Creativity Learned from Yuru Sports

Report by KYOPRO Staff

On Tuesday, July 10, 2018, the Extracurricular Education Program "Creativity Learned from Yuru Sports" was held at the Tama Campus. The lecturer was Mr. Takuya Hagiwara, Trustee and Secretary General of the World Loose Sports Association.

Yurusports is a new sport that anyone can enjoy regardless of age, gender, or athletic ability. Yurusports also solves social issues such as "Yurusports Healthcare" for rehabilitation and "Local Yurusports" for town revitalization. The process of creating Yurusports, in which knowledge gained from the discovery and analysis of social issues is combined with "looseness" and "sports" to create original ideas, was chosen for this event because we believe it will provide hints for students to use their own knowledge and creativity to create something new.

In the first half of the program, we had a slide lecture on the overview of YuruSport and how it came into being. He told us that when he invented YuruSport, he took two steps: thinking to build it up firmly and thinking to jump in with an idea. From this, we learned that adding creative spice to logical thinking leads to "creation.

In the latter half of the session, participants actually experienced the loose sport of "baby basketball. Baby basketball is a basketball that uses a special ball with an embedded sensor. If the ball is handled too violently, the child will start crying, so soft passing is required. It is typical of YuruSport that being good at basketball does not give you an advantage.
The philosophy of YURU-SPORT is to "eliminate the weak sportsmen from the world. The philosophy of YURU-SPORT is to "eliminate the weak in sports from the world. As the philosophy says, the participants who had never met each other before were smiling at each other through the competition, and there seemed to be no one who was weak in sports. In the first half of the lecture, he said, "YuruSport is a sport, so it is meaningless if you don't move your body, and when participants say, 'It's not loose at all,' I feel I have done it. After the lecture, some of the participants were still sweating, and I think they were truly "cheated" by the lecturer.
The instructor acted as a referee during play, and winners and losers were strictly decided. The rules were very strict, but the ball was special, and there was a sense of humor that made me chuckle, such as the rules for "childish" and "direct baby," and I felt that this was the "looseness" of YURU-SPORT. I also felt that in general sports, players' ability to compete is not the same as their ability to win. In general sports, handicaps are often used when teams are formed with members of different abilities, but he said that "handicaps do not mean that everyone can enjoy the game equally. Everyone can have fun without handicaps, everyone is serious about winning, but it is fun whether you win or lose. I felt that this is what YuruSport is all about.

Participants also commented that the program was "fun" and "there was a good balance between classroom lectures and practical learning," and I believe they were able to deepen their understanding of the lecture content through hands-on experience. We would like to continue to plan programs from various angles and create opportunities for participants to learn new things.

Report by KYOPRO staff] Toru Matsumura (3rd year, Department of Policy Science on SocietyFaculty of Social Sciences )