Resilience Building Pedagogies and Women’s University Club Sport in Japan

Anglophone studies on school club sport (undō bukatsudō 運動部活動) in Japan commonly consider sport as cultural fields that reproduce hegemonic masculinity and ‘traditional’ notions of femininity. This study suggests that school club sport for women in Japan is more diverse and complex than what the dominant symbolic level gender ideological frameworks imply. This article is based on a broader embodied ethnographic project that examines how university club kendo contributes to the construction of women’s identity via member relationships and sport’s cultural learning. It discusses resilience (gaman 我慢) as an important indigenous value that women develop through sport and manifest as embodied cultural capital within employment. It highlights that engagement in resilience building for women varies and practices are in motion in alignment with social change. Despite these developments, methods of disciplining resilience in sport settings continue to be murky and waver between maltreatment and personal development. This paper offers a unique sporting example of how women’s lived reality of sport is multifaceted and dependent on homosocial relationships, member dispositions, educational trajectories, and personalized ambition.