports organizations, etc. in the region. The club activity transfer will possibly be facilitated in three expected plans: transfer of club activities to athletic clubs in the region; outsourcing of coaching jobs to private instructors; and schoolteachers’ serving a "dual-role" as instructors on a chargeable basis. The first phase of transfer is aimed to realize at nationwide public junior high schools by the 2025 academic year. Initially, the activities on holidays are targeted for the transfer but weekday activities are also encouraged to be transferred to the implementing bodies in the community. This will be a major policy change of Japan’s physical education that has positioned schools as bases for sports promotion.

The transfer movement is associated with the decreasing number of students and the subsequent school consolidation as a result of Japan’s declining birthrate. Nowadays, it is reportedly becoming difficult to maintain regular club activities at schools even in urban areas, needless to say in rural areas. On the other hand, the operational transfer to the local community may bring extra benefits. It will be valuable for Junior high students to experience various sport activities and communicate with people across generations in the community. Incidentally, the experts’ proposal also indicated the need to cultivate qualified leaders with expertise such as coaching skills and know-how for the prevention of harassment. Human rights violations have often been overlooked behind the victory-focused approaches and it is more than welcome to eliminate those kinds of violations. Most of all, the largest benefit of the new policy change is to free teachers from long hours of unpaid overtime work. In other words, school club activities, which have been supported by a traditional "dedication" of the field staff teachers, etc., will finally be directed toward normal condition.

First of all, a shortage of teachers is obviously true. According to a survey by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, there is a shortage of 2,558 teachers as of the first day of school in April 2021 at public elementary, junior high and high schools, and special-needs schools nationwide. This means that the authorized number of regular teachers was not sufficiently substituted by temporary teachers. It is not simply a matter of shortage of absolute number of teachers, but it involves the underlying factor that a large number of non-regular teachers work on a short-term contract for a maximum of one year, which represents 7.5% of the authorized number of teachers in the 2020 academic year. This is partly attributable to the increase of financial burden on local governments related to the increase of personnel costs, while greater discretion was shifted from the national government to municipalities in hiring teachers based on the public education reform. In short, a status of a temporary teacher is financially convenient and taken for granted to balance the finance of local governments.

I remember a scene from a movie “ Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom " (2019. Directed by Pawo Choyning Dorji), which features interaction between village children and a young teacher assigned to a school in a mountain village in Lunana, an unexplored region at an altitude of 4800 meters in Bhutan. One day the teacher asks the school children about their dreams for the future. One child answered, saying, “I want to become a teacher because a teacher touches the future.”

“Basic Policy on Economic and Fiscal Management and Reform 2022” of the Kishida Administration (so-called “big-boned policies”) approved by the Cabinet on June 7 advocates "investment in human resources.” Investment in high-skilled human resources is an urgent task. At the same time, raising the level of national education is also essential to a realization of sustainable growth. The policy change of shifting school club activities to the involvement of the local community will eventually be summarized as a cost sharing issue. But then, the available capacity for public subsidies is hardly left for local governments that have been unreliably poor in recruiting teachers. Children are the key players of the future of this country. If so, the government must demonstrate a clear vision and responsibility for how it will make commitments to the public education.

This Week’s Focus, June 10

Takashi Mizukoshi, the President