as martial arts, or bujutsu. These arts are presented in terms of the persons directly or indirectly involved with, or subjected to, this systematic violence (part 1); the particular weapons and techniques which assigned to each martial art its position and relative importance within the body of bujutsu teachings, here termed the doctrine of bujutsu (part 2); the factors of inner control and power as well as strategies and motivations, which, when compared to the above-mentioned elements, were considered by the ancients as being of equal (if not greater) significance, due to their importance in implementing the various combat methods (part 3).
Any inquiry into the history, instruments, and strategic functionality of the martial arts of feudal Japan is bound to encounter serious and often seemingly insurmountable obstacles in the selection of basic reference material as well as in the interpretation of the terms employed therein. In this work, terminology should present no difficulties, for in the Index the terms most frequently used in the martial arts to define and illustrate their functional characteristics are listed along with the number of the page on which each term appears for the first time in the main text and where its meaning is briefly explained and/or illustrated. Decidedly more difficult to resolve are doctrinal problems—that is, problems arising from conflicting references (direct and indirect, ancient and modern, in both the original language and in translation) to the specializations of the Japanese experience in the ancient art of combat.
Among the direct sources of information used in the compilation of this book are translations of records contained in scrolls (makimono) and manuscripts belonging to masters and representatives of particular schools of the martial arts, whose founders were courageous enough to defy the age-old Japanese custom of secrecy and exclusiveness in order to add the results of their experience, as Yamashita phrased it, to “the common stock of knowledge” of the entire human race. Direct information of particular value to any study of armed bujutsu is also provided by a review of the huge collections of weapons and armor available in the major museums and art galleries of the world, as well as items of interest held by private collectors. Indirect sources of information on bujutsu in general would include the Japanese classics, religious and philosophical texts and treatises, and poems and chronicles of the nation—primarily works which concern themselves with aspects of the national culture other than the military but contain oblique and often highly illuminating references to the specializations of bujutsu.
All these sources are equally vital because they integrate, confirm, or modify one another, thus helping the student of bujutsu to determine their respective degrees of reliability, historical authenticity, and, consequently, their usefulness to any program of research and interpretation. In carrying out such research, it becomes evident that the doctrine of the Japanese martial arts is heir to that failing common to every doctrine devised by man; that is, the further back one’s historical research is carried, the harder it becomes to distinguish fact from fiction. The Japanese chronicles of antiquity are particularly susceptible to animistic and mystical interpretations of events, and this tendency—still very much in evidence in the records of disciplines of combat which have emerged during the last century—is further compounded by the highly individualistic approach of each master to the theory and practice of armed and unarmed combat. This approach is clearly exclusivistic and unilateral, being centered primarily upon the merits and virtues of this or that representative or founder of a particular school, with only a few obscure references to those techniques or methods of combat which made them famous.
When confronted with the wealth of available written records concerning the schools of unarmed combat (presumably issued in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), each extolling a particular school of bujutsu or a particular master, the modern observer is often forced to ask himself a question similar to that posed by a famous translator of Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching, in relation to the various philosophical schools active during a particular period of Chinese history: “May it not be the case that some of these schools were very much alike but each had to put up a different ‘slogan’ in order to be an independent school, since in the Warring States period, so much was to be gained by this claim?” (Lau, 50). This particular approach to the problems of combat (adopted by many ancient and modern teachers of bujutsu, and so reflected in chronicles of the martial arts) is historically misleading because it presupposes an initial originality at the root of each school, as well as a widespread and individualistic type of excellence which is very rare in any culture and must have been particularly unusual in the highly conformistic and restrictive world of feudal Japan. Numerous warriors, after all, had trained in many different schools of bujutsu, and almost all the masters of those schools had done exactly the same thing before opening their own centers of instruction—which would implicitly negate a basic prerequisite of strict originality: isolation. Such an approach, moreover, makes any attempt to produce a syncretic and anthological study of the martial arts extremely difficult, because it presents a kaleidoscopic collection of arts, each pulling centrifugally away from any concept of basic unity.
The aim of the present study, therefore, is to establish a platform of observation from which the martial arts of feudal Japan may be analyzed as expressions of a strongly unified and conformistic culture and, consequently, as methods of combat which, notwithstanding obvious differences in their choice of weapons, produced great similarities in their bodies of techniques and, above all, an almost identical conception of those inner factors and activating motivations which made those techniques relevant and effective in combat. This global and syncretic approach to the study of bujutsu is necessitated by the current abundance of specialized presentations of the individual martial arts and, in particular, of those derived from ancient bujutsu, which, as indicated earlier, have made such names as jujutsu, judo, karate, aikido, and kendo famous the world over. The authors’ aim has been primarily that of restoring a certain balance between the specialized knowledge of each martial art and the comprehensive knowledge of them all, even if only from a historical standpoint. The twin dangers which we have recognized and sought to avoid were those of overspecialization (an exaggerated emphasis upon only one expression of the Japanese experience in the art of combat) and superficial eclecticism (a dispersive and necessarily diluted exposition of them all). It is our hope that a general knowledge of all the martial arts will help to deepen and expand the reader’s understanding of each—the way a detail, for example, becomes even more significant when observed within that larger, richer, and more harmonious context of which it is but a part.
Those of us interested in the evolution of that experience in the art of individual confrontation throughout its many forms and specialized manifestations must inevitably seek to relate the parts to the whole. Thus a syncretic approach to bujutsu, intended to provide a general framework within which to comprehend clearly its various components, underlies and motivates the present study in its entirety.
In synthesis, for those readers particularly interested in bujutsu, it is to be hoped that this introductory study will satisfy an immediate need and constitute a broad foundation for further studies of the ancient Japanese martial arts, or at least provide a panoramic background for those already in existence.
It is also intended to provide the basis for another type of research, linked to the problem of human violence as systematically exercised in those practices man has found difficult to discard along the path of his evolutionary history. This type of research enters the domain of ethics, of those moral justifications which supposedly influence man’s actions and (within the context of bujutsu) will determine his behavior in combat against his fellowman. Unfortunately, considerations and analyses of the morality of the martial arts (viewed as being of primary significance by those masters who have provided interesting and varied solutions to the moral dilemma a man had to confront and resolve in combat) will, of necessity, be somewhat limited in this work, since its central subject is their historical background, their weapons and techniques, their strategies and phases of application—those factors and elements which made them extremely effective within the immediate and utilitarian reality of combat. The observations on the ethical implications of bujutsu which the authors have included in the text form the foundation for an ensuing volume (tentatively entitled Budo: The Way of the Warrior) which will deal almost exclusively with the motivations, ethics, and metaphysics of those arts which, throughout their long and
