When Karate was a Weapon of the Colonized Working Class: The “China Hand Technique” in Japanese Proletarian Fiction

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.

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