The Life-Giving “Sword” of the Martial Arts

Abstract The final era of the overt manifestation of the samurai fighting spirit came to an official end on August 15, 1945. Under American occupation, Japan became a nonaggressive nation whose only military force was composed of self-defense units and whose constitution forbade their use outside the Japanese islands, a policy now slightly modified. But as suggested in Chapter 9, the imprint of the warrior centuries and the samurai regime of the Tokugawa era could not be erased overnight by the stroke of an official pen. The armed warrior version of the samurai spirit was indeed gone, or perhaps not quite gone, but reborn in a new nonlethal form—the martial arts.