East Asian Women and the Olympic Games

11 S(up)porting Roles: East Asian Women and the Olympic Games Robin Kietlinski he fi rst Asian woman to compete at the Olympic Games was Hitomi TKinue, a track and fi eld athlete who represented Japan in the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam. Her participation came on the heels of her previous successful performance at the second Women’s Olympics in 1926 in Gothenburg, Sweden, where she competed in six different events, receiving medals in fi ve of these events and setting the world record in the running long jump. She was offi cially hon- ored as the outstanding individual of the Games. This occurred at a time when women in nearly all countries were discouraged from taking part in competitive sports or strenuous exercise for fear of the damage such activity would cause women’s bodies. A small coalition of women, including Japan’s Hitomi Kinue, chose to go against the majority mindset, however, and in doing so they would change the future of sports and of the Olympic Games forever. As the fi rst non-Western woman to compete in the Olympics, Hitomi was, quite literally, on the starting line of a budding trend towards increased female and non-Western participation at the Olympics. Many other Asian women would follow in her footsteps to create a long and respectable record of athletic performances at the pinnacle of all sporting events that is the Olympic Games. In this chapter, I will highlight some important moments in the history of East Asian women’s participation in the Games in order to show the role they have had in shaping the Olympic movement both nationally and internationally. The contribution that Asian women have made to the Olympic movement tends to be left out of English-language literature on the Olympics, and such an exclusion has negative consequences. First, it perpetuates an untrue stereotype that male athletes dominate the sporting world in Asia. Second, it reinforces a woefully incomplete image of Asian women as weak and docile. In focusing on the long and varied history of participation by Asian women in the Olympics, S(up)porting Roles 171 this chapter shows that Asian women have played more than mere supporting roles in the representation of their respective countries in athletic performance on the world stage: they have come to contribute at a rate comparable to—or even above—that of their male counter- parts. Women fi rst made their appearance at the second Olympic Games in Paris in 1900, competing in sports that were considered appropri- ately feminine at the time, namely tennis, golf, and croquet.1 Olympic founder Pierre de Coubertin is frequently cited as having espoused a strong disapproval of female participation in the Games, which was of course refl ective of the Victorian mindset of his time. In his writing, Coubertin referred to women’s sports as “the most unaesthetic sight human eyes could contemplate,” and argued that “a woman’s glory rightfully came through the number and quality of children she pro- duced, and that where sports were concerned, her greatest accomplish- ment was to encourage her sons to excel rather than to seek records for herself.”2 However, at the turn of the twentieth century, all did not share the mindset of Coubertin and his all-male International Olympic Committee (IOC). Feminists from Western nations were cam- paigning for increased participation by women in sports, and women in Asia were also starting to take a more active role in the growth of competitive sports. Simply put, the development of modern women’s sports in Asia came about through a combination of indigenous sporting practices and the infl uence of Western nations.3 In the case of China, historical texts dis- cuss women participating in ball games from as early as 123 A.D., and in other more aggressive sports such as wrestling from the time of the Song Dynasty (960–1279).4 Similarly, in Japan there exist records sug- gesting that women participated in ball games such as kemari as early as the fourteenth century, though these activities were usually enjoyed only by men.5 China, Japan, and Korea also all have long histories of armed and unarmed martial arts, and ancient records place women in prominent roles within these martial traditions.6 In the nineteenth century, as missionaries and foreign settlers began to bear infl uence on ways of thinking and on educational systems in East Asia, attitudes towards women in sports were affected. Missionary schools in China introduced modern sports like gymnastics, athletics, swimming, basketball, volleyball, and table tennis into the curriculum for female students.7 In the early twentieth century, education that included courses in physical education became more common among Chinese women, and by 1912 the fi rst private women’s sports school was opened in southeastern China.8 Of course, with the introduction of new Western sports also came certain Western biases towards women’s participation in them. The Victorian-infl uenced mindset of many of China’s foreign settlers was that gentle exercise was acceptable in that in helped women successfully procreate, but that most games or competitive sports were likely to cause long-term damage to women’s bodies.9 For this reason, women were restricted from taking part in .

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