Herrigel spoke each other’s language. Writing from memory almost twenty
years after he left Japan, Herrigel placed subtle metaphysical arguments
first voiced by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) in Awa’s mouth.
Moreover, subsequent testimony from Herrigel’s interpreter shows that the
mystical episodes related in the book either occurred when there was no in-
terpreter present or were misunderstandings based on faulty translations.
Regardless of these problems, Herrigel’s account has been uncritically ac-
cepted not only in Europe and the United States but also in Japan (where
it was translated in 1956) as an accurate description of traditional Zen
teaching methods.
During the 1950s, Japanese teachers of martial art readily embraced
the “Zen” label because it served to rehabilitate their public image, which
had been thoroughly discredited by Japan’s defeat and its occupation by the
Allied Powers. In November 1945 all forms of martial arts were banned.
Even the word budô(martial ways), with its imperialistic connotations, be-
came taboo for almost ten years. In 1947 school curriculums in “physical
training” (tairen [60]) were officially renamed “physical education” (taiiku
[61]) to signal that henceforth they would emphasize democratic ideals, in-
dividualism, and sports instead of militaristic discipline. Once the Korean
War began in 1950, however, occupation policy reversed course. Leftists
were purged from official positions, and Japan became a silent partner in
the Cold War. This policy shift permitted the revival of martial arts, pro-
vided that they assumed the characteristics of Western sports. In 1953, for
example, when the Ministry of Education allowed high schools to teach
kendô (officially renamed “bamboo-stick competition,” shinai kyôgi [62])
the Ministry stipulated that “it must not be taught as budô, but as a phys-
ical education sport (kyôiku supootsu [63]) in exactly the same way as any
other physical education sport” (quoted in Nakabayashi 1994, 128). In this
environment, some martial art instructors defended their authoritarian
teaching methods by identifying them as Zen instead of as a legacy of fas-
cism. This Zen aura enhanced their charismatic power and permitted them
to evaluate students on the basis of arbitrary criteria not tied directly to
physical performance.
After the 1950s it became commonplace to define the -dô suffix of
martial art names (e.g., budô, kendô, jûdô) as denoting Zen-like “ways” of
spiritual development. This trend found its most rigid expression in the
publications of an American martial artist named Donn F. Draeger
(1922–1982), whose numerous books and essays comprise the first com-
prehensive survey in English of the entire range of Japanese martial arts. In
these works, Draeger classified this subject into four distinct categories of
classical (ko [64]) or modern (shin [65]) forms of arts (-jutsu [66]) or ways
(-dô [67]). Reflecting the postwar sensibilities of his teachers in Japan,484 Religion and Spiritual Development: Japan