Practical Martial Arts Association

Australian/American Signals cooperation was not only important in stopping the Japanese advance to Australian shores but marked the beginning of Australia embedding its forces with the United States rather than simply furnishing troops for the British.  Whilst the British, in my opinion , had a long history of using Commonwealth troops to either protect their colonial interests or to take on deployments with high expected rates of attrition, when Australia faced the real possibility of invasion with the vast majority of its troops and equipment deployed overseas, it was the Americans, whose interests in the Pacific aligned with our own, that were on hand to push the Japanese back from our shores. The Battle of the Coral Sea saw the beginnings of the deployment of Australian sea power under direct American command, a joint approach that would continue to the present time – it was, however, Signals Intelligence that led the way to the embedding of US/Australian forces and played a ma...

The active struggle against barbarity and totalitarianism is not a quasi myth from the feudal period nor an abstract  koan  for contemplation - it is in our recent past and goes on in much of the world today.  We who live in societies so civilised that the carrying of weapons is not a regular habit of most of the population live in one of history's outliers.  One who practices a  gendai  school of Jujutsu should always keep the closeness of these struggles in mind. Each year, around this time, we are given cause to remember the Second World War.  My thoughts always turn to my teacher's teacher, whom I trained with only occasionally but whom many of my contemporaries knew quite well and trained with quite a bit.  This man, fresh in the memory of many people, had to use Jujutsu to survive in occupied Holland being part of the Dutch resistance. Rather than being somewhat ashamed that the majority of the Jujutsu schools I have prac...

On September 20, 1945, President Truman issued an executive order terminating the OSS, effective 1 October.    In the few days remaining to the agency, General Donovan ordered Lt. Edwin J. Putzell to assist him in microfilming select documents from Donovan's safe files for his own action and personal use. Donovan and Putzell worked, under pressure of time, with a Kodak Recordak Camera to produce 131 rolls of 35mm microfilm from the records of the Donovan files. You can find the summary of the contents of those microfilms here - not only is it a good place to look for other reference material, the summary itself makes for fascinating reading and shows just how many pies the OSS was trying to stick its fingers in by 1945.

In an interesting aside, W E Fairbairn witnessed a competition between Japanese and English soldiers whilst stationed in Korea around 1903.  The roughness and effectiveness of the Japanese left an impression on him.  “…For the first time, we had been hit with the butt of the rifle, tripped and thrown and what was worse, shouted at by our opponents.” I should begin by saying, as an outsider, I am a big fan of many technical aspects of Jukendo & Tankendo.  Previously, I had included Jukendo on articles on the spear however this did not do Jukendo justice and as Jukendo and Tankendo are separate forms of Budo in their own right I have elected to expand on some things (and ignore some others) in an attempt to give an overview of these two martial arts. Interestingly, the vast majority of current Jukendo & Tankendo ‘players’ are within the Japanese military and it is not as mainstream as many other Budo.  The profile of these arts has been raised recently with the...

The Finnish Military film 'Lähitaistelu', literally 'close combat' or 'melee combat' is said to date from 1957 and provides an interesting look at what I like to call the re-engineering of Jujutsu (1).  In some ways, the system is extremely sophisticated, with a high degree of systematisation and some complex training exercises. For the most part, I don't want to add detailed commentary as what appears in the film is self-explanatory and I am unable to understand the Finnish soundtrack - for all I know it may show something and be saying "never do this". The first part of the film is somewhat of an introduction, but I have included it as it shows physical training (reminiscent of the old Camp X footage) and some shooting.  The film is broken up into sections, and I will, therefore, make one post per section in the manner of the film. Lähitaistelu (close combat) Highlights from coming sections: Sub-machine gun training with moving and pop-up targets...

So far we have had a brief look at the scope and scale of Japanese Intelligence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  We have also had a brief look at the facts that: As early as 1896 Ryohei Uchida had begun using the Kodokan as cover for the right wing activities of Toyama’s Genyosha and his own Black Dragons. Other Jujutsu dojo were already being used as intelligence posts in Southeast Asia. The practice of martial arts, especially Jujutsu & Judo was an excellent cover, facilitating travel, access to police, military and political officers and premises. The dojo itself as an excellent choice of a cover premises allowing fraternisation of local and itinerant personal, including military personal, without raising suspicion. Determining the exact make-up of martial artists, dojo and intelligence networks is nigh on impossible from the top down, but we can consider the implications to Jujutsu and shed new light on Judo in the process. Let us consider the common fable of Jud...

At the end of the 19th and into the early 20th century, the access abroad obtainable to ‘Jiu-jitsu’ (as it was commonly referred to at the time) men (often wrestlers) was quite extraordinary.  These men spread out across the globe - Asia, North and South America, Europe - the interest in Japanese martial arts, especially unarmed methods, was riding high.   Jiu-jitsu, including Judo, was demonstrated at the Whitehouse, and demonstration and teaching was commonly carried out at western military academies and law enforcement institutions. Early pioneers found what was to be a most excellent occupation in terms of accessing people and places and enabling movement from place to place. The SOE gave the following advice to its agents in training with regards to their selected occupation, as part of their cover: a. Cover occupation …a real one is best.  An occupation is necessary:- i To account for presence in locality. ii To explain the source of livelihood… The Job which you...