Abstract

The Japanese martial arts are suggested to the West, and to the Japanese themselves as `old'. They are less old than the suggestion and are, indeed, part of an attempt to make the Japanese suitably `samurai', in the first instance, so that an export of an image can take place in the second instance. Under outer shells and forms, however, something spiritual is indeed old, but people - Japanese and non-Japanese alike - have tended within modernity to reify the shells and forms.