Sports History

Karate of Japan

2020-08-11T02:32:00.000-07:00

Karate of Japan

Okinawa teachers' attempt to change the art of karate

The adoption of uniforms and standard ranking, the development of militaristic and sporting practices, and a purposeful effacement of the art's origin (Krug 2001), were all programs aimed at making karate popular with the Japanese. In doing so, those Okinawan masters responsible for such changes sought to make the art something more in line with the Japanese martial art tradition, or budo. The acceptance of these changes by practitioners in Okinawa (both instructors and students), who were not themselves engaged in training with Japanese from the mainland, signals their own role in such modifications of the art. Either as actors with their own agency who found value in these changes, or as the victims of structural forces that capitulated to the assimilation programs of the Japanese government, these practitioners modified their practice to align with the ideologies of mainland Japan.

Despite these efforts and compromises, karate was viewed as a foreign martial art, largely because the Japanese government (as well as many Japanese people) still did not consider Okinawans to be fully Japanese (Friman 1998). This foreign connotation was not merely a neutral, geographic marker to the Japanese of the mainland, but was also wrapped up in the stereotypes applied everywhere to a minority culture. As Donohue notes, “Karate had often been thought to be the art of thugs and the lower class- as a “foreign” art with none of the pedigree of kendo or even judo” (1993: 109).

As mentioned above, the most successful course of action was to adapt philosophy and art to a more "Japanese" model. It is recognizable to state authorities as well as prospective students.

nother aspect of the mold-making process of converting karate into a Japanese system was the incorporation of their own martial ethic into the newly established karate-do system by the Japanese. They were partly in the traditional form of samurai and combined with bushido. Code. This was done to inject into the karate-do what could be considered a Japanese spirit into Karate -Do”(Rosenbaum, 2002: 14).

Samurai karate

The traditional forms of the samurai class were held to be of great antiquity, having a history into the early part of the millennium- but such a characterization is an oversimplification (Goodman 2005). It is true there was a samurai culture for centuries in Japan and that it powerfully shaped and influenced life and culture in certain ways (Nakane 1981). Importantly, the influence of the samurai class in Tokugawa Japan owes more to the status of the samurai class as what Sugimoto calls, a “core subculture”, than to the ubiquity of the samurai lifestyle (2003:12).

Due to the power of their position politically and economically, core subcultures, such as the samurai of the Tokugawa Era, are able to project their idealized version of what society should be into the everyday world, where society is constituted. Through a near monopoly of legal and legislative powers, media channels, and even military force, a core subculture is able to frame the cultural discussion and shape it to their own desires or beliefs. (Sugimoto 2003). The extent to which core subcultures are able to accomplish such a task is connected to their ability to minimize those subcultures within their society- either through compliance or capitulation- that do not come from the same cultural traditions or perspectives (Goodman 2005).

Thus, though the samurai class was the most dominant subculture both politically and culturally in Tokugawa Japan, the samurai lifestyle was lived by only a few (Sugimoto 2003). Interestingly the core subculture of the samurai class obtained its widest currency not when its political power was ascendant, but rather when it was on the decline and the very class identity of the samurai verged on extinction (Ueno 1987). It was not until the Meiji Restoration, when the Tokugawa regime was seemingly dismantled, that the samurai class was able to effectively project their ideological influence further afield than ever before by offering a viable way to the other subcultures of Japan to adopt the samurai lifestyle. As Ueno so elegantly puts it, “Democratization meant not the “commoner-zation “ of the samurai class, but the “samuraization” of the commoners” (Ueno 1987: S78).

Like the other classes that ordered Tokugawa in Japan, the samurai class was abolished, but the samurai class was reluctant to give up their values and decided to share it. Instead of allowing democratization to make all Japanese people common people, they paved the way for all Japanese people to become warriors. Many ordinary people embraced these changes, seeing the advantage of following the preferences and norms of the former ruling class as a way to uplift their cultural status.

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OKINAWAN KARATE MASTERS

2020-08-06T07:58:00.004-07:00

OKINAWAN MASTERS AND THE TRANSLATION OF KARATE

Though it is certain that some Japanese people had already been exposed to karate, the demonstrations in 1916 of Okinawan karate master, Funakoshi Gichin in Tokyo, and his decision to stay in Japan in the early 1920's (Mottern 2001), signal the opening of the period when most Japanese would become familiar with karate for the first time. By 1922 Funakoshi Gichin was teaching karate at the Okinawan dormitory of Japan University in Tokyo. By 1935 he had established more than 30 dojo, or training halls, mostly aligned with educational institutions (Madis 2003: 187). He was also instrumental in convincing the government to make karate part of the curriculum in Japanese schools in 1927, as it had been in Okinawa for over two decades (Krug 2001). As Itosu and Miyagi had simplified the system in order to make it more appropriate for introduction into public schools in Okinawa, so too did Funakoshi:

In response to his students requests, Funakoshi introduced jiyu-kumite, or sparring, into the practice of karate in Japan (Krug 2001). This represented a departure from the kata centric, or pattern-practice focused, nature of karate as performed in Okinawa until that time. This change also opened the art up for sportification and competition, and it is credited for greatly increasing the popularity of karate in Japan (Krug 2001; Friman 1996).

“At this time, numerous techniques and teachings of karate were systematically removed from the bunkai (explanations) of kata and from the kihon waza (basic techniques). The system was reduced to punches, blocks, kicks, and weapons, while advanced techniques were considered unsuitable for school children or the general public. This deskilled karate became the public face of the art” (Krug 2001:

These changes should not be characterized as simply a process of subtraction as techniques were pared away. As Moening states, “With the introduction from Okinawa to Japan, karate developed by incorporating new ideas from young Japanese students. The university clubs, which were often Shotokan schools of Funakoshi, played an especially important role in karate's rapid development” (2011: 10). One of Funakoshi's students, Nakayma Masatoshi, reported, “My seniors... knew only kata; it was the only thing Master Funakoshi taught them... [But] all of us had studied judo and kendo... [which] were centered around combat... So, the idea of combat was deeply ingrained in us... and we all really needed the combative aspect that karate lacked” (Hassell 2007: 43).397).

Funakoshi was quite aware of the judo and kendo sport culture that his Japanese students had grown up in and were motivated by in their requests for live competition. From judo he adopted the ranking system of colored belts and degrees of black belts, as well as the basic uniform or gi (Mottern 2001). Before adopting uniforms, karate practitioners in Okinawa simply practiced in their everyday clothes. In many cases they practiced in nothing other than their underwear because of the oppressive heat and humidity of their tropical island home (Madis 2003). As Donohue points out, the significance of the uniform is of a highly symbolic nature, in that it is, “a statement of individual conformity and identification with the group” (1993: 113).

Perhaps no one else at this time understood the importance of the connection between the uniform, group identity and physical exertion better than Yabu Kentsu:

“A former officer in the Japanese army, Yabu [Kentsu] introduced many procedures still practiced in karate schools worldwide... These innovations included... bowing upon entering the training hall, lining up students in order of rank, seated meditation (a Buddhist practice), sequenced training, answering the instructor with loud acknowledgment, closing class with formalities similar to opening class. Most of these procedures already had been implemented in judo and kendo training and reflect a blending of European militarism and physical culture with Japanese neo-Confucianism, militarism and physical culture. However, these procedures did not exist in China, or in Okinawan karate before Yabu” ( Madis 2003: 189).

Donohue points to “the ritual of the bow and the recitation of dojo kun (the precepts of the dojo normally recited at the end of a training session)” (1993: 113) as key markers of a ritualized behavior that serves to create a privileged space in the dojo. These practices also signal a distinct shift from the karate practiced on Okinawa as described earlier (Friman 1996, Krug 2001, Mottern 2001) and mark the beginning of what is thought of as 'karate' today. Through the adoption of the sport and militaristic elements, as well as the spiritual philosophies of Japanese martial culture, karate was able to find a place in the culture of mainland Japan. Often supported by and disseminated through the government, these adaptations of the practice found their way back to Okinawa and were largely embraced both by masters and students. To this day, in Okinawa as well as Japan, students wear the gi and colored belts, line up in order of rank and drill in precise lines.

In the 1920's, “Funakoshi Gichin suggested to the karate research group at Keio University that the character for “Tang/China”, be replaced with that of “empty””(Mottern 2001: 241), but at that time he had found little support. In 1936, a collection of karate instructors who had followed Funakoshi's lead and had emigrated to the mainland, gathered together to discuss karate's future at the invitation of Ota Chofu of the Ryukyu Shinpo (Ryukyu Press). A decade or so after Funakoshi's suggestion, they determined that it would be best to change the characters used to write “karate” from “Tang Hand/China Hand” to “Empty Hand” (Mottern 2001). This move was largely precipitated by and in recognition of Japanese animosity and contempt for China at the time. In addition, by changing one character, “The term karate was thus elevated to the metaphysical realm by embracing reference not only to unarmed combative applications, but to Buddhist and Daoist concepts of transcendent spirituality as well” (Mottern 2001: 242). Central to the continuation and success of karate was this decision to align the art more appropriately with Japanese ideologies, particularly those of a spiritual nature. Without such concatenation of elements karate may never have found purchase in mainland Japan.

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Football Beyond the Metropolis

2020-08-06T03:48:00.002-07:00

SHEFFIELD

Football Beyond the Metropolis

It may not be generally known that Sheffield holds, or ought to hold, a very prominent position in the football world. Perhaps in no other town in the kingdom (London, of course, excepted) is the game played to anything like the extent to which it is in Sheffield. There are now fourteen clubs in the town, almost every cricket club having a football club connected with it. —Sporting Life, 18671

It was this enthusiasm to play football that animated Nathaniel Creswick and William Prest when they founded Sheffield FC in 1857. As with the founders of all the other clubs formed at this time, both were members of their local middle class. Creswick was a solicitor whose father owned a silver-plating business and Prest was a wine merchant. Both were members of Sheffield Cricket Club who thought that football would be a good way of keeping fit during the winter. Sheffield, like its rival and near-neighbor Nottingham, had developed a vibrant cricketing culture, and Creswick and Prest soon found that their new football club did not lack for members. It quickly outgrew informal agreements about how to play football and decided to design its own set of rules.

Although none of its leading members had attended a public school, they had been educated in local private schools and the club saw itself as a socially elite institution. Emulation of their social superiors has long been a defining characteristic of the British middle classes and the Sheffield footballers were no exception. So, to inform their discussions about

football rules, they wrote to all of the public schools asking for a copy of their football rulebooks.2 Having compared the rules of each school, the club picked out those elements it liked, combined them with its own ideas and in October 1858 voted to adopt what would become known as the Sheffield rules of football.

Over the past two decades or so, these rules have become soccer’s version of the William Webb Ellis myth. Just as rugby union promoted the myth of Ellis picking up the ball and running with it during a game of football at Rugby School in 1823 – without a shred of evidence – to explain the birth of rugby, so too have soccer fans pointed to the Sheffield football rules as being the true origins of the modern game. Uncomfortable with the fact that what is often called the ‘people’s game’ was founded by the upper- middle class administrators of the Football Association, many soccer supporters have looked to Sheffield rules as a pure kicking and non-handling form of football untouched by the public schools. But such a belief, like the Webb Ellis myth, has no foundation in reality. This can be seen when the wording of the 1858 Sheffield rules is compared to those of a leading English public school [in brackets]:

1 Kick off from the middle must be a place kick. [vi. Kick off from middle must be a place.]

2 Kick-out must not be from more than twenty-five yards out of goal. [vii. Kick out must not be from more than ten yards of our goal if a placekick, not more than twenty-five yards if a punt, drop or knock on.]

3 Fair catch is a catch direct from the foot of the opposite side and entitles a free kick. [i. Fair catch is a catch direct from the foot.]

4 Charging is fair in case of a place kick, with the exception of kick off, as soon as a player offers to kick, but may always draw back unless he has actually touched the ball with his foot. [ix. Charging is fair in case of a place kick, as soon as the ball has touched the ground.]

Far from Sheffield rules being free of public school influence, the rules in brackets are direct quotations from the 1845 Laws of Football Played at Rugby School.

The links between Sheffield and Rugby School rules go even deeper. Sheffield’s Rule 8, forbidding the ball from being picked up from the ground, was common among rugby clubs and appears in the 1862 Rugby School rules. Moreover, Sheffield rules did allow the ball to be handled by outfield players. Rule 3 allowed catching with hands if the ball was caught on the full in what was known as a ‘fair catch’, a term still in use in American football and which became known as a ‘mark’ in rugby and Australian

Rules. Rule 9 allowed a bouncing ball to be stopped by the hand, is a variation on the Rugby School rule of allowing a bouncing ball to be caught. Rule 10, ‘No goal may be kicked from touch, nor by free kick from a fair catch’, is also based on Rule 5 of the 1845 Rugby School rules, which also allow a goal to be scored from a fair catch. The eleventh of the Sheffield rules, defining when a ball is in touch and how it should be returned to play, uses the same wording as Rugby’s 1862 rules, with the exception that a Rugby player was also allowed to throw the ball in to himself. Even Sheffield’s Rule 6, prohibiting the ball being ‘knocked on’ with the hand and penalizing it with a free kick, appears with slightly different wording in Rule 11 of the 1862 rugby rules. Only Sheffield’s Rules 5 and 7, forbidding pushing, hacking, tripping, holding or pulling a player over, have no link with Rugby School rules.4 This may possibly suggest that they objected to the roughness of the rugby game, but this was also true of some adult rugby clubs, many of whom banned hacking and tripping, as did the Rugby Football Union when it was formed in 1871.

This is not to suggest that Sheffield football was a version of the Rugby School game. Like trying to appreciate the taste of food simply by reading a recipe book, it is impossible to understand how a game was played merely from its written rules. But the similarity of Sheffield and Rugby School rules does highlight the fact that differences taken for granted today did not exist in the 1850s and 1860s. Far from being committed exclusively to a kicking game, Sheffield FC had no objections to playing Rugby style matches until at least the late 1860s. In 1863 they played Garrison FC under rules that allowed ‘striking and throwing the ball’. The following year they played home and away matches against Leeds Rugby Club using ‘rules [that] were of a mongrel type, neither rugby nor association’, according to Leeds’ founder J.G Hudson. In 1868 they played against Manchester FC, then as now a rugby club, losing the rugby match by one goal and eight touchdowns to nil in Manchester but winning the home game by two rouges to nil. It was not until 1876 that Sheffield FC played its last rugby match, against Hull FC.

For almost ten years from 1859 to 1868, the Sheffield game allowed players to score a ‘rouge’, a rule taken directly from Eton’s field football game. A rouge was scored ‘by the player who first touches the ball after it has been kicked between the rouge flags [which were placed twelve feet away at the side of each goalpost]’. Touching the ball down with the hand clearly has nothing in common with modern soccer, although Australian Rules football still has extra posts called ‘behind posts’ and Canadian football retains the term rouge for a ball kicked into the end zone and not returned. The similarity of this rule to rugby can be seen quite clearly in the match report of the 1867 Youdan Cup final, which was won by Hallam FC, who scored two rouges to Norfolk FC’s nil. Bell’s Life described Hallam’s first rouge:

The touchdown became such an important part of Sheffield football during this period that it often became the most important way of scoring, as in 1860 when Sheffield FC defeated the 58th Regiment club by a goal and ten rouges to a goal and five rouges.6 In some games, the rule was varied to allow the player who touched down the ball to take an unimpeded kick at goal, just as was the case at Rugby School.7 The fair catch remained a feature of the Sheffield FA’s rules even after the FA had abolished it.

But, as would become the case wherever people played any type of football, the rules under which the game was conducted did not determine its popularity. Five years after Sheffield FC had been formed, there were over a dozen clubs playing football in the Sheffield area. In 1867 twelve clubs – most of them based in local communities such as Broomhall, Hallam, Heeley, Norton and Pitsmoor – formed the Sheffield Football Association to organise regular fixtures. That same year its teams took part in the Youdan Cup, a knock-out tournament sponsored by local theatre owner Thomas Youdan. The final, which was won by Hallam’s two touchdowns, attracted a crowd of 3,000 people. The following year another knock-out competition, the Cromwell Cup, was played for by four sides and once again sponsored by a local theatrical entrepreneur, the incongruously named Oliver Cromwell. This combination of regular competition between clubs representing their local communities, the crowds that matches attracted and the regular discussion of football matters in the press meant that Sheffield was the first city to develop something resembling a modern football culture, which within a generation was replicated in almost every town and city in Britain. Why was Sheffield the first to develop a football culture? Partly because the economy of the city in the first half of the nineteenth century was based on small-scale, highly skilled metal manufacturing, which meant that the working classes had more leisure time and disposable income to watch and, albeit in a limited fashion at first, take part in sport. The city was also one where ‘Saint Monday’, the tradition of workers not going to work on Monday, lasted into the late nineteenth century.8 Perhaps because of this, Sheffield already had a vibrant, pre-existing sporting culture based on cricket. Since the 1820s, it had been the stronghold of cricket in Yorkshire and second only to Nottingham as the most important cricketing centre outside of London. In 1821 George Steer and son-in-law cricketer William Woolhouse built and opened a cricket ground to the east of the city, which by August 1824 was reportedly attracting crowds of between 15,000 and 20,000 for major matches. The enthusiasm for organised sport and the desire of local businessmen to profit from it saw new cricket grounds being opened at Hyde Park and Cross Scythes by the end of the decade. Sheffield cricket was resolutely commercial, matches being played for stake money with sums of £100 being common and even £1,000 not being unknown.9 It was also a game for all the classes, as demonstrated by the Darnall club’s attempts to attract the working classes in 1829 by charging tradesmen sixpence and ‘working people’, by which they meant labourers, just threepence. And, as would be the case with soccer and rugby in the last decades of the nineteenth century, professional cricketers become local heroes, none more notably than the Sheffield-born all-rounder Tom Marsden, one of the first local professionals and one of the finest exponents of single-wicket cricket of his age, regularly attracting five-figure crowds to his matches.

Many of Sheffield’s early footballers were also cricketers and its clubs were also cricket clubs, such as Hallam FC, or closely associated with them, and Sheffield’s football culture was built on this pre-existing sporting tradition. Youdan and Cromwell’s sponsorship of cup competitions was simply a continuation of the long relationship between local cricket and the entertainment industries. Even the formation of the Sheffield FA had a commercial impetus, as its clubs sought to come together to buy cheaper advertising space from local newspapers and provide a cost-effective insurance scheme for its players. The same point can be made about Nottingham, where the strength of local cricket culture provided an infrastructure for the development of football in the early 1860s. When the newly formed Nottingham FC hosted Sheffield FC at the start of 1865 its side included Richard Daft and George Parr, two of the greatest cricketers of the Victorian era and experienced sporting entrepreneurs.11 The fact that the football club became known as the Nottinghamshire County FC underlines the extent to which it sought to follow the pattern of cricket.12 As the newfound enthusiasm for football slowly began to blossom from the late 1850s, Sheffield and Nottingham already had in place the customs and structures that would nourish this new sporting phenomenon.

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Origins of Karate

2020-07-06T10:52:00.005-07:00

Origins of Karate

KARATE IN OKINAWA

Regardless of whether one adopts a stratified view of te versus Toudi, or otherwise, during the 19th-century the diverse variants of martial practice in Okinawa coalesced into two main schools of karate. Conventionally, these two styles were referred to as Shorin-ryu and Shorei-ryu respectively (Mottern 2001). At this time these practices were not seen as karate but rather still as Toudi, and the term karate was only circulated in Japan after a demonstration in 1916 by the Okinawan karate master, Funakoshi Gichin (Mottern 2001). From this perspective, the art of “karate” is taken to be quite clearly a creation of the 20th-century and suggests that karate is a relatively modern invention rather than an ancient martial art (Chan 2000). On the other hand, what has become known as karate may only have been recognized under that name in the 20th-century, whereas before, the 'same' practice went under the name of Toudi or te. Regardless of the name, the physical sequences of karate set it apart from the martial practices of Japan, making it a foreign martial art to the Japanese of the mainland. More importantly, it was the structural and procedural differences that karate, as a cultural practice developed in an Okinawan context, would have to overcome to successfully spread to Japan:

They taught karate informally in Okinawa

Karate on Okinawa was taught in an informal manner. Students were assigned tokuigata (individual forms) at the discretion of the instructor. No ranking system existed, so there were no established criteria for advancement. Students were either sempai (senior) or kohai (junior). No recognizable uniform (gi) was used. Karate was indiscriminately referred to as di, bu (martial arts), or Toudi. This individualism was alien to the Japanese concept of wa (harmony). Japanese martial arts were structured around the ryûha system propagated by the Dainippon Butokukai. A ryûha included an historical continuity, methodological transmission, and pedagogical style. (Mottern 2001: 235)

Here we see clearly some of the ways that Okinawan culture should not be historically equated to Japanese culture. Though the Japanese government has put considerable effort into conforming the Okinawan people to the ideals of the Japanese mainland (Morris-Suzuki 1996; Amdur 2001; Madis 2003), the two populations historically belonged to separate political entities with distinct cultural heritages.

It is true that today Okinawans share many beliefs, ideals and practices with the mainland Japanese, but at the beginning of the 20th-century, before many of the Japanese assimilation programs had been established, the Okinawan culture and the practice of karate would have appeared alien to the Japanese from the mainland. As Ko & Yang have remarked upon the transmission of Asian martial arts to the West, “In collectivist cultures, the self is construed in interdependent terms as a connected, relational entity that is expected to fit in by maintaining interpersonal relationships and group harmony. On the other hand, in individualistic cultures, the self is construed as an independent entity” (2008: 14).

Due to proximity and cultural exchange, it would be a mistake to assume that Okinawa was an “individualistic culture” in the same sense that Ko & Yang are using to describe Western cultures of the present day. Still, the intimate, pragmatic practices of Okinawan karate required fundamental changes to transition to Japan where they were ritualized, formalized and militarized. These modifications were not always carried out at the direct order of the Japanese government. Often, they were in response to the observations of individual Okinawan masters who felt that changes were necessary for the further dissemination of the art, including recognition of karate's legitimacy by the populations of mainland Japan (Mottern 2001). Itosu Anko and Miyagi Chojun were influential in the simplification of the system and its dissemination through the development of their series of Pinan and Gekesai dai kata, respectively. In 1901, Itosu introduced karate into the physical education program at the Shuri Jinjo Shôgakkô (Elementary School). “His continued efforts on behalf of karate eventually led to its being established as a part of the physical education curriculum throughout the Okinawan school system” (Mottern 2001:245). Though examples such as Itosu and Chojun illustrate the role of individual agency in modifying karate, the structural setting that the Okinawan art found itself in vis-a-vis the government and culture of mainland Japan should not be neglected.

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Where is karate from

2020-07-06T10:36:00.003-07:00

OKINAWA (Motherland of Karate)

The Ryukyu Kingdom was not a nation apart, but rather a participant in cultural exchange with its neighbors, most notably the Japanese and Chinese. If Okinawa was able to maintain a relative autonomy even though it was the site of exogenous cultural influences combining or playing off of the host community, then is it any surprise if karate, as a practice, defies attempts to be classified as simply Japanese, Chinese or Okinawan in descent? Krug's positioning of Okinawa eloquently stresses the ideas of exchange and flux, but he ascribes all agency to the foreign influences on Okinawa:

Caught in the middle of the turbulent history of Sino-Japanese realtionships, invaded during the Japanese civil wars and in 1945 by the Allied Forces, Okinawa has been constantly transformed and its cultural practices threatened by the waves of different cultures that washed over the island. Thus, from its inception, karate was never a single thing but an evolving set of practices linked to local knowledge as well as prevailing cultural beliefs. It was, as well, actively evolving in many directions and idiolects or styles (Krug 2001: 396).

The syncretic nature of karate (Donohue 1993) is in large part linked to the different periods of intense cultural interaction (an academic euphemism for invasion and occupation and/or domination in this context), between Ryukyu and China, or Ryukyu and Japan at different times. These interactions became more regularized, following the consolidation of mainland Japan by Ieyasu Tokugawa.

At this time, Japan and China both viewed Ryukyu as one of their vassal kingdoms (Kerr 2000), and in the years directly following the consolidation of mainland Japan in 1603, the Satsuma clan of Kyushu launched an offensive upon the Ryukyu Kingdom in the name of the Tokugawa Shogunate. In 1609, the Satsuma clan invaded the Ryukyu islands and captured Shuri Castle on the island of Okinawa in May of the same year (Friman 1998). This military action and the beginning of formal oversight by the Japanese mitigated the influence that China had previously exerted upon the Ryukyu Kingdom. Mottern contends that following this conquest, there were many routes for Japanese martial practice and implements to enter the Okinawan culture and lead to the development of te, perhaps through Ryukyu vassal lords traveling to Kyushu to acquire military training by the Satsuma (2001: 288).

In contrast to this view- in what Tessa Morris-Suzuki calls 'the maintenance of difference'- the Japanese overlords instructed their Ryukyu subjects to wear their “distinctive brocade robes, strange headgear” and carry their “Chinese weaponry” so that they could not “'be mistaken for Japanese'” (1996: 84) when visiting the royal court. Clearly, if the Okinawans had “Chinese Weaponry”, and were known for having such weaponry, then this casts some suspicion on the claims that the weapons system within te comes from distinctively Japanese origins. On the other hand and in support of Mottern's contentions, the Ryukyu emissaries from Okinawa had to be instructed to bring their distinctive clothing and weapons. For some reason, the members of the Shogunate felt they must take deliberate steps to prevent the Okinawans from showing up with Japanese weapons and in Japanese clothing, thus challenging the whole demarcation between superior and subordinate cultures. This would suggest that, even at this time, the difference between Japanese and Okinawan was negotiable.

Culture and nations are often envisioned as monolithic, enduring, structural entities that socialize and normalize their participants. Anthropologists have brought this understanding of structural entities into question (Featherstone 1990; Appadurai 1990), arguing that such structural entities are, upon closer inspection, shown to be items in flux. When such constructs are viewed as malleable frameworks the way that participants make us of these frameworks, adapting and modifying them to their own ends, comes into focus.

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The Gentleman Game (football)

2020-07-06T08:20:00.001-07:00

THE GENTLEMAN'S GAME

If cricket on an Eton Field trained up our youth for Waterloo, Sure Rugby’s noble game has sealed the fate of many a battle too. “Sunk in ease” cry croaking ravens, England’s nodding to her fall, Know ’tis false, ye tim’rous cravens, For her sons still love football. —The Goal, 18731

There was, however, one section of British society where football had

become hugely popular during the first half of the nineteenth century: its elite private schools. By the time of the Great Reform Act of 1832, which gave the vote to the middle classes, football was on its way to becoming an essential part of the education of young men educated at Britain’s public schools, as the elite private schools were known. Eton, Charterhouse, Harrow, Rugby, Westminster and Winchester each developed their own distinctive versions of the game. The undermining of football’s plebeian traditions by the industrial revolution allowed the public schools and the middle classes to embrace football as a symbol of the new ideology of Muscular Christianity. Freed from the physical and social dangers of playing football against those they saw as their social inferiors, these upper-middle class schoolboys took up the game with gusto. This should not be surprising. Public schools were often located in places where folk football had a long history. In the town of Rugby in the English midlands, for example, football had been played every New Year’s Day since the early 1700s and as late as 1845 ‘six tailors of Rugby’ challenged teams in the area to a match for a prize of £5.2 For school authorities, football was welcomed as an outlet for the

excess physical energies of adolescent youths. For the boys, the violence with which they played was a source of pride: ‘the savage “rouge” or the wild broken bully, would cause a vast sensation amongst our agricultural friends’, an Old Etonian remembered in the 1860s.3 By the middle of the nineteenth century, the public schools had imbued football, and also cricket, with a moral purpose and educational role that would have been unthinkable in the gambling-obsessed Georgian era. The ethos that underpinned Britain’s elite schools was Muscular Christianity, which placed vigorous and masculine physical activity at the centre of its character-building outlook. At root it was an expression of British nationalism, rendering the teachings of the Church of England into a credo that both justified and maintained the principles of the British Empire. Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School from 1828 to 1841, had popularised a Muscular Christian educational philosophy that sought to create ‘healthy minds in healthy bodies’ which, although he personally had no interest in sport, valued games as importantly as academic studies. Healthy minds were those seen as free of sin and moral weakness, and vigorous football was promoted as a reliable antidote to the great triangular fear of the Victorian public schools: masturbation, effeminacy and homosexuality. ‘Every school ought to regard it as part of its duty to and mission to rid itself almost entirely of delicate complexions, narrow chests and feeble limbs’, declared Loretto headmaster and prominent Scottish rugby official H.H. Almond.4 Football therefore came to be seen as a vital part of the training of the boys and young men who would grow up to lead the government, industry and empire. Other than two teams, two goals and a ball, every school’s football rules were unique. Even the ball was not uniform: Eton’s ball was round but much smaller than a modern soccer ball, Harrow’s resembled a large cushion and Rugby’s was an irregular ovoid. Offside differed, in that Harrow and Rugby deemed any attacking player in front of the ball to be offside, whereas the Eton game deemed a player to be onside if there were at least three defenders between him and the goal. Almost all schools allowed a ball in the air to be caught with the hands but Eton only allowed the hands to be used to knock the ball down. When the ball went over the touchline, play at Eton and Winchester was restarted with a form of scrum, known as a ‘bully’ and a ‘hot’, respectively, at Harrow and Winchester by kick-in and at Rugby by a right-angled throw-in. A ball that went behind the goal line resulted in a

bully in front of goal at Eton, a kick for goal at Rugby or a kick-out by the defending side at Harrow and Charterhouse. To complicate matters, the ‘Wall Game’ version of Eton football consisted of little more than endless scrummaging as the ball was slowly propelled back and forth against a wall

towards rarely reached goals. All schools decided matches solely by goals, except for the Eton field game, which also counted ‘rouges’, the equivalent of a try in the Rugby game.5 The rules of the Rugby School version of football were printed for the first time in 1845, and those for the Eton field game appeared in print in 1847. But these circulated only among boys of the two schools and had little influence on the spread of public school football into the wider population. The book that played a major role in expanding the popularity of football was not a rulebook but a novel, Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Written by Thomas Hughes, an old boy of Rugby School, it was published in 1857. Based on his own experiences of life at Rugby, Hughes’ book depicted the values of Muscular Christianity as a boy’s adventure yarn, replete with trials of courage and tests of character, a portrait of a saintly Thomas Arnold, and stern warnings against bullying, effeminacy and ‘funk’, as cowardice was known. Hughes’ book portrayed football as a school for moral education and character building through the simple technique of writing the most thrilling descriptions of a football match yet committed to print. It was a runaway best-seller. A guide for boys about to be packed off to boarding school, a yardstick by which parents could judge a school and a handbook for aspirational private schools, Tom Brown made football not only morally respectable but also fashionable. It brought Rugby School and its version of football to a new, national audience. This prestige was enhanced several-fold in 1864 when the Clarendon Commission published the report of its inquiry into the state of England’s leading public schools. It lauded Rugby above all other schools, declaring it as ‘a national institution, as being a place of education and a source of influence for the whole Kingdom’.6 Thanks to a best-selling novel and a Royal Commission seal of approval, the Rugby version of football was now identified in the public mind with morality, education and excitement. This was the reason why Rugby School’s football survived and flourished as an adult sport. None of the other public school codes of football survived outside of their native environments, despite the social prestige of the institutions that produced them. Although elements of Eton and Harrow’s rules were incorporated into the rules of the FA, the FA’s game was very different to that seen on any public school playing field. Rugby’s sense of separateness from other schools’ football was heightened by the crusading moral certitude that the school imbued in its pupils, causing ‘Old Rugbeians’, as its former pupils were known, to disdain those who did not share its traditions. This was a not unimportant factor when it came to understanding the opposition to its style of football. Antipathy to Rugby School football rules often reflected public hostility to the widely perceived arrogance of its alumni.

The enthusiasm for football among public schoolboys often did not diminish as they began their adult lives. The game that had meant so much to them at school now became the focus of their adult recreation. The mid-1800s were a period of widespread concern about the health hazards of living in the rapidly growing but dirty and polluted industrial cities. The sedentary lifestyles of the new legions of office-bound lawyers, accountants, clerks and other administrators of the burgeoning capitalist economy spurred the formation of gymnasia, athletic clubs and football teams. And, as with the other male clubs, these new football clubs constituted an entirely masculine kingdom. They provided a respite from the new world of Victorian middle-class domesticity, offering young men a haven from women, children and family duty, while giving them the opportunity to display an overtly masculine physicality in defiance of contemporary fears of softness and effeminacy. Football was not only fashionable, it had also become, perhaps more importantly, respectable. Between the publication of Tom Brown’s Schooldays in 1857 and the formation of the FA at the end of 1863, numerous football clubs would be formed by privately educated young men, including Edinburgh Academicals (1857), Sheffield (1857), Liverpool (1857), Blackheath (1858), Richmond (1861), Wanderers (1859), Manchester (1860), Crystal Palace (1861), Lincoln (1862), Bradford (1863), Royal Engineers (1863) and the Civil Service (1863). Although football supporters have long debated which was the ‘first’ adult club to be formed, the reality was that the sudden creation of clubs to play football in the 1850s and 1860s was part of a burgeoning new associational world of social and business networks of the Victorian middle classes. Between 1830 and 1870, fifteen of what would become seen as the most prestigious elite gentleman’s clubs were formed in London, such as the Garrick Club (1831), East India Club (1849) and the Hurlingham Club (1869). In the provinces, the same social clustering took place, and as can be seen from the previously mentioned roll-call of football clubs formed in industrial cities, the game was one of its most conspicuous beneficiaries. Perhaps the earliest example of these new middle-class football clubs was that formed in Edinburgh by John Hope in 1824. He had played football at Edinburgh’s High School and, on moving to what is now Edinburgh University and discovering that the game wasn’t played there, formed his own ‘football’ club. Composed largely of young Edinburgh solicitors, Hope’s club lasted for seventeen years playing internal matches against each other.7 This would be the initial pattern for all clubs of the mid-Victorian era. Liverpool members would divide into Rugby and Cheltenham old boys versus the rest, Bradford played captain’s side versus secretary’s side, and many clubs played fair versus dark, married against single, and when all else

failed, A-M versus N-Z or some other alphabetical adversarial arrangement. Clubs made no effort to attract spectators and paid little attention to those who did watch. None of the twenty-one provincial football clubs listed in the 1868 Football Annual charged an entrance fee to watch a match. Indeed, admission to some of Sheffield FC’s early matches was by invitation only. The first football clubs were precisely that: associations of young men organised solely for the enjoyment of their members. The football played by these clubs was neither soccer nor rugby as we know them today. The obvious modern differentiation between the two football codes – that football is a kicking game and rugby is largely a handling game – cannot be extended back to the 1850s or 1860s.8 Clear differentiation between the association and rugby codes did not emerge until the 1870s. So, for example, handling the ball and passing it by hand were a minor part of the Rugby School version of football. Even when the Rugby Football Union was formed in 1871, the use of hands was subordinate to dribbling and kicking the ball. Play revolved around scrummaging and kicking to set up scrummages. Forwards, who would usually comprise fifteen of what were twenty-a-side adult teams until 1877, aimed to break through their opponents by dribbling the ball with their feet through the scrum. Until 1886 a rugby match could only by won by the side scoring the most goals. Conversely, scrum-type struggles for the ball were common in Eton and Winchester schools’ football games, and references to ‘scrimmages’ are not uncommon in reports of matches played under Sheffield Association rules.9 Far from being a ‘handling code’ at this time, Rugby School’s football rules severely limited handling the ball. If the ball was caught on the full from a kick – a ‘fair catch’ – the catcher was allowed to kick the ball unhindered by the opposing side, as was the case in the early rules of both the FA and the Sheffield FA. But if the ball was on the ground, it could not be picked up unless it was bouncing. A rolling or stationary ball could not be touched with the hand. Using the feet to propel the ball was a major feature of the football games that emerged from Rugby School, and, conversely, catching and handling the ball was also common among those games that would later become associated with soccer. In fact, all forms of football that were played in the 1850s and 1860s had far more in common than that which set them apart. Kicking and handling the ball differed only by degree. Rather than being two distinct codes, there was one football with a spectrum of views about how it could be played. Outside of a few public school partisans, rules were a matter of pragmatism and subordinate to the desire to play the game. The view of one of the founders of the Hull club (today’s Hull FC rugby league side), William Hutchinson, that ‘we played any mortal code possible with other clubs away

from home so long as we could get a game of some sort’, would have been widely endorsed. Hull’s first away match was under FA rules at Lincoln in 1866 and, despite being known as a rugby club, they regularly played against FA sides, so much that when the Nottinghamshire Guardian called for the formation of a Midlands football association, it included Hull alongside Nottingham, Lincoln and Newark as one of the leading clubs of the region.10 Stoke Ramblers, the forerunner of Stoke City, played Sheffield rules against clubs in Derbyshire and South Yorkshire, and rugby matches against the Congleton and Leek clubs in their first season. Sale FC committed themselves in 1870 to play association and rugby on alternate Saturdays.11 Even rugby-playing Bradford still set aside two Saturdays a season on their fixture list for ‘association practice’ as late as 1873. Like Blackheath, London’s Civil Service FC was a founder member of both the FA and the RFU. Manchester FC, arguably Lancashire’s most socially prestigious rugby club, entered the FA Cup in 1877. Clapham Rovers were so successful at both rugby and association that they were not only a founding member of the RFU in 1871 but also won the FA Cup in 1880. The fluid nature of the rules of the game at this time and the lack of what might be termed ‘code-patriotism’ is exemplified by Bramham College, a small private school in West Yorkshire. It played its own code of rules (which had soccer-style goals, rugby’s offside and ‘fair catch’ rules, and allowed the ball to be propelled forward by the runner bouncing the ball in front of him, as in Australian Rules) and was an early member of the FA, but its old boys were founders of Bradford, Huddersfield and Hull rugby clubs.12 Ultimately, the vast majority of footballers just wanted to play a game – and codes of rules were merely a means to this end.

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THE NATURE OF KARATE (Karate)

2020-07-05T13:02:00.000-07:00

THE NATURE OF KARATE

Though often viewed as a only a system of physical sequences, for many practitioners karate is not only a bodied practice but also, “exists within a framework of ideas, knowledges, beliefs, and practices drawn from the cultures in which it appears” (Krug 2001: 395; see also Donohue 1993; Friman 1996; and Ashkenazi 2002). To many, the practice of karate is not merely the acquisition of physical skill and ability but also a path to self-improvement and an identification to a cultural and symbolic practice as a component of their self-identity (Donohue 1993).

Even when Keenan remarks that “Martial arts can easily be taken out of their East Asian context, shorn of all spiritual or humanistic value, and practiced merely for athletic prowess or street-smart fighting” (1989: 285), he does so with the implication that something is lost in the process. Such a shift is not merely a slight modification of practice, but a change so dramatic and fundamental that it transforms the entire enterprise- divorcing it from its antecedent irrevocably, and creating something different. This poses the question “what can be changed in a cultural practice before it is no longer a variant, but rather an entirely different practice all together?”

If, as Donohue contends, “Martial arts organizations are... essentially symbolic vehicles in that they enmesh participants in a constellation of actions and ideas which create a sense of identity and community” (1992: 88), then we are faced with the possibility that though remarkably able to adapt to new cultural surroundings, such a symbolically intermeshed practice runs the risk of quite easily becoming ungrounded in its 'original' culture. The central importance of such symbolic, structural and procedural practices, as they relate to this paper, are predicated upon the understanding that karate is the expression of cultural ideals that typify Okinawan culture. To inspect this claim requires a properly framed understanding of the proposed origins of karate, and the historical setting in which the practice arose.

Origins of Karate

The origins of the art known as karate were not recorded in detail, but we are offered some information through oral tradition and occasional written references. From the fragments gathered, an official, though contested, narrative has emerged:

Karate is a creole of practices that were combined together on the island of Okinawa. Originally referred to as te, karate combined indigenous fighting techniques with knowledge and practices from China, Japan and possibly from Thailand, the Philippines and other countries in the area. However, the major influence was Chinese. (Krug 2001: 396)

According to this most inclusive of theories (including the possibility of influences from India, Korea and other countries as well as those listed by name), karate is an amalgamation of practices and techniques, from all corners of Asia, that were incorporated into the Okinawan art of te. In contrast, Mottern contends, “Karate should not be confused with te. The original name for karate was Toudi, or Tote (Tang hand), denoting its roots in the Chinese martial arts” (2001: 366). Though the connection of Toudi with Chinese martial arts is well established, it is believed by some commentators that te had a distinct cosmogony, springing from interactions between the Okinawan ruling class and feudal Japan (Mottern 2001).

Toudi and te may have shared the islands of Okinawa, while remaining distinct, stratified and separately connected to China or Japan respectively. Alternatively, they may have been sister disciplines that borrowed from the same sources and intermingled as they co-developed in the Ryukyu Islands.Though the definitive lineage of the art that became karate is contested, the interaction and cross-pollination of combat practices in the region is one phenomenon that almost all commentators agree led to the coalescence of karate (Donohue 1993; Krug 2001; Mottern 2001; Madis 2003). It should be remembered that there was trade and travel between all three kingdoms (Ryukyu, China, and Japan) and that, in such interactions, cultural practices were shared in addition to trade goods.

From its outset, karate was not merely the product of one nation or one culture, but rather the outcome of interactions in East Asia between groups sharing frequent and prolonged contact. Though this suggests that karate is a practice separate from culture, such an assumption would be a mistake. That karate was drawn from many sources does not diminish the importance of place when we speak of the formation of karate. An intangible cultural item like karate is not created by a certain culture (in this case the Okinawans) out of whole cloth, but is rather drawn from sources both in that culture's history and in the exposure that particular culture has to other ways of doing.

Though karate did not spring wholly formed on the Ryukyu Islands, it is not necessary for it to have done so to be considered an Okinawan cultural practice. The question of ultimate genesis misplaces the importance of a cultural practice on its origin rather than on its relation to the society and culture in which it is practiced. Through whatever channels it traveled, karate became an Okinawan cultural practice when it was recognized by that culture as indicative of their group identity- when it could successfully bear, transmit and embody their conceptions of shared identity

d identity. It is this relation to Okinawan society, rather than its origin within that society, that makes karate an important piece of Okinawa's intangible cultural heritage. This relationship is constituted by the overlaying of cultural beliefs and process onto the apparatus of the practice (i.e. the human body), and its limitations (Csordas 1990). This combination of objective parameters and subjective motivations creates meanings and purposes within karate that are unique to Okinawa. But this does not foreclose the possibility of other ways of conducting the practice in different cultural settings.

What is karate? (karate)

2020-07-04T07:25:00.001-07:00

side kick

KARATE

what is karate?

Karate is popularly held to be a form of unarmed combat that coalesced in Okinawa, (known then as the Ryukyu kingdom,) from influences of Chinese and Japanese origin, which were combined with the Okinawan indigenous art of te, or “hand”. This amalgam developed through a “sustained cultural cross-pollination with Japan and China... throughout Ryukyu history” (Mottern 2001: 240) due, in large part, to Okinawa's geographical positioning between China and Japan, and its mercantile trade network that stretched as far as Java (Kerr 2000). Though the finer points of karate's origin are disputed, this encompassing description is the framework that will be employed in examining the history of the art before it became the object of historical record.

In the early part of the 20th-century, karate began to establish itself in mainland Japan, (meaning in this case the islands in the Japanese archipelago aside from the Ryukyu Islands and Hokkaido). It has since that time come to be understood by many outside of Japan as a Japanese martial art, rather than one that is specifically Okinawan. This paper takes up the contested nature of karate among its practitioners, who may variously describe karate as: 1) an Okinawan martial art, 2) a Japanese martial art or 3) a Japanese martial art differentiated by its Okinawan origin. The broad spectrum of interpretations ascribed to karate derives from the art's intersection with the ways that Okinawa and the people of Okinawa are viewed in relation to the Japanese mainland. The following work will seek to untangle some of the historical antecedents for the varied perspectives given to the practice of karate.

Japan is known for its martial arts throughout the world and, as Chan states, “apart from electronics, cars and cuisine, [martial] arts represent the greatest export of Japan and are seen by their practitioners worldwide as not merely emblematic of a culture, but derived directly from that culture's history and spiritual philosophy” (2000: 69). Karate may be positioned within the constellation of Japanese martial arts, but can be represented as such only through the flattening of any difference between Okinawan and Japanese culture or through the modification of the practice itself. In order for karate to be considered a Japanese martial art, a shift of framing from the Okinawan culture and its traditions to those of mainland Japan- a cultural translation of the practice- was required. The introduction of elements from the Japanese martial tradition, and a contraction of the perceived difference between the two cultures and their respective populaces, combined to allow karate to establish itself in mainland Japan.

This process was not merely the appropriation of a cultural tradition by an invading and dominating foreign presence in the form of the Japanese government. In fact, this translation was also facilitated through acts of individual agency by Okinawans who willingly adopted Japanese martial traditions and identified themselves as Japanese as well as Okinawan. The interesting dynamic of this negotiation in translating the Okinawan art of karate to Japan, a culture with its own rich martial traditions, can be described as either wildly successful or disquietingly effective.

While some maintain the autonomy and cultural rooting of karate as an indigenous art of Okinawa, those in the Japanese government view karate as a Japanese cultural tradition, as is consistent with their view of Okinawa as part of Japan both legally and culturally. The Japanese government includes karate within the constellation of activities covered under the “cultural visa”, which affords visitors an extended stay in Japan if they are there for cultural studies (Ko & Yang 2008). In doing so, the Japanese government sends the clear signal that karate is Japanese, and can be employed as an entrance for visitors into what it views as quintessential Japanese culture, or as an ambassadorial practice when exported abroad.

rnment of Japan, it follows that either Japanese culture would have to have shifted to align with karate's traditions and ideals (informed by its setting in Okinawan culture), or vice versa. Through an examination of the historical relationship between Okinawa and Japan, and specifically that of karate in the early part of the 20th-century, we can elaborate on the practices adapted, removed or adopted in the translation of karate from Okinawa to Japan. Furthermore, we can ask what the ramifications of such changes would be upon the cultural practice itself and how such ramifications may affect the placement of karate within a cultural context.

THE BEGINNING OF FOOTBALL | INCLUDING FOLK FOOTBALL

2020-07-03T07:12:00.006-07:00

(FOOTBALL 2)

BEFORE THE BEGINNING

folk football

Then strip lads, and to it, though sharp be the weather, And if, by mischance, you should happen to fall, There are worse things in life than a rumble on heather, And life is itself but a game at football. —Sir Walter Scott, 18151

The high social status of the men who formed the FA in 1863 would have come as a surprise to most of those who had played the game in previous centuries. Before the industrial revolution football was largely seen as plebeian entertainment, a folk practice that was played regularly on religious holidays and rural festivals.

The first written reference to it in Britain appears to be William Fitzstephen’s preface to his 1174 biography of Thomas à Becket, which describes a Shrovetide game of ball between London apprentices. In the first decade of the fourteenth century Nicholas Farndon, the lord mayor of London, banned football because it caused ‘certain tumults’, and in 1365 Edward III declared a national ban on football and handball because they distracted the population from archery practice.2 Richard II re-imposed the ban in 1388, stating that ‘servants and laboured shall have bows and arrows, and use the same on Sundays and holidays, and leave all playing at ball whether handball or football’. It was the same in Scotland, where the first four King Jameses all banned the sport.

Yet by Shakespeare’s time, football had become such a part of national culture that references to it in literature were not uncommon, perhaps most notably in King Lear when the Earl of Kent taunts a servant as a ‘base football player’.

folk football

Britain was just one of many countries around the world that throughout history have played games we today would call football. In France, ‘soule’ occupied much the same place in popular culture as football did in Britain, while in Italy ‘Calcio Fiorentino’ became a major feature of life in Florence as part of the celebrations of Epiphany and Lent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

But these were merely the most well-known European versions of the game. The simple truth is that most cultures in most regions of the world have played games with a ball that is propelled by hand and foot towards some form of goal. From the Americas to Aboriginal Australia, humans have found limitless pleasure, unbounded fascination and deep satisfaction in playing and watching these games, which they may or may not have called football. In China, Cuju, or Ts’u Chu, emerged from a form of military training as a ceremonial game of the royal court under the Han Dynasty and survived in various forms for 1,500 years. Women occasionally played and apparently in its later years professionals were engaged to play the game. But as with many ancient sports, Cuju was a largely ceremonial game, played at the gatherings of the elite.

Others, like Ulama and the various ball games of Mesoamerica, had a religious or ritual significance. But none of these games were either a direct ancestor or an inspiration for the modern games of football; humanity’s endless desire to play with a ball has always been shaped by the social and economic characteristics of the society it created. In Britain, traditional football was a product of the rhythm and structures of life in a rural society. Matches were staged as local customs during the ebbs and flows of an agricultural economy. Festival games held across Britain and Ireland at Christmas or Shrovetide were often occasions for teams of hundreds to attempt to carry, kick and throw a ball to goals at either end of a village or town.

The Derby Shrovetide game reputedly involved 1,000 men, the Sedgefield game 800, Diss Common in Norfolk 600, while at Alnwick in Northumberland 200 men lined up for the annual match. With such numbers, the playing was similarly large. Goals were three miles apart for the Ashbourne game in Derbyshire, at Workington they were set at Curwen’s Hall at one end of the town and the harbour at the other, while Whitehaven’s goals were set at the docks and a wall outside of the town.

With local pride at stake, few rules and often challenging terrain to navigate, including rivers and streams, the risks of physical injury were considerable, further contributing to football’s reputation for violence and disorder.3 But this was not the only type of football to be played. Some were far more organised and based on clearly defined rules. In 1729 Derbyshire played Gloucestershire in Islington for five guineas; sixty years later the stakes had increased somewhat when Cumberland played Westmoreland in a twenty-two-a-side match at London’s Kennington Common for a thousand guineas.4 In East Anglia from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century ‘camp-ball’ was played on dedicated pitches, known as ‘camping closes’ where ten- or fifteen-a-side teams fought to carry the ball to their opponents’ goal.5 ‘Hurling to goals’ was played in Cornwall between teams of fifteen to thirty players and, like camp-ball, allowed forms of blocking (not unlike modern American football) and required a player to throw the ball to a teammate when tackled.6 Nor was traditional football always entirely restricted to men.

In October 1726 women played a six-a-side match on Bath’s bowling green, married women played unmarried in Inveresk in Midlothian in the late 1700s, and as late as 1866 and 1888 women took part in the annual Uppies versus Doonies match at Kirkwall in Orkney Islands.

7 Although many of the larger matches required the support of the local landowners, the large numbers who gathered to play or watch often aroused suspicion or concern in the authorities. As early as 1480 villagers protested against the enclosure of land in Bethersden in Kent by occupying it and playing with ‘foteballes’.8In 1649 fears that a royalist revolt lay behind ‘a great Foot-ball play near Norwich, where the people were very tumultuous and disorderly’ proved well founded when part of the crowd declared for Charles I.9 And as the enclosure of common lands intensified in the eighteenth century, football again became a pretext for crowds to gather in protest, such as at White Roding, Essex, in 1724, or at Kettering in 1740 when a match served as a pretext for the attempted destruction of a local mill.10 From its earliest times in Britain, football was always, as noted by the early chronicler of sport Joseph Strutt, ‘much in vogue among the common people of England’.11 By the time that Strutt wrote this in 1801 football was increasingly under attack from the economic and social forces that were transforming Britain from a rural agricultural society into an urban industrial power. Enclosures of common lands led to more than 6 million acres of land taken into private ownership between 1750 and 1830, sweeping away many of the traditional customs and leisure activities of village life. As a Suffolk vicar explained in 1844, his parishioners now had

no village green or common for active sports. Some thirty years ago, I am told, they had a right to a playground in a particular field, at certain seasons of the year, and were then celebrated for their football; but somehow or other this right has been lost and the field is now under the plough.12

In countless other towns and villages strenuous efforts were made by businessmen, religious evangelicals and moral reformers to stamp out football games that caused town centres to close or violated the Sabbatarian’s sense of good order. This was formalised in 1835 when the Highways Act banned football being played on roads. Not all footballers went quietly. Attempts to stop Derby’s Shrovetide football match being played were regularly frustrated by determined opposition before it was finally repressed in the 1850s. Football games continued to be played informally in streets, at festivals and during holiday times such as wakes. The 1842 Royal Commission on Children in Mines and Manufactories noted that football was played widely in the West Riding coal fields. These types of football were essentially traditional rural recreations, which persisted in a similar way to quoits, cudgels and Maypole dancing. Occasionally organised football matches did take place in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1829 a fifteen-a-side match was played for prize money of £6 between the Leicestershire villages of Wigston and Blaby. Rochdale staged games between teams dubbed the ‘Body Guards’ and the ‘Fear Noughts’ in the 1840s. On Good Friday 1852 a match between Enderby in Leicestershire and Holmfirth in West Yorkshire was played for £20 at Sheffield’s Hyde Park.13 But these were one-off events arranged for specific occasions – there were no organised competitions or nationally agreed rules other than what had been decided for that particular match.

Organised football matches were few and far between during the first half of the nineteenth century. Even the most assiduous researchers have been able to locate only fifty-eight organised matches played between 1830 and 1859.14 We have no way of measuring the extent to which the playing of football declined during the industrial revolution, because no records were kept and newspaper reports are too fragmentary, but the sheer weight of anecdotal evidence confirms the 1842 judgement of the Nottingham Review that ‘the field games of old England have almost entirely passed away. Football, throwing the quoit, spell and knur, archery have become obsolete and forgotten, like an old fashion in apparel, or a custom known only by a name’.

15 The game’s decline was recognised by footballers themselves. When the landlord of the Hare and Hounds Inn at Bolton offered a fortypound cheese to the winners of a match in January 1847, it was intended ‘to revive the old sport of foot ball’.16 The short-lived gentleman’s club Surrey FC in 1849 was created partly in recognition of the atrophy of football (and wrestling) over the previous decades:

wrestling and football play continued to dwindle, until at length Good Friday became the only day upon which they were brought into operation. . . . its practice had been discontinued in the neighbourhood of the metropolis. The only locality where the game could now be said to exist near to London was that of Kingston

reported Bell’s Life, which went to say that the aim of the club ‘was to restore the equally healthful game of football to that district’.17 The position of football before the 1850s can best be gauged by the fact that sports weeklies such as Bell’s Life, The Field and dozens of local daily newspapers carried regular reports of cricket, boxing, horse racing and many other sports – but almost nothing on football. Newspaper coverage of the game was confined to short and highly irregular reports or advertisements. But that should not be surprising. Outside of the public schools, football was essentially an informal leisure practice or folk custom that had no connection to the highly organised sport of the late Victorian era.18 Insofar as we know anything about the games that were played then, there is nothing to suggest any connection between them and modern football’s rules, playing styles, organisation or cultural meaning. When football did emerge as a mass spectator sport in the last third of the nineteenth century it had been reinvented. Outward appearances can often lead to continuities being imagined where none exist.

The fact that a penguin walks upright on its hind legs does not make it an ancestor of humans. How could football fail to become a major spectator sport before 1860? Why was it that when cricket, boxing and horse racing codified their rules and became commercial spectator attractions in the eighteenth century, football remained a marginal sport? Unlike these sports, football lacked the aristocratic patronage of the ‘Fancy’ – the leisured rich who provided the financial backing to sport in the Georgian era – and was not viewed as a sport that could be commercially exploited through gambling. Its lowly social status and reputation for violence precluded its developing like cricket because young aristocrats would simply not play alongside the common people.

Its ephemeral nature made it unsuitable for gambling, the engine that drove the transformation of cricket, boxing and other eighteenth-century sports. And in striking contrast to the Victorian era, there were no clubs formed to play football, underlining its lack of appeal to the emerging associational culture of the urban middle classes. Without aristocratic patronage or middleclass social networks, there was no force that could standardise the rules of football or impose a governing structure, as the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) had done in cricket or the Jockey Club in horse racing. Moreover, the most popular and therefore the most commercialised sports of the Georgian era were based on individual professionals: the boxer, the jockey, the pedestrian walker or runner and the cricket professional. With the exception of cricket, eighteenth- and early nineteenth–century sport was based on individuals competing against each other.

And even though cricket is a team game, its dominance by aristocratic amateurs on and off the field, together with the fact that no more than a handful of professionals were employed by teams, meant that it did not need a large market of regular paying spectators to financially sustain its teams. The economic basis for the development of the modern football codes – a large population with significant leisure time and disposable income, plus a national transport and communication network to facilitate playing and promoting the game – would not emerge in Britain until the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

WORLD FOOTBALL ASSOCIATION

2020-07-02T04:16:00.003-07:00

FOOTBALL

THE FAILURE OF THE FOOTBALL ASSOCIATION

It has been proposed to hold a sort of ‘Football Congress’ consisting of representatives from the public schools and clubs, who should be empowered to draw up an equitable body of rules adapted for universal use. . . . Until we have a universally acknowledged and accepted code of rules for the regulation of both public and private matches, football can never attain the proud position among the national sports of England [as] the ‘cricket of the winter months’. —Sporting Gazette, 18631

In the history of sport, few organisations have begun so unsuccessfully as the Football Association (FA). Its original goal of uniting all football clubs under one code of rules was a complete failure. Just four years after its formation, even its own members considered winding it up. And for the first decade and a half of its existence, it played second fiddle to rugby football. This was not an auspicious start for what would become the world game.

The FA was founded on 26 October 1863, when representatives of eleven clubs and schools in London answered an advertisement in the weekly Bell’s Life in London for a meeting ‘for the purpose of promoting the adoption of a general code of rules for football’.2 Held at the Freemason’s Tavern in central London’s Great Queen Street, the meeting was intended to be the culmination of a discussion that started in the letters page of The Times at the beginning of October, when a pupil of Eton College called for ‘the framing of set rules for the game of football to be played everywhere’ and that the captains of the football teams of the public schools, universities and ‘one or two London clubs’ should ‘frame rules for one universal game’.3 An animated discussion ensued, with letters from current and former pupils of Harrow, Charterhouse, Winchester and Rugby schools, each largely agreeing with the sentiment but emphasising the superiority of their own school’s code of rules.4 Joining the debate, the Sporting Gazette backed the call for a single set of rules, arguing:

where would be the interest in the [cricket] contests between the elevens of Surrey, Sussex, Kent, Yorkshire, Nottingham and Cambridgeshire if the representatives of these counties has their own private opinion respecting the laws of the game and the duties of umpires?5

Despite this animated debate, when the meeting finally convened at the Freemason’s Tavern none of the public schools were represented, with the exception of Charterhouse, whose football captain Benjamin Hartshorne told the delegates that his school wouldn’t join the new organisation until the other public schools did. This boycott did not merely deprive the new association of prestige. It also made the framing of a set of commonly accepted rules almost impossible. Each of the leading English public schools – Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse, Rugby, Winchester, Westminster and St Paul’s – played football according to its own unique set of rules. Eton even had two codes. One for its ‘Wall Game’ played against a wall in a narrow strip of land five metres wide and 110 metres long, and another for the Field Game, played on a more familiar open pitch. Each school differed in its concept of offside, the extent to which the ball could be handled, the method of scoring, the shape and size of the ball, and much else besides. A school’s method of playing football was a matter of intense pride to past and present pupils, and ideas about the rules of the game were a symbol of each school’s sense of superiority.

The formation of the FA was not the first attempt to design a single code of rules for football. In 1856 the Cambridge University Foot Ball Club, which appears to have been set up in 1846 by former pupils of Eton, Harrow, Rugby and Shrewsbury, had printed a set of rules based on the principle of taking the best of each school’s rules.6 These eleven rules allowed any player to catch the ball and prescribed a liberal offside rule that put a player onside if there were three defenders between him and the goal. These rules gained no support outside of the university and did not deter students from forming separate university clubs devoted to Eton (in 1856), Harrow (1863) and Rugby (1857) football rules. In 1859 the editor of Bell’s Life suggested adopting a single code of rules for football (he proposed those of the Eton field game) but quickly abandoned the suggestion after receiving ‘many other letters on this subject by public schoolmen, but they are so mixed up with abuse of each other that we consider them better unpublished, and the correspondence closed’.7 Other writers, such as the Uppingham School headmaster J.C. Thring, the journalist John Dyer Cartwright and a number of pseudonymous authors also campaigned for football to be played under a universal set of rules.8All of the men who gathered at the Freemason’s Tavern had been educated in the traditions of public school football.9 Their aim was to find a way of framing the schoolboy rules that would allow them to play as adults and popularise the sport among like-minded young middle-class men, thus ensuring that football became part of the social and business networks of the growing professional classes. But now it came to deciding on a universal code the delegates were hamstrung. Not only did they know that their decisions would be ignored by the public schools, but they themselves were no less divided about how to codify a commonly accepted set of rules.

At least three of the ten clubs in attendance, Blackheath Football Club (FC), Blackheath Proprietary School and the Blackheath-based Perceval House, were well-known adherents of Rugby’s School’s football rules. Barnes FC, the club of the FA’s founding secretary, Hull-born solicitor Ebenezer Cobb Morley, regularly played under rugby rules, as did the Civil Service club. Indeed, it was not unusual for adult clubs to play under different rules from week to week in order to have regular matches. Moreover, each delegate was committed to his own ideas about the best way to play football. So when they re-convened in November to discuss the rules they became embroiled in discussions about the efficacy of crossbars, the desirability of ‘fair catching’ and the dangers of unrestrained deliberate kicking of shins, otherwise known as hacking. Such was the intensity of the discussion that it was decided to hold a further, third meeting the following week to arrive at the ‘final settlement of the laws’.

But the next meeting settled nothing. The draft set of rules presented to that third meeting by Ebenezer Morley was something of a football Frankenstein’s monster, hurriedly bolting together various features of the different public school codes. Rule 9 allowed players ‘to run with the ball towards his adversaries’ goal if he makes a fair catch or catches the ball on the first bound’, while Rule 13 permitted a player catching the ball directly from a kick or on its first bounce to pass it by hand to another player. These were two of the key elements of football as played at Rugby School, as was Rule 10, which allowed defenders to ‘be at liberty to charge, hold, trip or hack’ the ball-carrier. Yet the very next rule stated that ‘neither tripping nor hacking shall be allowed’.

If this wasn’t baffling enough, the meeting then plunged into further confusion when Morley, supported by John Alcock, whose education at Harrow School made him no friend of Rugby School football rules, informed the delegates that he had decided to repudiate his own draft rules. Instead, he proposed that the FA should adopt a new code that had recently been drawn up by students at Cambridge University, which Alcock had only just seen before the meeting.12 These rules made no mention of carrying the ball but did forbid tripping and hacking. In a state of bewilderment, the delegates voted both for Morley’s original draft and the Cambridge rules.13 No satisfactory explanation was ever given by Morley and Alcock for their unexpected volte face but it is possible that they felt that the social cachet of aligning the FA with Cambridge University might compensate for their failure to persuade the public schools to join the FA.

A few days later the meeting re-convened yet again and amidst considerable acrimony voted to adopt a revised version of the Cambridge rules that removed any ambiguity about hacking or carrying the ball. Blackheath’s F.M. Campbell appealed for the decision to be delayed until further discussions could take place but was slapped down by Alcock and Arthur Pember, the FA president. Realising that it had been the victim of a coup, Blackheath resigned from the FA, little more than five weeks after being a founding member.14 Eight years later, the club would become one of the founders of the Rugby Football Union (RFU).

Despite getting their own way, Morley and Alcock’s rules were something of a dead letter. Indeed, when ‘first match under the rules of the Football Association’ took place on 19 December 1863, Barnes FC won it by scoring six tries to Richmond’s nil.15 As with Blackheath, Richmond would also abandon the FA and become a founding member of the RFU. As the Barnes’ result shows, the FA’s initial rules bore little resemblance to modern soccer. Their six tries were a consequence of FA Rule 7, which allowed the attacking team to touch down the ball behind their opponents’ goal line for the right for a free kick at goal, just as in rugby. The FA’s 1866 rules even allowed matches to be decided on the number of touchdowns scored if the goal score was equal (rugby did not allow tries to be counted in the score until 1886). Rule 8 legislated for a ‘fair catch’ where a player could catch the ball in the air before it had bounced and, again as in rugby, make a ‘mark’ to gain a free kick. Rule 6 also bore a strong resemblance to rugby in that any player in front of the ball was offside. Throw-ins had to be taken at right angles to the pitch as in rugby’s line-out, and there were no cross bar on the goals.16 Even the Royal Engineers’ club, which would appear in four of the first seven FA Cup finals, played under their own rules that allowed running with the ball. Handling the ball by outfield players was not completely outlawed by the FA until 1870. It would only be through a long process of trial and error that association football, as the FA’s version of football was called, came to resemble modern soccer. Having failed in its mission to unite all football clubs under one set of rules, the FA’s fortunes plummeted. At its first anniversary, the FA minute book noted that ‘no business was conducted’ and its committee did not meet again until February 1866. By 1867 membership numbered just ten clubs, barely half the nineteen that were members in December 1863.17 When John Alcock’s younger brother Charles published the first edition of his Football Annual in 1868 he recorded thirty clubs using the FA’s rules but forty-five playing Rugby School rules, despite the fact that no governing body yet existed for rugby-playing clubs. To no-one’s great surprise, or interest, at the FA’s 1867 annual meeting Morley suggested that they ‘should seriously consider that night whether it were worthwhile to continue the association or dissolve it’.18 However, the other five delegates at the meeting were not quite as pessimistic as Morley and concluded that it would be worthwhile for the association to continue.

Their optimism was vindicated. Within a generation, the FA’s brand of football would become a social, cultural and commercial juggernaut, the most popular sport the world had ever known. But it would also be almost unrecognisable to that small group of men who had met at the Freemason’s Tavern.