Kobe abolished club activities at all of its municipal junior high schools and moved students to community clubs, the first designated city to do so, a reform its education chief drove after teacher shortages left clubs without coaches.
Yasushi Fukumoto, 64, heads the city board of education. He became a teacher out of admiration for his volleyball club adviser and spent years on the coaching side.
He says his devotion to club activities is exactly why they had to change. "Club activities today have become a matter of form only," he said.
The turning point came while he was a principal at a municipal junior high school. When an advising teacher was away for a long stretch on leave, finding a replacement consumed him.
Few teachers could coach the sport. In some clubs, the vice principal did no more than order push-ups and other training.
“The children cannot even swing a bat or kick a ball.”Yasushi Fukumoto, head of the Kobe board of education
He asked whether clubs could still serve their purpose, and his sense of crisis grew.
Behind it lay a structural problem that effort at the school level could not solve.
The Mainichi Shimbun reported that Kobe made the shift in September.