From Ming to Meiji: The Declining Status of Chinese Influence in Japanese martial culture from 1600-1900

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At the beginning of the Edo perio, Ming culture was valued in Japan, thus the nittō tales of brining knowledge of skill back from China. Once the Ming Dynasty fell to the Manchu, establishing the Qing Dynasty, we see more of a sense of nostalgia for Ming culture in Edo period Japan, and a de-emphasis of Chinese influence. Both nature and narratives abhor vacua, so indigenous Japanese origins become emphasized. This becomes even more stark with the split of religious organizations into Shintō-centric or Buddhist labels.

This emphasis on Chinese-derived methods, however, did not last.

In the early Edo period, Chinese influence may have had a cache to it, but by Meiji it clearly did not. That inversion over time is sharp enough to be useful as a dating instrument. The valence of a foreign-origin claim is not constant; it tracks the cultural politics of the period in which the claim was inserted, and “Chinese provenance” swung from asset to liability across the Edo–Meiji line as social senitment changed in Japan.

In the early-to-mid Edo period the cachet was real and structural.

Neo-Confucianism (Shushigaku 朱子学) was the quasi-official Tokugawa learning, kangaku (漢学) was the prestige register of scholarship as such, and the Ming-émigré wave that brought Ōbaku Zen, literati painting, sencha, and continental medicine gave “things from the great Ming” a sheen of sophistication.

Chen Yùanbin was himself a carrier of exactly that prestige — a Ming literatus, not a fighter — which is precisely why a martial school gained by association with him: “I teach the seizing art of the Ming” outranked “I learned it from a domestic teacher.”

The Akiyama-sailed-to-China legend and the Chen graft are both products of that gradient; they were worth fabricating because Chinese descent paid.

It is worth noting that the undertow was already present, though: the fall of the Ming to the Manchu Qing in 1644 generated the ka-i hentai (華夷変態) idea that civilization itself had migrated, leaving Japan the truer heir of the middle kingdom (中華) in the eyes of the early Tokugawa. Contemporary China was thus quiety demoted — the seed of the later reversal towards nativism sat inside the period of highest Sinophilia.

Nativist Shintō Thought

That seed grew through kokugaku. The nativist program of Motoori Norinaga, continued by Hirata Atsutane, attacked Karagokoro (漢意, the “Chinese mind”) and elevated a purified native-Shintō interiority over Chinese learning, so by late Edo the automatic prestige of a Chinese pedigree was already eroding.

Motoori Norinaga (本居宣長, 1730–1801) gave kokugaku (国学; “national learning”) its mature form as a philological recovery of antiquity, above all in the Kojiki-den (古事記伝), his decades-long commentary on the Kojiki. Its polemical core is the rejection of karagokoro (漢意; “the Chinese mind”) — the rationalizing, moralizing Confucian-Buddhist cast of thought — in favor of a native magokoro (真心; “true heart”) recoverable from the oldest texts.

He held that the contrived “Way” of the Confucian sages was an artificial human device for governing a badly-ordered society, whereas Japan, under the imperial line descended from Amaterasu, was naturally well-ordered and needed no explicit moral teaching, no kotoage (言挙げ; “explicit moralizing assertion”). His literary theory of mono no aware (物の哀れ; “the pathos of things”) rehabilitated feeling over didacticism as the authentic register of Japanese sensibility. On religion he was a literalist about the age of the gods and counseled humility before kami whose workings exceed human reason; and his view of death was bleak — the dead go to the polluted Yomi (黄泉) regardless of merit, to be grieved honestly rather than consoled by foreign doctrines. His program was scholarly, aesthetic, and devotional more than political.

Restoration Shintō

Hirata Atsutane (平田篤胤, 1776–1843), who styled himself Norinaga’s posthumous disciple, radicalized this into fukko Shintō (復古神道; “Restoration Shintō”) — a systematic theology and cosmology with a devotional and activist charge. He foregrounded a creator principle in Ame-no-Minakanushi (天御中主神) and the zōka no sanshin (造化三神; “three deities of creation”), giving kokugaku a more structured, near-monotheistic cosmogony. His decisive break with Norinaga was the afterlife: against the bleak Yomi, he taught a hidden world, kakuriyo (幽冥界; “the unseen realm”), ruled by Ōkuninushi (大国主), where souls are judged and from which the dead continue to watch over the manifest world — a consoling, salvation-oriented doctrine that openly absorbed Christian and other foreign materials while claiming to recover the pure native truth.

He paired this with a supremacist comparativism, treating the myths of China, India, and the West as corrupted dialects of an original Japanese revelation, and with a populist, ritually practical Shintō aimed at ordinary rural people rather than elite scholars. That combination made the Hirata school a mobilizing ideology: it fed bakumatsu sonnō thought, the Restoration, the early-Meiji program of saisei itchi (祭政一致; “unity of rite and rule”), and the short-lived attempt to install Restoration Shintō as a state religion. The shift between them — from Norinaga’s philological-aesthetic recovery to Atsutane’s theological-political system — is the hinge by which kokugaku passes into the Meiji de-syncretization and the kokutai/Kōdō nationalism.

Kokutai Doctrine

Imaizumi Sadasuke (今泉定助, 1863–1944) was a Shintō ideologue, kokugaku-trained scholar of classical Japanese letters, and one of the principal early-Shōwa authorities on kokutai (国体; “national polity”) doctrine. Imaizumi was born into a samurai household in the Shiroishi castle town in Mutsu (present Miyagi), a son of a retainer of the Katakura house, briefly adopted into the Satō family of the Shiroishi Shinmei-sha before reverting to the Imaizumi name. He entered the classics course (古典講習科) of the Faculty of Letters at Tokyo University in 1882 and graduated in 1886. Through the Meiji period he worked as a scholar of national literature: a compiler on the Koji Ruien (古事類苑) encyclopedia project, an assistant supervisor (学監補) and lecturer at Kokugakuin (國學院), and an editor of the Kojitsu Sōsho (故実叢書), with a specialty in yūsoku kojitsu (有職故実; court and warrior ceremonial precedent). Favored by the first justice minister Yamada Akiyoshi (山田顕義), he was brought in to lecture at the Kōten Kōkyūsho (皇典講究所).

Then, in early Taishō, influenced by Kawazura Bonji’s (川面凡児) practical, ascetic Shintō, he grafted a faith-based, practice-oriented dimension onto the Motoori-derived literary Shintō and named the synthesis Kōdō (皇道; “the Imperial Way”), then devoted himself to propagating it as a national guiding doctrine. Through the priestly-family networker Ashizu Kōjirō (葦津耕次郎) he reached government, military and financial elites, taught kokutai doctrine to politicians and officers amid the unrest of the 1920s–30s — most prime ministers of the era are said to have received his instruction — and held formal positions as chairman of the Jingū Hōsai-kai (神宮奉斎会), director of the Kōdō Gakuin (皇道学院) at Nihon University, and adviser (参与) to the wartime Jingiin (神祇院). He served as a special defense counsel at the 1934 trial of the Ketsumeidan (血盟団). He was, in short, an architect and popularizer of the kokutai/Kōdō ideology that undergirded prewar State Shintō.

The Ketsumeidan Incident

The Ketsumeidan Incident (血盟団事件, “League of Blood Incident”) was a campaign of political assassinations in Japan in early 1932, one of the episodes of ultranationalist terror that marked the collapse of party government in the early Shōwa years.

It centered on Inoue Nisshō (井上日召) , A Nichiren-influenced agrarian-nationalist preacher who had gathered a group of young followers — students and rural youth — at his base near Ōarai in Ibaraki.¹

Later in life, after hearing what he took to be a divine voice in 1924, he immersed himself in Nichiren Buddhism — reading Nichiren’s doctrine, training at Mount Minobu, attending Tanaka Chigaku’s study sessions, and when that left him unsatisfied he turned to Zen, becoming a disciple of Yamamoto Gempō at Shōinji. He then moved to the Risshō Gokokudō he built at Ōarai in Ibaraki, aiming to cultivate young men — the “dōjō” in his story is a religious and communal-living hall, not a martial training ground. Earlier he had also spent time on the continent (China/Manchuria) in nationalist and intelligence-adjacent activity.

Inoue’s doctrine was summarized in the slogan ichinin issatsu (一人一殺; “one person, one kill”): each member would assassinate one corrupt leader, the targets being a list of roughly twenty senior politicians, court officials and zaibatsu businessmen held responsible for Japan’s economic distress, party corruption and the 1930 London Naval Treaty. The aim was to clear the way for a “Shōwa Restoration” of direct imperial rule.

Two killings were carried out before the group was broken up. On 9 February 1932 Onuma Shō (小沼正) shot Inoue Junnosuke (井上準之助), a former finance minister and a leading Minseitō figure, while he was campaigning. On 5 March 1932 Hishinuma Gorō (菱沼五郎) shot Dan Takuma (團琢磨), the head of the Mitsui holding company, outside the Mitsui Bank in Nihonbashi. Arrests followed and the remaining plot collapsed; the name “Ketsumeidan” was applied externally, by prosecutors and the press, rather than chosen by the group.

Inoue’s authority over his followers was religious, not martial — the ichinin issatsu doctrine framed in Nichiren and Zen terms — and the two assassinations were carried out with pistols, not blades.

So, although the League sat in the same Shōwa-Restoration milieu that the budō world brushed against (and where Imaizumi appears as defense counsel), it was not a martial-arts-rooted cell.

If there is a bujutsu thread into this milieu, it likely runs through other figures such as the naval-officer cors, and not through Inoue himself, but figures like Imaizumi strongly influenced famous budō practitioners such as Kunii Zen’ya.

Honma Ken’ichirō (本間憲一郎), head of the Shizan-juku (紫山塾) was documented in Inoue’s network from Manchurian-railway years — during his time working for the Mantetsu, Inoue became acquainted with Honma Ken’ichirō and Maeda Torao — and it was Honma who, at the time of Inoue’s surrender, asked Amano Tatsuo to talk Inoue out of suicide and into giving himself up. His Shizan-juku was a nationalist training-juku that had martial components.

The Ketsumeidan was a religious-and-student cell that killed with pistols supplied by naval officers; its martial-arts content is Inoue’s own youthful Jikishinkage-ryū training and the Genyōsha dōjō culture (the Tenkōkai hall, Honma’s juku) that surrounded and sheltered it — not the participation of professional swordsmen.

When Inoue went underground before surrendering, his hiding place was the Tenkōkai dōjō (天行会道場) within Tōyama Mitsuru’s estate — specifically the residence of Tōyama Hidezō — and the police could not bring themselves to raid the Tōyama compound. The Genyōsha patriarch’s family compound, with its training hall, sheltered him. Tōyama and his son Hidezō belonged to the Ketsumeidan circle as nationalist patrons.

The Ketsumeidan members were tried in 1933–34, and the proceedings became a sounding board for nationalist sympathy, with relatively light outcomes — life sentences for Inoue and the two assassins, most of them released within the decade. The incident sits in a chain with the 15 May 1932 assassination of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi (which drew on the same naval-officer and Inoue circles) and, later, the February 1936 mutiny, marking the shift from party politics toward military-backed authoritarianism.

Political Impacts on Budō Scholarship

Meiji made the inversion of prestige decisive and political: the construction of a national identity, State Shintō, the “Leaving Asia” editorial of 1885 (conventionally linked to Fukuzawa), and above all the decisive victory in the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese war recast China from venerable Middle Kingdom to backward “Shina.” For anything being built as a quintessentially Japanese national art, foreign — especially Chinese — origin was now an embarrassment to be scrubbed.

Kanō’s 1888 disavowal of the Chen Yuanbing thesis of Kitō-ryuū’s origins is the inversion of prestige (from high to low) captured in a single gesture: the Kōdōkan project required a Japanese pedigree, and the Dai Nippon Butokukai, founded in 1895 in the war’s immediate afterglow, framed the Japanese martial arts as expressions of native spirit and bushidō, not transmission from abroad.

This is echoed by the later Kashima-centric restoration narrative of Kunii Zen’ya of Kashima-shinryū fame.

So, in budō studies, a Chinese-origin claim is most economically read as an Edo-period accretion — inserted while Sinophilia paid — and one that a Meiji recension would tend to drop or mute rather than amplify.

Finding it effaced between an Edo densho and its Meiji reissue is itself a signal that the origin was updated to meet the tenor of the times. The mirror case is the durable, prestige-positive direction: native-divine, imperial-loyalist, and Sengoku-warrior framings gain status across the whole kokugaku, Meiji, Shōwa arc. This is why a Kashima-divine-transmission or a Matsumoto/Yoshitsune pedigree is the kind of claim that gets added or amplified late — the Kunii–Imaizumi Shintō-nationalist milieu being a textbook instance. Where a Chinese claim is perishable, a native-sacred claim is the one with motive to grow.

This affinity can be regarded as a dominant tendency, but was not monolithic or absolute. Sinophile kangaku medical prestige persisted well into Meiji in some quarters, and the early-Edo cachet was specifically for Ming-literati and Confucian-medical learning, not “China” in the abstract.

A claim that runs against its period’s prestige gradient is likelier to be sincere or inherited, since no one fabricates a low-status origin. A Meiji-era densho that still openly asserts a Chinese source — against the nationalist grain — is probably carrying an inherited claim it could not easily jettison, and that awkwardness is an evidentiary asset rather than a defect.

Reading the Akiyama and Chen materials from that perspective and their very clear Sinophile reading tells one that those stories began in the early-to-mid Edo period and not later. The would have served no purpose during the late Edo period or beyond.

The Chen Yuanbin teaching medical theory of Ryoi Shintō-ryū is plausible. The Akiyama foreign travel narrative is implausible, but both are early Edo narratives due to shifting status of Ming and then Qing even more so in Japan over time.

The split of Buddhism and Shintō did just that on the surface but in banning the Shugendo syncretism it quietly deemphasized Daoist underpinnings (nature worship/early gongen figures/explicit five phase theory, etc.)

The asymmetry is doubly grounded, which is why it stays stable rather than being just a guess about valence or affinity. In the case of important jūjutsu ryūha I have written about:

• The Chen medical reading is plausible on both mechanism and prestige: the Nagasaki channel and the émigré-physician milieu were real, and kanpō (漢方; Sino-Japanese medicine) held genuine institutional standing as the dominant medical system straight through Edo, so an early jūjutsu master having “absorbed Chinese medical and resuscitation (活法) theory” requires neither an illegal voyage nor an anachronistic status-claim.
• The Akiyama combat-voyage legend fails on both counts — the travel was banned, and “learned to fight in China” was the perishable kind of pedigree that was of no later value – so if a fiction, it was an early one.

Both sit in the same early-Edo discorse admiring aspects of Chinese culture, but the cachet was specifically Ming, and Ming-loyalist at that.

Chen, the Ōbaku monks, Zhu Shunsui were prestigious precisely as refugees from the Manchu conquest, carriers of a preserved Ming civilization, so borrowing them borrowed the fallen-but-pure Ming, not the contemporary Qing. As the referent shifted from the mourned Ming to the disdained Qing and ka-i hentai (華夷変態) logic demoted the Manchu realm, the generic prestige of China also drained over time.

Kanpō medicine’s own prestige did eventually collapse, but much later in the 1870s–80s when the state adopted German medicine, on a traditional-versus-Western axis rather than a Chinese-versus-Japanese one, and a generation later than the martial disavowal — so the medical stream outlived the combative channel of recognized influence.

End Notes