Sekiya Sonoda
Honorary member, Japanese Society for the Study of Human Welfare and Culture

1. Disabled people have been denied recreation

People living with disabilities have experienced various inconveniences and barriers in their daily lives. Among the supports for these “disabilities” in everyday life, the first issue addressed was how to enable the smooth functioning of the basics of daily life, such as eating, sleeping, and toileting. Attention then shifted to communication issues. Research was carried out into how to enable mutual communication with people with major difficulties such an inability to see, hear, or produce words, and various methods were developed as a result. Next was the issue of mobility. In order to allow people who use wheelchairs, in particular, to move around town freely, systems were created to make roads barrier-free and to enable them to ride on buses, subways, and trains.

What was left until last was recreation. Leisure time, play, hobbies, perhaps entertainment – in general terms, recreation – exist to allow people to lead enjoyable lives as humans. These also represent a world to which people with disabilities have long been denied access. Many of the general public feel that it can’t be helped if someone cannot play as they would like to because they have a disability; that as long as they are guaranteed the necessities of life, it probably can’t be helped if play remains out of reach. There is also a way in which disabled people themselves have accepted this. In this country, it has been taken for granted that play and recreation were a bonus if you were lucky enough to be given them, and that you should simply put up with your fate if you were not. Recreation was a secondary element of life: awareness of it as one of the activities essential to leading a human life or, put another way, as part of the right to life has been lacking.

The roots of this conception lie in the “principle of lesser eligibility” which was strongly preserved in earlier social welfare. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Britain became the first in the world to establish welfare measures to help the poor and the sick; but at that time, the principle was declared that “the level of help for those receiving assistance must be below even the lowest living standards of ordinary workers.” This was because it was thought that if the level of help were too high, many people would stop working hard. A new ideology which demolished this argument finally spread in the second half of the twentieth century, based on the keyword of “normalization”. This was a way of thinking which held that all people had a right to “healthy and cultured lives”, and that the role of social welfare was to make this a reality. This thinking spread widely, and recreation came to be understood as one of the issues for normalization.

2. Recreation which is “possible even with a disability”?

The recreation movement, a social movement aiming to enhance recreation in daily life, began in America at the start of the twentieth century and spread to the rest of the world. In Japan, too, initiatives took place from around the mid-1930s under the name of the “wellbeing movement”, but these were coopted by the militarism of the time and transformed into a movement aiming to promote a sense of nationhood. After the War, a new “recreation movement” was promoted at national policy level as one facet of America’s occupation policy, and recreational activities such as new sports, outdoor activities, dancing, chorus groups and so on gained vigour in communities and schools. During the period of rapid economic growth, workplace recreation was rolled out at factories and offices nationwide for the younger age group, and later, with the advent of an aging society, recreational activities for the elderly took root and became an indispensable part of the programme at nursing homes. However, the development of recreation with a focus on disabled people made very slow progress.

It is not the case that there were no stirrings of interest in recreation at disabled welfare settings. However, these were limited to gentle, readily accessible activities that were “possible even with a disability”. This way of thinking held that if a normal table tennis rally were difficult, a table tennis-like game would be played in which the ping pong ball was rolled to make it easier to receive. What sent shock waves through this recreation for the disabled, which aimed to make everything easy and straightforward for the sake of disabled people, was the introduction of “recreation for the handicapped” programmes carried out in America in the 1980s. The menu included everything from regular sports to music and art, hiking and mountain climbing, and even scuba diving and skydiving – in brief, the exact same forms of recreation enjoyed by regular citizens.

In other words, the issue of disabled recreation is not one of promoting easy forms of recreation which are possible even with a disability, but rather one of devising ways of providing support to allow disabled people to participate in the various recreation programmes in which they naturally also wish to take part. When a wheelchair user wants to climb a mountain, responding to this wish requires resolving various issues such as which places are suitable, what clothes and equipment they need, how many supporters are necessary, and what roles they should play. Considering how to set up appropriate support methods through a process of repeated trial and error becomes the task of recreation support personnel. Promoting disabled recreation means positioning recreation as a human right, and creating the conditions and comprehensive support activities which aim to make this right a reality. This awareness made us keenly sense the paucity of disabled recreation in our country: the situation could accurately be called a Copernican Revolution in disabled recreation in the sense that we were forced to think about how to change it from its foundations.

3. From “enjoying ourselves all together with everyone” to “enjoyed by everyone”

Although the philosophy of disabled recreation came to be relatively well-understood after this, it did not mean that recreation was improved so easily in practice. More than anything, Japanese society is world-famous as a “leisure-poor country”, where working hours long enough to invite death from overwork still show no sign of disappearing, and the amount of time off at weekends or of long holidays compares unfavourably with developing countries, let alone with developed countries. As long as the recreation standard for ordinary workers remains stagnant, it is difficult for this to be improved greatly in welfare settings. First of all, a social movement to establish “recreation as a right” is essential.

Even so, when it comes to travel, a leading example of recreation, great improvements have been seen in the world of disabled people. In the past, various barriers such as differences in level existed even when moving along the street in a wheelchair, but now, more and more places can accommodate wheelchairs – not only public cultural facilities, but also cafes and restaurants around town. Many, though not all, buses and trains are wheelchair-accessible, and special wheelchairs have been developed to make journeys involving planes possible. Support for mobility and communication for visually- and hearing-impaired people, such as the installation of Braille blocks or the use of sign language interpreters, has also expanded, playing a role in enriching recreation.

Nevertheless, the provision of group recreation remains the norm in residential and daycare facilities. “Recreation time” still evokes an entrenched image of recreation as a group, in which users gather in a hall and “enjoy themselves all together” playing games, singing songs, or taking part in quizzes. The idea that “recreation is something that we all do together” is pervasive among both the people concerned and their supporters. However, just as people’s personalities are diverse, what they find enjoyable also varies widely, and so it is self-evident that recreation is not solely something that people do all together. If we understand recreation as enjoyment which is essential for people to live as humans, we must value each individual’s play and hobbies. Of course, this is not to deny everyone enjoying themselves together, but we surely also need to consider how each person can have an experience which is enjoyable for them. The ultimate goal for disabled recreation is how to provide activities not to enjoy “with everyone” but to be enjoyed “by everyone” as individuals.

Note from the editorial team: the column “A new age of recreation – from recreation ‘with everyone’ to ‘by everyone’” has begun from this month’s edition. Sekiya Sonoda has been researching how to create the conditions for people with disabilities to enjoy physical activities such as “light sports”, art, outdoor activities, travel, and other recreation programmes, and their promotion, for many years. This column will appear on an irregular basis from now on.