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University of Hawai’i Press.Japanese Martial Arts, Chinese Influences on
It is no surprise that Japan’s feudal society, with its samurai-dominated
martial culture, spawned an abiding interest in martial arts. Although
weapons techniques, primarily archery and swordsmanship, were the main
traditional Japanese martial arts, today the first things that normally come
to mind are jûdô and karate.These, however, are not traditional Japanese
martial arts in the purest sense. In fact, Japanese bare-handed martial arts,
including sumô(grappling), which had a combat variation, have all been
influenced to some degree by Chinese martial arts.
The earliest Japanese historical reference to sumô traces its origins to 23
B.C., but the reference itself was recorded in the first Japanese history, Nihon
Shoki,in 720, using the Chinese term jueli.Another entry in the same work,
dated 682, uses the current term for sumô (xiangpuin Chinese). While the
Japanese, like the other peoples on China’s periphery, probably practiced an
indigenous form of wrestling, they adopted Chinese terminology for it dur-
ing China’s Tang dynasty (618–960), the height of Japanese cultural contact
with China. They also seem to have adopted some of the Chinese ceremonial
trappings of the period, which they combined with their own customs and
transmitted to the present. Like Chinese wrestling, sumô contained hand-to-
hand combat techniques, which were emphasized for military use from the
late Heian through the Kamakura periods (ca. 1156–1392).
Japanese Martial Arts, Chinese Influences on 199