March 30, 2018
The Japan Times - The Japan Sports Association is modifying its organizational name beginning with the start of the new fiscal year on Sunday, April 1..
Well, in English, the change is tiny. It will now be called the Japan Sport Association, with “Sport” as a singular noun (the abbreviation becomes JSPO).
But taking one letter out indicates what the nation’s governing body for sports federations and prefectural sports governing bodies wants to do moving forward.
“Sports, in plural, mean an aggregation of different sports,” JSPO chairman Masatoshi Ito said at a Tokyo news conference on Thursday. “But when you make it as sport in singular, it means a common culture of humanity.”
The Japanese organizational name has always included a word “taiiku” — which is literally translated into “physical education” or “physical training” — since its inception in 1911.
The Japanese name (Nihon Taiiku Kyokai) has been unchanged since 1948, but the organization decided to rename it because sports are no longer a means to just train people as part of education, but are meant to give a more affluent culture to citizens.
The JSPO defines sports as “a common culture for all of humanity” that people “enjoy voluntarily,” implying they are not activities that they are forced to do. And it hopes to give the people in Japan more access to sports.
（Baseball Federation of Japan is a member of JSPO）
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