When Karate was a Weapon of the Colonized Working Class: The “China Hand Technique” in Japanese Proletarian Fiction
Update: 2025-05-30
Description
If you had a male-coded childhood at all recently in the Anglo-American world, you have felt the influence of the Soldier of Fortune culture of the 1980s, within which martial arts and other action films featuring Silvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and Steven Seagal were prominent, and accompanied by dojos proliferating even in mid-sized American towns. But what you may not know is that, like the sushi boom around the same time period this shadow-reich version of the East Asian martial arts was quite deliberately seeded into the pop culture of the Reagan Era by a rogue’s gallery of all the usual WACL suspects: Moon Seonmyeong of the Unification Church, his high-ranking lieutenant Jhoon Rhee, Sasakawa Ryōichi—as well as Zionists like Menachem Golan and Haim Saban. Moreover, the hyper-individualism and hierarchicalism of this WACL school of karate, far from being inherent to the art, represents its co-optation and enlistment in a fight against its true roots in the struggles of the colonized and the working class in the Japanese Empire. In the proletarian fiction of 1920s Japan we find a little-known earlier chapter in the story of karate, when it was a new and exotic weapon, developed by Ryukyuan peasants under early-modern feudal and mercantile rule, and now wielded by Ryukyuan proletarians and the Korean and Japanese comrades to whom they taught it, to devastating effect against the bosses and their yakuza goons.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Comments
In Channel
![The Birth of the Comprador Chief and the Defeat of the Secret Society [PREVIEW]: Profound Desires of the Gods w/ Nathan, part 2](https://assets.pippa.io/shows/60daf5ffba5f4f0012e7c022/1754114086922-9efe9cc4-89d5-4598-9829-42935aa298c2.jpeg "The Birth of the Comprador Chief and the Defeat of the Secret Society [PREVIEW]: Profound Desires of the Gods w/ Nathan, part 2")
![Japanese First! (into the digital prison and the war machine) [PREVIEW]](https://s3.castbox.fm/c9/7f/b6/7f187c1cbced29fd457597491ef10de91a_scaled_v1_400.jpg "Japanese First! (into the digital prison and the war machine) [PREVIEW]")
![English for Compradors on the Eve of the Final Enclosure [PREVIEW]: A Journey into TED Talk Hell](https://s3.castbox.fm/0e/c5/d9/71c22a8b2ff2fd65cc693de2722e63ef37_scaled_v1_400.jpg "English for Compradors on the Eve of the Final Enclosure [PREVIEW]: A Journey into TED Talk Hell")
![Eat the Yellow Powder, Get in the Wara [PREVIEW]: The first king, the first collapse, and the first underground bunker society in the Avesta and the Ṛigveda](https://s3.castbox.fm/f3/1a/11/eb44a261c1fb1e0df6adaa5af3a02af189_scaled_v1_400.jpg "Eat the Yellow Powder, Get in the Wara [PREVIEW]: The first king, the first collapse, and the first underground bunker society in the Avesta and the Ṛigveda")
![The Conversion of Kevin Gaijinson ケビン・ガイジンソンの転向 [PREVIEW]](https://assets.pippa.io/shows/60daf5ffba5f4f0012e7c022/1739585505219-a661ed53-45b0-46a0-9f52-82a473ce615b.jpeg "The Conversion of Kevin Gaijinson ケビン・ガイジンソンの転向 [PREVIEW]")
![Ritual Serial Murder and the Birth of a Ruling Class: Popol Vuh, Title of Totonicapán (Maya, 16th c.) [PREVIEW]](https://assets.pippa.io/shows/60daf5ffba5f4f0012e7c022/1736666361209-bd7aed85-e254-43fc-a887-d2f226fd4f6d.jpeg "Ritual Serial Murder and the Birth of a Ruling Class: Popol Vuh, Title of Totonicapán (Maya, 16th c.) [PREVIEW]")
![Asiatic Athena: karmic roots of Greek culture in Hittite class struggle (Song of Release, 15th c. BCE) [PREVIEW]](https://s3.castbox.fm/ce/f7/59/0b7d48f1d6c9734ccba918bde9663c47d3_scaled_v1_400.jpg "Asiatic Athena: karmic roots of Greek culture in Hittite class struggle (Song of Release, 15th c. BCE) [PREVIEW]")
![The origins of class society and revolutionary consciousness according to Second-Temple Judaism: 1 Enoch, Jubilees (Palestine, 3rd-2nd c. BCE) [PREVIEW]](https://s3.castbox.fm/3d/64/75/3e0e44467762fdd87de2d6592c26d7e782_scaled_v1_400.jpg "The origins of class society and revolutionary consciousness according to Second-Temple Judaism: 1 Enoch, Jubilees (Palestine, 3rd-2nd c. BCE) [PREVIEW]")
![ParaPower Mapping the Six-Pointed Crusader State [PREVIEW]](https://s3.castbox.fm/ef/fa/79/3987aeb23a8c97eac36344e9d88a642f33_scaled_v1_400.jpg "ParaPower Mapping the Six-Pointed Crusader State [PREVIEW]")
Download from Google Play
Download from App Store
United States00:00
00:00
x
