Saving Japan's Martial Arts

By Christopher M. Clarke

"Saving Japan's Martial Arts" is the story of how a young school teacher helped spark a martial arts revolution in Japan, rescue Japan's ancient martial arts from the brink of oblivion, built Japan's Olympic Movement, and became a driving force behind modern education in Japan. It is the only comprehensive biography in English of the remarkable Jigoro Kano (1860-1938), founder of Kodokan Judo. "Saving Japan's Martial Arts" also contains biographical sketches of more than a dozen top Judo students including Maeda Mitsyo, who taught Judo and Jujutsu to the Gracies in Brazil; Yamashita Yoshiaki, who taught President Theodore Roosevelt Judo in the White House; Shoriki Matsutaro, Judo master, founder of the Yomiuri media empire, creator of professional baseball in Japan, and Japan's first nuclear energy commissioner; and many others. "Saving Japan's Martial Arts" contains a detailed history of the bloody end of the Tokugawa shogunate, including the political struggles, assassinations and duels, and battles portrayed in the blockbuster 2003 Tom Cruise movie, "The Last Samurai.""Saving Japan's Martial Arts" is chock-full of rare, vintage pictures and descriptions of the training and masters of the ancient Japanese martial arts.It should be required reading for anyone interested in the development of the Asian martial arts and for those who want to understand how those arts survived one of the most tumultuous centuries in Japanese history, a century that saw Japan emerge from an isolated and backward feudal autocracy to a modernized, industrialized major power.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1466211725
• ISBN13: 9781466211728
• Release Date: October 2011
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 284 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.6" x 5.5"