Category Archives: Japanese Martial Arts

Judo in Taiwan, 1895-1945: The Dark Side of Martial Arts Politics

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Rafu Dojo team at the Southern California Judo Tournament, April 1940. Collection of Yukio Nakamura. Source: http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2014/5/2/more-than-a-game-2

 

Dong Jhy and J. A. Mangan. 2018. “Japanese Cultural Imperialism in Taiwan: Judo as an Instrument of Colonial Conditioning.” in Mangan, Horton, Ren and Ok (eds.) Japanese Imperialism: Politics and Sport in East Asia – Rejection, Resentment and Revanchism. Palgrave Macmillian.

 

Introduction

I have been looking for comparative sources to enrich my overall understanding of China’s use of martial arts-themed public diplomacy strategies in the 20th and 21st centuries.  These other cases take a variety of forms.  Much of this material has proved to be quite interesting. I am slowly working my way through a volume on the history of table tennis, and the surprising role it assumed in Cold War era high stakes diplomacy. Indeed, it is not a coincidence that the PRC first began to send touring groups of Wushu athletes to the West during the era of “Ping Pong Diplomacy.”  It is always helpful to be able to place developments in realm of the martial arts within a larger social and political context.

Alternatively, one can conduct a comparative study by holding the martial arts constant, and looking for other instances in which they played a critical role in a diplomatic or political process.  This is actually surprisingly easy to do as many East and South East Asian countries have turned to local hand combat traditions when attempting to exercise “soft power” on the international stage.  While Chinese efforts to promote Wushu may be the most visible of these campaigns at the moment, it falls within a long tradition that began with Japanese attempts to create a positive image through the global spread of Judo, and culminated with Korea’s successful bid to globalize Taekwondo in the 1970s and 1980s.  Even minor powers such as Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia have sought to leverage their martial arts and combat sports in the promotion of both tourism and national brand building campaigns.

Still, as J. A. Manga et. al. would quickly remind us, this tendency of connecting political and athletic ambition is not unique to East Asia.  A quick survey of European literature during the 19thcentury suggests that the West’s imperial ambitions often found expression in, and were consciously cultivated through, the development of school sports and gymnastics programs.  Such endeavors could produce the sorts of healthy bodies and disciplined spirits that the era’s militaries and civil services both required.

This tendency was developed to a greater degree on the playing fields of the UK’s public schools than one might expect.  It was there that games like cricket, or the training for track and field events, came to be seen as the crucible which shaped the soul of the nation.  Given the extraordinary reach of the British Empire, this ideological and rhetorical turn would have profound effects on the development of global culture.  The UK exported not just technology and free trade, but also an entire culture of international sporting competition which has subsequently been taken up almost everywhere in the world.

In the introduction to this volume Mangan illustrates, at some length, how the questions of sporting competition and empire have never really been as separate as they might at first appear.  No power, no matter how hegemonic, can afford the economic and military cost of ruling an empire through sheer force of arms.  Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that such holdings often prove so costly that alternative modes of administrations are urgently needed. Perhaps the most common of these is an attempt to instill a sense of cultural desire within the colonies for the type of life that the metropole can offer.  Once the norms, education and philosophies of the center come to be desired within the peripheries, the cost of administering one’s empire drops dramatically.  When individuals in the colonies consciously style themselves as British subjects, and attempt to succeed within the economic, social and cultural frameworks that the empire has established, it suddenly becomes possible for a small island nation to rule vast portions of the globe. And the spread of games like cricket and football are an important part of this fundamental re-ordering of cultural desire at the individual level.

Nothing about this logic is exclusively tied to the British Empire.  Indeed, as they were building their influence throughout the region another island nation and would be naval empire carefully studied these strategies.  When Japan began to assemble their own co-prosperity sphere they copied many of the lessons of other colonial empires, but added their own unique twist.  In an attempt to unify their newly seized territories they too took a strong interest in athletic endeavors, promoting some activities and banning others.  And, of course, they introduce Judo and Kendo to schools throughout the region as a central aspect of their wider strategy to pacify occupied territories by spreading Japanese norms and values.

As any good social scientist can tell you, even small differences in the way that a policy is implemented can have huge effect on eventual outcomes.  Mangan’s introduction to this edited volume begins with an interesting question.  In their time both the British and Japanese imperial influence in Asia were destructive and much resented.  Likewise, the sports that both powers introduced (football and Judo) are still widely played and have now taken on distinctly national (and at times even revanchist) characteristics.  Yet while the memory of British occupation often causes consternation, it is nothing compared to fury that can be unleashed by discussions of Japanese imperialism.  Why is this?

This anger has many sources, not the least of which was flagrant human rights violations throughout the Second World War.  Yet the authors of this volume also suggest that the Japanese approach to empire building, specifically with regard to athletics and the martial arts in the pre-war period, became a source of major resentment in areas like Korea and Taiwan.  Whereas the British had attempted to use their mastery of the athletic realm to create the sort of cultural desire that lays at the heart of “soft power,” the Japanese vacillated between policies which sought to promote Judo as a means of winning “hearts and minds” in some time periods, and mandating its practice as a tool of militarism and cultural genocide (all backed by a repressive state apparatus) in others.  Or to use Joseph Nye’s paradigm, they sought to bring the athletic practices within the realm of “hard power.”  The results of this policy were mixed in some areas (Taiwan) and simply disastrous in others (Korea).  But the very different approach of the Japanese to the question of promoting martial practice abroad, compared to either the British in the 19thcentury, or attempts to establish Wushu as a universal Olympic sport today, suggests all of this might make for a compelling comparative case.

 

Rifles and bayonets for a school military drill class behind two Judo students. Vintage Japanese postcard, late 1930s. Source: Author’s personal collection.

 

Bringing Judo to Taiwan

Any number of chapters in this edited volume have interesting things to say on this topic.  But for the sake of brevity I would like to narrow the focus of my discussion to the political uses of Judo in the occupation of Taiwan between 1895 and 1945.  Dong Jhy and J. A. Mangan provide what is the most extensive discussion of this topic that I have yet seen in a paper titled “Japanese Cultural Imperialism in Taiwan: Judo as an Instrument of Colonial Conditioning.” By way of quick introduction, I would like to recommend it to anyone who is interested in the complex relationships between the martial arts and imperialism, or even the formation of political identities through martial practice. This brief chapter provides a focused overview of Japan’s problematic introduction of Judo into Taiwan, and the role of martial artists in furthering the process of both colonization and modernization. Indeed, this discussion will quickly disabuse readers of the notion that all outcomes of martial practice are positive, or that these practices are somehow apolitical by nature.

After its 1894 defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War the Qing Government was forced to secede the island of Taiwan to the increasingly powerful Japanese state.  As the authors of the article make clear, Judo arrived soon after the formal handover in 1895. Of course, that same year saw the creation of the Dai Nippon Butokukai in Japan.  This organization, dedicated to the promotion of the Japanese martial arts in service of the state and the Royal family, would forge a close relationship with the state’s Interior Ministry and police forces.  These same officers would play a critical role in seeding the practice of Judo (as well as Kendo) in Korea when they were transferred there as part of the colonial government.

Indeed, by 1900 the Butokukai would begin to open its own branches in Taiwan.  Much as in Japan, local officials and police officers took the lead in raising funds to construct regional training centers.  These buildings became the locations for instruction and tournaments, all of which served to extend Japan’s cultural influence in the region.  Just as importantly, they would eventually facilitate martial arts themed “good will” travel and exchanges between Taiwan and Japan.

Educational reform was one of the first major projects undertaken by the new colonial government and in 1898 they went about regulating the sorts of physical education that Taiwanese children should receive.  In addition to promoting public health the new “gymnasium” classes were designed to both introduce children to a variety of “Japanized” sports as well as to inculcate them with the proper patriotic values.  Mandated activities included marching with Japanese flags, singing Japanese songs, learning the Japanese national anthem and developing “Japanese” norms such as team spirit and discipline.

Still, a careful reading of the author’s timeline suggests that in this earliest period most Judo practice occurred on a purely voluntary basis with local police officers (who were required to practice as part of their professional certification) acting as instructors.  They note that in this initial phase of practice the introduction of the martial arts were seen mostly as a tool to build a common community and “win hearts and minds.”  In that sense the political theory of martial practice remained within the realm of soft power.

While Taiwan was one of the Japan’s longest held territories, and its programs for subjugating the people would ultimately have some success, the colonial government suffered several violent early attacks.  Following a number of uprisings in 1915 the Japanese government responded by increasing its policy of promoting Judo classes as a form of “recreational distraction.”  But again, at this early point almost all of the instructors remained either Japanese police officers or guest teachers from Japan. Because of the long length of time needed to establish strong schools and to train competitive athletes, many of the “Taiwanese” competitors who appeared in Japanese contests during this period were actually Japanese police officers stationed on the Island.  That pattern would quickly begin to change as the practice grew more firmly established.

Between 1918 and 1920 (and largely in response to the spread of the Wilsonian ideal of the self-determination after WWI) the Japanese government in Taiwan adopted the policy of “gradualism and separatism.” This would have a major impact on how the martial arts were practiced.  In essence, the occupying Japanese force decided that the best way to head off localized calls for “self-determination” was to rapidly accelerate the trends towards cultural assimilation that had already been established in their social and educational policies.  Both individuals and groups were pressured to see themselves exclusively as Japanese subjects, and those who resisted came under increasing sanction.  For the Taiwanese middle class, the practice of Judo quickly became a sign of the acceptance of this Japanese cultural identity and an important means to get ahead in (Japanese controlled) local society. Judo was seen by the government as a tool by which the Taiwanese population could be transformed into an essential (if forever unequal) aspect of the Japanese body politic.

The formal advent of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 caused another revaluation of Japan’s martial arts policy in the region.  Whereas prior policies had vacillated between attempts to regulate activity, and the more traditional use the martial arts as a way of building an internalized desire for Japanese identity, the die was now cast.  For the remainder of its occupation the colonial government would seek only to advance the “Japanization Movement.”

As the need for military recruits and tax revenues grew, the colonial government sought to legislate a highly restrictive vision of cultural assimilation.  The use of the Chinese written language, the study of Chinese history or literature and the wearing of Chinese dress were all prohibited.  Chinese religious temples and festivals were banned.  In their place the government instituted a new brand of State Shinto.  Meanwhile Chinese customs were to be replaced with Japanese modes of dress, membership in imperial organization and even the forced adaptation of the Japanese language.  In essence the goal of these programs was to extinguish the indigenous content of Taiwanese identity, replacing it politically docile (yet physically very fit) Japanese subjects.

Once again, the Japanese martial arts were called upon to play a critical role in this national reeducation program.  Training in both Kendo and Judo became mandatory for all male students with the goal of instilling the “Bushido spirit.”  This would be critical as large numbers of Taiwanese citizens would soon find themselves serving in the Imperial military.  Indeed, the authors suggest that an awareness of shared rituals of martial practice was critical to the process of instilling a shared sense of “Japanese identity” not just at home, but within the colonies as well.

Imported martial practices may play an especially insidious role within a colonial context. According to the authors, Frantz Fanon noted that individuals often internalize a unique sense of self-hatred which causes them to seek to shed those aspects of themselves (from skin color, to lifestyle, culture and mode of education) that mark them as colonial subjects.  While Joseph Nye never seems to have considered this issue, we can actually understand Fanon’s self-loathing as the very real negative aspect of the cultural desire for the other that defines soft power.

I am not convinced that in the long-run the abuse of soft power is any more humane than its military or economic cousins. As Fanon notes, once the colonizer disappears this cultural inferiority complex can remain and maintain the institutions of hegemony long after one would have assumed that they should have collapsed (also see Robert Keohane,After Hegemony).  The martial arts come into this story as these are systems that can be mastered by “outsiders”.  They can thus be seen as confering a sort of honorary status on their practitioners, in this case signaling the perfection of one set of desired traits (the Budo values). And by offering this possibility of individual escape and redemption, the martial arts as a tool of colonial subjugation become ever more engrained within local society.

It is important to remember that long after the Japanese were forced to withdraw from the region, their martial arts remain.  Judo is still quite popular in Taiwan.  And Korea is probably the only country in the world capable of routinely fielding Kendo teams that can match the Japanese.  In their current forms these arts have been (once again) reimagined and reconfigured.  What was once a tool of national oppression is now understood as an aspect of a more positive national pride.  Yet as the authors note, when Taiwanese and Japanese (or Korean and Japanese) martial artists meet, the sudden eruption of revanchist emotions suggest just how deep the scars of imperialism run, and the degree to which these arts were implicated in the construction and maintenance of Japan’s short-lived empire.

 

Judo at Ina Middle School. Vintage postcard circa late 1930s. Source: Author’s personal collection.

 

Conclusion

No chapter, especially one as brief as this, is without its limitations.  Given the importance of the subject matter one wishes that Dong Jhy and J. A. Mangan would have been able to bring more primary source material into their discussion. For instance, I liked the comparison of overwrought writing on school sports, produced in the UK during leadup to WWI, contrasted with the equally romantic verses on the nobility of military self-sacrifice, which pepper Mangan’s introduction to this volume.  Those quotes and sources really grounded the larger theoretical argument in a specific time and place.

Sadly, similarly specific sources tend to be missing from the later discussion of the Taiwanese case.  In Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan, Denis Gainty drew on a wide range of statements by political leaders, reports in the local press, and articles in various martial arts publications to illustrate the ways in which martial artists used their agency (and practice) to gain influence in Meiji Japan.  It would have been nice to see similar statements from martial arts societies or colonial leaders who seemed to be carrying out similar (though not identical) policies in Taiwan.  The authors provide what appears to be a very credible reading of the historical record. Yet without more specific statements grounding all of this within the lives or careers of specific martial artists, it is difficult to know how much weight their reconstruction can really bear.  I fully expect this sort of material is out there.  The Butokukai seems to have liked nothing so much as a good newsletter and seeing its events reported in local newspaper.  But bringing it to the fore may be helpful.

Doing so might also shed light on one of the critical questions to arise out of Gainty’s work.  It is one thing to observe the vast sweep of a historical process.  That is basically what the authors have given us with their history of Judo in Taiwan.  And it is certainly important to see the ways that global trends (such as the spread of Wilson’s self-determination in 1918-1920) have shaped events.  Yet where did the actual causal variable lay?  How much of this outcome was really due to the structural considerations of colonial management, or global politics? Alternatively, what role did the agency of Japanese martial arts instructors, and later their Taiwanese disciples, play in promoting and maintaining these colonial systems?

Perhaps that would be a difficult subject to open up.  It is clear that the Japanese martial arts had a very mixed legacy in Taiwan during the first half of the 20thcentury, and it is impossible to discuss agency without also touching on the concept of individual and institutional accountability.  Yet if we really want to understand how the martial arts functioned within various political contexts (some innocuous and others more sinister) I don’t think we can afford to ignore this more granular level of investigation.  After all, many individuals gravitate toward the martial arts precisely because they seek a sense of personal empowerment.  Political studies of the Japanese martial arts, such as the one provided here, as well as Gainty’s prior volume, suggest that this aspiration may not have been entirely misplaced.  As such questions remain as to whether these practices will embolden or reign-in our worst impulses.  One would hope for the later, but the historical record suggests that there are no guarantees.

 

oOo

If you enjoyed this post you might also want to read: Butterfly Swords and Long Poles: A Glimpse into Singapore’s 19th Century Martial Landscape

oOo

Through a Lens Darkly (57): The Asian Martial Arts and Modern Primitivism

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This advertisement is from the 1970s, but it hits many of the same notes as the one discussed in this post and I love its graphic nature.

 

 

Introduction

My ongoing research on the public diplomacy of the Chinese martial arts has taken a decisive turn.  The Second World War is one of those historical calamities that defines an era, and I now find myself venturing into the post-war era.  This is something of an adventure for me as I have gotten rather comfortable with the first half of the twentieth century.

Adventures are fun.  But any journey worth the trip is also a bit intimidating. Moving into a new era inevitably means loosening my grip on old assumptions and trying to see familiar processes through new eyes.  More specifically, if we are going to understand how various Asian states engaged in “Kung Fu Diplomacy” in the 1950s and 1960s it becomes vitally important to learn a little more about the attitudes of the Western public that they were attempting to appeal to.  What sorts of desires and predispositions do we find here?  Why might images of the martial arts appealed to them? What did they make of updated martial arts practices the post-war period?

Such answers might help to explain some of the remaining paradoxes regarding the post-war globalization of the Asian martial arts. For instance, it makes sense that Americans would have found the Japanese martial arts more interesting than their Chinese cousins during the 1910s.  Japan had just shocked the world with their defeat of Russia, and all sorts of travel writers were commenting on the rapid modernization of its society. It was inevitable that the Western public would develop an interest in their martial arts as it sought to come to terms with a newly ascendant Japan.

This is a logical, cohesive, and widely shared narrative. It also makes what happens after WWII something of a paradox.  If there had been a degree of polite interest in the Japanese martial arts during the 1910s-1930s, it paled in comparison to the boom unleashed during the 1950s.  Yet this was a humbled Japan, one that had been exposed as a brutal fascist power and utterly broken on the battlefield of the Pacific. China, on the other hand, had been on the winning side of this conflict and an ally (if a somewhat reluctant one) of the West.  Yet American GI’s remained vastly more interested in judo than kung fu.

Perhaps Japan’s status as an occupied country after 1945 made its culture available for colonial appropriation in ways that had not really been possible in the 1920s-1930s.  If nothing, else the country was hosting a sizable occupation force? Yet China’s status as a defacto colonial power in the late Qing and early Republic period did not seem to make its physical culture all that attractive to the many missionaries, government functionaries and YMCA directors that administered the Western zones of influence there.

Donn Draeger explained his interest in the Japanese martial arts by noting the superior performance of Japanese soldiers on the battlefield. Yet surely that had as much to do with their superior weapons, officers and communications systems as anything else. Something in this equation remains unexplained.  Japan continued to possess a store of cultural desire (or “soft power”) that was intuitively obvious to individuals at the time. But what exactly was it? Ruth Benedict’s controversial book, the Chrysanthemum and the Sword, has been widely criticized for what it got wrong about Japanese society.  Yet we still need to come to terms with its popularity.  What does this say about the Western adoption of the martial arts, and their continued preference for Japanese, rather than Chinese, fighting systems in the 1950s and early 1960s.  After all, it was an era when American servicemen and women were being in posted in Taiwan and all over the Pacific region.  Why not a sudden interest in White Crane?

 

Funny story, I decided to write this post while listening to a DJ on an NPR’s Retro Cocktail Hour play this record.

 

 

Visiting the Tiki Bar

We can shed some light on this small mystery by turning our attention to a larger paradox, emerging from the realm of architecture.  In 1949 the Eames finished construction on “Case Study Number 8”, now known simply as the Eames House.  This masterpiece of modern design was an experiment in using newly available “off the shelf” materials (many invented during WWII) to create functional modern dwellings to address America’s post-war housing crisis.  If one were searching for a harbinger of mid-century design, something that would begin to push its simplified, functional, glass and steel lines into the mainstream of American culture, this might well be it.

Yet this was not the only architectural trend to explode in the early 1950s.  At exactly the same time that Americans were building mid-century masterpieces, they were also creating thousands of cringeworthy Tiki bars.  It would be hard to think of two aesthetic visions that could be more opposed to each other.  Why would the flannel suit clad worshipers of America’s modernist temples spend their evenings in Tiki bars, listening to an endless supply of ethnically inspired vinyl records that inevitably featured the word “savage” in their titles?

Americans are restless spirits searching for paradise.  Their popular culture has been shaped by reoccurring debates about where it is to be found, and how one might acquire such an ephemeral state.  Much of the 19thcentury was invested in debates between pre and post-millennial religious movements.  In the early 20thcentury these currents secularized and reemerged as a debate between what I will call “progressive modernism” and “modern primitivism.”

It was the core values of progressive moderns that the period’s architecture rendered in steel and concrete. This social movement exhibited an immense faith in the ability of technology to address a wide range of material and social challenges, and the wisdom of human beings to administer these ever more complex systems. The era that gave us the space race promised that man’s destiny lay among the stars, and it was only of matter of time until well ordered, rational, societies reached them.  Of course, there were underlying discourses that found a certain expression in the 1950s.  It is clear that science and modernism had been looking for a future paradise in the stars since at least the time of Jules Verne.  But the 1950s threatened to make this vision a reality.

Reactions against progressive modernism also had their roots in the pre-war period.  Post-impressionist artists were becoming increasingly concerned about the sorts of social alienation that technological change brought.  They turned to African, Native American and Asian art as models because the abstract forms they found within them seemed to symbolize the alienation of modern individuals cut off from traditional modes of understanding.  Yet these “primitive” models also offered a different vision of paradise, the promise that an early Garden of Eden could still be recovered if we were to turn our backs on a narrow vision of progress and attempt to recapture the wisdom that “primitive” communities possessed.

The current of “modern primitivism” surged again in the post-war era, a period of unprecedented economic and technological change.  A wide range of thinkers once again became concerned with creeping alienation.  Some noted that that an Eden could be found within.  Joseph Campbell, drawing on the work of Jung and Freud, released his landmark Hero with a Thousand Facesin 1949.  Rather than seeing happiness and fulfillment as something to be achieved through future progress, Campbell drew on psychological models to argue for a return to something that was timeless.  The stories of forgotten and “primitive” societies were a sign post to our collective birth right.  Likewise, Alan Watt’s the great popularizer of Zen Buddhism, published prolifically throughout the 1950s and 1960s, feeding an endless desire for an internal technology that could insulate us against fears of displacement, alienation and even nuclear annihilation.

It is easy to discount the Tiki Bar, to treat it as an architectural oddity.  Yet it was simply a popular manifestation of a fascination with naturalism and primitivism whose genealogy stretches back to the first years of the twentieth century. The easy play with sexual innuendo and hyper-masculinity that marked these spaces makes sense when placed within the larger discourses on the stifling effects of modernism, social conformity and the need to return to a more “primitive” state to find human fulfillment.  The savage was held up as someone who bore a secret vitally important to navigating those temples of glass and steel that marked the American landscape.

 

 

 

A Kendo Lesson

The pieces are now in place to approach the central subject of this essay.  Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Canadian Club whisky ran an advertising campaign attempting to associate their product with notions of exotic travel and (luxurious) adventure. In an era when much of the advertising in the alcohol market focused on nostalgic images of hearth and home (situating the consumption of whisky within a comfortable upper-middle class heteronormativity) Canadian Club asked its drinkers to aspire to something more.  It featured images of archeological expeditions to Central America, safaris in Africa, and (of course) adventures in the exotic east.

Yet the fulfillment in these adds was not simply the product of getting back to nature, or living in a more primitive condition. It was necessary to physically strive with the citizens of these realms to capture some aspect of their wisdom.  At times these advertisements, each of which reads like a miniature travelogue, seem to spend as much time advertising hoplology as whiskey.  Of course, nothing as prosaic as judo was featured in these adds. One did not need to join the jet set to experience Kano’s gentle art.  More exotic practices, including jousting matches between Mexican cowboys, stick fighting in Portugal, and Japanese kendo were held up as the true measure of a man.

Judging from years of watching eBay auctions, the Kendo campaign was Canadian Clubs most successful of their excursions into hoplology. Or, more accurately, people have been more likely to preserve the Kendo advertisements than some of the other (equally interesting) campaigns.

Titled “In Japanese Kendo its no runs, all hits and no errors” the advertisement tells the story of traveler who comes to Japan and, after a brief period of instruction, joins a kendo tournament.  Readers are informed:

“A greenhorn hasn’t a chance when he crosses ‘swords’ in a Japanese Kendo match,” writes John Rich, an American friend of Canadian Club “In Tokyo I took a whack at this slam-bang survivor of Japan’s 12thcentury samurai warrior days.  The Samurai lived by the sword and glorified his flashing blade.  His peaceful descendant uses a two-handed bamboo shinai in a lunging duel that makes Western fencing look like a dancing class.”

Predictably, things go badly for Mr. Rich who is immediately eliminated without being able to get a blow in against his first opponent. His instructor informs him that he “needs more training.” But its ok, because even in an environment as exotic as this, one can still enjoy Canadian Club whisky with your fellow adventurers. Interestingly, the advertisement places Mori Sensei within the category of fellow travelers when he opens a bottle from his personal reserves.  Thus, a community is formed between the jet setting adventurer and the bearer of primitive wisdom through their shared admiration for the same popular brand.

So what is the Ethos of a kendo tournament, at least according to a 1955 alcohol advertisement?  It is challenging and painful.  But is it primitive?  Is it savage?

Historians of the Japanese martial arts can easily inform us that Kendo is basically a product of the 19thand early 20thcenturies.  Yet this advertisement repeatedly equates it with the world of the samurai, thus suggests that something medieval lives on in Japan.  According to mythmakers in both East and West, this is a defining feature of Japanese culture.  So clearly there is a type of “primitivism” here.

Nor does one need to look far for the savagery.  It is interesting to think about what sorts of practices we don’t see in these advertisements.  I have never seen a Canadian Club story on judo, Mongolian wrestling or professional wrestling. Not all of these adds focus on combat, the jet setter had many adventures to consume. Yet when the martial arts did appear, they inevitably involved weapons.  I suspect this is not a coincidence.

Paul Bowman meditated on the meaning of these sorts of issues in his 2016 volume Mythologies of Martial Arts.   While those of us within the traditional martial arts think nothing of picking up a stick, training knife or sword, he sought to remind us that to most outsiders, such activities lay on a scale somewhere between “deranged” on one end and “demented” on the other.  While one might argue for the need for “practical self-defense,” it is a self-evident fact few people carry swords in the current era and even fewer are attacked with them while walking through sketchy parking garages. There is just very little rational justification for this sort of behavior.  Most of who engage in regular weapons practice can speak at length about why we find these practices rewarding, or how they help to connect us with the past. But all of that rests on a type of connoisseurship that most people would find mystifying.  For them, an individual who plays with swords has either seen too many ninja movies or is simply asking for trouble.  Playing with weapons (as opposed to more responsible pursuit like jogging, or even cardo kick-boxing) is almost the definition of “savage.”

But what about an entire society that plays with swords? What if one has been told, rightly or wrongly, that this is a core social value?  It is that very disjoint with modernity that would make such a group a target for the desires of modern primitivism.  The problem with the Chinese (and hence the Chinese martial arts) was not that they won or lost any given war.  Rather, it was the (entirely correct) perception that the Chinese people did not valorize violence.  Despite all of the critiques that were directed at their “backward state” and “failure to modernize” in the 1920s-1930s, their pacific nature was seen as a positive value widely shared with the West (indeed, it was a point of emphasis in WWII propaganda films).  Ironically, that similarity would serve to make Chinese boxing less appealing to the sorts of individuals who consumer Canadian Club whisky, or at least its advertisement.  Nor did the actual performance of real Japanese troops on specific battlefields determine the desirability of their martial arts.  It was the image of cultural essentialism (carefully constructed by opinion makers in both Japan and the West), which made kendo desirable because of its “primitive nature,” not despite it.

Seen in this light, the early global spread of the Japanese arts makes more sense.  What had once been a modernist and nationalist project could play a different role in the post-war American landscape.  These arts promised a type of self-transformation that placed them in close proximity to the currents of modern primitivism.  While the Tiki bar appealed to those who sought temporary release from the strictures of progressive modernism, the martial arts spoke to those who sought a different sort of paradise.  Theirs was an Eden to be found in the wisdom of “primitive” societies and the search for the savage within.

 

oOo

If you enjoyed this essay you might also want to read: The Tao of Tom and Jerry: Krug on the Appropriation of the Asian Martial Arts in Western Culture

oOo