Until the end of the sixteenth century, wrestling sometimes took the
form of no-holds-barred competitions that included both punching and
kicking, although restrictions were placed on lethal strikes. When the
Tokugawa assumed the shogunate in 1600, sumô stables and tournaments
were established, and wrestlers were put on retainer. This lasted until the
beginning of the Meiji period (1868).
Although modern sumô societies forbid women from even entering
the ring, sumô has not always been an exclusively male sport. The Nihon
Shokirecords ladies-in-waiting of the emperor Yûryaku as holding bouts
in A.D. 469. History also records a powerful Buddhist nun who took on
men in Kyoto during the reign of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1592–1598).
Since 1960, modern sumô has been composed of seventy moves de-
rived from the original forty-eight. The ring is considered holy ground and
sanctified with salt and water both before and during a tournament as each
competitor enters the ring. Sumô is regarded as a heavyweight grappling
art, and the contestants are often taller than 220 cm and weigh over 200
kg. The minimum requirements are 173 cm in height and 150 kg in weight
for apprentices. The object of the bout is no longer to kill the opponent
(nor has it been for centuries), but to hurl the opponent out of the ring or
to the ground. Today, there are over forty-five sumô stables ruled by the
Japan Sumô Association. Matches frequently draw crowds exceeding ten
thousand in Japan, and the sport is gaining popularity around the world.
In contrast to the ritual sport of sumô, jûjutsu (from jû [supple, soft]
and jutsu[technique, method]) was from its inception a combative grap-
pling art. Unlike contemporary codified sports, various systems of jûjutsu
developed from a variety of sources. As a result, famous schools like the
Daitô-ryû Aiki-jûjutsucoexist with the relatively unknown mountain vil-
lage schools that go back for centuries in the warrior traditions of Japan.
The Japanese record over eight hundred schools of jûjutsu.
According to some traditional sources, a Ming refugee imported
jûjutsu to Japan in the seventeenth century. This is as suspect as the belief
that Damo brought martial arts to the Shaolin Temple. Older schools of
jûjutsu than the still existing and popular Shibukawa, Takuechi, Kito,
Sekiguchi, and Oguri schools of that period predate the seventeenth cen-
tury. Moreover, Zen was introduced into Japan from China during the
Nara period (710–781). Zen monks were well known for their skills in
grappling and striking. Therefore, a Chinese influence on the wrestling and
grappling arts of Japan from the eighth century is likely.
Shibukawa Yoshikata (1652–1704), founder of the Shibukawa (knights
of harmonious spirit) school and author of Jûjutsu Taiseiroku(Synthesis of
Jûjutsu), credited Chinese philosophy as the source of his ideas, as he
claimed the “change of strength hinges upon being soft and yielding to ad-730 Wrestling and Grappling: Japan