ORIGIN OF JIU-JITSU.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 9321, 22 August 1908, Page 4

ORIGIN OF JIU-JITSU.

» BORROWED FROM THE CHINESE. Jiu-jitsu is known to the Japanese under various names, such as judo, yawara, tai-jutsu, kogusoku, kempo, and hakuda, but judo, ju-jutsu, and yawara are tho terms most commonly employed. Considering the high esteem in which it hats always been held, it is really wonderful what few books there are upon it among the Japanese, and still moro wonderful that such as there are have not dealt with it as they might have done. The pamphlets that have been published refer more to the many schools of jiu-jitsu, and there is absolutely no doubt that the originators of certain new schools have made history to suit their own purpose. Still, there seems little doubt that while kogusoku and kempo were originally two distinct arts — the former the art of seizing, and the latter the art of gaining victory by pliancy— the two were afterwards amalgamated and formed into one art, and that is jiujitsu as we now know it. As to the date when jiu-jitsu first became firmly established as an., art necessary to the proper training of a warrior, that would appear to have been somewhere about the middle of the seventeenth century, and so, contrary to the oftpublished statements of sensational writers and others, the science is something less than four hundred years old, and not the many thousands, so boastfully claimed on its behalf. A Chinese refugee named Chingempin had, apparently, something to do with its introduction into Japan, for his name appears in nearly every work bearing upon the subject from an historical point of view. But, for all that, the art, like so many others originally borrowed from the Chinese, is now essen-