The Western Books That Introduced Japanese Budō to the World — Reading the “Outside Accounts,” from Before the 19th Century to the 1970s

This essay was originally written in Japanese for a readership of karate and budō researchers, and has been adapted into English for an international audience on mejiro.info. It surveys the books and papers — written in languages other than Japanese — that treated Japan’s martial arts (or their pre-modern predecessors) as a subject from the seventeenth century down to the 1970s, and asks a simple set of questions about each: who wrote it, for whom, in what genre, and how it shaped the image of Japanese budō that the world holds today. Where a term or an assumption would be unclear to a non-Japanese reader, explanatory glosses have been added.

A note on key terms. A handful of Japanese words recur throughout this essay; they are glossed here once for convenience.

bujutsu (武術) — the older “martial techniques” of the warrior class, oriented toward combat.
budō (武道) — the modern, institutionalized “martial ways,” which fold self-cultivation and moral discipline into technique. This essay generally uses bujutsu for the pre-modern arts and budō for their modern, systematized forms.
jūjutsu (柔術) — the classical unarmed grappling arts; jūdō (柔道) is the modern system Jigorō Kanō built from them.
dōjō (道場) — a training hall.
kata (型/形) — set forms; kumite (組手) — sparring or paired practice.
menkyo (免許) — a traditional teaching license in a classical school; menkyo kaiden (免許皆伝) is the highest such license, certifying “complete transmission.”

Introduction — Why Read the Foreign Accounts of Japanese Budō?

The subject of this essay is the body of books and papers, written in languages other than Japanese, that took Japan’s martial arts (or the bujutsu that preceded them) as their theme or as a major component. The period covered runs from the seventeenth century — when the earliest European descriptions of Japan appeared — to the 1970s, the decade in which English-language writing on the martial arts began to multiply explosively.

Why take up this theme? For a Japanese scholar of karate or of budō more broadly, surveying the run of texts that have described one’s own martial culture from the outside is valuable in several ways. First, grasping when, by whom, and in what vocabulary the image of budō was carried abroad is the starting point for understanding how the world’s present-day image of budō was historically formed. Second, foreign-language texts come in a remarkable variety of writer-and-reader combinations — works by the Japanese parties themselves, works by purely foreign observers, collaborations between the two, translations by disciples — and that very arrangement tells the story of how each art became internationalized. Third, these texts are not merely historical sources: they are still consulted, still cited, still read in dōjō and universities abroad as “explanatory works on Japanese budō.” Alongside the Japanese-language books a Japanese researcher treats as primary sources, there exists another canon that has been read and re-read around the world.

The essay is organized as follows. It begins with descriptions of martial arts in the travelogues and topographies of the period before the nineteenth century; moves to the rendering of jūjutsu and jūdō into English in the Meiji era; traces the appearance, in the interwar years, of the “observer who stepped inside,” exemplified by E. J. Harrison; considers why the English-language coverage of kendō, naginata, and the like lagged; passes through the postwar Occupation; takes up the birth of an English-language literature on karate in the 1950s–60s; and arrives at Donn F. Draeger’s attempt, in the early 1970s, to render budō as a scholarly subject. It closes by sorting the literature by genre — technical manuals, popular books, histories, and scholarship — and by sketching the situation on the eve of budō studies emerging as an independent academic field.

Throughout, I generally distinguish bujutsu (the pre-modern martial techniques) from budō (the institutionalized competitive and self-cultivation systems of the modern era), while using the terms flexibly as the context of a quotation demands. Book titles are given in their original form at first mention and in short form thereafter. Because years of publication differ by edition and translation, I give the year of the first edition or an equivalent, noting explicitly where a date is uncertain.

Before the Nineteenth Century — When Martial Arts Were Described as “Customs”

Japanese martial arts were not seriously treated as a subject in any non-Japanese language until roughly the latter half of the nineteenth century. Before that — that is, in the books about Japan published in Europe between the end of the sixteenth century and the eighteenth — the martial arts were mentioned only fragmentarily, less as an independent topic than as one element making up the customs, dress, and ethics of that peculiar status group, the samurai.

The earliest systematic account always cited is that of the German physician Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716), whose The History of Japan survives for English readers in the translation by J. G. Scheuchzer, published in London in 1727 (Kaempfer wrote his manuscript in his native German; a full German edition did not appear until the twentieth century). Resident in Japan in 1690–92 as the physician to the Dutch trading post on Dejima, Kaempfer portrayed the structure of warrior society, the design of swords, the etiquette of the samurai, and the ceremonies conducted under the shōgun as a world entirely unknown to the European readers of his day. The book mentions the existence of swordsmanship, archery, and spearmanship, but says little about their technical content or the structure of their schools. The author’s interests lay in political institutions, religion, and natural history; the martial arts are kept in the background. The intended readers were Europe’s intellectuals, merchants, and colonial administrators, and the work was read not as a martial-arts manual but as a topography.

The Jesuit documents of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that precede Kaempfer — for example the Historia de Japam of Luís Fróis (1532–1597) — were written in Portuguese. Fróis’s manuscript itself remained unpublished for a very long time; a full critical edition had to wait for the five volumes edited by J. Wicki, S.J. (Lisbon, 1976–84). Even so, the contemporaneous Jesuit letter-collections (Cartas) circulated in Europe in Italian, Latin, and Spanish translations of the Portuguese originals, and became precious records conveying the customs of the warriors and the conduct of battle to European readers. None of them, however, set out to explain the martial arts systematically. The same holds for the voyage account of the English East India Company’s John Saris (c.1580–1643), who reached Hirado in 1613 (his journal was partly included in Samuel Purchas’s Purchas his Pilgrimes of 1625; the Hakluyt Society’s critical edition appeared in 1900), and for the Beschrijvinghe van het Machtigh Coninckrijck Japan of the Dutch trading-post chief François Caron (1600–1673) — the Dutch original of 1645/46, translated by Sir Roger Manley as A True Description of the Mighty Kingdoms of Japan and Siam (London, 1663; reissued 1671). They marvel at the sharpness of the sword and at the custom of seppuku (ritual self-disembowelment), but they are not martial-arts manuals.

The great work that appears in the first half of the nineteenth century is Philipp Franz von Siebold’s Nippon: Archiv zur Beschreibung von Japan (published intermittently at Leiden from 1832). Siebold too was a physician at the Dutch post, resident in Japan in 1823–29 (he was expelled in 1829 after the so-called “Siebold Incident” of 1828), and he left an extraordinarily wide-ranging body of plates and descriptions from a natural-historical and ethnographic standpoint. The book includes finely detailed plates of arms, armor, and swords — which greatly influenced later Western researchers and collectors — but it is not a manual that transmits technique. Siebold’s text is in German (with some Dutch), and its intended readers were Europe’s naturalists and orientalists.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, amid the so-called “Japan boom,” the work that brought the martial arts into the foreground for general readers was Tales of Old Japan (Macmillan, 1871) by the British diplomat A. B. Mitford. Recasting in English the story of the Forty-seven Rōnin of Akō, the etiquette of seppuku, and various warrior tales, it is not a technical manual, but it was among the earliest books to introduce the ethics, deportment, and physicality of the samurai to a Western readership in a systematic way. From here on, the English-speaking world came to share a common groundwork for talking about bushidō (“the way of the warrior”).

As we have seen, the foreign books that spoke of Japanese martial arts in the period before the nineteenth century fall into three lineages — (1) topographies and natural histories, (2) diplomatic reports and travelogues, and (3) religious and moral tales — and none qualifies as a technical manual, a history, or an academic paper. For martial arts to surface as an independent subject, one had to await the Meiji Restoration and the outward transmission by the Japanese themselves that it set in motion.

The 1880s–90s — Jūjutsu and Jūdō Reach the World First

Among Japan’s martial arts, the first to appear as the sole object of a description in a language other than Japanese was, almost without exception, jūjutsu (later jūdō). This was no accident. As the Meiji government pressed forward with the modernization of physical education, Kōdōkan jūdō was introduced early into the academic venues of the English-speaking world, thanks to Jigorō Kanō’s careful strategy of outward communication.

A decisive role was played by the Asiatic Society of Japan (hereafter ASJ), founded in 1872 by the British and American residents of Yokohama and Tokyo. The Society’s journal, the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan (TASJ), was the principal publishing medium for the Western orientalists, missionaries, diplomats, and foreign government-employed advisers (o-yatoi gaikokujin) who studied Japan at the time.

It was in TASJ vol. 16 (1889), pp. 192–205, that the paper Jiujutsu: The Old Samurai Art of Fighting Without Weapons, co-authored by the Rev. T. Lindsay and Jigorō Kanō, appeared. There is a record of its being read at an ASJ meeting on 18 April 1888; though a relatively short piece of about fourteen pages, it surveyed in English the historical origins of jūjutsu, the lineages of its various schools, the circumstances of the Kōdōkan’s founding, and the principles by which its techniques are classified — and it is regarded as the first full scholarly account in the English-speaking world. It took the form of a collaboration between a foreign clergyman (Lindsay) and a Japanese martial artist (Kanō), securing at once the standing of the Japanese party and the scholarly frame of the Western side. The intended readers were the ASJ’s members — Western orientalists and educators — not a commercial audience.

At almost the same time, the Transactions and Proceedings of the Japan Society of London, vol. 1 (1892, pp. 4–21) — the journal of the Japan Society founded in London in 1891 (its first council met in December 1891, and its inaugural meeting was held at the Royal Society of Arts on 29 April 1892) — carried Jiu-Jitsu: The Ancient Art of Self-Defence by Sleight of Body, by Tetsujirō Shidachi (1867–1946; at the time an employee of the Bank of Japan and a Kōdōkan judoka). Alongside the Lindsay–Kanō paper, this was among the earliest presentations to convey the ideals of Kōdōkan jūdō in English. Shidachi himself read and demonstrated it at the Society’s inaugural meeting, and the talk was then set in type; its readership was similar in composition to the ASJ’s, but tilted more toward the intellectuals, businessmen, and diplomats of the British home country.

What these works of the 1880s–90s share is, first, that a Japanese principal (Kanō or someone close to him) took responsibility for the text and had it rendered into English through a Western collaborator; second, that the medium was the journal of a learned society rather than a book on the general market; and third, that they were closer to historical and ideological introductions than to technical manuals. As for whom they were written, the answer is that they were a highly strategic effort to present the legitimacy and modernity of Kōdōkan jūdō to a very narrow community of orientalists.

For the other martial arts — kendō, naginata, jūkendō, karate, and so on — there were at this stage virtually no independent papers in TASJ or the Japan Society’s journal. That jūdō stood first on the international stage as “the representative of Japanese budō” was a product of Kanō’s strategy and personal network, and the head start it gained over the other arts would not be closed for decades.

The 1900s — The Vogue for “Japanese Physical Culture”

With the turn of the twentieth century, “Oriental physical culture” became a popular craze in Britain and the United States. The shock of Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) spurred it on. Jūjutsu became, almost overnight, an object of commercial publishing — a “practical technique for self-defense and health” ranked alongside boxing and wrestling for the middle-class man of the Anglophone world.

The American author H. Irving Hancock embodied this current most typically. Hancock published Japanese Physical Training (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York) in 1903, and followed it in rapid succession in 1904 with Jiu-Jitsu Combat Tricks and Physical Training for Children by Japanese Methods. These were less technical manuals than repositionings of jūjutsu, as a method of health and self-defense, within the “physical culture” movement then flourishing in the United States; they made heavy use of photographs and line drawings and were designed to make self-study possible. The intended readers were the men, boys, and families of the urban middle class, and the price point was that of a general book fit for a middle-class study.

In 1905 Hancock brought on as co-author Katsukuma Higashi, said to have taught jūjutsu at the U.S. Naval Academy, and published The Complete Kano Jiu-Jitsu (Judo): The Official Jiu-Jitsu of the Japanese Government (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1905, xv+526 pp.). The very fact that the title bore the name “Kano Jiu-Jitsu” is telling: one can read in it both the conferring of authority on Kōdōkan jūdō in the American market and a strategy of claiming “the real thing” amid the miscellaneous “jiu-jitsu” then in circulation (though modern jūdō-history scholarship has raised doubts about Higashi’s official relationship to the Kōdōkan and the legitimacy of his rank). The book’s character as a technical manual is prominent, explaining throws, holds, and striking with photographs.

At almost the same time, full-fledged jūdō books in English were being published on the Japanese side as well. A representative example is Judo: Japanese Physical Culture; Being a Further Exposition of Jujitsu and Similar Arts in Japan (Mitsumura & Co., Tokyo, 1908, 230 pp.) by Sumitomo Arima (a fourth-dan of the Kōdōkan). In addition to technical explanation, it discusses in English the history and significance of Kōdōkan jūdō and its contest rules. Author and publisher alike were on the Japanese side, and the intended readers were the British and American residents and educators who had come to Japan, as well as the educator class in the home countries. As one of the earliest jūdō/jūjutsu books written in English by a Japanese author inside Japan, it later saw re-translations into German and French.

In the 1910s an English translation appeared of the Jūdō Kyōhan of Sakujirō Yokoyama (1864–1912, one of the Kōdōkan’s “Four Guardians”) and Eisuke Ōshima — published as Judo (translated by Yamakichi Horiguchi; Nishōdō, Tokyo, 1915, 175 pp.). These correspond to the period in which Kōdōkan jūdō was being presented abroad as “the official version of Japan’s system of physical education and gymnastics.”

The English-language literature of this period splits into two directions. The first is the “jiu-jitsu self-study book” carried on American commercial publishing (Hancock and the like), delivered to the middle class as a half-entertainment, half-practical book. The second is the “official Kōdōkan jūdō” that the Japanese side issued in English inside Japan (Arima and others), aimed at a more authoritative readership that included officials of the government, the military, and educational institutions. Even for the same jūdō, the face of the text differs greatly according to who wrote it for whom.

A word, too, on Inazō Nitobe’s Bushido: The Soul of Japan (Leeds & Biddle, Philadelphia; the copyright notice and the author’s preface are dated 1899, though it generally circulates as a 1900 imprint). It is not a technical manual on the martial arts, but as the background discourse by which contemporary British and American readers came to understand Japanese budō, it exerted a decisive influence on the later martial-arts books. Nitobe’s argument was moral philosophy, not technique — but from this point on, whenever Japanese budō was discussed in the Anglophone world, the vocabulary of bushidō was almost invariably summoned up.

The Interwar Years — E. J. Harrison and the “Observer Who Stepped Inside”

From the 1910s onward there appear descriptions of budō by Westerners who had stayed long in Japan and trained themselves. This is a third lineage of writer — neither the outside observation of the orientalist nor the English-language transmission by the Japanese.

Its representative is the British-born journalist Ernest John Harrison (1873–1961, born in Manchester). Resident in Japan from around the time of the Russo-Japanese War, he earned a fourth-dan in jūdō and trained inside the Kōdōkan. His major work, The Fighting Spirit of Japan and Other Studies (T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1913, 351 pp.; later abridged and revised to 156 pp. in a 1955 W. Foulsham edition), contains accounts of jūjutsu, jūdō, swordsmanship, sumō, and more, and takes a journalistic shape grounded in his own experience and in interviews with Japanese masters. It is less a technical manual than a comprehensive critical work discussing the relationship between budō and Japanese society, and it went through many editions over the years.

The distinguishing features of Harrison’s work are: (1) that it is not closed around a single art but treats several arts across the board; (2) that its emphasis falls on culture, history, and personalities rather than on technical description; and (3) that, because the author was himself a trainee, it brings the vocabulary of the inside (ma-ai — combative distancing; kiai — the focused shout; keiko — practice) into English. The intended readers were the British educated public at large, and especially the middle class with an interest in the cultures of the East and the Far East.

From the interwar period into the postwar years Harrison wrote several jūdō books, including The Manual of Judo (1952) and Judo for Beginners: Basic Methods Explained (1958), and he also handled the translation and editing of Japanese authors. His presence can be credited with bridging, at a certain intellectual level, an Anglophone budō discourse that had tended to split into “jūdō = the exclusive property of the Japanese” and “jūjutsu = the American self-defense craze.”

The interwar years also saw Jigorō Kanō himself increasingly deliver lectures and papers in English: his lecture The Contribution of Judo to Education, given at the University of Southern California (USC) to coincide with the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics; his correspondence with International Olympic Committee (IOC) figures of various countries; his contributions to European and American physical-education journals. These were not stand-alone books, but they were important work in marshaling the ideals of Kōdōkan jūdō — seiryoku zen’yō (“maximum efficient use of energy”) and jita kyōei (“mutual welfare and benefit”) — into a set of English-language concepts.

For kendō, naginata, jūkendō, and karate, on the other hand, interwar English-language books scarcely exist. Harrison’s main work includes descriptions of swordsmanship, but they do not go beyond an introductory level; karate, as of the 1913 first edition, was all but unknown both on the Japanese mainland and in the Anglophone world (Gichin Funakoshi’s first public demonstration on the mainland was in 1922), and no serious mention of it is found. For these arts to have an independent English-language book of their own, one had to wait for the postwar period.

Why the English-Language Coverage of Kendō and Naginata Lagged Behind

Here it is worth briefly sorting out the scarcity of English-language literature on the major martial arts other than jūdō, particularly kendō and naginata. Whereas jūdō had a scholarly paper from the 1880s, a technical manual in the 1900s, and a comprehensive critical work in the 1910s, an independent English-language book on kendō did not appear until after the war — and not until the 1960s at that.

A representative postwar English book on kendō is This is Kendo: The Art of Japanese Fencing (Charles E. Tuttle, 1964, 160 pp.), co-authored by Junzō Sasamori (1886–1976; sixteenth-generation headmaster of the Ono-ha Ittō-ryū and an eighth-dan hanshi in kendō) and Gordon Warner (1912–2010). Warner, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, studied kendō in Japan before and after the war (he later co-authored Japanese Swordsmanship: Technique and Practice with Donn F. Draeger, published by Weatherhill in 1982), and this volume is also positioned as the first kendō book he wrote. As the title suggests, it is a comprehensive introduction that adds the historical and ethical background of kendō to technical explanation, and it became the de facto standard “kendō book” of the English-speaking world. The intended readers were American kendō enthusiasts and martial artists, together with general readers interested in Japanese culture.

The reasons the rendering of kendō into English lagged include: (1) that, unlike Kōdōkan jūdō, there was almost no organization before the war to carry outward transmission institutionally and through personnel; (2) that the kendō curriculum was tied to school and police physical education, so the emphasis fell on domestic diffusion rather than outward communication; and (3) that the temporary postwar ban on the martial arts by GHQ (1946), the resumption under the name kendō by way of a transitional “shinai competition,” and the founding of the All Japan Kendo Federation (14 October 1952) that accompanied it all delayed the starting point of the English-language literature.

As for naginata (the glaive), it can hardly be said that an independent English-language book appeared by the 1970s. It is mentioned only to the extent that it figures in Donn F. Draeger’s trilogy (discussed below); before the International Naginata Federation (INF) was founded in 1990, an official English-language book existed essentially not at all. A serious English-language book taking naginata as its subject came only with Alex Bennett’s Naginata: The Definitive Guide (Rising Sun Productions, 2012) and after. The reasons include that the postwar reorganization of “new naginata” as a women’s physical-education activity slowed its overseas expansion relative to the other arts, and that the center of its competitive population remained strongly within Japan.

As for jūkendō (bayonet art), because it was closely bound up with prewar military training, its public communication was suppressed for some time after the war. An independent book in English is, within the range up to the 1970s that this essay covers, essentially impossible to confirm.

The Postwar Years, 1945–1950s — A New Beginning Under the Occupation

The years from 1945 to the early 1950s were the most difficult period for Japanese budō. Under GHQ policy, the practice of kendō, jūdō, naginata, and the like in school education was temporarily banned or restricted, and the budō organizations were forced to reorganize. And yet, in the publishing market of the Anglophone world, demand for budō books actually rose — as an extension of wartime enemy-study, and as an object of interest for those connected with the occupying forces.

Three things characterize the English-language literature of this period: first, that revisions and reprints of the prewar works of Harrison and others continued; second, that a circuit began to form in which servicemen and civilian personnel of the occupying forces trained themselves and then, on returning home, became authors; and third, that the Tuttle company (the Charles E. Tuttle Company; its founder, Charles E. Tuttle, 1915–1993, was from Vermont) set up a base in Japan and industrialized the English-language publishing of Japan-related books, including budō books.

Tuttle was established in Tokyo in 1948 (it began under the Allied Occupation by importing American paperbacks and distributing them to the occupying forces, and from 1951 onward started full-scale publishing of books on the Japanese language and culture), and thereafter, through the 1950s–60s, it led the English-language publishing of budō books. The hallmarks of a Tuttle edition were (1) collaboration between a Japanese author and a native-English editor or translator, (2) an abundance of photographs and plates, and (3) binding and pricing with the international market in view. Many of the major English-language books on karate, kendō, and aikidō discussed below came out under the Tuttle imprint.

For jūdō, the appearance of Trevor Pryce Leggett (1914–2000, born in London) was significant. Leggett studied jūdō and Zen in Japan from before the war, eventually became the first foreigner to attain the sixth dan in Kōdōkan jūdō, and after the war headed the BBC Japanese Service for twenty-four years, from 1946 to 1970. Throughout that time he continued to teach at the Budokwai in London (the oldest jūdō dōjō outside Japan), and from the 1960s onward he published numerous books on jūdō and Zen in English; his representative work A First Zen Reader (Charles E. Tuttle, 1960) greatly influenced the British and American reception of Zen as well. As Harrison’s successor he formed the central axis of the introduction of Japanese budō in Britain, and in 1984 he was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Third Class.

As for karate, until the early 1950s a stand-alone book in English scarcely existed. The English translation of Gichin Funakoshi’s Karate-Dō Kyōhan (first published in Japanese in 1935) did not appear until 1973, and in the years immediately after the war the karate books an English reader could pick up were extremely limited.

The Late 1950s–1960s — The Birth of an English-Language Literature on Karate

The English-language literature on karate appeared in earnest from the late 1950s. This was the result of three converging factors: (1) U.S. military personnel in Japan learned karate and, on returning home, opened dōjō on the American mainland; (2) the various schools in Japan made an organized decision to “advance overseas”; and (3) English-language publishers such as Tuttle commercialized karate books as “the next jūdō.”

The earliest English-language karate book to draw notice is What is Karate? (Tokyo-News Co., January 1958; first edition 98 pp.) by Masutatsu Oyama (founder of the Kyokushin Kaikan). Issued from Tokyo as an English-language original (there was at first no Japanese edition; the English writing came first), it introduced to English readers — under Oyama’s own name, and on both the technical and the philosophical planes — the karate of the period that would become the forerunner of the Kyokushin Kaikan. It went through edition after edition — a 1959 revision, a 1963 revision, a 1966 “Completely New Edition” — and was later reissued by Japan Publications (Nichibo) as well. Oyama followed it with This is Karate (Japan Publications, 1965, 368 pp.) and then, in 1970, Advanced Karate and others. The hallmark of Oyama’s English books is that they assert the legitimacy of his school (the Kyokushin Kaikan) strongly while also carrying the commercial character needed to meet the demand of the American physical-culture market (karate = a symbol of strength). The intended readers were the general karate enthusiasts of the Anglophone world, centered on the United States, and the books clearly also intended to funnel readers toward enrollment in the Kyokushin Kaikan.

From the JKA (Japan Karate Association, of the Shōtōkan line) came Karate: The Art of Empty-Hand Fighting (Charles E. Tuttle, 1960), co-authored by Hidetaka Nishiyama and Richard C. Brown. Systematizing the JKA’s curriculum for English readers, it established the template for later English-language karate books: a three-part structure of fundamentals, kata, and kumite; romanized notation of technique names; sequential photographic illustration of the various kata. As a collaboration between a Japanese karateka and a native-English author, it reconciled the authority of the school with readability. The intended readers were American karate trainees and instructors, and it went through repeated editions as the school’s official text.

From the Gōjū-ryū line came Peter Urban’s (1934–2004) The Karate Dojo: Traditions and Tales of a Martial Art (Charles E. Tuttle, 1967). Urban was stationed in Japan with the U.S. Navy in 1952, studied under Richard Kim in Yokohama, then under Masutatsu Oyama (Kyokushin Kaikan) in Tokyo, and finally under Gōgen Yamaguchi (Gōjū-kai), returning home in 1959 to open dōjō in New Jersey and New York and to launch American Gōjū-ryū (this was done without the consent of the Japanese parent body, and so occupies a complicated position organizationally as well). The book is less a technical manual than a half-autobiographical, half-explanatory work that narrates the history, dōjō culture, and master-disciple relationships of karate in English; as a school’s self-narration it belongs to the earliest examples.

From the Uechi-ryū line, George E. Mattson’s The Way of Karate (Charles E. Tuttle, 1963) was published, making the existence of Uechi-ryū in the United States known to English readers. Mattson is said to be the first American to attain the black belt in Uechi-ryū.

In parallel with these, a great many karate books by American authors — “without a Japanese intermediary” — were also published. Representative is the series of introductory books (centered on the 1960s) by Bruce Tegner (1929–1985). Tegner mass-produced popular practical books spanning jūdō, karate, and self-defense (in 1963 he founded “Jukado,” his own integration of jūdō, jūjutsu, karate, aikidō, and staff techniques), and with cheap paperback bindings he diffused karate into American homes. His books were often judged “crude in the eyes of a genuine karateka,” but their influence on the popularization of the English-language karate book cannot be ignored.

Let me sort out here who wrote for whom. The English-language karate books of the 1950s–60s divide broadly into the following four types.

Type	Representative example	School / lineage	Intended readers
Official book by a Japanese author, issued from within Japan	Oyama, What is Karate?	Kyokushin	General readers and would-be entrants in the Anglophone world
Official school book co-authored by a Japanese and a native-English writer	Nishiyama & Brown	JKA / Shōtōkan	American trainees and instructors
School self-narration by U.S.-resident or returned servicemen	Urban, Mattson	Gōjū, Uechi	American school members and general readers
Independent popular book by an American author	Tegner	(cross-school)	American households at large

This matrix shows how karate came to have “official English-language books” by individual school earlier than the other martial arts. Whereas jūdō had a single center in the Kōdōkan, karate had multiple centers — Shōtōkan, Gōjū, Kyokushin, Uechi, Wadō, and others — each of which attempted to position itself in the English-language market. As a result, the totality of 1960s English-language karate books already took on the aspect of “the largest player in the overseas transmission of Japanese budō.”

The Early 1970s — Where Translation and Scholarship Crossed

With the 1970s, the English-language budō book leaped forward in quantity and quality at once. Two decisive events deserve mention.

The first is the English translation of Gichin Funakoshi’s major works. Funakoshi’s Karate-Dō Kyōhan (first edition 1935, revised 1958) was the most systematic technical text of karate’s modernization period, and with the publication of its translation, Karate-Do Kyohan: The Master Text (translated by Tsutomu Ohshima; Kodansha International, 1973), English readers could at last gain access to a classical technical text written from karate’s “inside.” With the translation of Funakoshi’s autobiography Karate-Do: My Way of Life (Kodansha International, 1975; original 1956), the thought of karate’s founding generation reached the Anglophone world directly. Kodansha International, alongside Tuttle and Japan Publications, became a pillar of English-language budō publishing, sending out translation after translation of the Japanese side’s official books from the 1970s onward.

The second is the appearance of systematic, scholarly description of Japanese budō by the American martial-arts researcher Donn F. Draeger (Donald Frederick “Donn” Draeger; born 15 April 1922 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; died 20 October 1982). Draeger served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1943 to 1956 (he saw action at Iwo Jima, handled the surrender of Japanese forces at Tianjin in 1945–46, went through the Korean War, and retired as a major), and after his discharge stayed in Japan for long periods. A man of rare credentials — Kōdōkan jūdō (fourth dan in 1948, eventually high rank), Tenshin Shōden Katori Shintō-ryū (he was the first foreigner to enter that school and is said to have obtained its teaching license, menkyo — though sources differ as to whether he was granted menkyo kaiden, “complete transmission”), and Shintō Musō-ryū jōjutsu (short-staff art) — he is regarded as one of the earliest figures to assemble budō research as a “discipline” in English. He also contributed greatly to the development of hoplology (the comparative anthropology of weapons and combative techniques).

His principal work is the following trilogy (all from Weatherhill):

The Martial Arts and Ways of Japan, Volume I: Classical Bujutsu (1973, 112 pp.) — the classical martial techniques
Volume II: Classical Budo (1973, 128 pp.) — the classical martial ways
Volume III: Modern Bujutsu and Budo (1974, 190 pp.) — the modern martial arts

In this trilogy Draeger distinguished bujutsu and budō conceptually, and further crossed each with an axis of “classical” versus “modern.” It was the first work to present to English readers, at a scholarly level, both an ordering of the vast classical schools — including swordsmanship, spearmanship, archery, glaive art, dagger art, and seizing/arresting techniques — and a systematic connection to the modern jūdō, kendō, karate, and aikidō. The intended readers were the Anglophone world’s budō researchers, advanced trainees, and university Japan-studies people; the titling, the binding, and the manner of citing references all approached those of a scholarly book. Draeger’s trilogy was cited repeatedly in subsequent Anglophone budō research, and it can be said to have created the starting point for graduate-level budō study abroad.

Draeger had earlier, in 1969, co-authored Asian Fighting Arts with Robert W. Smith (1926–2011) (Kodansha International, 1969; reissued in 1980–81 as the paperback Comprehensive Asian Fighting Arts), presenting a comparative-research framework that treated not only Japanese budō but the combative arts of all Asia across the board. The trilogy can be positioned as a development of that work.

Surveying the early-1970s English-language budō literature, four streams ran side by side: (1) translations of the Japanese side’s official books, (2) independent technical manuals by individual school, (3) Draeger-type scholarly and comparative-research works, and (4) Tegner-type popular books. The English-language budō-book market was no longer the “jūdō-dominated” field it had been before the war. That karate, aikidō, kendō, and the classical martial arts had each come to possess their own English-language literature is the achievement marking this period.

A Comparison by Genre — Technical Manuals, Popular Books, Histories, and Scholarship

Let us re-sort the English-language budō books we have followed in chronological order, this time by genre. Classifying the English-language budō books up to the 1970s into four — technical manual, general/popular book, historical narrative, and academic/scholarly work — the following distribution comes into view.

Technical manuals. Quantitatively the most numerous. The jūjutsu self-study books from Hancock onward, Arima’s jūdō, Nishiyama & Brown’s karate, Sasamori & Warner’s kendō, and Oyama’s karate all belong here. Their common features are: (1) a large number of photographs and plates; (2) systems of romanized notation for technique names that are idiosyncratic to each author or school and not standardized; and (3) adherence to a structural order of kata, fundamentals, and kumite. The readers are, broadly, trainees and instructors.

General / popular books. Harrison’s The Fighting Spirit of Japan, Urban’s The Karate Dojo, and Funakoshi’s autobiography belong here. These are books that narrate, rather than explain technique, the life of the martial artist, the culture of the dōjō, and the philosophy of training, and their readership broadens beyond trainees to lovers of Japanese culture in general.

Histories. Histories in the strict sense — connected, narrative accounts — were exceedingly few in the Anglophone world up to the 1970s. The first two volumes of Draeger’s trilogy (Classical Bujutsu, Classical Budo) can be said to have presented, for the first time in English, a framework for “a connected history of Japanese budō.” Beyond that, one is left with the tale-like historical narration of the Tales of Old Japan type, or the brief school-histories placed at the head of each school’s book.

Academic / scholarly works. The Lindsay–Kanō paper of the 1880s, the Shidachi paper of 1892, the various papers of the Asiatic Society of Japan (including arms-and-armor studies of swords and armor), the sword and armor research by prewar museums and orientalists, and Draeger’s trilogy of 1973–74 form the core. Before Draeger, peer-reviewed scholarly papers that confronted budō (bujutsu/budō) head-on could be counted on one’s fingers in the Anglophone world. It was the eve of the period — from the 1970s on — in which the history and sociology of budō would arise as an academic field.

What this genre distribution reveals is, first, that the English-language budō book was overwhelmingly centered on technical manuals up to the 1970s; second, that histories and scholarly works were strikingly thin until Draeger’s arrival; and third, that although there were popular hits (Harrison, Funakoshi’s autobiography), they did provide a framework for discussing “what Japanese budō is” as cultural commentary, yet could not substitute for scholarly works in technical and historical precision.

Academic Research on Budō — What Had Taken Shape by the 1970s

Finally, let me sort out the state of “academic research on budō” during the period this essay covers, restricting the focus to English-language literature.

From the latter half of the nineteenth century into the first half of the twentieth, English-language scholarly research did not so much thematize budō itself as treat arms, armor, and swords as objects of Oriental antique-art, arms-history, and material-culture studies. The sword papers and armor papers by the curators and researchers of the Asiatic Society of Japan, the Japan Society of London, the various countries’ oriental societies, and museums (the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and others) belong to this. These were not budō books, but they served to convey budō‘s material foundation to Western readers.

The earliest peer-reviewed papers that discuss “budō” itself are, to repeat, the Lindsay–Kanō Jiujutsu of the 1880s and the Shidachi Jiu-Jitsu of 1892. Compared with the standard of a modern paper these lean toward historical description and contain no scientific or sociological analysis of technique, but they were presentations conducted according to the scholarly procedures of the orientalism of their day, and they are the starting point of Japanese-budō research “as a paper” in the Anglophone world.

From the interwar years into the postwar period, English-language papers and lecture-records by Jigorō Kanō and his disciples, and discussions of jūdō within the frameworks of pedagogy and physical education, were published intermittently. Many of them, however, took the form of lecture-records, contributions to specialist journals, or international-conference materials, rather than being included as peer-reviewed papers in Anglophone scholarly journals.

Nitobe’s Bushido (1900) is often positioned as a scholarly work, but strictly it is a commentary in ethics and moral philosophy, not a scholarly work in the history or science of budō. Even so, its influence in providing the reference frame of the “bushidō” concept whenever Japanese budō was discussed in English is incalculable; it can be said to have created the soil in which the English-language budō book — down to Funakoshi, Oyama, and Draeger — would go on sharing the word “bushidō” almost uncritically.

With Smith & Draeger’s Asian Fighting Arts (1969) and Draeger’s trilogy of 1973–74, budō was for the first time positioned in the English-language scholarly space as “the study of budō itself,” independent of arms-and-armor history and the philosophical essay. Draeger’s framework has, seen from the present, much room for criticism, but his achievement in conceptually re-ordering the previously fragmentary English-language descriptions of budō is unshaken. The end point of this essay’s period (the early 1970s) was also the moment when Anglophone budō research achieved the minimal form of a “discipline.”

Note that English-language scholarship analyzing Japanese budō from social-scientific and anthropological viewpoints — themes such as budō and the nation-state, budō and gender, budō and globalization — entered the picture roughly from the 1980s onward, and falls outside this essay’s range.

Conclusion — What Was Introduced, and What Was Not

We have surveyed the lineage of books introducing Japanese budō in English (and in a small number of German, French, and other texts) from before the nineteenth century to the 1970s. By way of conclusion I want to stress a few points.

First, what was introduced was overwhelmingly jūdō and karate. Ever since the papers of the 1880s, the Anglophone image of Japanese budō was made first by jūdō (jūjutsu), and from the late 1950s karate took up the succession. Kendō came to have an independent book belatedly, in the 1960s; serious English-language books on naginata, jūkendō, and the like scarcely existed by the 1970s. For the overseas reader, the mental map of “Japanese budō” was long composed of the two pillars of jūdō and karate, and that has continued, with strong inertia, down to the present.

Second, who wrote a book very nearly determined who read it. The papers of Kanō and others, carried in the journals of learned societies, reached the orientalists; Hancock’s run of jūjutsu books reached middle-class households; Harrison’s criticism reached the intellectual reader; Nishiyama & Brown reached the JKA’s trainees; Oyama reached the Anglophone world’s general karate enthusiasts; Draeger reached the budō researchers. Even for the same “book introducing Japanese budō,” the readers were sharply sorted by publisher, binding, price, and chapter structure, and each readership formed its own distinct image of budō.

Third, by genre the technical manual was overwhelmingly dominant, while histories and scholarly works were thin. Until Draeger appeared in 1973–74, there was almost no book that discussed Japanese budō systematically as “history” in English. This is consistent with the fact that the historical description of budō was a comparatively new academic field on both the Japanese and the English sides.

Fourth, the continuity from before to after the war was maintained through individuals. Harrison and Leggett were involved with Japan from before the war and continued their activity into the postwar years; Tuttle came to Japan during the Occupation and built a base for English-language publishing in Tokyo; Draeger, through long postwar residence, made budō research scholarly. Their generations and positions differed, but the distinguishing feature of the English-language budō book’s lineage is that, even when an organization once lapsed, the discourse was carried on through people.

Fifth, there are martial arts that were not introduced — or not written about. Naginata, jūkendō, aikidō (which was rendered into English to some degree by the 1970s, though not treated deeply here), and many of the various classical bujutsu remained in supporting roles in the English-language book market up to the 1970s. One may say that the totality of Japanese budō was, in the Anglophone world up to the 1970s, “only half introduced.”

The significance, for Japanese researchers and enthusiasts, of consulting this body of English-language literature is not limited to the source-critical matter of “confirming past outward communications.” Much of the very wording in which Japanese budō is read, practiced, and discussed in today’s world rests on the vocabulary set down by the books taken up in this essay. The connotations that words such as budō, kata, dōjō, sensei, and bushidō carry in the Anglophone world were formed by the few dozen English-language books running from Lindsay–Kanō to Oyama and Draeger, and they have been handed down to today’s English-language scholarly papers, dōjō regulations, and commercial publishing.

To re-read this body of English-language literature within Japan is the surest procedure for grasping how one’s own martial culture was transmitted to the world, how it was misunderstood, and how it came to be loved. It is my hope that this essay serves readers as a first map for that procedure.

Appendix: Principal Works Cited (Chronological)

E. Kaempfer, The History of Japan (English translation, London, 1727)
F. Caron, Beschrijvinghe van het Machtigh Coninckrijck Japan (Dutch original, 1645/46) / R. Manley, English trans., A True Description of the Mighty Kingdoms of Japan and Siam (London, 1663; reissued 1671)
P. F. von Siebold, Nippon: Archiv zur Beschreibung von Japan (Leiden, 1832– )
A. B. Mitford, Tales of Old Japan (Macmillan, 1871)
T. Lindsay & J. Kano, Jiujutsu: The Old Samurai Art of Fighting Without Weapons (in TASJ, vol. 16, 1889, pp. 192–205)
T. Shidachi, Jiu-Jitsu: The Ancient Art of Self-Defence by Sleight of Body (Transactions and Proceedings of the Japan Society of London, vol. 1, 1892)
I. Nitobe, Bushido: The Soul of Japan (Leeds & Biddle, 1900)
H. I. Hancock, Japanese Physical Training (Putnam, 1903)
H. I. Hancock, Jiu-Jitsu Combat Tricks (1904)
H. I. Hancock & K. Higashi, The Complete Kano Jiu-Jitsu (Judo) (Putnam, 1905)
S. Arima, Judo: Japanese Physical Culture (Mitsumura, 1908)
E. J. Harrison, The Fighting Spirit of Japan (T. Fisher Unwin, 1913)
M. Oyama, What is Karate? (Tokyo-News Co., 1958)
H. Nishiyama & R. C. Brown, Karate: The Art of Empty-Hand Fighting (Tuttle, 1960)
G. E. Mattson, The Way of Karate (Tuttle, 1963)
J. Sasamori & G. Warner, This is Kendo: The Art of Japanese Fencing (Tuttle, 1964)
M. Oyama, This is Karate (Japan Publications, 1965)
P. Urban, The Karate Dojo (Tuttle, 1967)
D. F. Draeger & R. W. Smith, Asian Fighting Arts (Kodansha International, 1969)
G. Funakoshi, Karate-Do Kyohan: The Master Text (trans. T. Ohshima, Kodansha International, 1973)
D. F. Draeger, The Martial Arts and Ways of Japan, Vol. I: Classical Bujutsu (Weatherhill, 1973)
D. F. Draeger, Vol. II: Classical Budo (Weatherhill, 1973)
D. F. Draeger, Vol. III: Modern Bujutsu and Budo (Weatherhill, 1974)
G. Funakoshi, Karate-Do: My Way of Life (Kodansha International, 1975)

Bibliographic details vary by edition and printing; readers are encouraged to re-confirm against the physical copy or a library catalog before relying on any entry.