Sporting disability: official representations of the disabled athlete at Tokyo's 1964 Paralympics

Abstract

Since the late nineteenth century, when sports emerged as a central component of efforts to modernize Japan, officials, intellectuals and athletes have used sports to articulate and enact their visions of Japanese bodies. Yet it was only during the post-World War II era, as Japan became involved in the emerging Paralympic Movement, that societal understandings of the sporting body expanded to include athletes with physical disabilities. The 1964 Tokyo Paralympics, the first international sporting event for disabled athletes held in Japan and the first Paralympics outside Europe, critically shaped Japanese views of disabled athletes. Focusing on official representations of disability in formal reports, a documentary film and the writings of Paralympic promoters, this article examines how these Games in many ways reinforced pre-existing medicalized views of the disabled body. At the same time, I argue that disability advocates and Paralympic athletes took advantage of the prominence of the Tokyo Paralympics...