Reflecting on One’s Own Bu

In all forms of physical activity, many people likely believe that what matters most is practice itself, and that what one chooses to call it is of little consequence. Rather than pondering whether what they practice is budo or bujutsu, they focus instead on the techniques they wish to master and the bodily movements they have yet to acquire. The distinction between budo and bujutsu can be left to critics, they think, while they devote themselves to daily training. In a sense, those who are able to practice each day with such an attitude may be considered fortunate.

As for me, what I practice is budo, not bujutsu. On this point, I have reflected deeply and persistently throughout my life, and I have felt compelled to do so.

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As mentioned earlier, budo emerged from bujutsu by placing the concept of the “do” (the Way) at the forefront. However, in Japan there never arose a movement to objectively examine this historical transformation. Without clearly distinguishing between bujutsu and budo, disciplines such as judo spread throughout the world as Olympic events. In the process, they were increasingly absorbed into a sports-oriented ideology, and the full nature of budo as a form of physical activity became ever more obscured.

When I moved from Japan to Switzerland and began the task of introducing and spreading budo from the ground up, I started to consider what characteristics of budo were truly worth transmitting. In doing so, I was compelled to reexamine how deeply I myself understood budo. By retracing its historical development from the beginning, it became clear to me that the boundaries defining the outward form of budo as a physical practice remain indistinct.

Thus, I came to recognize that spreading budo is not akin to a missionary act of propagating a fully completed system to foreign lands. Rather, it involves discovering for oneself the qualities that are worth transmitting, and steadfastly upholding them with unwavering conviction. Therefore, one must also be able to explain, from one’s own perspective, how budo differs from bujutsu and what distinctive characteristics it possesses as a physical discipline. When conveying one’s understanding of budo to an entirely different cultural context, it is not possible to carry along vague and unexamined ambiguities that have never been clearly defined.