Ryukoku University in Kyoto has suspended its hardball (baseball) club for one month, from July 28 to August 27, following incidents of violence between team members, theft within the dormitory, and a case in which a player filmed himself defecating and the footage was shared on the dorm’s TV. Around 20 students reportedly say they were victims of the thefts. On 5channel, many commenters questioned the closed-off culture typical of Japanese sports clubs.
Ryukoku University (Fushimi Ward, Kyoto) announced on the 27th that it had suspended its hardball club for one month over multiple instances of violence between members, theft within the dormitory, and the filming of inappropriate behavior, among other issues. The suspension runs from July 28 to August 27.
[Photo] Ryukoku University representative comments on the baseball club’s suspension: “As someone entrusted with overseeing this organization, I feel a heavy sense of responsibility”
The university held a press briefing on the 27th to explain what happened. Last May, a second-year student flew into a rage after being mocked/imitated by a first-year student, kicking him in the stomach and punching him in the shoulder several times. It also came to light that in July of this year, cash and underwear were stolen in the dormitory but the incidents were never reported to the coaching staff. About 20 students say they were victimized, and the university, in consultation with police, is having an investigative committee conduct interviews. Additionally, in February and March of last year, team members filmed themselves defecating by a river in Shiga Prefecture and played the footage on the dormitory TV to share it.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
You were staring at me while I was taking a dump earlier, weren't you?
No, it's "defecation," not "disbandment" (a pun — in Japanese "haibu"/disbandment and "haiben"/defecation sound almost identical)
Baseball club
Rugby club
And American football too, huh
What's even the upside?
It doesn't teach the person anything.
"They're too young to know better" kind of talk is beside the point.
They're housing them in the dorm, so of course the school is acting as a stand-in parent.
Setsuko, that's "Astro Kyudan"… (riffing on the famous line from Grave of the Fireflies, "Setsuko, that's not…"; the real manga is titled Astro Kyudan, not Scat-ro Kyudan)
Background and Key Points
Ryukoku University is a private Buddhist school in Kyoto founded in 1639 as a seminary for the Nishi Honganji sect, one of Japan’s oldest institutions of higher learning, though its baseball program is not a Koshien-level powerhouse on the order of Waseda or Keio — the “elite” in the headline refers to its status as a respected old university, not to national baseball prestige. Like most Japanese university sports clubs, its players live communally in a team dormitory under a strict senpai-kohai hierarchy, a structure meant to build discipline but which also isolates the team from outside oversight — exactly the “closed-off culture” commenters kept invoking with the slang term yakyu-nou, or “baseball-brain,” used to mock the insular, conformist mindset such clubs are stereotyped as producing.
The thread didn’t really argue over what happened; it split instead on who should answer for it. One poster insisted the individual offenders, not the school, should be the ones apologizing, since institutional contrition teaches nobody anything — but another pointed out that because the university houses these students in a dorm it has functionally taken on a parental role, making its response unavoidable.
What the thread glosses over, buried in wordplay about “disbandment” versus “defecation,” is that the violence ran in an unexpected direction: it was a second-year student attacking a first-year, not the senior-hazes-junior pattern foreign readers might expect from Japanese sports hierarchies. The roughly twenty theft victims also suggest an organized pattern within the team rather than an isolated incident, something the posts never engage with at all.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5channel (Breaking News+) thread “Filmed Themselves Defecating and Played It on the Dorm TV: Elite Ryukoku University Baseball Club Suspended Over In-Team Violence.”
