Born Twice: How European and Japanese Martial Arts Each Found Their Revival
On extinct traditions, modern didactics, and the price of survival.
Why this article
This article grew out of a quest that may sound paradoxical: why practise a martial art while accepting that you may never be permitted to use it? Our society is built on the premise that violence is not an option: self- defence is narrowly circumscribed by law, unnecessary violence is punished, and conflicts are supposed to be resolved with words, diplomacy, and institutions. Against that background, reconstructing a tradition of stick fighting looks like cherishing a skill that society itself forbids you to apply.
That very paradox is the reason for this article. If practical application is all but ruled out, what remains? What does the practice do to someone who lives in an ordered world where the law — rightly — claims the monopoly on violence? And why do people, myself included, return to traditions that answered these questions centuries ago, in a form they preserved for us?
The comparison with Japan is no accident. Japan went through the same trajectory — disapproval, disappearance, revival — but under different circumstances and with a different outcome. By placing the two revivals side by side, I hope to see more clearly what a martial art can still be today: not a preparation for violence that must never come, but a discipline that teaches something about violence itself — and about the person who engages with it. This article is therefore not a reconstruction manual, but an attempt to account for the why of my own practice.
Since the end of the 20th century, historians and practitioners have been reconstructing European martial arts that had gone extinct — not because they were poor systems, but because they had become practically irrelevant and society disapproved of them. If you look for a parallel, you need not go far: Japan. There too, at the end of the 19th century, the old martial arts gave way to Western influences. But the way both worlds breathed new life into their traditions differs fundamentally. And that difference determines how we deal with our own history today.
Japan: from banishment to pacifism
When Japan opened to the West in the Meiji period, everything changed. The wearing of swords was banned, the samurai class lost its function, and the modern army was organised along English and Prussian lines. Where individual masters had once passed their ryu on to a handful of students, group drill now took over: mass-scale, standardised, militarily efficient. The Swedish gymnastics model of Ling probably played a role here too — the same gymnastics that dominated the gymnasiums of the European continent.
But the old concepts did not disappear. They returned surprisingly quickly in modern garb. In 1882, Jigoro Kano forged several old jujutsu schools into judo: a scientifically structured, graded, safe and above all mass- teachable method. Kendo did the same for swordsmanship. The old ryu were not imitated — they were translated into the pedagogical idiom of their time.
After the Second World War, everything seemed lost again. The American occupier demilitarised Japan and banned the martial arts. But Japan solved this cleverly: the new disciplines were recast as sport and as character formation. Kendo and judo returned with an explicitly pacifist image — no longer an art of war, but a path of self-development.
Europe: the same waves, different ground
European history shows similar waves, but here a remarkable drama unfolded even before the disappearance:
the traditions were first modernised from within, and only then abandoned.
Take French la canne. The old school of Leboucher and Larribeau (c. 1830–1860) was a genuine fighting art: a weighted canne with its centre of gravity in the head, a martingale around the wrist, biting brisés and the dreaded cassante parry — parrying with a hard counter-shock that disarmed the attacker. In 1899, Charlemont swept this entire approach off the table as “absolument nuls au point de vue de la défense” and replaced it with his canne par développement: a kinematically grounded method based on leverage and the complete muscle chain from shoulder through arm and wrist to hand. He even dismissed his predecessors’ moulinets as “pure fantaisie”.
This is precisely what Japan did in the same period: reforming practice according to the modern scientific insights of the late 19th century. Charlemont was the European Kano before the fact.
Then came the decline: urbanisation, weapons legislation, and the rise of modern sports. But when Europe began rebuilding its martial arts in the 1990s, the fundamental difference emerged:
- In Japan, a living line of transmission remained. Masters taught students, students became masters. The revival could fall back on continuity.
- In Europe, the traditions were dead. Only texts remained: treatises, manuals, engravings. The revival was by definition a reconstruction — study the sources, reinterpret experimentally, apply today. Exactly the schema that the Acta Periodica Duellatorum today describes as the methodology of Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA). Interestingly, European traditions survived the 20th century along two opposite routes. La canne survived through sportification: after the 1970s it became a federal competitive sport with referees, rulebooks and adapted techniques — the cassante parry was replaced by absorbing parries, dangerous ripostes forbidden. Irish bataireacht, by contrast, survived nowhere institutionally: church and GAA turned against it, and only a family line — the Doyles, who maintained the tradition as the “whiskey stick dance” — carried it orally into the 21st century. One tradition saved by the sport model, one saved despite the absence of any model. Two survival strategies, one lesson: the form in which a martial art reaches the present says more about its social environment than about its technical merit. Anachronism as working method
And here the key question arises: what does the modern era do to the reconstruction itself? Because the European line of transmission was severed, any contemporary interpretation of a historical source must pass through a modern head. And that head was shaped by everything the 20th century learned: Modern sports science colours the lens. Charlemont’s leverage-and-speed logic is today’s self-evident norm. Anyone reading a cassante parry in an old treatise quickly experiences it as a “technical error”, because modern fencing parries by absorbing. In this way a contemporary movement paradigm filters unnoticed into what we consider “correct” reconstruction. Living traditions fill the gap. Many practitioners borrow structure from Asian arts — grades, etiquette, kata- like drills, even grips and footwork. Take my own reconstruction of Happel’s stick fencing: the thumb-against- middle-finger grip turns out to come not from Happel’s own prescription (which places the thumb over index and middle finger) but from Iaido, Jodo, and Uchida Ryu Tanjo Jutsu. Such borrowing can be illuminating as a bridge, but becomes misleading the moment it is sold as “historically authentic”. Competition selects. Whoever organises tournaments must write rulebooks and guarantee safety. Whatever does not score, or is too risky, disappears from practice — the same mechanisms that gave kendo and judo their present form.
Anachronism as function
The mechanisms above raise a broader question. Why do people reach back to old, quasi-extinct martial arts at all? At first sight they are an anachronism in a society that speaks ever more insistently of harmony, diplomacy and redistribution — while simultaneously normalising violence and aggression in films, games and geopolitics. Nobody defends themselves with a stick against a mugger today; self-defence as a motivation is largely a rationalisation. What, then, is the real function?
The anachronism is not a defect — it is precisely the function. In a society that condemns violence while making it consumable, the martial art offers one of the few settings where aggression can be performed stylised, codified and regulated: within etiquette, rulebooks and mutual respect. The pacifist image of post- war Japan and the “heritage” image of HEMA are two versions of the same defence mechanism: making violence acceptable by framing it as culture. That the practice is an anachronism makes it safe — it is decoupled from any contemporary threat.
Authenticity in a fabricated world. Modern sports are products: fitness as consumption, MMA as entertainment, self-defence as fear marketing. A reconstruction from old treatises promises something no market can deliver: a real link to the past, a craftsmanlike, slow practice. That the original is unreachable increases the attraction rather than diminishing it — it is an endless project, not a finished product.
The experience of competence. Beneath the stated motivations lies one that is rarely spoken: nostalgia for direct physical mastery. In a reality where people have less and less concrete control over their environment, reconstruction offers measurable, hand-won progress. The weight of the exercise, the pain, the advance — those are real, even if the historical reconstruction is not entirely.
And perhaps most importantly: a bodily memory of what violence is. The philosophical claims of martial arts — discipline, self-control, character formation — are largely unproven. But the experience is real: anyone who has physically felt what tension, distance, timing and intimidation do understands conflict differently from someone who only talks about it conceptually. In a society that represses violence but keeps talking about it, martial arts preserve its physical reality — not an abstraction, but something with rules and consequences. Paradoxically, this may make practitioners precisely better at de-escalation: it replaces vague fear with concrete knowledge.
A case study: reconstructing Happel’s stick fencing. Everything above plays out in miniature in the attempt to bring the stick fencing of Jacob Happel (1833–1916) — Antwerp gymnastics master, fencing teacher and author — back to life. Of Happel there are no living students, no film footage, only manuals. Every choice the modern reconstructor makes is therefore an act of translation: take the grip. Happel’s own prescription places the thumb over index and middle finger, in the idiom of his gymnastics method. The reconstructor practising today, however, instinctively reaches for a thumb-against-middle-finger grip he knows from Iaido, Jodo and Uchida Ryu Tanjo Jutsu. That grip works, it feels natural — but it is not in Happel’s text. Thus, generation after generation, a hybrid emerges: a body fed by Asian arts reads a 19th-century Antwerp treatise. The anachronism is not theory here but daily practice: the reconstruction has become a dialogue with Happel, not a copy. And as long as that dialogue remains explicit — Happel’s Kreisen beside the Jodo grip, both named and distinguished — it is not falsification but precisely the way a dead tradition comes alive again.
Conclusion: born twice, but not in the same way
The social choreography of both revivals is nearly identical: disapproval, suppression, and a return under a harmless image — sport, heritage, character formation. But the methodical core differs worlds apart. Japan reconstructed concepts, with living transmission as a safety net. Europe reconstructs texts, without any net.
As a result, in HEMA the influence of modern ideas is not a marginal phenomenon but the core of the discipline. Every reconstruction is a dialogue between the historical source and the researcher’s movement paradigm. The question, therefore, is not whether we use modern influences — we inevitably do — but
whether we make them explicit. Only when the researcher distinguishes between what the source says and what he himself adds does reconstruction become history rather than projection.
The old-school canne of Larribeau, the judo of Kano, the bataireacht of the Doyles: each was born twice. The second birth always bears the traces of its time. Whoever knows and names those traces can work with them. Whoever denies them rewrites the past in their own image.
