Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

from firsthand knowledge of their own religious traditions, it encouraged
their acceptance of new abstract interpretations of Japanese religiosity.
Meiji leaders filled this spiritual vacuum with the vaguely mystical State
Shintô ideology of emperor worship and ultranationalism. Buddhist intellectuals,
many of whom were educated in European thought, sought to create
a New Buddhism (shin bukkyô [9]) free from previous institutional ties,
which would be scientific, cosmopolitan, socially useful, and loyal to the
throne. They actively appropriated contemporary European intellectual
trends and presented them to Western and to Japanese audiences alike as
the pure essence of Japanese spirituality. Significantly, many intellectuals
found this pure spirituality expressed best not in the traditional religious
rituals that seemed too superstitious for modern sensibilities, but rather in
the worldly skills of poetry, painting, tea ceremony, and martial arts.
In the early 1900s, martial arts became identified not just with new
interpretations of Japanese spirituality, but specifically with the mystical aspects
of militarism and emperor worship. The government promoted the
transformation of martial arts into a particular type of “spiritual education”
(seishin kyôiku; see below) and incorporated them into the national
school curriculum to inculcate in schoolchildren (i.e., future soldiers) a religious
willingness to sacrifice themselves for the state and to die for the
emperor. Before martial arts could be transformed into so-called spiritual
education, however, Japanese had to develop new forms of martial art education
based on recently developed European notions of sport.
Modern sports emerged during the nineteenth century, when Europeans
united physical training with nationalism and games with imperialism.
The Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815) and their large conscript armies
had vividly demonstrated the importance of a physically fit citizenry for
modern warfare and for the exercise of national power. In response to this
need there developed two competing and, in the minds of many, mutually
incompatible methods of providing general citizens with physical vitality:
continental gymnastics and English sports. The ardent German nationalist
Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852) advocated gymnastics (turnen) to
unify the Germanic races (volk) and to develop soldiers stronger than
those of France. Adolf Spiess (1810–1858) and other German educators
developed Jahn’s turnen into a system of group exercises closely resembling
military drill, which demanded physical discipline, strict obedience,
and precision teamwork. Competitive games (i.e., sports) were denounced
for harming moral development (defined as sacrifice for the nation) and
for encouraging pride and egoism. This German model was emulated elsewhere
on the continent, most notably in Denmark, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia.
Militaristic gymnastic societies and their nationalistic ideology
were vindicated by Prussian victory over France in the war of 1870–1871,
476 Religion and Spiritual Development: Japan