Who invented Japanese martial arts?

Answer 1

No one person created it. Martial Arts are inherent in just about every culture. It is simply an outgrowth of conflict. Wherever there is war and strife, there is bound to be people who know how to wrestle or handle a sword. Even Chimpanzees, our closest genetic cousins, box and wrestle each other. Therefore, learning to defend oneself or to offensively attack another is natural and much older than recorded history.

Anyone who tells you that one person created martial arts as a whole is relying on legend. The most famous legend is that the Buddhist Monk Bodhidharma (Ch: Damo, Jp: Daruma) brought his knowledge of indigenous South Asian martial arts with him to China from India during the 6th century CE. He is purported to have settled at the famous Shaolin Monastery and taught qigong, a type of medicinal stretching and breathing exercise, and a system of boxing to the monks there, thus founding Chinese martial arts. However, what the people retelling this do not realize is that the origins of the legend do not predate the 17th-century. This is when the qigong set was first published by a Daoist priest in a Chinese training manual known as the Sinew-Changing Classic (Yijin Jing). The manual has two forged prefaces by famous historical generals that trace the exercise through a chain of heroes and holy men back to Bodhidharma. The exercise has no martial applications, so the idea of him physically teaching boxing to the monks of Shaolin didn't come until much later. In fact, this particular evolution of the legend did not come about until the early 20th-century publication of a Chinese satirical novel known as the Travels of Lao Can(laocan youji). The author obviously mistook the exercise for martial arts and claimed that Bodhidharma had taught the monks boxing. This mistake was later repeated in several bestselling martial arts manuals, thus allowing the legend to become a part of the social fabric of martial arts practitioners. The story is still circulating today. The idea that Bodhidharma created ALL martial arts is a much, much later adaptation of the early 20th-century mistake.

Another popular legend is that Alexander the great spread Greek martial arts to all of the lands that he conquered between Europe and India during the 4th-century BCE. However, this legend has no basis in history. A researcher would be hard pressed to find actual documented proof of this. Sure, some martial arts are known to be based on others; however, there are several seemingly unrelated styles that have striking similarities. This is because the human body can only bend and move in so many directions. A good example of this would be the similarity in joint-locks between the 12th-century German School of Fencing and the 16th-century Chinese technique of Eagle Claw (which imitates the grasping of an eagle's powerful talons). Does this mean that Chinese martial arts were based on that from Germany? No. Both were no doubt based on independent historical discoveries of the limits of human flexibility.

For more about the Bodhidharma legend, see my research paper "A Venerated Forgery: The Daoist Origins of Shaolin's Famous Yijin Jing Manual." See the references therein for a wider perspective.

Answer 2

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