Olympic samurai: Japanese martial arts between sports and self-cultivation

ABSTRACT

One of the longest-standing debates in the martial arts relates to their being either ‘sports’ or methods of self-cultivation. Traditionalists often ascribe unique spiritual characteristics to the martial arts, while criticising the ‘sportification’ of certain practices. In this view, the martial arts are seen to have declined from ancient ideals and become focused on ‘superficial’ competition and techniques. This paper argues that the supposedly intrinsic connection between martial arts and mental self-cultivation is largely a product of the last 150 years, and developed from the historical context of Japan’s modernisation in the late nineteenth century, as martial arts were codified while experiencing a powerful challenge from the arrival of Western sports. This dynamic was closely related to the development of the nationalistic ideology of bushido, the ‘way of the samurai’, which was frequently invoked by promoters of the martial arts. In this context, intangible elements such as ‘spirit’ were used by martial artists to include and exclude people along lines of gender, nationality, and ethnicity. This paper uses three Tokyo Olympics, 2020, 1964, and the cancelled 1940 games, to examine how the Japanese martial arts were ‘spiritualised’, and to consider the enduring legacy of imperial ideologies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Oleg Benesch is Senior Lecturer in East Asian History at the University of York, specializing in the history of early modern and modern Japan and China in global perspective. His recent publications include the books Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan (Oxford, 2014) and, with Ran Zwigenberg, Japan's Castles: Citadels of Modernity in War and Peace (Cambridge, 2019). For more information on Oleg and his research, please see www.olegbenesch.com.

Notes

1 Oleg Benesch and Ran Zwigenberg, Japan’s Castles: Citadels of Modernity in War and Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

2 Jessamyn R. Abel, ‘Japan’s Sporting Diplomacy: The 1964 Tokyo Olympiad’, The International History Review 34, no. 2 (2012): 203–20; Tagsold, Christian, ‘The 1964 Tokyo Olympics as Political Games’, The Asia-Pacific Journal 23-3-09 (2009), June 8.

3 Abel, ‘Japan’s Sporting Diplomacy’, 213.

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6 Bennett, Kendo, 3–5.

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8 For a discussion of alternative readings of bushido as a historicised ‘way of the samurai’ or a more universal ‘way of the warrior,’ see: Oleg Benesch, Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 245–7.

9 Benesch, Inventing the Way of the Samurai.

10 http://www.nipponbudokan.or.jp/shinkoujigyou/rinen (accessed December 15, 2019).

11 Bennett, Kendo, 5.

12 Helen Macnaughton. ‘The Oriental Witches: Women, Volleyball and the 1964 Tokyo Olympics’, Sport in History 34, no. 1 (2014): 145.

13 For an excellent overview of these debates, see pp. 2–6 of Paul Bowman, Deconstructing Martial Arts (Cardiff: Cardiff University Press, 2019).

14 Matsumae Shigeyoshi, Budō shisō no tankyū (Tokyo: Tōkai Daigaku Shuppankai, 1987), ii.

15 Oleg Benesch, ‘Reconsidering Zen, Samurai, and the Martial Arts’, The Asia-Pacific Journal 14, no. 17 No. 7 (Sept. 1, 2016): 1–22.

16 Benesch, Inventing the Way of the Samurai, 74.

17 G. Cameron Hurst III, Armed Martial Arts of Japan: Swordsmanship and Archery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 85.

18 Anne Walthall, ‘Do Guns have Gender? Technology and Status in Early Modern Japan’, in Recreating Japanese Men, eds. Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 25–47; Michael Wert, ‘Swordsmanship and Society in Early Modern Japan’, in Sports and Physical Exercise in Early Modern Culture, eds. Rebekka von Mallinckrodt and Angela Schattner (London: Routledge, 2016): 253–68; Lee A. Thompson, ‘The Invention of the Yokozuna’, in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, ed. Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 174–90.

19 Wert, ‘Swordsmanship and Society’, 257.

20 Ibid., 265.

21 Hurst, Armed Martial Arts, 67; Wert, ‘Swordsmanship and Society’, 257.

22 Hurst, Armed Martial Arts, 85.

23 Ibid., 185–96.

24 Ibid., 147–56.

25 Colin Jaundrill, Samurai to Soldier: Remaking Military Service in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016).

26 Bennett, Kendo, 80–1.

27 Elisabeth Dencker Berit, ‘Popular Gymnastics and the Military Spirit in Germany, 1848-1871’, Central European History 34, no. 4 (2001): 503–30.

28 Oleg Benesch, ‘Wang Yangming and Bushidō: Japanese Nativization and its Influences in Modern China’, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 36, no. 3 (Fall 2009), 439–54.

29 Sonoda Hidehiro, ‘The Decline of the Japanese Warrior Class, 1840-1880’, Japan Review 1 (1990): 73–111.

30 Benesch, Inventing the Way of the Samurai, 37–8.

31 Mike Callan, ‘Judo as a physical, intellectual and moral education’, 14–8 of Mike Callan ed., The Science of Judo (London: Routledge, 2018).

32 Benesch, Inventing the Way of the Samurai, 11.

33 Ibid., 140–7.

34 Sakaue Yasuhiro, Nippon yakyū no keifu gaku (Tokyo: Seikyusha, 2001), 99.

35 Ultimately, only four issues of this ambitious journal were published, all in 1898. For a more detailed discussion of its content, see: Benesch, Inventing the Way of the Samurai, 85–90.

36 Nakamura Tamio, ed., Kendō jiten: gijutsu to bunka no rekishi (Tokyo: Shimadzu Shobō, 1994), 316; For a discussion of the Great Japan Martial Virtue Association, see: Denis Gainty, Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan (New York: Routledge, 2013).

37 Sakaue, Nippon yakyū, 82–3.

38 Thomas Blackwood, ‘Bushidō Baseball? Three ‘Fathers’ and the Invention of a Tradition’, Social Science Japan Journal 11, no. 2 (2008): 223–40; Sakaue, Nippon yakyū, 101–2.

39 Takashima Kō, Guntai to supōtsu no kindai (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2015), 327–32.

40 For an overview of the 1940 Tokyo Olympics, see: Asato Ikeda, ‘The Tokyo Olympics: 1940/2020’, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 18, no. 4:11 (15 February, 2020)(https://apjjf.org/2020/4/Ikeda.html) and Mark Schreiber, ‘1940 Tokyo: The Olympiad that Never Was’, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 18, no. 5:10 (1 March, 2020)(https://apjjf.org/2020/5/Schreiber.html).

41 Takashima, Guntai to supōtsu no kindai, 30.

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45 Kinoshita Hideaki, ‘“Gekiken” “kenjutsu” kara “kendō” he no ikō ni kansuru shiteki kōsatsu’, Taiiku gaku kenkyū 51 (2006): 33–48.

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50 Bennett, Kendo, 129–30.

51 Ibid., 131–54.

52 T. Lindsay and J. Kano, ‘Jiujutsu’, The Asiatic Society of Japan 16 (1889): 204.

53 Michel Brousse and David Matsumoto, Judo in the U.S.: A Century of Dedication (Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2005), 109–10.

54 Sarah Panzer, ‘When Jiu-Jitsu was German: Japanese Martial Arts in German Sport- and Körperkultur’, in Transnational encounters between Germany and Japan: perceptions of partnership in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, eds. Joanne Miyang Cho, Lee Roberts, and Christian W. Spang (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

55 JACAR file nos. B13080343900, B13080336300, B13080335300, B13080317400, B13080320400.

56 Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 14; Joseph Svinth, ‘Professor Yamashita Goes to Washington’, in Martial Arts in the Modern World, eds. Thomas Green and Joseph Svinth (Westport: Praeger, 2003), 47–60.

57 Diana Looser, ‘Radical Bodies and Dangerous Ladies: Martial Arts and Women’s Performance, 1900–1918’, Theatre Research International 36, no. 1 (2011): 3–19; Wendy Rouse, Her Own Hero: The Origins of the Women’s Self-Defense Movement (New York: NYU Press, 2019), 129–30.

58 Benesch, Inventing the Way of the Samurai, 90–7.

59 S. P. MacKenzie, ‘Willpower or Firepower? The Unlearned Lessons of the Russo-Japanese War’, in The Russo-Japanese War in Cultural Perspective, 1904-05, eds. David Wells and Sandra Wilson (London: MacMillan Press, 1999), 30–40.

60 Benesch, ‘Reconsidering Zen, Samurai, and the Martial Arts’.

61 Brian Victoria, ‘D.T. Suzuki, Zen and the Nazis’, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 11, no. 43:4 (October 21, 2013); Brian Victoria, ‘A Zen Nazi in Wartime Japan: Count Dürckheim and his Sources—D.T. Suzuki, Yasutani Haku’un and Eugen Herrigel’, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 12, no. 3:2 (January 13, 2014).

62 Yamada Shoji, Earl Hartman, trans. Shots in the Dark: Japan, Zen and the West (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009).

63 My thanks to Otsuka Ayako (University of York) for pointing this out. The traditional view of the subject is: Frank W. Iklé, ‘Japanese-German Peace Negotiations during World War I’, The American Historical Review 71, no. 1 (October 1965): 62–76.

64 https://www.digital.archives.go.jp/das/image/M0000000000000770873 (accessed January 6, 2020).

65 Bill Maltarich, Samurai and supermen : national socialist views of Japan (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2005); Sergio Raimondo, Valentina De Fortuna, and Giulia Ceccarelli, ‘Bushido as Allied: The Japanese Warrior in the Cultural Production of Fascist Italy (1940-1943)’, Ulerevistas 12, no. 2 (2017): 82–100.

66 Benesch, Inventing the Way of the Samurai, 211–2.

67 Brousse, Judo in the U.S., 65–76; https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2018/08/24/manzanar-judo-cagney-japanese (accessed January 6, 2020).

68 Craig Cameron, American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941–1951 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 60; Richard J. Schmidt and George H. Bristol; Ogawa Junko, trans, ‘Amerika gōshūkoku kaiheitai māsharu ātsu puroguramu no kaihatsu ni okeru Nihon budō no eikyō’, 272–93 of Yamada Shōji and Alexander Bennett, eds., Nihon no kyōiku ni ‘budō’ wo: 21 seiki ni shingitai wo kitaeru (Meiji Tosho, 2006), 274–5.

69 Cameron, American Samurai; John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1987).

70 Gainty, Martial Arts, 145.

71 Bennett, Kendo, 159.

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73 Bennett, Kendo, 167–9.

74 Gainty, Martial Arts, 145.

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76 Bennett, Kendo, 22–3; Hurst, Armed Martial Arts, 8, 78.

77 Bennett, Kendo, 187.

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81 Ran Zwigenberg, ‘Hiroshima Castle and the Long Shadow of Militarism in Postwar Japan’, Japan Review 33 (2019): 195–218.

82 Nick Kapur, ‘The Empire Strikes Back? The 1968 Meiji Centennial Celebrations and the Revival of Japanese Nationalism’, Japanese Studies 38, no. 3 (2018): 306.

83 Bennett, Kendo, 3.

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88 Matsumae, Budō shisō no tankyū; Matsumae Shigeyoshi, Toward an Understanding of Budo Thought (Tokyo: Tokai University Press, 1987).

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93 Katherine Sylvester, ‘Negotiating Kendo Capital and Gendered Identity in a Japanese Sports University Kendo Club’ (unpublished PhD thesis at the University of Victoria, 2015).

94 Sylvester, ‘Negotiating Kendo Capital’, 23.

95 Anna Kavoura et al., ‘“Some Women Are Born Fighters”: Discursive Constructions of a Fighter’s Identity by Female Finnish Judo Athletes’, Sex Roles 79, no. 3–4 (August 2018): 239–52.

96 Lawton, ‘Globalization’, 1762–8.