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The following pages, whatever their merits, represent the fruits of nearly twenty years’ residence in Japan, where for the greater part of the time I was engaged in newspaper work for English papers published at Yokohama and Tokyo and later as resident correspondent for English and American home papers.

I made my way to Yokohama from San Francisco in the steerage of the P.M. ss. China during the early summer of 1897, having been engaged at the latter port to join the staff of the Japan Daily Herald as sub-editor. At the risk of somewhat dimming the dignity that should hedge that office, but in the interests of truth, I am bound to say that the aforesaid staff consisted at that time of one other foreigner besides myself, in the solid person of the late Mr. J. H. Brooke, then over seventy years of age but in his day and generation a power to be reckoned with by the Japanese Government as a stalwart opponent of Treaty Revision and a staunch defender of what he conceived to be the interests of all resident foreigners. Subsequently, after the death of Mr. Brooke, I became connected with the Japan Times, the Japan Advertiser, and during the Russo-Japanese war, with the London Daily Mail as its base correspondent in Tokyo. In the course of my residence in Japan I undertook various professional trips beyond the boundaries of the country returning to England via Siberia immediately after the war and again travelling more recently in Korea, South and North Manchuria, other parts of North China and East Siberia to study the situation. This book, however, is not intended to describe in detail my personal experiences as a journalist in Japan; that task would require more space than I have at my disposal and leave little or no room for other purposes more germane to the plan I have mapped out. The talented and witty author of Letters of a Self-made Merchant to his Son speaks somewhere of an old reprobate who took normal sustenance now and then just to be sociable, but lived chiefly on tobacco. Somewhat analogously of myself I might say that although I was obliged to work as a journalist in order to earn my daily bread, yet during the first few years of my stay in the country I lived more particularly for the study of the language and the practice of the celebrated art of judo, more commonly known abroad in those days as jujutsu. As a boy in Lancashire I had always been fond of wrestling. Then for a year or more, while working as city editor of a local paper at Nanaimo, British Columbia, I studied catch-as-catch-can systematically under one Jack Stewart, a favourite pupil of Dan McLeod, otherwise known as the “Californian Wonder”, although he was actually a native of Nova Scotia, and gained his first scientific experience of mat work at Nanaimo, which small coal-mining town could perhaps produce among its collier population a proportionately larger number of skilful wrestlers than any other spot on the continent. With such strenuous antecedents, therefore, what more natural than that immediately after my arrival in Japan I should cast around for some similar method of getting rid of my surplus energy? I gained my first introduction to jujutsu about that juncture in the course of a nocturnal adventure which brought me into contact with the Yokohama police, when I was rather chagrined to discover that my catch-as-catch-can repertoire of tricks was of scant avail against even a third-rate exponent of what is now properly known as judo. Not relishing this feeling of inferiority in comparison with a man considerably smaller than myself, although I am no Goliath, I speedily set about repairing these deficiencies. With the help of the Japan Herald’s Japanese translator I found out a local dojo or school of jujutsu referred to elsewhere in these pages. Its proprietor was a small Japanese named Hagiwara Ryoshinsai, a disciple of the Tenjin Shinyo-ryu and a wonderful little man in his way. Although in stand-up wrestling, known technically as Tachiwaza, he would have been no match for the black-belt brigade of the famous Kodokan of Tokyo, yet in what followers of the art have designated “ground work” he possessed remarkable skill and a neck of such indiarubber-like elasticity and strength as to defy my utmost efforts to strangle him even when he deliberately exposed himself to my attack and chokelock. In this small school of not more than fifteen mats^[1] I gained a good deal of rough-and-tumble experience, my opponents being drafted chiefly from the bourgeois element with an occasional coolie thrown in. At the outset I sustained numerous nasty falls, a cracked collar-bone at one stage of the proceedings putting me out of action for several months and almost incapacitating me for professional work, to the no small disgust of my venerable employer Mr. Brooke, who had never in his life been under the spell of athletics and therefore regarded my distraction as more than a mild form of lunacy.

By dint of perseverance coupled with “beef” I began to gain proficiency, and was eventually given the grade of shodan at this small dojo. With very rare exceptions I was the only foreigner who ever attended. One disadvantage was that practice took place only at night after dinner, and another was that the interior was always visible from the outside, nothing more substantial than a low hoarding separating the wrestling mats from the roadway. Naturally the sight and sound of incessant struggle invariably attracted a large crowd of spectators, and when I chanced to be holding the floor the rush and scramble for seats in the stalls were fiercer than ever. My own attitude towards this unsought-for publicity was direct and simple. During the initial stages of my novitiate, while I continued to be an “easy mark” for every juvenile “disciple” with blood in his eye and a mad desire to feel what it was like to hurl a foreign devil through the heated air, quite frankly on hearing the noisy laugh and ill-bred chaff of the hoi polloi onlookers I asked myself what the deuce I chanced to be doing on board that galley. Later, however, when I began to “put it over” the majority I thoroughly enjoyed this notoriety, and tried to look blandly unconscious every time the downfall of a victim elicited a groan of patriotic disgust from the disgruntled spectators.

I should add that my jujutsu activities were by no means confined to the Tenjin Shinyo-ryu dojo. Reports of my very modest prowess in the “soft art” having reached the ears of the Yokohama police I was invited to practise with them at the central Kagacho police station which exercised jurisdiction over the foreign settlement. This interval happened to coincide with my connexion with a foreign paper which left me more or less free to devote my mornings after breakfast to keiko (practice) on the mats of the police dojo. There too I usually got the better of the rank and file without much difficulty but did not fare quite so well when trying conclusions with visiting police yudansha (black belt holders) from Tokyo some of whom had no doubt graduated from the Kodokan. Moreover the chief instructor of the Kagacho police station dojo, although not a disciple of the Kodokan but the product of another ryugi or school of jujutsu the name of which I cannot recall, was none the less a decidedly formidable customer and especially adept in Newaza, otherwise “ground work”. I am not at all likely to forget this stalwart seeing that it is to him that I owe my first introduction to the Kansetsuwaza known as the Ashigarami, or Leg Entanglement, and that too on no less important an occasion than a specially organized demonstration of jujutsu at the Kagacho police station before the late Prince Henry of Prussia who was then visiting the port with the German Far Eastern squadron of which he was the admiral. I had been paired with the Japanese instructor and greatly to my youthful chagrin it was not long before I was forced to submit to this particular lock of which I had until then been ignorant.

With the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war in 1904 I moved to the capital and there joined the Kodokan whose 250 mats were in striking contrast to the humble fifteen of the Yokohama wrestling haunt. Here too I soon found that I was a mere tyro in the art and had to unlearn a good many bad habits engendered by the fault of relying too much upon brute strength instead of upon skill.

In connexion with the study and practice of judo my attention was drawn to the part which a certain kind of occultism plays in the armoury of really efficient masters. The relegation of the seat of courage to the lower abdomen (shitahara or more elegantly saika tanden in Japanese), and the contention that the concentration of strength in that portion of the body is, as it were, the alpha and omega of fighting capacity, at once impressed me profoundly as plausible and original theories worthy of investigation. By actual experiment I found that these claims were more than idle and empty theorizing and that the habit of deep abdominal breathing, if pursued as directed by the Japanese teachers of martial arts, and side by side with the practical study of the latter, would generally lead to a marked development of defensive and offensive power.

That more gush and drivel have been written about Japan than about any other country in the world is a fact too notorious to require special proof and I should be loath to add my “sum of more to that which has too much”. Nevertheless, even when due allowance has been made for exaggeration I think it will be generally admitted that the Japanese race as a whole possesses the fighting knack. Of course the country has its full quota of weaklings, and the average Japanese man in the street is by no means an impressive object. Still, if I were asked to sum up the physical characteristics of the Japanese in as few words as possible, I should undoubtedly say that these people are usually stronger than they look, whereas with us the opposite is very often the case—i.e. we frequently look stronger than we are. I have dealt with this aspect of the question in subsequent chapters, but it may be said here that some of the most powerful Japanese of my acquaintance make very indifferent tailors’ dummies. I have in mind as I write the judo instructor at Keio University, Mr. Iizuka, who, when clad in Western garments and seen from behind might very easily be taken for a schoolboy but who, when stripped, displays the thews and sinews of a miniature Hercules. Again, admitting that the average Japanese is hardly a match for the average Englishman or American in a fight with Nature’s weapons, Europe and America have had ample proof that on these terms the Japanese specialist is nearly always certain to be the victor. Investigation will show that there are purely technical reasons for this outcome, but one object of a portion of this book is to demonstrate that the offensive and defensive ability of the Japanese specialist is not based solely upon technical reasons. I will even go so far as to declare my opinion that, given equal technical skill on either side, until we have learned thoroughly the lesson of abdominal power the Japanese will nearly always defeat his Western opponent in a fight to a finish with or without weapons, firearms of course excluded. In the following pages I have tried to explain in as simple language as possible the secret of this marked superiority. I am prepared to incur in some quarters the reproach of mendacity on the score of what I have written; but if my modest efforts gain an occasional convert I shall not complain, for a little leaven will sometimes leaven the lump, while if those whose opinion really counts will take the trouble to trace my statements back to their original sources they will speedily be satisfied of my bona fides.

It should be pointed out that the book is in no sense a technical exposition of these Japanese arts but rather an imperfect first attempt to arrive at their rationale, both esoteric and exoteric; nor is it intended to be that and nothing more. On the contrary, I have ventured to deal with several other distinctively Japanese subjects which, during my residence in Japan occupied part of the leisure that could be spared from purely professional duties. I do not say that these subjects have never before been handled by a foreign author, but I do say that I have handled them here either quite independently or with recourse to Japanese originals. While the chapters devoted to the esoteric and exoteric aspects of judo form a more or less connected narrative, other chapters may be read as distinct and separate studies, and the rest are offered simply as lighter samples of actual personal experiences of Japanese town and country life.

[1]

The Japanese floor mat called tatami is usually about 6 ft. long, 3 ft. wide, and 2 in. thick, consisting of toko (made of rice straw bound together), tightly covered with a straw mat called the omote, with the edges neatly bordered with cloth. Mats used in judo exercise are about the same size but much more strongly made. A detailed description will be found in the chapter on the subject.