Episode 199 - Fist of Legend, Part 6

History of Japan

Isaac Meyer

Japan, History, Japanese

4.8 • 744 Ratings

🗓️ 24 June 2017

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In which we bring things to a close by considering the fall of the Butokukai, the spread of budo beyond Japan, the role of martial arts in the African-American community, the question of Olympic sport status, and the challenge of the UFC. It's gonna be a busy week.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you. Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 199, Fist of Legend, part six.
0:48.8	Way back in the second episode of this series, which I suppose is not that long ago, four episodes is not that
0:55.5	long a time, I said that the three biggest moments of change in Japanese history are the Taika
1:01.2	reforms of 645 CE, the Meiji Restoration, and the American Occupation. We've now arrived
1:08.8	the third of these great shifts in the Japanese landscape.
1:12.6	The Americans have come to town, and they're convinced that they know what's right for all involved.
1:18.6	Remember that the initial American mission in Japan was twofold, democratize and demilitarize the country.
1:26.6	That meant dismantling not only Japan's actual war potential, democratize and demilitarize the country.
1:34.2	That meant dismantling not only Japan's actual war potential, tanks, fighters, warships, what have you,
1:41.2	but dismantling the psychological infrastructure that had driven the Japanese to accept war in the first place.
1:46.9	Patriotic education in schools, propaganda, secret police, emperor veneration more generally, and so on. So when the Americans came to town and saw a bunch of wartime
1:54.0	propaganda from the Bhutoku Kai about the close association between the martial arts and the military,
1:59.9	about how Budo were designed to provide the
2:02.6	psychological and physical education of the emperor's soldiers. Well, they took the organization
2:08.6	at its word. The Bhutoku Kai was clearly a part of the apparatus of Japan's military state,
2:15.3	and as such, it would have to go. Funnily enough, the Bhutoku Kai was actually a relatively weak organization by the 1940s.
2:25.3	While it had championed the standardization of martial arts curricula across Japan and the incorporation of Budo into the school system,
2:33.3	that mission was more or less
2:35.5	complete by the 1920s. After that point, the Bukukai found itself with less and less to do,
2:43.1	and the organization was hindered by mismanagement after the government split control over it
2:48.3	between six different and competing government ministries.
2:53.1	However, Bhutoku Kai propaganda meant that the organization had one final, massive, shared impact
	...

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