Martial Arts in Japanese Proletarian Literature: Fujisawa Takeo, “Ryūkyū’s Weapon,” December 1929

Fujisawa Takeo, “Ryūkyū’s Weapon,” December 1929, trans. Fergal Schmudlach

Karate has become very famous for its overwhelming power. In the Faculty of Medicine at Kyoto University, apparently they went so far as to invite masters in that Way to come from Ryūkyū so they could illuminate and clarify the power of karate academically.

As many people know, karate is a form of boxing, a unique cultural property born in Ryūkyū. It’s a technique for protecting yourself and defeating your enemy without weapons, using your bare hands.

In recent years, a great many Ryūkyū-born fighters have come forward and joined the workers’ struggle, and among them not a few are masters of karate. What an encouragement! I remember that the workers of Tsurumi who are great at karate make an appearance in Kataoka Teppei’s story, “We Got Strong Guys,” but there is one amazing fighter in the Kantō Free Workers, too. When they have their gatherings, the cops have a healthy respect for him: they know they need to come with a dozen some officers at the ready if they want to take him in. He’s a compact guy who doesn’t even seem strong just to look at him, but one time while fighting in a fierce fracas, as a counter-attack in defense of his Free Worker comrades, he went strutting all by himself into a crowd of twenty or thirty goons baying for blood, and in the blink of an eye he laid them all out flat, and ever since then his stock went up bigtime, so he’s known as the man you have to have on hand to deal with a fight.

The most popular karate moves would be, first, the eye poker, the ball buster, the rib breaker, and so on. The eye poker is when you stick your fingertips out stiff and straight like fire tongs, then poke them into the enemy’s eyes and crush them. The ball buster is when you jump up and then suddenly use the flat upper surface of your foot, between your little toe and the front of your ankle, to deliver a devastating kick to the enemy’s testicles. Finally, the rib breaker is when you punch the enemy in the ribs with the back of your fist. Sometimes this will break a rib and take the enemy down immediately. But if we’re talking about a master, they can decide: I want to leave this guy alive for now and kill him after this many days, so if they punch him with that in mind, after ten days or a month or whatever their appointed time, the enemy will keel over all by himself, just as if he had died from some other cause.

Also, if you become a master at that level, you can jump high just by lightly kicking the ground, or—it is just for a moment, but—you can also cling to the ceiling. Also, they hang a big hunk of pork from the ceiling up high. Then every time they jump up, their fingers are so powerful that they can rip off a handful of meat and land on the ground with it in their hand.

Of course, to become this sort of master you have to train wholeheartedly from childhood. They stick a wedge-shaped piece of wood one or two feet long into the earth, and then they go on punching it from the side to train their fists.

I had heard about karate, but the first time I saw it in real life I was shocked. I joined a Ryūkyūan worker for a meal at the home of a certain friend. This was a different person from the Kantō Free Worker mentioned above. The topic of karate came up. He made a face like he was going to light the cigarette he had just put in his mouth, held out his hand toward the large ceramic ashtray in front of me that also held the matches, and said, “Gimme that a second.” I pushed the ashtray over towards him. He spread out his fingers and pulled it over in front of his knees. When it got to him, I noticed that the ashtray was crushed into little pieces.

“How about this?” Our mutual friend pointed to the big floor-height table next to us. It was the kind you eat at.

“That’s nothing—but you’re sure you don’t mind?” he said, looking over at our friend’s wife.

“I don’t mind: do give it a go!” she answered, apparently half doubting he could really do it.

The table broke clean in half.

“This is nothing for me, to be honest. Anybody can do this level of karate,” he said.

“Well then, here’s something to remember me by,” he said on his way out the door, and then he punched a hole in the wall of the foyer.

I heard something interesting about the origins of this karate with its unbelievable power. From olden times, Ryūkyū kept being persecuted and plundered by both China and the Shimazu clan of Kyūshū, and in the midst of this oppression by two oppressors, they kept inventing weapons to protect themselves. But as soon as they would make them, one by one they would be confiscated and banned by their plunderers. Any and all weapons would be confiscated. The plunderers tried to leave the Ryūkyū islands completely bereft of weapons. How do you protect yourself without weapons? In this way, they say that by and by, necessity made the Ryūkyūans invent the weapon that is no weapon: karate.

I was so moved to hear this story: isn't it almost too perfect a metaphor for the process by which the proletarian party is refined into strong steel?

About the Ryūkyūan customs that gave birth to karate, I’ve heard one more beautiful story—in a Ryūkyūan home, at mealtimes they say the father will often hit the boys or the girls lightly on the head with chopsticks. From the time they’re three or four. A little child will easily get hit. The father keeps doing this every day. By and by he can’t hit them anymore. They say that by the time the child is sixteen or seventeen, no matter how hard you try to find an opening and take them by surprise, they can’t be hit.