LibGuides: Asian Studies: Martial Arts of China &amp; Japan

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Martial Arts As Embodied Knowledge : Asian Traditions in a Transnational World
A wide-ranging scholarly consideration of the martial arts. This landmark work provides a wide-ranging scholarly consideration of the traditional Asian martial arts. Most of the contributors to the volume are practitioners of the martial arts, and all are keenly aware that these traditions now exist in a transnational context. The book's cutting-edge research includes ethnography and approaches from film, literature, performance, and theater studies.
Striking Beauty : A Philosophical Look at the Asian Martial Arts
Using the ethics and aesthetics of the Asian martial arts to enrich our knowledge of human behavior, bodily movement, technical knowledge, and artistic creation.
The Shaolin Monastery : History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts
The Shaolin Monastery charts, for the first time in any language, the history of the Shaolin Temple and the evolution of its world-renowned martial arts. In this meticulously researched and eminently readable study, Meir Shahar considers the economic, political, and religious factors that led Shaolin monks to disregard the Buddhist prohibition against violence and instead create fighting techniques that by the twenty-first century have spread throughout the world.

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The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts
Looks at southern Chinese martial arts traditions and how they have become important to local identity and narratives of resistance. This book explores the social history of southern Chinese martial arts and their contemporary importance to local identity and narratives of resistance. Hong Kong's Bruce Lee ushered the Chinese martial arts onto an international stage in the 1970s.
Legacies of the Sword: The Kashima-Shinryu and Samurai Martial Culture
Western scholars and educators are generally far less familiar with the samurai in his original-and, ostensibly, primary-role as warrior and masters of arms than in his other functions as landowner, feudal lord, literature, or philosopher. Yet, any attempt to comprehend fully the samurai without considering his military abilities and training (bugei) is futile. Karl Friday combines the results of nearly two decades of fieldwork and archival research to examine samurai martial culture from a broad perspective: as a historical phenomenon, as a worldview, and as a system of physical, spiritual, and moral education.
Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan
In 1895, the newly formed Greater Japan Martial Virtue Association (Dainippon Butokukai) held its first annual Martial Virtue Festival (butokusai) in the ancient capital of Kyoto. The Festival marked the arrival of a new iteration of modern Japan, as the Butokukai's efforts to define and popularise Japanese martial arts became an important medium through which the bodies of millions of Japanese citizens would experience, draw on, and even shape the Japanese nation and state.

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The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts
Looks at southern Chinese martial arts traditions and how they have become important to local identity and narratives of resistance. This book explores the social history of southern Chinese martial arts and their contemporary importance to local identity and narratives of resistance. Hong Kong's Bruce Lee ushered the Chinese martial arts onto an international stage in the 1970s.
Green Peony and the Rise of the Chinese Martial Arts Novel
Explores the development of the Chinese martial arts novel. Martial arts fiction has been synonymous with popular fiction in China from the Qing dynasty on. This book, the first to trace the early development of the martial arts novel in China, demonstrates that the genre took shape nearly a century earlier than generally recognized.
Lost T'ai-chi Classics From the Late Ch'ing Dynasty
Analysis of rich new material allows Wile to make a fresh survey of longstanding issues: the origins of T'ai-chi; the authorship of the classics; the differences between Wu, Yang, and Li; and the roles of such figures as Chang San-feng, Wang Tsung-yueh, Chiang Fa, and the formerly missing link, Ch'ang Nai-chou.Douglas Wile translates and analyzes four collections of recently released nineteenth-century manuscripts on T'ai-chi ch'uan.
The Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang: Republican-era Martial Arts Fiction
Xiang Kairan, who wrote under the pen name "The Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang," is remembered as the father of modern Chinese martial arts fiction. In this book, John Christopher Hamm shows how Xiang Kairan's work and career offer a new lens on the transformations of fiction and popular culture in early twentieth-century China.

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Bushido: The Soul of Japan
Chivalry is a flower no less indigenous to the soil of Japan than its emblem, the cherry blossom; nor is it a dried-up specimen of an antique virtue preserved in the herbarium of our history. It is still a living object of power and beauty among us; and if it assumes no tangible shape or form, it not the less scents the moral atmosphere, and makes us aware that we are still under its potent spell. The conditions of society which brought it forth and nourished it have long disappeared.
Kendo : Culture of the Sword
Kendo is the first in-depth historical, cultural, and political account in English of the Japanese martial art of swordsmanship, from its beginnings in military training and arcane medieval schools to its widespread practice as a global sport today. Alexander Bennett shows how kendo evolved through a recurring process of "inventing tradition," which served the changing ideologies and needs of Japanese warriors and governments over the course of history.
Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan
Karl Friday, an internationally recognised authority on Japanese warriors, provides the first comprehensive study of the topic to be published in English. This work incorporates nearly twenty years of on-going research and draws on both new readings of primary sources and the most recent secondary scholarship. It overturns many of the stereotypes that have dominated views of the period. Friday analyzes Heian -, Kamakura- and Nambokucho-period warfare from five thematic angles.
Samurai and Ninja : The Real Story Behind the Japanese Warrior Myth That Shatters the Bushido Mystique
The myths of the noble Samurai and the sinister Ninja are filled with romantic fantasy and fallacy. Samurai and Ninja expert Antony Cummins shatters the myths and exposes the true nature of these very real--and very lethal--medieval Japanese warriors. The Samurai and Ninja were in fact brutal killing machines trained in torture and soaked in machismo.
Samurai to Soldier : Remaking Military Service in Nineteenth-Century Japan
n Samurai to Soldier, D. Colin Jaundrill rewrites the military history of nineteenth-century Japan. In fifty years spanning the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and the rise of the Meiji nation-state, conscripts supplanted warriors as Japan's principal arms-bearers. The most common version of this story suggests that the Meiji institution of compulsory military service was the foundation of Japan's efforts to save itself from the imperial ambitions of the West and set the country on the path to great power status
Soul of the Samurai
Soul of the Samurai contains modern translations of three classic works of Zen & Bushido. In Soul of the Samurai, bestselling author and respected translator Thomas Cleary reveals the true essence of the Bushido code or Zen warrior teachings according to 17th-century Japanese samurai master Yagyu Munenori and his Zen teacher Takuan Soho.
Tengu : The Shamanic and Esoteric Origins of the Japanese Martial Arts
This is the first in-depth study in English to examine the warrior and shamanic characteristics and significance of tengu in the martial art culture (bugei) of Muromachi Japan (1336-1573).

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Edo Kabuki in Transition : From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost
Satoko Shimazaki revisits three centuries of kabuki theater and its representations of medieval Japanese tales and tradition, reframing Edo kabuki as a key player in the formation of an early modern urban identity. Challenging the common understanding of kabuki as subversive, Shimazaki argues that kabuki instilled a sense of shared history.
Onnagata : A Labyrinth of Gendering in Kabuki Theater
In this case study of how gender has been defined and redefined through the centuries, Maki Isaka examines how the onnagata's theatrical gender “impersonation” has shaped the concept and mechanisms of femininity and gender construction in Japan. The implications of the study go well beyond disciplinary and geographic cloisters.
Warrior Women : Gender, Race, and the Transnational Chinese Action Star
Warrior Women considers the significance of Chinese female action stars in martial arts films produced across a range of national and transnational contexts. Lisa Funnell examines the impact of the 1997 transfer of Hong Kong from British to Chinese rule on the representation of Chinese identities--Hong Kong Chinese, mainland Chinese, Chinese American, Chinese Canadian--in action films produced domestically in Hong Kong and, increasingly, in cooperation with mainland China and Hollywood.
Women in Chinese Martial Arts Films of the New Millennium : Narrative Analyses and Gender Politics
Women and Gender in Chinese Martial Arts Films of the New Millennium, by Ya-chen Chen, is an excavation of underexposed gender issues focusing mainly on contradictory and troubled feminism in the film narratives. In the cinematic world of martial arts films, one can easily find representations of women of Ancient China released from the constraints of patriarchal social order to revel in a dreamlike space of their own.
Yuen Woo Ping's Wing Chun
This book explores Wing Chun's narrative representation of femininity and the martial arts genre, its history, traditions and cultural influences. While studio-made Hong Kong genre cinema has stressed action over narrative, Wing Chun offers a more egalitarian gender imaginary rooted in Daoist and Buddhist thought. The book provides new insights on the non-linear cinematic storytelling of the film.

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Chinese Martial Arts Cinema : The Wuxia Tradition
This is the first comprehensive, fully-researched account of the historical and contemporary development of the traditional martial arts genre in the Chinese cinema known as wuxia (literal translation: martial chivalry) - a genre which audiences around the world became familiar with through the phenomenal 'crossover' hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). The book unveils rich layers of the wuxia tradition as it developed in the early Shanghai cinema in the late 1920s, and from the 1950s onwards, in the Hong Kong and Taiwan film industries.
Martial Arts Cinema and Hong Kong Modernity : Aesthetic, Representation, Circulation
At the core of this book is a fascinating paradox: the martial arts film, long regarded as a vehicle of Chinese cultural nationalism, can also be understood as a mass cultural expression of Hong Kong's modern urban-industrial society. This important and popular articulates the experiential qualities, the competing social subjectivities and gender discourses, as well as the heightened circulation of capital, people, goods, information, and technologies in Hong Kong of the 1960s and 1970s.
The Martial Arts Cinema of the Chinese Diaspora : Ang Lee, John Woo, and Jackie Chan in Hollywood
This book critically examines three of the most internationally famous martial arts film artists to arise out of the Chinese diaspora. Positing the idea that these filmmakers' success is evidence of a "cosmopolitical awareness" arising from their cross-cultural ideological engagements and geopolitical displacements, Szeto demonstrates how this unique perspective allows these three filmmakers to develop and act in the transnational environment of media production, distribution, and consumption.
Women in Chinese Martial Arts Films of the New Millennium : Narrative Analyses and Gender Politics
Women and Gender in Chinese Martial Arts Films of the New Millennium, by Ya-chen Chen, is an excavation of underexposed gender issues focusing mainly on contradictory and troubled feminism in the film narratives. In the cinematic world of martial arts films, one can easily find representations of women of Ancient China released from the constraints of patriarchal social order to revel in a dreamlike space of their own.

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Martial arts films
Martial arts -- Drama. (these are martial arts feature films)
Martial arts films -- History and criticism.
Martial artists.
Lee, Bruce, 1940-1973.
Motion pictures -- China
Motion pictures -- Japan
Motion picture producers and directors -- China
Motion picture producers and directors -- Japan

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