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Training Swords MA Thesis Swords across borders Attitudes of international traditional Japanese swordsmanship practitioners towards their training swords Leiden University MA Asian Studies: History, Arts and Culture of Asia Supervisor: Dr. M. Winkel July 2021 Lluís Diago Camps Table of Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................. 2 Introduction ............................................................................................ 3 Structure and Methodology .................................................................... 4 About terminology used .......................................................................... 5 Chapter 1: The habitus in traditional Japanese swordsmanship ............... 7 Habitus in martial arts and combat sports ................................................................................ 7 Material agents in the development of the habitus ................................................................. 8 Habitus changing across borders ............................................................................................ 10 Objects changing across borders ............................................................................................ 13 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 15 Chapter 2: Training swords across borders ............................................ 16 Other material elements across borders ................................................................................ 16 Materiality of training swords ................................................................................................. 18 Training swords as a gateway to Japanese traditional culture ............................................... 20 More than tools, more than objects ....................................................................................... 21 Training swords as objects for mental conditioning ............................................................... 23 Training swords as deservers of respect ................................................................................. 23 Is it all the same? Training swords as the Other or the Us ..................................................... 26 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 27 Chapter 3: Training swords: consistent agency ...................................... 28 The social representation of the Japanese swords: widespread narrative ............................ 28 Traditional Japanese martial arts discourse ............................................................................ 29 Material immobility, material exclusivity ................................................................................ 30 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 31 Conclusion ............................................................................................. 33 Bibliography .......................................................................................... 35 1 Acknowledgements During the writing of this thesis, I received great assistance and support from several people. First, I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Margarita Winkel, whose guidance and expertise were extremely helpful for me in finding a meaningful research question and methodology to explore it. Despite there was a lot to work on, your patience and feedback were of incalculable value for me. I would like to also thank the interviewees, who answered my questions and offered me their unconditional help during the whole process of data compilation and writing. Their collaboration was crucial to develop the arguments presented and helped me to expand my insight on the topic with different approaches besides my personal experiences. I would like to thank my mother, who have checked the final version for grammar and spelling mistakes to give the thesis a cleaner English. Lastly, I want to thank Wa Rei Ryū – Omoi Rei Kai (Barcelona) and Yū Shin Ryū (Kyoto), the two traditional Japanese swordsmanship schools in which I had the pleasure to practice, and all my colleagues, masters, and other people I have met along my years involved in traditional Japanese martial arts. 2 Introduction People around the world practice traditional Japanese swordsmanship as part of their life. As a traditional form of martial arts, it explores not only physical aspects of the practice but also the mental and spiritual, encoded in Japanese tradition and philosophy. Most of its teachings revolve around training swords: along with the practitioner, they are an ever-present element in traditional Japanese swordsmanship. The practitioners learn how to move, hold, and use the swords with their body. Also, they learn how to appreciate and deal with them mentally and affectively as integral part of the practice. Through active participation, they develop a habitus1 that directs how they perceive and respond to the social world of the martial arts and to the objects involved in it. I had the privilege to practice traditional Japanese swordsmanship for more than 8 years. Most of my training time was in Barcelona (Spain), my home city where I conducted most of my years of practice. There I have met and practiced with other practitioners from other schools in Spain and other countries in Europe. In 2020, during my stay in Kyoto for 6 months, I joined another school of traditional Japanese swordsmanship. After some time there, I could feel differences in the practice compared to my experience in Barcelona. Although the general elements of were similar, I could not help myself to notice several deviations grounded in the socio-cultural and material context of each place. I had to adapt my habitus to the new circumstances to fully engage with traditional Japanese swordsmanship in Japan. Surprisingly, my relationship and attitude (both physical and mental) towards the training swords could remain unaltered. I could see also the same attitudes of my practitioner peers in Barcelona and Kyoto, and all the other people I came across. The social practice was different, but not the attitude towards the training swords. This aspect seems a constant everywhere, and it made me wonder what makes it so “sturdy” and static and if it really is unchanged. The main research question of this thesis is: how do the attitudes of the practitioners towards the training swords differ depending on the context in which traditional Japanese swordsmanship is experienced? Followed by the sub-questions: are there significant differences between various elements involved in the training practice? What factors may produce those differences – or similarities in their absence – between the elements involved in the training practice? The goal of this thesis is to contribute to the discussion about the role of material elements in the construction of social practices in different socio-cultural contexts. It has 1 A structure of physical and mental attitudes that shapes and is shaped by general human behavior when encountering similar practices or structures 3 been demonstrated that material elements are key in the development of the practitioner’s habitus in martial arts, but there is not a comprehensive study about how objects might be altered or not when crossing from their original socio-cultural context to another. Likewise, this paper will provide a general overview of the construction of the habitus in martial arts, what elements contribute to its creation and how the socio- cultural context affects those elements and the habitus formation. Structure and Methodology This paper will focus primarily on the training swords that participate in the construction of the social practice of traditional Japanese swordsmanship. Chapter 1 will provide a theoretical frame in which I base my research. Social practices are social environments that affect the way humans perceive and act towards their elements when they are socialized in them, producing a habitus. The application of the habitus in martial arts and combat sports is a topic studied by several scholars and pioneered by Loïc Wacquant in his deployment of carnal sociology2. Habitus theories put the focus of attention on the human agent, a scope that it is not completely useful for this paper, with training swords (objects) in the center of the question. Domaneschi’s approach to the material world of martial arts and its contribution to the development of the habitus is going to be crucial to understand the social weight of training swords and other material elements and how they affect the practice. He argues that training tools and other material elements are an indispensable active element in the formation of the habitus in traditional Chinese martial art wushu kung fu. I am going to apply the same theory to the training weapons in traditional Japanese swordsmanship as subjects in the creation of its habitus. On cultural translation when diverse elements move across socio- cultural areas, I will then use Cynarski and Farrer & Whalen-Bridge to see how the conceptualization of martial arts changes across borders, especially when those practices are moved from the East to the West. To see how objects are also re-signified when they travel, I will use the work of Roth and Kopytoff. This will allow to see that
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