More than Medals: A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan by Dennis J. Frost

Abstract

Reviewed by: More than Medals: A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan by Dennis J. Frost Franziska Seraphim (bio) More than Medals: A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan. By Dennis J. Frost. Cornell University Press, 2020. xiii, 311 pages. $39.95, cloth; $25.99, E-book. The Olympic Games are an unusually rich site for exploring the complex nature of our interconnected world from historical and interdisciplinary perspectives. Few icons of cultural internationalism reflect the changing interplay of geopolitical, economic, and sociocultural norms with so much affect, in large part because individual human bodies and souls bear out these dynamics. The rise of Asia as a locus in this historically Eurocentric internationalism—key moments being Tokyo 1964, Seoul 1988, Beijing 2008, Tokyo 2020, and Beijing 2022—has inspired a body of scholarly work on the value of sporting mega-events as diplomatic tools to renegotiate a range of power-political relations, domestic as well as international. The Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics served as a wonderful opportunity to read China's claims to international power through spectacle and the media more generally, as Tokyo 1964 once did for Japan.1 Since then, several edited volumes have taken an explicitly comparative approach to the Asian Olympics, still focused on narratives of nation in regional and international frames.2 But [End Page 445] as Tokyo 2020 took shape and then shifted to 2021 amidst the pandemic, academic research and public media combined in potent ways to place "health" at the center of a world more global than international: the mental health of athletes, public health in a time of pandemic, the environmental health of our planet. Taking seriously Tokyo's official motto "diversity and inclusion" and predating the pandemic, two special issues in the Asia-Pacific Journal in 2020 and the German Institute for Japanese Studies' timely edited volume Japan Through the Lens of the Tokyo Olympics, shift the focus to critical social, urban, and regional studies.3 From this vantage point, the history of the Olympics, and Tokyo 2020 in particular, reads like a century-long decline into unsustainability, with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as its alarmingly reticent flagbearer. Dennis Frost has unearthed a parallel history of the Olympic movement that tells a surprisingly different story. Reading More Than Medals is to realize the astonishing disconnect between the Paralympics and the "ablebodied" Olympics, despite concerted efforts made recently to think the two together, for example in Routledge's 2020 Handbook of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.4 The story of the Paralympics is rooted not in cultural internationalism through elite competitive sports but in local efforts to address the medical and social challenges of rehabilitating and reintegrating an army of injured war veterans in societies recovering from World War II. In England as in Japan, medical doctors directing government rehabilitation programs at leading hospitals for people with severe spinal injuries innovated treatment through movement and activity and quickly recognized the power of competition. Ludwig Guttmann (1899–1980), director of the National Spinal Injuries Unit at the Ministry of Pensions Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire, was instrumental in organizing the first Stoke Mandeville Games in 1948 and taking them to an international stage. The ninth International Stoke Mandeville Games borrowed the time and place of the 1960 Rome Olympics and is retrospectively recognized as the first Paralympic Games. His counterpart in Japan was Nakamura Yutaka [End Page 446] (1927–84), dean of the Orthopedic Department at Beppu National Hospital, ōita Prefecture, Kyushu, a wartime center of military training that had transitioned into a major center of veteran medical rehabilitation around its famous hot springs.5 Nakamura was a central figure in bringing about the first Paralympics organized as such, in Tokyo 1964, the Far East and South Pacific Games for the Disabled in 1975, and the annual International Wheelchair Marathon held in his native Ōita since 1981. Frost begins his Japan-centered history of international disability sports competitions with the question why Japan of all countries, where disability was safely kept out of sight and mind in the 1960s, ended up hosting the Paralympics in 1964 and went on to become an international...