lishes an article called “The New Art of Self Defence” in Pear-
son’s Magazine.Barton-Wright had studied jûjutsu while living
in Japan, and his “New Art,” which he immodestly called
“Bartitsu,” combined jûjutsu with boxing and savate.
1901 An elderly Ryûkyûan aristocrat named Itosu Ankô campaigns
for the introduction of a simplified form of Shôrin-ryû Karate
into the Okinawan public schools.
1902 A London dentist named Jack Marles invents the first mouth
guards for boxers. The devices were originally designed for use
during training, and the English welterweight Ted “Kid” Lewis,
who reigned from 1915 to 1919, was the first professional to
regularly wear one in the prize ring.
1902 Alan Calvert establishes the Milo Bar-Bell Company, the first
company to manufacture plate-loading iron barbells for ama-
teur use, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
1902 An editorial in Baltimore’sAfro-American Ledgercomplains
that professional boxer Joe Gans “gets more space in the white
papers than all the respectable colored people in the state.”
This was not to take anything away from Gans, but to wonder
why illiterate prizefighters should be more influential role mod-
els than “respectable colored people” such as Booker T. Wash-
ington or W. E. B. Dubois (Ashe 1988, 16).
1904 The word kokugi(national sport) is coined in Japan to describe
sumô; at the same time, Japanese school gymnastics (heishiki
taisô)are renamed “military drills”(heishiki kyoren),as this
puts the emphasis on discipline and obedience.
1904 Xu Fulin and his coworkers Xu Yiping and Xu Chenglie open
the Chinese Physical Training School (Zhingguo Ticao
Xuexiao) in Shanghai. Between 1926 and 1931 novelist Xiang
Kairan wrote some fictionalized popular accounts of this orga-
nization’s leaders beating Russians, British, and Japanese in
weight lifting, boxing, and jûdô contests.
1905 “It is a good thing for a girl to learn to box,” says an article in
the beauty column of the February 27 issue of the New York
Evening World,because “poise, grace and buoyancy of move-
ment result from this exercise.”
1905 A pro-Japanese karate teacher named Hanagusuku Nagashige
creates the modern ideograms for karate, the ones that mean
“empty hands” instead of “Tang dynasty [i.e., Chinese] boxing.”
1906 Erich Rahn of Berlin opens Germany’s first jûjutsu school; the
style taught is (probably) Tsutsumi Hozan-ryû.
1908 Robert Baden-Powell establishes the Boy Scouts of England.
Stated goals of the organization include preparing working-
class youth for future military service.
About 1911 Yabiku Moden establishes the Ryûkyû Ancient Research Asso-
ciation, the first school to publicly teach kobudô(ancient
weapons arts) on Okinawa.
1911 Under pressure from the Diet, Japan’s Ministry of Education
decides to require schoolboys to learn jûjutsu and shinai kyôgi
(flexible stick competition), as jûdô and kendô were known un-
til 1926; the idea, says the ministry in its reports, is to ensure
that “students above middle school should be trained to be a
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