難波優輝（『アンチ・スポーツの哲学』著者）（2026年9月23日放送分）

Why an Aesthetician Started Asking 'Why?' About Sport

Nanba Yuki was born in 1994 and is a visiting researcher at Ritsumeikan University specializing in analytic aesthetics and the philosophy of popular culture. He swam competitively in school, but after graduating he stayed with music and lived as a self-described 'arts-and-culture type' who kept his distance from competition. The trigger for confronting sport was a purely honest 'I have no idea what you're talking about' feeling when colleagues at work got excited about the WBC. He does have a way into sport through horse racing, yet he found himself asking: why are such enormous sums of money involved, and why do people become so passionate? To answer those questions through the lens of aesthetics he wrote Anti-Sports no Tetsugaku (Asahi Shinsho). The book's cover copy reads: 'Questioning competition, growth, inspiration, and nationalism.'

The Simple Definition: 'Deciding Who Is Amazing'

Nanba defines sport as 'the practice of deciding who is amazing.' When other researchers told him that sport 'measures excellence,' he intuited that they were saying exactly the same thing in more formal language. The power of the definition becomes clear when sport is set against music or film. You can argue that a particular film is the greatest ever made; you cannot tell a gold medalist that they didn't really win the gold. Only sport objectively and definitively settles the question of who is amazing. That very purity—its almost excessive simplicity—is also the source of sport's peculiar fascination.

The book opens with two examples that make this strangeness concrete: an athlete who says after a match that they are 'satisfied to have given everything against a tough opponent'—to which Nanba retorts, bluntly, that a competition should be judged by its result—and an athlete who claims that 'targeting an opponent's injury is the true kindness toward them.' Morally, both statements seem inverted. Yet inside sport's own logic, Nanba argues, they are perfectly coherent. The danger of sport drifting away from ordinary everyday morality is, at the same time, the very source of its appeal.

Why Sport and Education Are a Poor Match

The incorporation of sport into physical education has a specific historical origin: Muscular Christianity. At a point in history when the church was losing its appeal to young people, the idea arose that embracing athletics and competition would make Christianity attractive again. That impulse flowed through the YMCA into school curricula and eventually reached Japan, normalizing the expectation that schools would have students play sport. Nanba sees a fundamental contradiction here. Posting students' test rankings is considered problematic; having them win and lose in physical education is considered acceptable. The asymmetry, on reflection, is strange.

Nanba also challenges the common belief that 'we learn from failure.' He cites educator Alfie Kohn's term 'fail-ism' for this notion and flatly states that, in his experience, it is false. People learn by accumulating small successes; throwing them into situations where difficulty is suddenly raised and failure is guaranteed makes them shrink back and quit. Sport's structure of delivering a clear win or loss every time is, for this reason too, a poor fit with education. Nanba suggests that if humanity could reset and reshuffle its history, a world in which schools teach game play rather than sport is entirely conceivable.

The Sportification of Culture and the Weight of Dreams on Athletes

Nanba also identifies a broader 'sportification' of culture. AKB's general elections and the wave of idol audition programs that have surged in recent years share sport's logic: who comes first is decided by numbers. He mentions an argument by a female philosopher that sport, democracy, and philosophy all emerged at roughly the same historical moment. The reasoning that 'whoever has the most votes is the most popular, therefore that settles it' resonates with capitalism's logic of quantity.

Chapter 4, 'Why Are Athletes Made to Carry Dreams?', digs into the postwar Japanese context. At the time of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Mishima Yukio and many other literary figures made their way to the venues and found in the youth and physical power of athletes a symbol of postwar recovery. Nanba argues that this structure is continuous with the way people projected the recovery from the 2011 earthquake onto figures like the idol in the NHK drama Amachan. A deeply rooted imagination persists in Japanese society: by cheering someone on their way to becoming an amazing presence, we make our own collective future brighter. The phenomenon of soccer player Hasebe Makoto's book Kokoro wo Totonoeru ('Organizing the Heart') being read avidly by business professionals is cited as evidence that athletes are regarded as the ideal of human capability.