The Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts

Raul Sanchez Garcia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351333795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du Japon

Winner of the Norbert Elias Book Prize 2020

This is the first long-term analysis of the development of Japanese martial arts, connecting ancient martial traditions with the martial arts practised today. The Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts captures the complexity of the emergence and development of martial traditions within the broader Japanese Civilising Process.

The book traces the structured process in which warriors' practices became systematised and expanded to the Japanese population and the world. Using the theoretical framework of Norbert Elias's process-sociology and drawing on rich empirical data, the book also compares the development of combat practices in Japan, England, France and Germany, making a new contribution to our understanding of the socio-cultural dynamics of state formation. Throughout this analysis light is shed onto a gender blind spot, taking into account the neglected role of women in martial arts.

The Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts is important reading for students of Socio-Cultural Perspectives in Sport, Sociology of Physical Activity, Historical Development of Sport in Society, Asian Studies, Sociology and Philosophy of Sport, and Sports History and Culture. It is also a fascinating resource for scholars, researchers and practitioners interested in the historical and socio-cultural aspects of combat sport and martial arts.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Nowadays, the group of activities collectively known as martial arts has become a relevant and distinguishable family of physical culture all around the world. As an example from the specific group of Japanese martial arts, the Nippon Budokan considers an amount of more than 50 million practitioners outside Japan (Matsunaga 2009: 6), and 3 million inside Japan (Usui 2009: 7). However, martial arts have become relevant not only in terms of number of participants and governing bodies but also in terms of constituting a relevant research topic within academia. Recent collective volumes on the matter (Farrer and Whalen-Bridge 2011; Sánchez García and Spencer 2013) and international conferences (e.g. those organised by the International Martial Arts and Combat Sports Scientific Society) have been channelled towards the establishment of a new discipline or a field of academic research called martial arts studies (Bowman 2015, 2017).

The social behind the terms

For some of the scholars trying to establish a solid base for the discipline of martial arts studies, the most pressing question have been first and foremost to get a precise definition of martial arts.¹ However, trying to produce a strict universal definition for a set of variegated activities that took form as part of different collective socio-historical processes risks the chance of oversimplification. For the moment – assuming the risk of oversimplification – it suffices to say that the activities internationally considered nowadays as martial arts represent the last phase of a long-term process of development from Asian techniques/methods of war towards ways of self-perfection, self-defence, and/or sport open to any social group due to class, gender, age, ethnicity, or nationality. This recognisable set of physical practices spread during the second half of the twentieth century, within what Maguire (1999) distinguished as the ‘global sportisation phase’. This phase can be identified on a broader sense with what Nederveen Pieterse (2009) considered as the stage of ‘Contemporary globalisation’, starting in 1950, in which Japan, the USA, and Europe emerged as the central nodes of cultural hybridisation. In the spread of martial arts’ popular imagery (especially Western), not only was the Japan–West axis crucial; the Hong Kong/Hollywood axis also had a great impact through the movies produced during the 1970s. In these movies, the ‘Bruce Lee phenomenon’ became key for the spread of this set of recognisable Asian disciplines.² In fact, Bruce Lee must be credited with the popularisation of the term ‘martial arts’ (Clements 2017) that was alien to the terms used in Asian countries for naming martial traditions.

The book does not claim that martial arts ‘started in Japan’ as if martial arts were an exclusive Japanese set of practices that progressively spread all over the world.³ Other Asian countries such as China, Korea, and Thailand had indigenous martial traditions that could be analogous to those of the Japanese since ancient times (Draeger and Smith 1980). What the book states is that the Japanese pattern was the most relevant in shaping, systematising, and influencing the understanding of martial arts on a global scale. The key issue is that Japan was the instrumental actor for giving martial arts a recognisable form, evolving from a local to a global asset of physical culture. Still nowadays, the most iconic image attached to the notion of martial arts is the black belt, first appearing in jūdō during the early twentieth century. Japanese martial arts produced the blueprint for the organisation and systematisation of martial arts in the global governing bodies and international competitions. For instance, jūdō was the first martial arts discipline to be widely acknowledged on an international basis, being accepted as an official Olympic event in Tokyo in 1964. By contrast, Korean taekwondo only became a full medal sport in 2000 (being a demonstration sport in the Olympic Games of Seoul 1988), and Chinese wushu has not been included yet in the Olympic programme. Besides, whereas Japanese disciplines such as jūdō and karate (and probably also kendō and aikidō) are distinguishable to a reasonable degree, the situation is not the same in other Asian disciplines. E.g., apart from some well discernible activities such as tai-chi, Chinese martial arts are still known in the West with the generic term kung fu or, more recently, wushu (see Judkins 2014 for the historical controversy on the uses of both terms).⁴

Martial arts and the sports movement

Asian countries such as Japan, China, and Korea do not use the term ‘martial arts’ in their native languages. In Japan, three cognate terms are commonly used to convey the meaning of what we understand today as ‘martial arts’ (Green 2010: xv): martial arts/methods or bugei (武芸); martial techniques or bujutsu (武術); and martial ways or budō (武道). Nonetheless, the most internationally spread term to designate these Asian disciplines is not an Asian term itself but the Western term ‘martial arts’.⁵ Moreover, in most countries of the world, the term ‘sport’ can be understood independently from martial arts, but martial arts cannot be separate wholly from the notion of sport. These circumstances tells us something about not just the relation between two activities, but the whole geopolitical process surrounding the expansion, integration, reinterpretation, and accommodation of (physical) culture around the world. Broadly speaking, sports as the original expression of the Western countries spread towards other parts of the world more strongly and to a further degree than other expressions of physical culture. This is not to say that sport was uncritically accepted and unchanged in every region of the world. The variation of American baseball by the Japanese, stressing the qualities of budō, even calling this activity yakyūdō (the way of baseball) is a good example of the diverse cultural blends produced in such trans-national journeys of (physical) cultures. Besides, a comparison of the equivalent terms in widely used dictionaries from Western countries and Japan reveals significant differences. Whereas a common denominator from all the definitions of ‘martial arts’ found in English, French, North American, German, and Spanish widely used dictionaries is the inclusion of ‘sport’,⁶ the Japanese definitions of bujutsu, bugei, and budō do not include any direct reference to sport.⁷ The definitions of budō, bugei, and bujutsu highlight those features considered essential to the Japanese we-identity, contrasting with modern hybrids encompassing foreign notions such as sport.

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that Japanese martial arts were affected by the sports influence, especially after the Second World War. During the 1950s, the Ministry of Education replaced the term ‘budō’ with the term ‘combative sport’ (Kakugi 格技) in order to gain some distance from the militaristic connotations attached to budō and a way to get closer to more democratic formats such as Western sports (Bennett 2015: 180). In 1989, the Ministry of Education resumed officially the use of the term budō to refer to martial disciplines instead of kakugi. Nowadays, the Japanese term ‘kakutogi’ (格闘技)⁸ would be the rough equivalent of ‘combat sport’ and is often used to refer to disciplines such as boxing, wrestling, K-1, or MMA (mixed martial arts). Nonetheless, ‘budō’ and ‘kakutogi’ were (and still are) commonly used to refer to the same activity as, for instance, in the case of jūdō, a discipline commonly associated with budō if we take into account its educational side but that has undergone a strong process of ‘sportisation’. On the contrary, despite its long tradition as a professional competition, sumō is not considered kakutogi and is defined as ‘national sport’. The ‘reinvention’ of sumō as an essential part of the Japanese we-image since Meiji used the notion of foreign Western sport as a perfect contrast of what the Japanese were not.

To sum up, even though the Western sports influence varied depending on the disciplines under analysis (see Chapter 11), the most widespread Japanese martial arts – jūdō and karate – were severely affected, becoming part of the global sports figuration in either the amateur and/or the professional version.

Before ending this section, a word of caution is required on the anachronistic use of the term ‘sport’ when talking about Japanese martial arts. Despite the fact that some of the Japanese martial arts that expanded globally hybridised with sport formats, it would be an anachronism to talk about sports in pre-modern Japan. For instance, it is anachronistic to talk about archery or sumō as a kind of ‘sport’ during ancient and medieval times as Hurst (1998) or Cuyler (1979) sometimes do just because those activities implied some kind of entertainment for the players and spectators. The characterisation of these activities is improved but not completely solved either by differentiating between ‘traditional’ (indigenous Japanese contest-like activities) and ‘modern’ sports (those developed after contact with the Western sports movement) proposed by Guttmann and Thompson (2001). The shift from ceremonial contests to ‘sports-like’ disciplines as a recognisable, distinctive activity took a long time and was embedded in broader social patterns. Thus, it is not helpful to speak about ‘sport’ in ancient Japan but more accurate to speak about ‘ceremonial contests’ (not necessarily with a religious function but mainly political) that later placed more emphasis on the competitive side once the activity spread during Tokugawa. Moreover, despite the existence of common features between sumō during the mid/late Tokugawa and Meiji periods and some of the nineteenth-century sports in England (see Chapter 12), we should talk about ‘sports-like activities’ in the Japanese case. Historically, ‘sport’ is bound to a British, Western development and was harshly contested since the forced opening of Japan in Meiji by important organisations of martial arts such as the Dai Nippon Butokukai, especially virulent in this respect previous to the Second World War. Due to the leading hand of Kanō Jigorō, the Western sports movement fused with martial arts traditions during the Meiji period, but this relationship only became enduring and spread after the Second World War. This is not deny that Kanō built the sports connection upon certain ploughed ground. Competitive sumō of mid/late Tokugawa and gekikken (swordsmanship competitions) and jūjutsu of the early Meiji period had already laid a solid competitive professional sports-like basis. We should not lose sight also that Kanō’s jūdō had a big impact after winning contests against other jūjutsu styles of the era. Thus, the ‘sports-like’ orientation attached to martial arts was not something that appeared in Meiji with Kanō, but the blend of Japanese martial arts and the Western sports movement had a key element in Kanō’s jūdō. The counter-current of sports rejection and the explicitness of bushidō as a clear mark of Japanese martial traditions contrasting to Western sport could also be traced to the Meiji period, especially (not exclusively) in the hands of the Dai Nippon Butokukai.⁹

An overview of Elias’s process-sociology

This book proposes an analysis based on Norbert Elias’s figurational sociology, also called process-sociology, centred on long-term developments. Broadly known as a branch of historical sociology, Eliasian process-sociology shares with history its interest in past eras. However, it is not for the sake of merely identifying a succession of unique and unrepeated sequences of events. In a profound discussion on the relationship between history and sociology, Elias (1983) made clear that the main focus of process-sociology was to search for structured patterns in processes of social development and not the biographical accounts of individual figures. For instance, Elias needed to study the biographical account of Louis XIV to empirically test and construct ‘elaborate sociological models of connections’ that included the social position of the king in the figuration of the ‘court society’. In this sense, unique and unrepeated sequence of events (the details of Louis XIV’s biography) were embedded within patterned, repeatable sequences of events (the royal position) on another level. Precisely, Elias aimed to bring forth some identifiable dynamic patterns that would help us to advance towards more ‘reality congruent knowledge’ on a higher level of synthesis. In order to do so, Elias made use of several data coming from a variegated kind of sources and levels of analyses: from what is normally considered ‘macro level’ such as laws, economic relations, or power balances between nations to the ‘micro’ data of everyday behaviour provided by chronicles, biographies, literature, or manners books. Elias’s theoretical concepts were developed and tested within this rich soil of empirical data and became further iteratively refined in posterior studies. These empirically based studies about dynamic processes helped Elias to avoid the pitfalls of classical evolutionary models based on a succession of phases, criticised for being teleological or Eurocentric or containing a lack of testability (Goudsblom 1996: 21).

The following subsections briefly introduce some of the key Eliasian concepts that are going to appear throughout the book. A further discussion of each one will be conducted at the precise moments they are applied to the Japanese case. This strategy permits us to empirically tests the concepts, refining them and even providing new concepts if needed (e.g. see the concept of ‘shōgunal mechanism’ in Chapter 5).

Chains of interdependence, functions, and power balances

For Elias, sociology is the study of the long-term development (processes) of people forming chains of interdependence together (figurations). The notion of interdependence implies at the same time the notion of function and power relations. People depend on each other; they are bonded together by a functional relationship. For instance, I depend on the persons who plant and grow vegetables for me to be able to eat, but at the same time, they depend on me for gaining their wages; I also depend on the legal function of judges to carry on with my life under certain basic rights or depend on my friends, family, or partner for the emotional functions they provide for my life as a human being. Thus, Elias is talking about a functional interdependency, be it about economic, legal, emotional, security, or other aspects. As the functional interdependence implies asymmetrical relationships between people, these interdependencies always include power relations.¹⁰ Elias talked about power balances – a furthe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Warriors
• PART II Retainers
• PART III Martial artists
• Index