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Militarism, Martial Arts, and

Aesthetics in Japan
EYAL BEN-ARI
Published online: 16 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: EYAL BEN-ARI (2005) Militarism, Martial Arts, and Aesthetics in
Japan, Reviews in Anthropology, 34:4, 331-341, DOI: 10.1080/00938150500321054

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 Reviews in Anthropology, 34: 331–341, 2005
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Inc.
ISSN: 0093-8157 print=1556-3014 online
DOI: 10.1080/00938150500321054

MILITARISM, MARTIAL ARTS, AND AESTHETICS

IN JAPAN

Eyal Ben-Ari
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Hurst, G. Cameron III. Armed Martial Arts of Japan: Swordsmanship and

Archery. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. x þ 243 pp. including notes,
bibliography and index. $42.50 paper.

Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The

Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2002. xvii þ 411 pp. including chronology, appendix,
notes, bibliography and index. $20.00 paper.

In these two fascinating books, historian G. Cameron Hurst III and

anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney attempt, each in his or her
particular way, to tackle issues related to the place of the martial arts
and of militarism in historical and contemporary Japan. More perti-
nent to the readership of this journal, each one of these volumes
raises questions that center on how anthropology may contribute
to exploring the relationship between violence and its aestheticization
and acceptability.
Violence has been the object of intense anthropological scrutiny in
the past decade or so. While anthropology has long dealt with issues
related to violence, the stress in much of the newer literature has been
on its constructed nature, the symbolism in which it is embedded, and
its destructive and traumatic effects (Abbink, 2000, p. xv; Nordstrom
& Robben, 1996; Sluka, 2000). Typical examples are works on the
representations of suffering (Kleinman & Kleinman, 1997), Muslim
rituals of circumcision (Mehta, 1997), Indian riot victims (Das,

EYAL BEN-ARI is professor of anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has car-
ried out fieldwork on white-collar suburbs and early childhood education in Japan, the Japanese
community in Singapore, and the contemporary Japanese military. In Israel, he is studying the social
and cultural aspects of the Israeli armed forces.
Address correspondence to Eyal Ben-Ari, Department of Sociology and Anthropology,
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 91905 Jerusalem, Israel. E-mail: feba@netvision.net.il
 332 E. Ben-Ari

1990), and conflicts involving ethnic and national identity (Gilsenan,

1996). At the same time, however, as Krohn-Hansen (1994, p. 367)
stresses, anthropological studies of violence tend to focus on the
victim’s perspective, often overlooking the perpetrators or performers
of violent acts. This point is surprising, because if one wants to under-
stand the social and cultural significance of violence, then such actors
would seem to be a key research site. It is in this light that the two
books under review here should be seen. Both focus on the groups and
people who variously perpetrate, perform, or simulate violence and
the ways in which this violence, or its potential, have been social
and culturally ‘‘handled.’’
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SOLDIERLY ARTS, CULTIVATION, AND SPORTS

G. Cameron Hurst III has written a volume on swordsmanship and

archery as part of a two volume series on the armed martial arts of
Japan. His aim is to provide an overview of the martial arts in the
country and the place of these two traditions in Japanese history
and culture. He shows how these fighting skills were turned into
sports and the ways in which ‘‘Western’’ athletic traditions have
influenced them. At the same time, he is careful to demonstrate
and examine the various ways in which they have remained or more
correctly evolved into specifically Japanese arts in terms of the social
organizations supporting them, the ideas of cultivation held by their
practitioners and the created ‘‘traditions’’ by which they are trans-
mitted. This book tells a story that goes beyond history in the narrow
sense of the term to include the social, political and economic context
of the development of these martial arts. Very clearly and accessibly
written with a sharp analytical eye, it brings to us in the English
language access to a wide array of diverse Japanese sources (for
example, primary documents, secondary literature, or reflexive essays
by practitioners).
Hurst’s main aim is to chart out how swordsmanship and archery
developed from fighting systems into martial arts as part of the
processes that took place during the Tokugawa Era (1600–1867).
These processes included urbanization, internal pacification of
the population (and warring clans), the spread of literacy, proto-
industrialization, and the emergence of professionalized instruction
in the art forms. His thesis centers on the ways in which certain mili-
tary training, which was no longer needed given the pacification of
the country, led to the development and cultivation of new elements
such as physical fitness, spiritual composure, and character develop-
ment. His argument, in this respect, is that when compared to
 Militarism, Martial Arts, and Aesthetics in Japan 333

European and American forms of combative sports such as wrestling

or boxing where there is a relative social consensus over their being
sports, most martial arts in Japan (such as judo, karate, and kendo)
are sites for contentions over their character as sports. The conten-
tions center on their perception by practitioners, the degree to which
they are institutionalized in formal contests and competitions and the
extent to which they serve ‘‘other’’ aspects such as personal culti-
vation. As he shows, at the same time, Japanese martial arts—like
many such arts in East and Southeast Asia–partake of a serious artis-
tic dimension—an explicitly aesthetic aspect–that makes them part
and parcel of the Japanese cultural experience. Because of these wider
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cultural links, Hurst prefers to talk about these martial arts as sport-
ing traditions rather than as sports in the common Western definition
of such endeavors.
Along these lines, the first two chapters of the book are devoted to
a conceptual clarification of the terms ‘‘martial arts’’ and ‘‘sports,’’
and to the initial development of these arts into forms resembling
sports. His focus on two traditions, archery and swordsmanship,
allows him to show that they developed in differing manners. For
example, he argues that the ease with which results could be calcu-
lated and the fact that no one got hurt in archery competitions
worked towards turning it into a sport much earlier than swordsman-
ship. The next three chapters are devoted to swordsmanship and are
arranged chronologically to lead from an early tradition to the
medieval period and then on to the different epochs of the Tokugawa
era. He traces out the various ways in which swordsmanship was
institutionalized in ‘‘schools,’’ each with its own tradition, created
history, and ‘‘secrets.’’ With the pacification of the country, swords-
manship moved from a practice centered on self-protection to one
entailing self-perfection. Hurst shows the kinds of emphases that
swordsmanship took on, citing, for instance, that it became a focal
point for arguments about the higher purpose of its practices and
later the professionalization of the martial arts. The sporting elements
evolved most conspicuously during the late Tokugawa era with
the emergence of fencing academies, the spread of the practice to
commoners, and the link of the sword to a myriad of religious and
mystical elements. It was this link that later underscored the connec-
tion between the sword and nationalistic sentiments during a period
that Ohnuki-Tierney focuses upon.
The next two chapters deal with archery, again in a chronological
manner. Archery, we are told, was the primary fighting technique of
the premodern period, and it was only during the Tokugawa era that
swordsmanship took on prominence as the primary skill. Archery
 334 E. Ben-Ari

was also the first skill to be turned into a sports form. The first chap-
ter devoted to this art shows the close links between archery and reli-
gion, especially Shinto and the Imperial court. In ways similar to
swordsmanship, with the pacification of the country it began to be
practiced for physical improvement and spiritual cultivation, and
thus eventually became a sport. The story of the institutionalization
of the skill, through the establishment of schools, competitions, and
professionalization, follows much the same route as that of swords-
manship. Yet here Hurst reiterates his argument about the relative
ease with which archery became a sport. In contrast to swordsman-
ship, which had a much stronger link to combat and death, archery
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seemed to be removed from direct reference to violence and

aggression.
Finally, in a very good overview that spans the final two chapters
of his book, Hurst explores the contemporary organization, teaching,
ritual, and philosophy of archery and swordsmanship. He further
relates them to other art forms and their place in present-day Japan.
He traces out the standardization of swordsmanship and archery
during the Meiji period and then demonstrates their link to the
nationalism of the pre-War and wartime periods, during which their
‘‘spiritual’’ aspect were linked to a wider cult of Imperial armed
forces. This trend was especially evident in the ways in which Kendo
(fencing with wooden swords) was integrated into the schools of the
period as a prime means to ‘‘forge character.’’ Kendo, he goes on to
note, has made a revival in the post-war period and is now seen by its
numerous practitioners as a form that combines competition, cama-
raderie, character development and the revitalization of traditional
values. Hurst is no romantic, and he carefully shows that many West-
ern identifications of the martial arts—and especially archery—with
Zen Buddhism are misconceived.

MILITARISM, PERPETRATORS, AND ‘‘VICTIMS’’

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, an anthropologist from the University of

Wisconsin-Madison, has written a lengthy and detailed book on
the tokkootai, or what are popularly known as ‘‘kamikaze,’’ the sui-
cide pilots of the Japanese Imperial military of World War II. The
book is not written for scholars who specialize in Japan or Japanese
history and thus carefully lays out the contexts of its arguments. At
one level, Ohnuki-Tierney’s book is a sort of genealogy of the symbol
of cherry blossoms in Japanese history and the polysemy that has
developed around it. At another level, the volume represents an
exploration of the relationship between the Japanese totalitarian
 Militarism, Martial Arts, and Aesthetics in Japan 335

regime of the period leading up to and including World War II and

aesthetics. The third level involves an examination of the motivations,
thoughts, and feelings of the tokkootai pilots as expressed through
their diaries. The question that she asks centers on why ‘‘did these
highly intelligent men, the most unlikely group of young men endorse
Japan’s military and imperial mission, reproduce the military
ideology in their action, and fly to their deaths, when they knew
Japan was losing the war?’’ (p. 299). But hers is a wider question
about the links between nationalism, the totalitarian state, the will-
ingness of intellectuals to embrace the former two and their willing-
ness to sacrifice their lives for state-mandated aims and purposes.
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The case of the pilots is one that allows her to explore wider issues.
Let me describe the book’s contents. The first part (comprising one
chapter) traces the symbolism of cherry blossoms before the Meiji
Period. Its aim is to show how this symbolism was later enlisted by
the totalitarian regime to further its own ends. She justifies the focus
on cherry blossoms for a number of reasons: the everyday ubiquity of
the symbol; the multilayered nature of the symbol encompassing
gender relations, life and death, and nature and culture; its role of
symbolizing the whole Japanese collective; and the link between
cherry blossoms and the Japanese cultural themes of the aesthetics
of pathos over evanescence and the aesthetics of purity of the self.
The second part (which includes three chapters) maps out the militar-
ization of the country and the ways in which this process was related
to the cult of the emperor, the link between cherry blossoms and the
souls of fallen soldiers, and the actual and cultural mobilization of
the masses towards the state’s military purposes. Part Three (contain-
ing two chapters) focuses on the pilots themselves, on their writings
and thoughts, and their motivations and reasoning. It also includes
in-depth portrayals of five such individuals. The final part (spanning
three chapters) is devoted to Ohnuki-Tierney’s main contentions
about the ways in which the polysemy of the symbol of cherry blos-
soms was used to circumvent any resistance on the part of the pilots.
The book ends with a short summary of the main contentions.
What Ohnuki-Tierney tries to make amply clear is that the suicide
pilots did not simply reproduce the emperor-centered military ideol-
ogy in their thinking, for none of them died for the emperor. Very
importantly, she constantly brings out the protests, and the critical
voices that were sounded at the time (even if in the very private con-
fines of diaries). The wider question that Ohnuki-Tierney addresses
is how the political machinery of the totalitarian state influenced
the way these young men felt and thought without these people actu-
ally articulating in their minds the agenda of the state. Her answer
 336 E. Ben-Ari

seems to center on what may be termed a weak version of the false-

consciousness hypothesis. Her starting contention, and one that is not
surprising, is that ideological conversion is never complete, it does
not fully saturate people’s thinking. Rather, there are always gaps,
alternative interpretations and forms of resistances. Nevertheless,
and here is Ohnuki-Tierney’s insight, what needs to be explained is
how the suicide pilots became willing to sacrifice their lives (and I
would add, agreed to become participants in the military’s
perpetration of violence on others). Her question thus focuses on
how these men reproduced state ideology in action while defying it
in their thoughts (p. 300).
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Ohnuki-Tierney’s answer centers on the aestheticization of the

military (and other political machineries) and its actions. More perti-
nently, she focuses on the indeterminacy of symbolic referents that is
part of this aestheticization. It is this indeterminacy, she argues, that
can lead people to misrecognize the motives behind state strategies.
This point is where the concept of meconnaissance comes into her
argument. The concept denotes the absence of communication that
results when people do not share meaning but rather derive different
meanings from the same symbols and rituals and are unaware that
miscommunication is occurring. In the case examined in this book,
her argument hinges on the symbolism of cherry blossoms, which
became the master trope of Japan’s imperial nationalism at the
beginning of the Meiji period. She contends, first, that the Japanese
state altered the meaning of cherry blossoms through linking them
to soldiers’ sacrifice and the ‘‘blossoming’’ souls without altering
people’s previous understandings of the flower’s meaning. Second,
the aesthetics of cherry blossoms went beyond visual aesthetics to
represent the beauty of idealism, the purity of one’s spirit as under-
stood by the pilots. According to her, the state succeeded in channel-
ing the sense of dedication to the country of these young men–itself
based on the strong appeal of idealistic loyalty to one’s parents–to
its own imperial agenda. It is here that the processes of misrecogni-
tion–or, in my words, false consciousness–are central to her
argument: ‘‘the pilots assigned aesthetics to concepts and behaviors
involved in the state ideology without fully realizing that they were
being co-opted through ideological manipulation’’ (p. 302). Thus, it
seems, the pilots agreed to be mobilized for state aims because they
did not fully realize how they were being co-opted and manipulated.
A number of observations suggest themselves in regard to her
analysis. First, a long line of studies has shown that men die in the
military for reasons other than belief in the ideology of the state
which sends them to battle. This point has been amply documented
 Militarism, Martial Arts, and Aesthetics in Japan 337

within the fields of psychology (Grossman, 1995), history (Bourke,

1999; Holmes, 1985) and anthropology (Lifton, 1973). Thus, I could
not be anything but surprised at her amazement that soldiers may go
out to war without fully identifying with the ideology of the state.
Indeed, in Chapter 5, in which she describes the suicide pilots, no
mention is made of any scholarship on the military, on soldiers’ moti-
vations, on their willingness to sacrifice their lives or on what military
service means to them. Perhaps this is the outcome of the fact that
Ohnuki-Tierney tends to read classic theorists or those scholars
who seem to be at the cutting edge of anthropological theory. For
whatever reason, it readily appears that she has regrettably missed
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much more mundane, but relevant and essential, scholarship that

may have helped her formulate her findings in a way that is more
rooted in the lives and experiences of soldiers. To be fair, her schol-
arly predisposition may be the result of her attempt to refute popular
and media images of the kamikaze as patriotic zealots and not to
engage with previous work on soldiers and soldiering. Yet, what
results is a piece of work that seems to lack an appreciation of alter-
native explanations to her question about the willingness of young
men to sacrifice their lives for militaristic state aims. To suggest
one such alternative, a number of works have placed such willingness
within a model of the life-course that underscores how young men are
mobilized and become willing to risk their lives (as around the world)
on the basis of images of manhood (Gilmore, 1990), a quest for ident-
ity (Gill, 1997; Lomsky-Feder, 1992) or deep links to their comrades
(Ben-Ari, 1998).
Second, the volume that Ohunki-Tierney has written contains a
rather romantic portrayal of the suicide pilots. While she succeeds
in portraying the agony, fear, anxieties, and also the ‘‘ambivalences’’
and ‘‘contradictions’’ in the pilots’ writings, this is only one side of
the story. To begin with, the stress on ambivalences and contradic-
tions (sometimes espousing, at other times rejecting the dominant
ideology) rings true to her empirical material. What Ohnuki-Tierney
seems to reject is the idea that such twofold attitudes also contain
strong explicit identifications with the state and its aims. This stress
may, again, be the product of the fact that ultimately her meta-story
is one predicated on the false consciousness of the pilots. More than
that, in the final pages of her book (p. 304), Ohnuki-Tierney uses an
image taken from Walter Benjamin to say that the ‘‘pilots are no
longer able to speak on their own. They await the pale angel of his-
tory to awaken them and save their place in humanity and history’’
(p. 304). The problem, as she sees it, is that even the dead are not safe
from ‘‘enemies’’ which are power inequalities in geopolitics without
 338 E. Ben-Ari

and political amnesia within Japan. But who is this ‘‘pale angel of
history’’ if not Ohnuki-Tierney herself?
Third, the book contains almost no reference to something which
is inherent to war and soldiering: the perpetration of violence. Take
the manner by which she chooses to end her book (p. 305): ‘‘The
pilots’ diaries serve as testimony to the monstrous acts of Japanese
imperialism in driving these men full of dreams and idealism to their
deaths.’’ Ultimately, it is the victimhood of these men that interests
Ohunki-Tierney and not their role as perpetrators of violence. Viol-
ence is something that is somehow done to them rather than a result
of their actions. Fujitani and his associates (2001, p. 7) contend that
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in postwar Japan the dominant modes of remembering the war have

produced a ‘‘national victimology’’ with the entire population,
including the emperor, equally figured as victims of military mis-
deeds. One strand of thinking has taken this perspective to produce
a strongly anti-militaristic ethos with the idea that as victim, Japan
has a special world role in propagating world peace and understand-
ing (Berger, 1998). Thus, unintentionally, it seems that Ohunki-
Tierney’s book seems to reinforce this mode of understanding and
remembering the Second World War. At the end of the day, the pilots
are victims, the injured parties of World War II.

SOME WIDER IMPLICATIONS

Because both books center on the aestheticization of violence and

aggression (albeit in differing ways) they seem to touch upon the fol-
lowing question: What can be the specifically anthropological contri-
bution to the study of violence? Aijmer (2000, p. 8; also Lofving &
Macek, 1999) has suggested that one prime aim of anthropology
should be to show how violence is domesticated and shaped into a
controlled presence in various social institutions through the com-
bined use of discourse, drills, practices, symbols, and displays.
Although he does not explicitly formulate the point, Aijmer seems
to posit as the primary means in this regard the aestheticization of
violence.
Critical sociologists such as Charles Tilly (1985) and Anthony
Giddens (1985) argue that war and the institutions of warmaking
are integral to the creation of states and to the mobilization of social
resources. Such scholars have done much to uncover the main social
and (especially) political mechanisms—recruitment, taxation, or
propagation of ideologies of citizenship, for example—by which
war has become part and parcel of the very dynamics of contempor-
ary countries. My argument is that given anthropology’s long-term
 Militarism, Martial Arts, and Aesthetics in Japan 339

preoccupation with the broadly ‘‘cultural’’ aspects of social life, it

provides a complementary perspective to the one provided by soci-
ology and political science. More concretely, anthropology provides
the analytical tools and frames for examining the means by which
violence is concealed, naturalized, or blurred (Ben-Ari & Fruhstuck,
2003). In ‘‘civilizing’’ or ‘‘taming’’ violence, sports events or certain
kinds of symbols such as cherry blossoms seem to suggest that it is
controllable and, thus, either attractive or acceptable.
Hence, for example, while Hurst does not use the term ‘‘violence,’’
he is very aware of the fatal potential of martial arts. In one passage,
he notes that the secrecy of transmittal of knowledge in martial arts
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schools was of greater prominence than in other schools of arts (like

the tea ceremony) because of the lethal consequences of the activities.
His point seems to be that at the base of violent sports is a serious
potential for chaos and thus that, historically speaking, this potential
was related to the creation of the state: with the monopolization over
the means of violence, martial arts had to be somehow pacified
through aestheticization, standardization, ritualization, and profes-
sionalization. In this sense, his book can be read along the lines sug-
gested by Girard (1977), who has argued that ritual controls,
channels, and represses human violence so as to allow for ordered
social life. Essential to this point of view is the idea that rites and cer-
emonies allow the controlled displacement of aggressive impulses
(Bouroncle, 2000, p. 55; Schechner, 1994; Watson, 1996). In her vol-
ume, Ohnuki-Tierney takes these themes in a different direction. Her
point seems to be that the violence perpetrated by states is aestheti-
cized so that it can be willingly accepted by individuals. This aesthe-
ticization–the process of making cultural practices and symbols
appear visually and conceptually beautiful–is central to its acceptance
through turning military ‘‘things’’ into things to be contemplated, felt
and cognized without regard to their violent meanings or potentials.
It is in and around this point that we may comprehend the seductive-
ness of national and military symbols and the readiness of individuals
and the public to be seduced.
Both books, then, show how violence can be understood as an
object of fascination, enjoyment, and celebration. My argument, fol-
lowing this understanding, is that the aestheticization and domestica-
tion of violence are carried out precisely because it is so problematic,
i.e., chaotic and threatening. In this respect, the two volumes seem to
sound a word of caution. Many recent (mainly U.S.-based) inquiries
into violence have privileged ‘‘experience’’ as the most authentic form
of knowledge and have abandoned an analytical approach in favor of
a subjectivist focus on the impact violence has on the everyday life of
 340 E. Ben-Ari

individuals (Schroder & Schmidt, 2001, p. 7). To be sure, I do not

question that experience constitutes an important aspect of violence.
But a strongly subjectivist approach may interfere with our efforts to
understand violent confrontations from a historical or comparative
perspective (Schroder & Schmidt, 2001, p. 7). Both books reviewed
here well underscore the importance of placing violence in a broad
context that, rather than privileging experience, seeks to understand
its wider dynamics and ramifications.

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