Aikido: The Meiji Era [Part 1/3]

This series is going to be a bit different from my other stuff because it focuses more on context than anything else. To give you a peek under the hood of my video making process, this is a topic that has actually been present in the scripts of many, many of my recent videos and I always cut it out because it always ends up being too much of a tangent. Having said that, I think it was a blessing in disguise because it's given me some time to really let this idea mature into something that I believe is worth its own pieces of content. Beyond that, I feel that it is a crucially important video if you want to understand Aikido, both historical and current. However, I do want to start with a disclaimer. My experience is that when this information is presented, it tends to receive one of three reactions. The first is acceptance, which is, of course, healthy and what we'd hope to see. Generally, though, people don't accept it. In my experience, people either reject it outright or attempt to suck all the nuance out of the situation to support something they already believe. Make no mistake, I find both of these reactions to be almost fanatical in nature. Those who reject the information tend to be Aikido purists who have never, and possibly will never, look at the history and instead choose to blindly believe a marketing campaign that I will unpack over the course of this series. On the other hand, people who try to encapsulate everything I'm about to go over here into social media-friendly phrases like Aikido was a scam all along or something in line with that are just as ideologically motivated as the deniers. The reality is that this isn't a story that neatly fits into the most popular conceptions of Aikido. The people are neither scam artists nor entirely honest. Events are not wholly good or bad. This is something I would strongly suggest viewers keep in mind and do their best to put themselves in the shoes and time periods of our subjects as much as possible. While a lot of cultural studies these days seem to be almost myopic in their scope, I believe it's crucial to talk about the broader cultural trends to everyday people. It seems to me that many people are just disconnected from these larger cultural beats, and the result of that is that things seem to happen almost by surprise and very much confuse folks. By comparison, a more culturally and historically literate population would probably not have to ask, how did we get here? Nearly as much, at least. Reasons behind events would just be self-evident. Aikido is similar to this because as much as it is a martial art, it is also a specific moment in time. Beyond that, martial arts tend to be surprisingly convincing microcosms for broader social trends. Unfortunately for we in the English-speaking world, the context of Aikido is a lot more difficult for us to grasp, given we have to penetrate a foreign culture, foreign language, and foreign history to really wrap our minds around it. In my experience, people both inside and outside of Aikido practice tend to approach it in a kind of vacuum. There appears to be this underlying assumption that the style just spontaneously generated itself, but no tree grows in ignorance to its climate. Now, that isn't to say people believe it just popped into existence one day, but just that this whole tale sort of gets hand-waved as technically and substantially immaterial. Before I jump headlong into this topic, though, I want to be crystal clear that what follows is not something that is strictly academic in nature. I will bring up many examples, pieces of history, and data where applicable. Supplemental sources will be also available in the description. However, I am heavily interpreting these things through my own experiences. I would best describe what follows here as a framework more than a hard-fast history. Although, again, sources and readings in the description. Gaps in what we know do require a bit of speculation to fill in, although I've done my best to be transparent about when I'm making these kinds of fill-in statements. With all of that housekeeping addressed, I want to start off here not with Aikido, but with some of the things going on in Japan leading up to Aikido's founding proper. This is going to be a bit of a whirlwind through a much, much more complex history, but for our purposes, I'm really only focusing on some key events. First, and really the inciting incident of our whole story, is the arrival of the Americans in Japan and the forcing open of the nation. Whole volumes have been written on the political, cultural, economic, and ideological fallout of this event, and I'm not going to mislead you in trying to summarize all of that in a few lines of script here. Instead, let's keep our eyes on the broad strokes. The Japanese military government falls and power is ostensibly returned to the emperor. Early in this Meiji Restoration, several laws are promulgated that abolish not only the samurai class, but even their physical identifiers, such as carrying swords or dressing like them even. Keep in mind, though, that writing a law that abolishes a samurai class isn't really the same as destroying their societal influence. Many industrial, military, and political figures came from samurai blood, samurai wealth, and samurai connections even into the modern day, but especially in the lead-up to World War II. If I had to make an unsavory comparison, consider what old money meant in the era immediately after the American Civil War in the South. These were families who would continue to hold great influence in the region, primarily derived from wealth gained through a mostly abolished system. Turning back to Japan, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, Hokkaido begins to become more widely populated as the government subsidizes land reclamation and immigration to the island. Foreign advisors are brought in from America to help the Japanese change the Hokkaido wilderness into agriculturally viable land. These efforts are widely successful. The land is reshaped into the Meiji image. Forests are felled, and even an entire species of wolf is driven to extinction. The native Ainu population is aggressively suppressed. It is worth noting here that Ueshiba, founder of Aikido, took part in these programs, which lasted well into the 20th century, as a homesteader and frontiersman. It is no historical mistake that he would meet his teacher, Takeda Soukaku, in a Hokkaido inn, nor is it coincidence that the Aiki Shrine is built on Hokkaido soil. Around the same time that all of this is happening, Okinawa is formally incorporated as a Japanese prefecture in 1879. It had previously been a part of the Satsuma domain under the Tokugawa shogunate, that is the predecessor government to the Meiji Restoration, but in operation, it might be best to think of the island as a satellite tributary state in many ways, especially at this time. Something I think lost on many people is that Okinawa was originally the Ryukyu kingdom, and while the people there hail from the same ancestry as neighboring East Asian states, they were their own culture. They still technically are today too, but much like the Ainu have been heavily Japanized. The point I'm making with these digressions into Hokkaido and Okinawa is that this is a time of Japanese expansion. We think of these places today as inseparable from the classic shape of Japan on our own world maps, but in the late 1800s and early 1900s, these were exotic places that were either untamed, foreign, or some mixture of the two. Needless to say, this was a trend that would continue. Japan annexed Taiwan in 1895 after the First Sino-Japanese War and gained a foothold on the Chinese mainland after the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 just 10 years later. Obviously, all of this clearly demarcated Japan as a colonial power, and we could argue about when Japan truly evolved to its pre-war peak, but at the bare minimum, this was a premonition of empire. At the same time all this is happening, domestic Japan is changing internally at a breakneck pace no less. It flips from an isolationist state with deeply conservative sentiments to an almost viciously progressive state that suddenly was starved for everything its global peers had to offer it. It sent delegations to Germany, America, England, and France to learn military technology and doctrine among many other nations. It imported not only foreign culture but foreign professionals, such as the aforementioned agriculturalists. Even architects and chefs were among those brought into the country. We can see the fingerprints of this initiative in the beautiful Tokyo train station or even in the Hamburg steaks of modern Japan. All of this is the backdrop to what is going to happen in the martial arts world, and I'm telling you this to really drive home the fact that the word change almost doesn't really encapsulate the scale of dynamism going on here, especially given that time period. If you were an Edo-born person in, say, 1845, by the time you were 75, assuming you made it to that age, the city might as well have been a different planet compared to your early years. I really can't understate how much changed in Japan over the course of a single generation. If we compare that to the grander scope of Japanese history more generally, or even the history of other countries, this is sort of like waking up one day in medieval power and transforming into a first-rate modern global superpower by bedtime. In those terms, it's kind of insane, and I really think has only been replicated by contemporary, primarily coastal, China between 1970 or so and now. China, of course, isn't a perfect analogy. By 1905, Japan had a world-class navy, for example, perhaps the strongest in the world at the time even. Current-date China doesn't really seem to have a military proportional to that feat, but modern China is inarguably an economic superpower, something it achieved in about a single generation in much the same way that Japan achieved it a century prior, by sending delegations abroad and opening up to global influence. So, if the vector of the times in Japan is change, Judo and the larger Budo movement it inspired should be an almost obvious development to you. Judo and its founder Kano really are a product of the Meiji Restoration, and I think our tendency to divorce the art from that context makes Judo seem far more revolutionary than it actually was. Now, do not misunderstand me. I'm not trying to take anything away from Kano here, because when push came to shove, he was the guy who concocted the formula for Judo's success. All I am saying here is that Kano lived in a Japan where the resting state of culture was rapid change. If Kano hadn't built Judo, I personally suspect someone was eventually going to look around and realize that the globalist approach being applied to nearly every other aspect of society could be applied to martial arts, too. And that is exactly what Judo is. It is an art that is broadly influenced by foreign ideas, but is a reinvention of traditional concepts. I know some people will say that Judo invented free sparring, for example, but that's far from the truth. Something that I think is uniquely Kano's brilliance, though, is something he doesn't get a lot of credit for, which is the narrative control he had over his emerging Judo. This, to me, is one of those key concepts in predicting if a martial art will be successful down the line. There are other components to such predictions, don't get me wrong, but I think what I'm about to describe is one that almost no one discusses despite how big of a deal it really is. I hope you're paying attention, because here it is. The story of Judo is the story of Meiji Japan. Consider this. Judo is a new art born out of a uniquely Japanese cultural background, but it has been updated by new technologies, pedagogies, and approaches as introduced by a newfound globalist paradigm. After emerging as this innovative, updated martial art, it then starts defeating old jujitsu schools, clearly eclipsing the old with the new. Finally, Judo is exported from Japan to almost the whole world, mirroring a Japan now-becoming empire. The cultural narrative of Judo and the cultural narrative of the Meiji-era Japan are the same story. I'll break from Japan here for a moment to give another example of this concept in action, just to show that it's not a one-off. In the United States right now, BJJ is freakishly and explosively popular, almost, in my opinion, to the point of oversaturation. Consider the following. An immigrant art arrives in the United States and eventually works itself up to a grand stage, UFC 1 and 2, where it reverses a traditional paradigm in martial arts. At this point, the humble immigrant is a self-made success and begins to spread across the nation in almost a manifest destiny. Beyond that, it preaches a relatable formula for success to would-be practitioners. No matter who you are or where you come from or even your age, if you work diligently, this is an art you can succeed in. Finally, this heavily Americanized BJJ explodes globally and seems to have at least some presence in every corner of the globe. Does this story sound eerily familiar to my American viewers? The story of BJJ is really the cultural mythology of America itself. Now, I'm not trying to make a political statement here. I understand there is contention over the viability of the American dream, but I'm not really talking about whether or not the narrative reflects an objective reality or not here. What I'm saying is that the average American tends to identify with this narrative on some level. It encapsulates progress defeating tradition, outsiders becoming insiders, rags to riches, and the eventual cultural conquest of the globe. So, really, in the same way that judo's popularity is kind of obvious given its context, it really shouldn't surprise anyone that an art that essentially epitomizes the American dream, at least in marketing and in cultural myth, is a massive hit in America. Anyway, back to Japan. While I think judo is kind of the avatar of Meiji-era sentiment in the martial arts sphere, keep in mind that karate also arrives on the mainland in the 1920s. Much to the chagrin of a certain slice of contemporary karate folk, the karate that Japan imported was heavily curated for the Japanese people. I'd also posit that the dropping of clinch work, which arguably is the core of so much original Okinawan karate, was also likely done so as to not compete with the behemoth that judo had at that time now snowballed into. I bring up karate here, though, because unlike judo, karate would have been almost a foreign martial art. I know I just said it was heavily modified for import, but the general population would not have been widely aware of that, plus it was kind of a process that happened quietly through first and second generation mainland students and teachers. What I want to stress here instead is that Okinawa is freshly a Japanese prefecture in the 1920s, by just 40 or 50 years. To the average Japanese person at that time, it would be almost a foreign martial art in that sense. Again, using an American analogy here, it might be like a traditional martial art from Puerto Rico or Guam being imported to the U.S. mainland and updated for popular success. Puerto Rico and Guam are indeed a part of U.S. territory, but if you ask the average American about the country's geography and its general shape on the globe, these places typically are not going to come up. This isn't a perfect comparison because Okinawa had become a prefecture, which is roughly analogous to an American state, but we have to imagine there was a sentiment that Okinawa was sort of this far-flung place that was different from the traditional Japanese cultural centers, and this, again, was a sign of the times. If Judo represented the rapid domestic changes of the Japanese mainland, then karate was the bannerman for the expansion of Japanese borders. All of this, finally, at last, brings us to Aikido, which is markedly different in character to Judo and karate in this context, but I'm going to save that for Part 2, which I hope you tune into because this is where things get a lot more interesting, in my opinion. As always, thank you all so much for watching, and I will catch you in the next part. Peace.