Over 300 illustrations. Here is a basic introduction to the martial arts, including Taekwondo, Judo, Ju-Jitsu, Karate, and Kung Fu. With over 300 full-color photographs, this volume provides useful step-by-step illustrations of each movement, supported by lively descriptions that detail each move in context. A practical introduction to beginners and an authoritative review for advanced students, this book will be appreciated by anyone with an interest in the ancient art of self-defense.

This introduction to karate teaches both the physical training and the mentalhilosophy necessary for karate mastery. The book also provides the completeistory of karate.

From post-World War Two Japan, to contemporary Hong Kong, the martial arts film remains one of cinema's most enduring and popular genres. 'Chasing Dragons' traces the form's origins and shows how the genre has adapted to changing social and political climates to satisfy the demands of an increasingly international audience.

Martial Arts and Well-Being explores how martial arts as a source of learning can contribute in important ways to health and well-being, as well as provide other broader social benefits. Using psychological and sociological theory related to behaviour, ritual, perception and reality construction, the book seeks to illustrate, with empirical data, how individuals make sense of and perceive the value of martial arts in their lives. This book draws on data from over 500 people, across all age ranges, and powerfully demonstrates that participating in martial arts can have a profound influence on the construction of behaviour patterns that are directly linked to lifestyle and health. Making individual connections regarding the benefits of practice, improvements to health and well-being – regardless of whether these improvements are ‘true’ in a medical sense – this book offers an important and original window into the importance of beliefs to health and well-being as well as the value of thinking about education as a process of life-long learning. This book will be of great interest to a range of audiences, including researchers, academics and postgraduate students interested in sports and exercise psychology, martial art studies and health and well-being. It should also be of interest to sociologists, social workers and martial arts practitioners. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315448084, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Deep democracy, the inherent importance of all parts of ourselves and all viewpoints in the world around us, is introduced as the concept that fascilitates conflicts in relationships, communities, and the world. Skills and attitudes needed in situations of chaos, attack, transformation and conflict are provided, and examples from all over the world illustrate the theory.

Provides an overview to the history and philosophy of martial arts, such as karate, kung fu, and judo--complete with maps, glossary, index, sidebar facts, and anecdotes about famous samurai. Simultaneous.

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. This book shows how the notion and practice of Japanese martial arts in the late Meiji period brought Japanese bodies, Japanese nationalisms, and the Japanese state into sustained contact and dynamic engagement with one another. Using a range of disciplinary approaches, Denis Gainty shows how the metaphor of a national body and the cultural and historical meanings of martial arts were celebrated and appropriated by modern Japanese at all levels of society, allowing them to participate powerfully in shaping the modern Japanese nation and state. While recent works have cast modern Japanese and their bodies as subject to state domination and elite control, this book argues that having a body – being a body, and through that body experiencing and shaping social, political, and even cosmic realities – is an important and underexamined aspect of the late Meiji period. Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan is an important contribution to debates in Japanese and Asian social sciences, theories of the body and its role in modern historiography, and related questions of power and agency by suggesting a new and dramatic role for human bodies in the shaping of modern states and societies. As such, it will be valuable to students and scholars of Japanese studies, Japanese history, modern nations and nationalisms, and sport and leisure studies, as well as those interested in the body more broadly.