At the beginning of the Edo period, Ming culture was valued in Japan, thus the nittō tales of bringing 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 sentiment 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.
Chén Yuánbīn 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 Chén 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 quietly demoted — the seed of the later reversal towards nativism sat inside the period of highest Sinophilia.
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. That current ran forward — through Imaizumi Sadasuke’s kokutai/Kōdō synthesis and into the early-Shōwa nationalist milieu (the Ketsumeidan Incident, the Genyōsha dōjō culture) that the budō world brushed against and that shaped figures like Kunii Zen’ya. I trace that arc — Norinaga and Hirata, Imaizumi’s Kōdō, and the Ketsumeidan — in a companion piece, From Kokugaku to the Ketsumeidan.
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 Chén Yuánbīn thesis of Kitō-ryū’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 Chén 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. They would have served no purpose during the late Edo period or beyond.
The split of Buddhism and Shintō did just that on the surface but in banning the Shugendō 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 Chén 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 discourse admiring aspects of Chinese culture, but the cachet was specifically Ming, and Ming-loyalist at that: Chén, the Ōbaku monks, and 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 ka-i hentai referent shifted from the mourned Ming to the disdained Qing, the generic prestige of China 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.
