Our analysis of the great variety of Japanese weapons used throughout the feudal age of Japan was greatly facilitated by the opportunity to observe at close range the collections in the Metropolitan Museum of New York and the Museo Orientale of Venice, as well as in the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. By far the most extensive and diversified of these collections is contained within the Museo Orientale, presently housed in the Palazzo Pesaro, where it occupies a substantial portion of the third floor in this ancient Venetian palace. We were graciously given permission to examine the exhibits there closely and to use them as the basis for many sketches, ranging from those of intricate suits of armor to an entire spectrum of bows and arrows, spears, swords, daggers, and even the elaborate standards used by different clans and families of feudal Japan. Acquired in 1888 (twenty years after the Restoration) by Enrico di Borbone, Count of Bardi, during his extensive travels in Japan, the collection was sold in 1906 to a Viennese art dealer, who, in turn, sold many valuable pieces to foreign museums and private collectors. The objects which were presented to the Italian government after World War I still constitute a substantial and detailed representation of arms, armors, and accoutrements which any serious student of bujutsu might profitably explore. Photographs of many of these pieces, in fact, comprise the major portion of H. R. Robinson’s book Japanese Arms and Armour, listed in the Bibliography.
We are also obliged to Routledge & Kegan Paul of London and Princeton University Press for permission to use material from Daisetsu T. Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture; to Random House and Alfred A. Knopf for their permission to use direct quotations from Edwin O. Reischauer’s Japan: Past and Present; to Jay Gluck for the use of direct references drawn from his Zen Combat.
The authors wish to warmly thank all those students and instructors of bujutsu in the Eastern and Western hemispheres who so generously illustrated and explained, either in person or in lengthy correspondence, techniques and strategies of bujutsu which have contributed to the substance of many illustrated sequences in this book. Illustrations can often provide a more dynamic and vivid idea of the practical aspects of the many specializations of bujutsu than lengthy, abstruse descriptions, and we have relied heavily upon such illustrated material.
A special thank-you is extended to Mrs. Anneliese Aspell for her assistance in the translation of difficult German passages illustrating the educational system developed for the warriors of the Tokugawa period.
Finally, we feel ourselves at a loss in attempting to express our thanks to our friend and mentor Edvi Illes Gedeon, who, acting as a veritable one-man foundation, tracked down and provided many valuable texts on bujutsu. Last but not least on our list are the editors of the Charles E. Tuttle Company for their active interest in this as well as other works by the same authors, and for their efforts in handling a difficult editorial format in a manner always consistent with the traditions of their house.
PREFACE
THE JAPANESE experience in, and contribution to, the theory and practice of individual combat, armed and unarmed, is certainly among the most ancient, sophisticated, and enduring ever recorded. One need only consider the present worldwide popularity of jujutsu, judo, karate, aikido, kendo, kyudo, and so forth, which are essentially modern adaptations or derivations, to appreciate the continuing influence of ancient Japanese methods of combat. The ancient martial arts were developed and refined during an extended period of direct experimentation on the battlefields of pre-Tokugawa Japan; later, during the centuries of absolute isolation which generated the proper conditions, they were thoroughly revised and ultimately ritualized into transmissible patterns of exercise and technique. The effectiveness of the modern adaptations is attested to by the fact that they have deeply influenced and, in many instances, almost completely replaced other national methods of combat practiced for sporting purposes and as part of the utilitarian and practical training programs of military and police forces.
The present work is a survey of the major specializations of the martial experience, known in feudal Japan 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,