Shakunetsu: Chronicles of the Creation of Shintaido, a Japanese Martial Art

Amid the extraordinary, global upheaval of the 1960’s, a group of young Japanese idealists embarked on a quest characteristic of the time: to break down the cultural and class barriers of a venerable and ancient tradition to its essence, reconstitute it, and share it with as many people as possible. The tradition was budo, the traditional martial arts of Japan. The result of their work was shintaido, a radically new discipline, open and generous, forging its own body of tradition and mythos that would be handed down to their successors and, they hoped, benefit the world.
The ambition of this book, a collective biography, is to provide access to these origin stories by presenting the men and women who lived these moments, as they lived them. Their testimony may prove valuable, not only for practitioners of shintaido and martial arts enthusiasts but also as primary source material for scholars of the human sciences, particularly sociologists codifying the knowledge-to-exist of a culture.

About the AUTHOR:
Pierre Quettier is a retired professor from the University of Paris 8, an ethnomethodologist specialized in Information and Communication Sciences and in Education Sciences.
He is Dai-Shihan of Shintaido, which he studied in Japan since the 1970s with the founding members of the discipline, and holds high-level dan ranks in karate, bojutsu and kenjutsu.

Except from the forward by Peter Furtado, Shintaido Senior Instructor, Journalist, and historian:
“This unique book is complex in its ambition and structure. At its heart is the raw material of history – it brings together the oral testimony of 19 Rakutenkai members who describe in their own words how they came to join, what they were seeking and what they found. But this is supported, and given meaning, by the more academic commentary of sociologist and shintaido instructor Pierre Quettier, who carefully places their testimony in the contexts of the Japanese martial and other arts, and of the youth culture – in Japan and around the world – of the time, which had many similarly grand ambitions to change the world, though taking a different path up the mountain. He also offers a personal, honest, and sometimes painful account of the process of meeting the contributors and assembling the texts. As a social scientist who takes the name of that discipline seriously, he sticks closely to the evidence he has collected, declining to conjecture or judge, and refusing to repeat myths unless they can be grounded in fact. In the introduction, he explains the physically and emotionally arduous – and extended – process of preparing this work.”

Quote from the article Life, Burn by Aoki Sensei, founder of shintaido
“To catch sight of something which has always existed somewhere from earliest times without ever being seen by our two eyes and to express this something with our own body. Its mission is to express through the body’s forms or movements some sort of “perceived world” which visits us with time, while satisfying the limited conditions special to budo (martial arts).”