The purpose of this study was to clarify the nature of the “ tairyoku （bodily power）issue” during the period after World War II to the 1950s through analysis of newspaper articles published at the time. Soon after World War II, the issue of taii , as assessed in terms of height, weight and chest circumference, was　identified in children. A hange from a decrease to an increase occurred in 1948, based on comparison with records obtained before the war. It was also assumed that tairyoku could be regarded as an index of post-war recovery, reflecting the increase of taii in children. At the end of the 1940s, the tairyoku problem was thought to have been due to lack of nutrition during the war. Therefore, it was concluded that improved nutrition and rest for children would be the solution. In the 1950s, the tairyoku issue in Japanese athletes also emerged after the poor performance of the Japan team in the Helsinki Olympics, and this was extended to an interpretation that a “ tairyoku problem” existed in the Japanese nation as a whole as a result of wartime privation. However, in the mid 1950s, the notion of the physical ideal evident in the West was held in sharp contrast to the statistics obtained in Japan immediately after the war. Thus, tairyoku was considered to be a functional index of modernization. These circumstances illustrate that in the process of post-war reconstruction, the “ tairyoku issue” was always problematic because it was based on criteria that were representative of that era.