Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

that it defies all attempts at simple characterization. The production of martial
literature began with early chronicles and anonymous collections of
tales concerning wars and warriors and reached its zenith during the Tokugawa
[1] regime (A.D. 1603–1868) when government policies enforced a
strict division of social classes, according to which members of the officially
designated hereditary class of warriors (bushi [2] or buke [3]) were placed
above all other segments of society and charged with administration of government.
The Tokugawa combination of more than 250 years of peace, high
status afforded to warriors, widespread literacy, and printing technology resulted
in the production of vast numbers of texts in which warriors sought
to celebrate their heroes, establish universal principles of warfare, record
their methods of martial training, adapt arts of war to an age of peace, and
resolve the contradiction inherent in government regulations that demanded
that they master both civil (bun [4], peaceful) and military (bu [5]) skills. It
is this last endeavor more than any other that continues to capture the imagination
of modern readers, insofar as Tokugawa warriors applied abstract
concepts derived from Chinese cosmology, neo-Confucian metaphysics,
Daoist (Taoist) magic, and Buddhist doctrines of consciousness to give new
meanings to the physical mediation of concrete martial conflicts.
Some idea of the number of martial art treatises produced by Tokugawa-period
warriors can be gleamed from the Kinsei budô bunken
mokuroku [6] (References of Tokugawa-Period Martial Art Texts), which
lists more than 15,000 separate titles. This list, moreover, is incomplete,
since it includes only titles of treatises found at major library facilities and
ignores private manuscripts, scrolls, and initiation documents that were
handed down within martial art schools. Following the Meiji [7] Restoration
(1868), which marked the beginning both of the end of the hereditary
status of warriors and of Japan’s drive toward becoming a modern industrialized
state, interest in martial arts immediately declined. Despite a brief
resurgence of interest during the militaristic decades of the 1930s and
1940s and the reformulation of certain martial arts (e.g., jûdô and kendô)
into popular competitive sports, relatively few books about martial arts
have appeared since the end of the Tokugawa period. A 1979 References
(supplement to Budôgaku kenkyû [8], vol. 11, no. 3) of monographs concerning
martial arts published since 1868, for example, includes only about
2,000 titles, the vast bulk of which concern modern competitive forms of
kendô, jûdô, and karate. No more than a few Tokugawa-period treatises
about martial arts have been reprinted in modern, easily accessible editions.
For this reason, knowledge of traditional (i.e., warrior) martial art traditions,
practices, and philosophy remains hidden not just from students of
modern Japanese martial art sports but also from historians of Japanese education,
literature, popular life, and warrior culture.
Written Texts: Japan 759