Eventually, they would adopt textbooks and training methods developed
by educators at Tokyo Teacher’s College in the department of physical ed-
ucation that had been founded by Kanô Jigorô.
When the Ministry of Education finally adopted jûjutsu and gekken as
part of the standard school curriculum in 1911, Japan’s political situation
had changed dramatically. Military victories against China in 1894–1895
and against Russia in 1905 not only demonstrated Japan’s ability to chal-
lenge European nations but also gave Japan control over neighboring terri-
tories. Nonetheless, Japan’s industrial capacity could not supply armaments
in the quantities required by its military ambitions. Faced with this insur-
mountable economic inferiority, Japanese army leaders decided to rely on
fighting spirit (kôgeki seishin [16]) to defeat the material superiority of
Western forces. Beginning in 1905 the development of a program of spiri-
tual education (seishin kyôiku [17]) became a top priority. In 1907 the army
identified martial arts as one of its basic methods for training the spirit.
Thereafter, it became increasingly common for Japanese intellectuals to
contrast Japanese spirituality with Western materialism and to link martial
arts to spiritual development. In this context, however, the term spirit
(seishin) denoted “willpower” as in the well-known phrase “indomitable
spirit” (seishin ittô [18]) coined by the Chinese Confucian scholar Zhu Xi
[19] (a.k.a. Chu Hsi, Japanese Shushi, 1130–1200). Malcolm Kennedy, a
British soldier assigned to a Japanese army unit from 1917 to 1920, cor-
rectly captured the true sense of spiritual education when he explained it as
“training of the martial spirit.” He notes that it was designed to foster ag-
gression on battlefields abroad and to dispel “dangerous thoughts” (e.g.,
bolshevism or antidynastic sentiments) at home (54–55, 311, 337).
Public school education played an indispensable role in preparing stu-
dents for military training. In 1907, therefore, the same year that the army
linked martial arts to spiritual education, Japan’s legislative Diet passed a
law requiring the Ministry of Education to develop jûjutsu and gekken cur-
riculums. This law explicitly identified martial art instruction with bushidô
[20] (warrior ways), and the law’s sponsors argued that bushidô was more
important than ever because everyone in the country must become a soldier
(zenkoku kaihei [21]).
Significantly, Japanese Christians originally had popularized the con-
cept of bushidô. They had justified their own conversion to Christianity by
describing it as the modern way to uphold traditional Tokugawa-period
Confucian values, which they referred to as bushidô. The first book ever
published with the word bushidôin its title, for example, was Kirisutokyô
to bushidô [22] (Christianity and Bushidô, 1894) by Uemura Masahisa
[23] (1858–1925), a professor of theology at Meiji Gakuin Academy. In
this work, Uemura argued that modern Japanese should rely on Christian-
Religion and Spiritual Development: Japan 479