Body (Fat) “Compliments” and Shaming in Kendo: Are they Solicitous?
by Kate Sylvester.
I have been sitting on this article for a few months now. It is personal and a sensitive issue, but an important topic. The motivation to share my experiences of body (fat) shaming in kendo was triggered by a conversation I overheard between a female and male in a dojo setting. The man “complimented” a female kendo practitioner commenting “You have lost weight haven’t you”. Her response made it very clear that women don’t always receive “compliments” of fat loss as praise. Rather as a reminder that women’s bodies, and their fat, are constantly under surveillance and often freely commented on. That the World Kendo Championships (WKC) are imminent and since I am in the competitive sphere as a national team coach, memories resurfaced as I listened in on the exchange. I appreciated the woman’s clarity and wondered why I never challenged unwanted comments on my body as she had on this occasion.
I write this article from the perspective from when I was on the national team preparing for the WKC over a period of years. The lived experiences of body (fat) shaming that I share may resonate with others that have had similar body (fat) shaming experiences in kendo. It may also provide an insight that encourages kendo sensei, coaches, and peers to reassess how they communicate or perceive body fat in relation to a woman’s personhood, and their competitive potential and performance in kendo.
When I was actively competing in kendo as a national team member, my body weight was frequently commented on. I did assume at the time that it was with good intention as people could see my dedication to kendo and I knew these particular people cared about me. I became aware that people thought my kendo would be better if I was thinner and if my body was more aesthetically pleasing and fitted within the “norm” of the female kendo/sporting body. Although I was very passionate about kendo, I considered myself as an amateur athlete, not an elite athlete. I would argue that a small fraction of national team members in kendo are elite athletes by definition. As such do amatuer athletes in kendo, particularly women, need to be monitored as such?
Comments about my body had deeply affected how I perceived myself and the permission gave to myself to pursue competitive kendo in my natural body. The comments on my body fat that I remember most vividly are from those in my inner circle of kendo sensei, coaches and peers, as well as family members, and employers. I have never forgotten these comments, to the point that I can recall the exact words and where the monologues (one-way conversations) took place. These instances became reflexive moments—moments where I became detached from myself to imagine how others saw me. Through the persistent comments on my body fat since I was a child, I had come to experience my body as something that was separate from my inmost self. For some background, I had eating disorders in my teenage years that I had self-healed without family or professional support. My relationship with food is healthy now and the body dysmorphia or “phantom fat syndrome” is dissipating. I am committed to my journey of body acceptance and far less preoccupied by comments and “compliments” on my body composition.
When I started to train kendo with more seriousness in my early twenties, I had already developed a better self-image. However, this was challenged through the comments made by those closest to me. Before I describe these experiences, I will first clarify that despite the following examples and numerous remarks made by others about my body weight, I also have received good technical advice and genuine support from those that have also commented on my body weight in kendo settings.
I will share some of the most intensely remembered remarks on my body composition that I would like to believe were given with good intention, although they were not helpful to my kendo or self-confidence. I recall a sensei asking why I was the weight I was. At the time I was not sure how to answer this cryptic question. I shrugged my shoulders and replied “I don’t know”. I really did not know why my body shape was the way it was. I was fit, I did not overeat or eat fattening foods. A kendo peer brought up the conversation and indirectly expected an answer to the question. I can recall feeling confused by the question again but it did not stir a self-inquiry. However, it did make me feel my body was under surveillance, more so than my technical kendo development.
My partner’s father also tried to comfort (?) me by sharing that fat people can be fit and successful whilst providing examples of such women. I did not initiate the topic of conversation and again, I cannot recall responding, but do remember feeling confused as to why we were having the one-way discussion about my body fat. Another example was when I was a gym instructor, my manager reassuringly (?) stated that it was good for the “overweight” clients to have me as their instructor as I too were “overweight”. Again, I did not respond to this comment. I just absorbed it, detached from my body, and imagined myself through the eyes of others. Through all of these comments I was internalising the stigma messages about my body.
Probably the only times I have consciously acted on comments about my body composition was when I have trained in Japan. I clearly remember when I had just completed training at an elite institution in Japan for 2-months, I asked the sensei for advice that I could work on in my home country. She told me to lose weight. As I respected her, I took this advice seriously and had connected my body fat to my acceptance in kendo and my competitive potential. At the same time, these comments about my body had deeply affected how I perceived myself and how I should look to be allowed to pursue competitive kendo seriously. Through this experience and comments from other women, it became clear that women also become monitors of other women in kendo. This can be considered a result of how women internalise body norms and project this (self and other) objectifying gaze on to other women, often more critically than men. It is a repercussion of the same patriarchal system that has women competing against each other, pushing each other down to clutch at rubbles of power in an arena lower in status and separate from men.
I recently heard another national team member sharing a similar experience about how she was told to lose weight when asking a high-ranked sensei for advice on her kendo. She did not receive it to be particularly motivating or supportive of her competitive ambition.
When I was a national team member, I had however developed good cardio vascular fitness and body strength. At one stage I was leg pressing around 250 kg. In retrospect, I feel it would have been much more useful to my competitive kendo and self-confidence to receive more encouragement to accept my body shape and to work with it as a strength. Body positivity and only technical kendo advice would have benefitted my kendo development and self-confidence (which we know is integral to performance), more so than the incautious comments on my body fat. It would have been more helpful and motivational for my kendo goals if significant others had encouraged me to be more fit, more confident, and technically better at kendo—if their words were to match their intention. A more cautious dialogue would have been appreciated and may have unearthed my history of eating disorders and that I was still self-learning how to accept my body.
My body weight is less scrutinised now as am no longer an active competitor and I have just turned 47-years-old. Women and their bodies become increasingly invisible with age—which is problematic in many social spheres, including kendo. For me it feels paradoxically liberating for my body to now be unseen for the most part. I still receive comments on my body fat when I train kendo in Japan however.
I do wonder why people think it is ok and a “compliment” to share with a woman that they have lost weight. Maybe some women drop weight to receive this approval. However, such “compliments” are not always received as praise, and rather they can remind women that their bodies and fat are under surveillance and that women’s bodies are objects possessed by the normalising and objectifying gaze of others to be freely remarked upon.
Admittedly, I hoped to receive “compliments” for my weight loss, especially when training kendo in Japan. Although the “compliments” may have provided a false sense of acceptance, losing weight never made my kendo better. It never enhanced my kendo training or shiai success. The image in the mirror never changed. The only reliable sources that were telling of my weight loss were the scales and other people. Maybe when I was thinner, I looked more like what a serious athletic woman should look like, but on the inside, I was exhausted and undernourished from not eating well. Clearly, I did not perform well in this condition. My best competitive kendo performances have been when I focused on fitness and technique whilst intentionally detaching from how others perceived my body and my kendo. In this process I became connected to myself and removed from the observation of others. This fostered a courageousness that enhanced the presence between myself and my opponents.
Excess body fat on athletes is not without exception indicative of lack of fitness, discipline, or healthy eating habits. Rather a statement of what a non-normative athletic body is. The real issue is that Fatism is a pervasive problem in society and in most sporting spheres. By definition, Fatism is a prejudice or discrimination against fat people and it is considered the last acceptable prejudice. The acceptability of this bias is due to the social perceptions on how body weight is connected to health and beauty, and the generalisation that overweight people lack self-discipline and are a burden on society. These generalisations are flawed as there is a spectrum of “natural” body types and a myriad of reasons to why people are “overweight”.
Some “overweight” people have physical or psychological trauma or health issues that affect their body weight. Others may battle to accept, or simply do accept their body in a society that decides that a normative body is not “fat”. Social media has exacerbated body weight consciousness as users consume and create images that perpetuate body insecurities through distorted lived realities of users. This is particularly dangerous for young girls, but also boys. Despite the work being undertaken in equality and body positivity social movements, the female body remains an object for the male gaze and self-confidence is often anchored to adhering to unrealistic and unsustainable beauty norms.
Fatism manifests in sport, mostly in aesthetic sports and those that are categorised by weight. Anti-fat bias in sport can lead to eating disorders and other mental and physical problems that endure beyond sport. The stigma that “overweight” amateur athletes face can affect their physical and mental health, and their participation in sports (see Inderstrodt-Stephens and Acharya, 2018). Fatism is present in kendo due to the appreciation of aesthetics and a philosophy that is deep-rooted in self-discipline. Being “overweight” in kendo is often stigmatised and considered a kind of moral failing, particularly for women. Women are expected to be within a body weight range that is “normal” and aesthetically agreeable.
Appropriate or agreeable femininity in kendo as a gendered ideology, has roots in postwar Japan when the sportified version of kendo (shinai-kyogi) opened kendo for females. It was thought that the new democratised form of kendo, among other things, also complimented the cultivation of cultural femininity and beautified the female body (see Sylvester, 2023). Although kendo in Japan has since diversified and women and girls are encouraged to train their bodies for high performance and not specifically for beautification purposes, aesthetics remains an important component of kendo. Particularly for women. During my extensive field research in Japan, I observed habitual body weight consciousness of women practitioners. Body weight monitoring (self and other) is also practiced in kendo outside of Japan. This perspective is based on my lived kendo experiences as an observer and as a non-normative kendo body that has had my body weight scrutinised inside and outside of Japan.
In the sporting world, a discourse centring on the fat-positive potential of sports is surfacing. Although “athletes with bigger bodies are often stigmatised as less athletic or unworthy of opportunity, advocates are becoming more purposeful in creating spaces for “fat” athletes to thrive”. The Fat-Positive Potential of Sports is also relevant to kendo. Larger body compositions can be more suitable to certain sports and “this can allow people – especially women – whose bodies are hypervisible and policed in other aspects of their lives, to find pride in what their bodies can do and the assets they are to a team or a sport” (de la Cretaz, 2022). With certainty, the fat-positive potential of kendo is an important dialogue, as is the acceptance of corporeal diversity in kendo. Sara Ahmed’s enlightening description on the potential of corporeal diversity is also relevant to kendo.
“Corporeal diversity, how we come to inhabit different kinds of bodies, with differing capacities and incapacities, rhythms and tendencies, could be understood as a call to open up a world that has assumed a certain kind of body as a norm” (Ahmed, 2017, pp.166-167).
It is not necessary to have a body that fits within female sporting elite norms to be a great kendo competitor and one that is taken seriously. There are a number WKC level male kendo athletes whom prove you can be “overweight” and also skilful and successful in kendo. As I mentioned previously, being closer to a normative women’s kendo body did not enhance my competitive kendo performance. Competitive kendo is not a sport that requires athletes to be thin and toned, although it is important to have good cardiovascular fitness and sound body strength that can mobilise body weight athletically.
Rather than centring on body weight as a problem to resolve, it may benefit women’s competitive performance if sensei, coaches, and peers focus on advice and support that draws out the strengths and self-confidence in a natural body type. It is also important to keep in mind that comments on body weight loss, even given as “compliments”, are not necessarily empowering or received positively by women. Changing behaviours and attitudes surrounding body fat can contribute to cultivating body positivity and skill confidence in kendo athletes. This approach can bolster women’s kendo performance and their engagement in kendo.
References
Ahmed, S (2017). Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press.
de la Cretaz, B. (2022, February 22) The fat-positive potential of sports. Global Sport Matters. https://globalsportmatters.com/culture/2022/02/22/creating-positive-spaces-fat-athletes/
Inderstrodt-Stephens, J., and Acharya, L. (2018).“Fat” Chicks Who Run: Stigma Experienced by “Overweight” Endurance Athletes. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 42(1), 49-67.
Sylvester, K. (2023). Women and Martial Art in Japan. Routledge.
Kate Sylvester Perspectives 