Public middle schools are handing their club activities over to community clubs, and the change is exposing a divide between children whose families can afford the new setup and those whose cannot. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology is pushing the shift, and its reform period — the six academic years from fiscal 2026 to fiscal 2031 — began half a year ago.
Kakegawa in Shizuoka Prefecture and Kobe in Hyogo Prefecture moved first, setting their courses toward a full handover on August 1 and September 1 respectively. Under the ministry's guidelines, club activities on Sundays and holidays will in principle be run entirely by community instructors, and weekdays are meant to follow.
Two pressures drove the change: widening disparities between schools as the number of children falls, and the long hours teachers work as club advisers. Ryō Uchida, an educational sociologist at Nagoya University who has studied club activities for years, said schools had relied on those extra teaching hours. "Put another way, if club activities leave the school, the people and the money leave with them," he said.
Three groups of children
Uchida said surveys show children dividing into roughly three groups. Some want to keep playing the sport they played at school. A similar number want to try something new, with dance and badminton — rarely offered as school clubs — proving popular in every municipality, along with skateboarding, now an Olympic sport. The third group, he said, has had enough of clubs and wants a rest.
Small schools stand to gain the most, Uchida said, because their students have been limited to individual sports such as table tennis, tennis and track and field. He also welcomed the participation of students from ethnic Korean schools, which have lost pupils to falling birthrates and to political factors such as their exclusion from the high school tuition waiver program. Soccer, once their preserve, now draws too few players: three schools in Hyogo — in Kobe, Amagasaki and Nishiharima — field a single combined team.
Costs land on parents
The burden of the shift falls on families. In Kyoto, where club activities are being abolished, parents face participation fees, transport to and from clubs, and supervision duties, and some say a child's enthusiasm alone cannot settle the decision. The gap in what children can experience widens with household income.
Uchida's assessment is that the move was overdue rather than sudden. Small communities had long since been unable to field a team from a single school, in sports or in cultural clubs, and joint activities across school boundaries were being explored more than 10 years ago. Falling birthrates and the visible long hours of teacher-advisers then made the school-based club untenable. "School-by-school club activities can no longer be sustained," he said.