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Major Japanese city is abolishing extracurricular activities at all of its middle schools

Casey Baseel Dec 19, 2024
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No more school-run sports teams or cultural clubs in Kobe.

Despite Japan’s well-deserved reputation as a country that places a high degree of importance on academics, there’s also a pretty universal attitude among educators and parents that extracurricular activities are very valuable too. Some schools even go so far as to make participation in some sort of school-administered club or sports team a mandatory part of the curriculum, and even if kids don’t have such a requirement placed on them, those who don’t sign up for any after-school activities are often referred to as being in the “kitaku-bu,” or “going-home club,” a designation that sometimes carries a bit of a stigma that the child is a loner or a troublemaker.

But against this cultural backdrop of “Extracurricular activities are good,” Kobe has announced that it’s going to be completely eliminating all of its extracurricular activities at public middle schools within the city, with teams and clubs scheduled to start disappearing at the beginning of the upcoming school year, which starts in the spring.

The municipal board of education cites two factors for its decision. With Japan’s falling birth rate, the board says that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for individual schools to manage athletic programs and other clubs for small enrollments, ostensibly creating issues such as not having enough members to fill a properly sized roster or to making the use of full-scale facilities for small groups impractical. In addition, the board has concerns about the time demands for school club coaches and advisors. Even by Japanese standards, teachers have incredibly long working hours, and with extracurricular activities often requiring supervision on weekends as well as on weekdays (Japan generally doesn’t do after-school weeknight games for intramural sports, for example), the board of education is worried about teachers being overworked.

▼ Despite what you may have seen in anime, where national championships are routinely won strictly through the efforts of earnest young athletes who look good sweating and their cute equipment manager, in real life there are actual adults involved in youth sports programs too.

However, Kobe doesn’t want its public-school middle schoolers to be completely without extracurricular options, so as it phases out school-run clubs, the board of education is also planning to establish a system called Kobe Katsu (katsu here meaning “extracurricular activities”), in which non-school affiliated local sports and cultural organizations for youth participants can use school facilities such as sports fields and auditoriums. The hope is that middle school students will then join these, or other, non-school-run programs, as replacements for the extracurricular activities the schools themselves used to offer.

In other words, at the same time that Kobe’s public middle schools shut down their own extracurricular activities, they’ll also start pseudo-outsourcing their operations, which could have some benefits. The most obvious is greater freedom for students to choose programs that are a good fit for their needs, goals, and interests. For instance, instead of having to put up with a verbally or physically abusive coach because that’s who’s in charge of the team at their school, kids would be free to go play that sport somewhere else. Likewise, a student who’s passionate about a niche sport, style of music, or form of art may not have had enough similarly minded classmates to warrant a club at their home campus, but would have the option of joining a club that draws enough members from different schools. As an added side benefit, the dispersal of club venues would mean a larger number of students leaving campus after classes for the day end, making those who don’t participate in organized extracurricular activities stand out less and perhaps less likely to be stigmatized.

On the other hand, it’s not currently clear how the new system will affect participation costs, especially if the organizations running programs within the Kobe Katsu system aren’t themselves public/non-profit entities. Still, Kobe Board of Education head Yasunori Fukamoto is optimistic about the plan, the first of its kind in Japan, saying “We hope this will allow students, according to their individual circumstances, to make their own choices about how to use their time.”

The current timetable is for school-administered extracurricular activities to be entirely gone from public schools across Kobe by August of 2026.

Source: Yahoo! News Japan/Kansai TV via Jin, Goo News
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