Imagine a school shaped by a Christian ethos. Its mission speaks of peace, dignity, moral formation, and care for neighbour. It rejects violence not merely as imprudent but as contrary to human flourishing.

Now imagine a proposal that students might study budō — not as street self-defence, not as competitive fighting, but as a disciplined martial art rooted in restraint, hierarchy, repetition, and self-mastery.

Is there a contradiction?

At first glance, perhaps. Martial arts train the capacity to strike. Christian education seeks to form the conscience away from harm. The optics are uneasy. Yet beneath the surface lies a deeper question — not about bruises, but about anthropology.

Christianity has never spoken with one voice on violence. Across history, it has held at least two distinct moral trajectories. One tradition — most visible in pacifist movements such as the Religious Society of Friends — insists that participation in violence is incompatible with discipleship. Peace is preserved by refusal. One simply does not take up the sword.

Another tradition — articulated most clearly in Augustine and Aquinas — accepts that force may, under strict moral conditions, be used in defence of the innocent. Here, violence is never celebrated, but neither is it categorically excluded. It is morally tragic, tightly bound, and sometimes necessary.

I write from within the Roman Catholic tradition — a tradition that developed just war theory as a moral attempt to regulate the use of force, yet whose historical record reveals how often those limits were strained, ignored, or manipulated. Crusades, religious wars, political entanglements: the Church has not always embodied the restraint it theologised. That history matters. It cautions against moral triumphalism in either direction.

Most Christian schools today operate, whether consciously or not, within this Augustinian inheritance. They teach virtue, justice, courage, and self-control. They field rugby and hockey teams without perceiving contradiction. Physical contest is framed as discipline rather than aggression.

The difficulty with budō is not injury. Controlled dojo practice often produces fewer serious injuries than collision sports. The difficulty is symbolic. Budō carries an explicit lineage of combat. It trains techniques that, in another context, could cause harm. The question, therefore, becomes whether the cultivation of such capacity is already a moral compromise.
Here, the tension sharpens.

One regime of thought holds that peace is safeguarded through abstention. If one refuses the sword entirely, one cannot misuse it. Moral clarity lies in distance from force. To rehearse violence, even in ritualised form, risks normalising it.

Another regime holds that force, as a human capacity, does not vanish by being ignored. Strength exists. Anger exists. The potential for harm exists. The question is not whether these capacities are present, but whether they are disciplined. Peace, in this view, is secured not by denial but by mastery.

Budō belongs to this second logic.

At its philosophical best, it is not the celebration of aggression but the training of restraint. Repetition tempers impulse. Hierarchy humbles ego. Ritual slows reaction. One learns precisely how much force is possible — and therefore how grave its misuse would be. The highest expression of skill is often the refusal to strike.

Everything turns on telos — on the end toward which the practice is ordered. If the end is domination, spectacle, or personal superiority, then it stands in tension with Christian anthropology. If the end is the disciplined formation of character in service of peace, the contradiction is far less obvious.

This is not alien to Christianity. Monastic traditions cultivated bodily discipline through fasting, silence, obedience, and structured hardship. The aim was not punishment but purification of desire. The body became the site where will was trained. Budō functions analogously as a corporeal asceticism: through physical form, the self is governed.

The New Testament does not present a systematic theory of violence; it presents actions that later theology must interpret. Christ refuses retaliation at his arrest and commands Peter to put away the sword. Yet he also confronts injustice forcefully and disrupts the Temple in a dramatic prophetic gesture. The Gospels leave space for ethical development. Christian history filled that space in divergent ways.

It must also be admitted that the cultivation of force always carries danger. Discipline can slide into pride. Technical mastery can inflate ego. A martial framework without humility becomes caricature. But refusal carries danger as well. Moral abstention can drift into abstraction, detached from the embodied realities of conflict and responsibility.

The disagreement, then, is not between peace and violence. It is between two visions of how peace is secured.

Peace can be imagined as the refusal of power.

It can also be imagined as the disciplined governance of power.

Within a Christian educational setting, this becomes a question of formation. What kind of person is the school trying to produce?

A person who never touches the sword, believing that purity lies in abstention?

Or a person who understands the weight of the sword so thoroughly that it remains sheathed?
The Roman Catholic tradition, for all its historical failures, has long held that strength itself is not evil; it is its ordering that determines its morality. The tragedy of history is not that power existed, but that it was so often disordered.

Yet there remains a further question — perhaps the most uncomfortable one. Can one meaningfully guide others through the realities of conflict without ever having encountered its mechanics? Peace formed entirely in abstraction risks fragility. Restraint that has never wrestled, even in disciplined form, with the dynamics of force may prove thinner than it appears. There is a difference between refusing violence. After all, one cannot wield it and refuse it because one has learned its weight.

What appears at first to be a curricular question is in fact a theological one. It turns on the nature of the human person. Is strength inherently corrupting? Or is strength morally neutral until directed toward good or ill?

The sword, literal or metaphorical, is always dangerous. The Church’s own history testifies to that.

The question is whether peace is best preserved by refusing to touch it — or by learning to hold it without drawing it.

Optics cannot settle that question. It must be answered by anthropology.

And that, perhaps, is a conversation worthy of any Christian school — especially one mindful of its past.

「平和」と「鞘に収められた剣」― キリスト教的学校における武道の位置づけ（要約）本稿は、キリスト教的理念を持つ学校において武道を導入することが矛盾するのか、という思想的問いを扱っている。
キリスト教は歴史的に暴力について一枚岩ではなかった。一方には、すべての暴力参加を拒否する平和主義的伝統（例：クエーカー）がある。もう一方には、アウグスティヌスやトマス・アクィナスに代表される「正戦論」の伝統があり、一定の厳格な条件下でのみ武力行使を認めてきた。
筆者はローマ・カトリックの伝統に属しているが、その歴史は武力を神学的に制限しようとしながらも、必ずしも常にその理想を守ってきたわけではない。この歴史的自覚は、どちらの立場にも単純な道徳的優越を与えない。
武道の問題は、怪我の多寡ではなく「象徴性」にある。ラグビーなどの接触競技が容認される一方で、武道は「戦いの技術」を明示的に扱うため、倫理的緊張が生じる。
ここで二つの「真理の枠組み」が現れる。

1. 平和は「力の拒否」によって守られるとする立場
2. 平和は「力の統御」によって守られるとする立場

武道は後者に属する。武道の目的（テロス）は支配ではなく、自己制御と節度の形成にある。反復訓練、礼法、階層構造は、攻撃性を賛美するのではなく、むしろ抑制するための身体的修養である。
キリスト教の修道的伝統における断食や沈黙の修練と同様に、武道も身体を通して意志を鍛える「身体的禁欲」と理解できる。
しかし最後に、より根本的な問いが残る。
暴力の現実や力の構造を一度も経験したことがないまま、人に平和を教えることは可能なのか。
抽象的な平和は脆いかもしれない。力を知らずにそれを拒否することと、その重みを理解した上でそれを鞘に収めることは同じではない。
結局のところ、この問題は課外活動の可否ではなく、人間観の問題である。
力は本質的に腐敗的なのか。
それとも、方向づけられることで善にも悪にもなり得る中立的なものなのか。
平和とは、剣に触れないことなのか。
それとも、抜かずに持つことを学ぶことなのか。
この問いこそが、キリスト教教育の核心に触れている。

There are works one loves before one interrogates. Toto’s Africa is one of them. Its harmonic architecture is luminous; its tonal sincerity disarming. The song produces affective elevation with remarkable efficiency. It feels expansive, romantic, almost sacred.
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And yet, from within a semiotic and existential framework, something far more complex is taking place.

The word “Africa” in the song does not function as a referent. It does not signify 54 nations, layered colonial histories, languages, cities, infrastructures, politics. Instead, it operates as a mythic signifier — detached from referential density and reattached to longing, redemption, authenticity and spiritual restoration.

In Barthesian terms, it becomes myth.

But through a Sartrean lens, something sharper emerges: projection.

For Sartre, consciousness is intentional — it is always consciousness of something. Yet it is also constitutively lacking. Desire arises from absence. We project meaning outward in order to stabilise ourselves. The beloved, the nation, the “elsewhere” becomes charged with transcendence not because it possesses it, but because consciousness requires it.

In Africa, the continent functions precisely as such a projection surface. The singer seeks to “cure what’s deep inside.” Africa becomes the imagined site of plenitude. It is not encountered; it is posited.

It is an object for-for-itself — shaped by the needs of the subject.

The problem is not malice; it is bad faith. The song does not acknowledge the act of projection. It treats its myth as presence.

Now consider Joyce’s Araby.

The boy invests the word “Araby” with erotic and spiritual promise. The bazaar becomes an object of transcendence. It gleams in his imagination as a realm beyond the greyness of Dublin paralysis. Like Toto’s “Africa,” it is less a place than a promise.
But Joyce stages the collapse of this projection.

When the boy arrives, the bazaar is tawdry, commercial, dimly lit. The epiphany — “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity” — is existential recognition. He confronts his own act of meaning-making. He sees that the transcendence he sought was his own fabrication.

Where Toto sustains myth, Joyce dismantles it.

If Sartre explains the mechanism of projection, Derrida complicates the structure further.
For Derrida, the sign never delivers full presence. Meaning is always deferred — différance — structured by absence as much as presence. The sign “Africa” in the song appears full, radiant, stable. But its meaning depends precisely on what it excludes: historical specificity, political complexity, African voices themselves.

The fullness is constructed through erasure.

The song relies on what Derrida would call the metaphysics of presence — the illusion that the sign transparently delivers what it names. “Africa” sounds as if it stands before us, rain-soaked and sublime. Yet its meaning is constituted by a chain of substitutions: documentary images, inherited myths, romantic tropes, Western longings.

It is a sign without stable referent — a floating signifier animated by desire.
Joyce, by contrast, exposes différance at work. “Araby” promises presence but delivers deferral. The boy’s disillusionment is not merely emotional; it is structural. The sign fails to stabilise meaning. The exotic dissolves into commercial banality. The centre does not hold.
Thus, within a Sartrean–Derridean frame:

• Africa exemplifies projection without reflexivity.
• Araby exemplifies projection exposed.
• The song sustains myth.
• The story deconstructs it.

And yet — and this must be said — the music complicates the critique. The harmonic layering, rhythmic build and choral resonance produce a genuine aesthetic transcendence. The music achieves what the lyrics only gesture toward. The affect is real, even if the referent is thin.
This is the tension modern culture often inhabits: aesthetic depth alongside conceptual shallowness.

To call the song “silly” is not entirely unfair. Its geographical collapses — Kilimanjaro rising like Olympus above the Serengeti — reveal a semiotic indifference to precision. But its sincerity prevents it from descending into parody. It is not cynical exploitation; it is romantic abstraction.

Joyce, however, makes the silliness the point.

In that sense, Araby functions as antidote to Africa. It teaches us to recognise when we have mistaken projection for presence, myth for geography, longing for knowledge.
One sings within myth.
The other recognises its construction.
Perhaps maturity lies not in rejecting the song, but in hearing it with awareness — enjoying its sonic architecture while recognising its semiotic structure. To hold enchantment and critique together is not contradiction; it is intellectual responsibility.
Sartre reminds us that we project meaning outward.
Derrida reminds us that meaning never fully arrives.
Joyce reminds us to notice when we have been seduced by our own signs.
And Toto, quite unintentionally, gives us a beautiful example of why such reminders remain necessary.


トトの「Africa」は音楽的には美しく、ロマンティックで誠実な響きを持つ。しかし記号論的・哲学的に見ると、「Africa」は具体的な大陸を指すのではなく、憧れや救済への欲望を投影する〈神話的記号〉として機能している。サルトル的に言えば、それは欠如を抱えた主体が外部へ意味を投射する行為であり、自己の欲望を他者に託す構造である。
一方、ジョイスの「Araby」も同様に〈東洋〉を幻想化するが、物語はその幻想を崩壊させる。少年は、自らの投影と虚栄を悟る。デリダ的に言えば、記号は決して完全な現前を与えず、意味はつねに遅延されることが露わになる。
つまり「Africa」は神話を持続させ、「Araby」は神話を解体する。前者は投影の中で歌い、後者は投影に気づく。その差異こそが、両者を分かつ核心である。