The phrase "Bukatsudou" literally translates to "club activities," but were you to take a more holistic, emotive approach to the translation, you might come up with a much longer term that sounds more like a way of life than a good way to waste a lunch period. There is a character in Japanese, 道, "Dou," that essentially means "path, road, way," and it can express either the most plebian patch of concrete you've ever set foot upon (歩道 (hodou) for example, means sidewalk), or the other kind of life-governing "path," the kind that often, perhaps even necessarily, tend towards the transcendental (武士道 (bushidou) means, roughly and ineptly translated, "the way of the sword," or perhaps "the way of the samurai.") The "dou" in Bukatsudou (部活動) is not that "dou," but I want to suggest that it probably should be. If I were to spell "Bukatsudo" in Japanese, I would spell it 部活道, and I would translate it as "The Way of the Middle School Student."
Clubs in Japanese schools are nothing like clubs in American schools. When you think of clubs in America, you think of eminently marginal, fringey little unions that meet once a week at lunch somewhere and maybe occasionally plan a weekend outing. When you think of clubs in America you think of Debate Club, Environmental Club, Key Club, Anime Club. You think of them generally as a way to boost that extra-curricular section of your college applications, or, alternatively, as a way to goof off with a theme. Critically, you think of them as being fully separate from the much more visible, generally more serious team sports category of after-school-activities. Sure you've got your Swing Club and your Dinosaur Club (I just looked up a list of club activities at my high school because I couldn't come up with any more and they actually have a fucking dinosaur club), but compared to say, the Football Team, or the Basketball Team, who cares? Not only are clubs second tier socially, but they also just lag as a commitment of time and energy.
Enter the Way of the Middle Schooler. Clubs in Japanese Middle Schools take sports teams in American Middle Schools and bludgeon them over the head with a kendo sword; I'm not even going to mention what they do to clubs. Part of it is just a semantic difference, however. Club activities in Japan encompass all after-school activities, as everything from the Brass Band to the Soccer team fall under the umbrella of Bukatsu, whereas in American schools there is a stricter delineation made between the kids who spend their afternoons painting pictures and those who spend theirs kicking balls. Semantics aside, however, clubs in Japan are pretty much across the board a bigger commitment than anything American middle schoolers participate in, be it a club or a team.
I could go on like this forever, cutting cultural differences out of the fabric of my afternoons, but by this point I'm fairly sick of turning my life into an unending comparative anthropology classroom, so as much as is possible, I want to look at the Way of the Middle Schooler without overtly filtering it through an American consciousness. Whoops, I'm writing this so I guess that's an impossible task, but, Bukatsudo is fucking sweet and I don't want to taint it by punctuating it with an incessant, and ultimately misdirecting, chorus of "In America, we do it THIS way, but!"'s. Who cares about American Middle Schools anyway, they suck. However, this post is already horrifically polluted with them. I guess there's no escaping cross-cultural analysis in this post, so I've decided to finish here. Let the next post deal with the natives as they are, not as reflected off of the colonizers. Stupidest line ever.
In summation, clubs in America suck and aren't really a big deal, but clubs in Japan are EVERYTHING and are pretty awesome because of it. Stay tuned if you'd like to learn why.
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