| The Japanese martial arts are suggested to the West, and to the Japanese themselves as ?old?. They are less old than the suggestion and are, indeed, part of an attempt to make the Japanese suitably ?samurai?, in the first instance, so that an export of an image can take place in the second instance. Under outer shells and forms, however, something spiritual is indeed old, but people ? Japanese and non-Japanese alike ? have tended within modernity to reify the shells and forms. |