Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Introduction: modernization and beyond
- I Popular culture: tradition and ‘modernization’
- 1 Sumō and popular culture: the Tokugawa period
- 2 Osaka popular culture: a down-to-earth appraisal
- 3 New trends in Japanese popular culture
- II Popular movements: alternative visions of ‘modernization’
- III Uneven development and its discontents
- IV Sex, politics and ‘modernity’
- V ‘Modernization’ and ‘modernity’: theoretical perspectives
- Glossary
- Index
1 - Sumō and popular culture: the Tokugawa period
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Introduction: modernization and beyond
- I Popular culture: tradition and ‘modernization’
- 1 Sumō and popular culture: the Tokugawa period
- 2 Osaka popular culture: a down-to-earth appraisal
- 3 New trends in Japanese popular culture
- II Popular movements: alternative visions of ‘modernization’
- III Uneven development and its discontents
- IV Sex, politics and ‘modernity’
- V ‘Modernization’ and ‘modernity’: theoretical perspectives
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
Wrestling is one of the oldest of sports. Together with running, leaping, and the lifting or throwing of weighty objects, wrestling is made up of precisely those elements likely to appeal to the earliest forms of human society: it is satisfyingly competitive, it calls on physical skills of a kind valued in communities where strength and agility are at a premium, and those who engage in it need no equipment beyond that with which nature has endowed them. Wrestling emerged at an early stage in all civilizations, and there is no reason to doubt that it did so in Japan as well. Indeed the earliest of the Japanese chronicles, compiled in 720, says as much. In the year 23 B.C., according to the Nihon shoki, the Emperor Suinin came to learn of a certain strong man living nearby in the village of Taima, a man called Taima no Kehaya who boasted of being the strongest man in the world. On the face of it, this was perhaps not an unreasonable claim, since Kehaya was said to be capable of straightening iron hooks – and, into the bargain, breaking the horns of oxen – with his bare hands. The Emperor Suinin was obviously prepared to accept this claim, so the Nihon shoki records, until one of his courtiers chanced to mention yet another strong man – Nomi no Sukune, a ‘valiant man’, as he is described, from the distant land of Izumo, on the Japan Sea coast of Honshū.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Japanese TrajectoryModernization and Beyond, pp. 17 - 32Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988
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