What Is the Oldest Judo Manual?

Popular Judo Illustrated by Sumitomo Arima, 1905

I was poking around E-Budo today and I encountered a short but great thread: What is the oldest known Judo manual? Lance Gatling, currently working on The Kano Chronicles, offered the definitive answer, complete with links.

"Arima _Sumitomo_ sensei did write the text for his book possibly as early as the very late 1890's, but the book wasn't publicshed until later.

Arima and his (elder?) brother were of the noble class, students at the Gakushuin where Kano shihan first taught and then became (briefly) the head, then for longer was the academic dean. They were two of the first 5 students of the Kodokan.

Kano shihan recruited Arima to the Fifth High School in Kumamoto to teach and to run the new judo dojo when he was recalled from his assignment to enter the Ministry of Education in 1893.

Various versions of Arima's book remained in print for decades, mostly with the illustrations getting worse and worse as they were copied again and again, and as a sort of period piece into the earilest days of judo; that was well past the time when judo had been heavily changed into the more child-friendly version needed to get it into the school system.

These latter books edited and republished by a son. Arima sensei himself died pretty young [in 1908]."

Thanks to Japan's National Diet Library Digital Collections, you can access a 1905 version of the book, titled 通俗柔道図解 by 有馬純臣 著, which Mr Gatling reports is the oldest, here.

Thanks to Google's book archive, you can access a 430 MB PDF of the 1908 English translation, titled "Judo: Japanese Physical Culture," here.

It's cool to see how this book evolved from line drawings (shown at the top of the post) to photographs, as depicted here.

Judo: Japanese Physical Culture, Sumitomo Arima, 1908

There's also a discussion of the book on E-Judo.

Enjoy reviewing these historical treasures!