Many of the arts already mentioned can be loosely grouped together under the title of Historical European Martial Arts.
This includes the German, italian, spanish, english, and french style of fencing (note that fencing incorporated more than just the sword at those times. All weapons of the time are part of the training, as is weapon-less combat) of both the high middle ages and the renaissance.
Modern sport fencing is a sport, not a martial art, I’d go as far as saying the same about the SCA, and many other asian “martial arts”, which are really much less martial than sport.
That’ true enough. Any of the Janapese-named martial arts that end with “do” are sport-fighting. Not something you usually want to get beat with, but not nearly as fundamentally brutal as older, more practical styles.
And the Historical European martial arts are also just a sport. being a re-creation of what might have been taught in various schools based on recently popular fechtbuchs.
Does this really count as a non-Asian martial art? JKD was created by Bruce Lee who was trained in Chinese Wing Chun. As it was explained to me, JKD is not really a martial art itself but more a philosophy and training strategy for using the parts of other martial arts that fit. Most of the JKD people I knew trained a little bit of Wing Chun, a little Silat, etc. but would never have taken a technique and said “this is JKD” in the same way a person would say that about Wing Chun or some other art.
Obviously all arts share similarities and many arts are derived from others but still consider themselves distinct. For example, Aikido is derived from Daito-ryu roots, and all the various flavors of Aikido and Jujutsu share basically the same techniques. But Aikido considers itself a distinct art and would say “this is the way to do x-technique the aiki way”. On the other hand, the JKD people I knew never “took ownership” of the techniques they took from Wing Chun and other arts and would still say that this part of their curriculum was Wing Chun and this other part was some other art. When they said “this is JKD”, they were talking about the big picture, not the techniques they’d assembled from various arts.
But my knowledge of JKD is second-hand; please illuminate.
The Association for Renaissance Martial Arts has this page for unarmed martial arts, which has links to various images documenting historical European unarmed styles.
micco: part of it depends on the JKD school. The open attitude described by your friends is more common with students of Dan Inosanto’s JKD Concepts. On the other side, the “Original” Jun Fan JKD of Taky Kimura teaches a somewhat more “static” approach. In that school of thought, many if not most of the techniques could be said to be purely JKD, being based exclusively on Bruce Lee’s various innovations and way of doing things.
The latest thing in the mail order MA courses are Native American styles. The stuff I’ve seen and heard about (though not seen the tapes/books personally) runs the gamut of equivalence from JKD to “totally uppercutted some kid because he opened a window.”
Throwing arts are extremely common, especially when used as games more than fighting methods. I wish I still had the article, but there was an old school wrestler (Karl Gotch IIRC) who got involved in this Irish style where they wore heavy wooden/metal shoes and, after getting in something like the familliar collar and elbow position, tried to throw the ohter person. Catch was they could use the shoes to stomp the other person’s feet and shins.
As for making something similar to judo, if you take a few minutes to think about how to throw someone, you’ll come up with something similar to judo and the same basic principles have been used in everything from English wrestling (developed into the flying mare) and mid-1800s French self-defence books. To be sure, I don’t think there are many arts that have developed throwing as highly as judo.
I’ve seen people claim to be practitioners of pankration and you can find Web sites about schools that have “reconstructed this effective, brutal art” from ancient texts, but I think most of the time the people are confusing the older art with Pancrase which is a Japanese fighting organization. Many of these seem to fall into the “McDojo” syndrome and others seem to be MMA mixes that just use the term.
As for whether it’s really “making a comeback,” I don’t think you’ll ever see one in the Yellow Pages.
Rather OT, but I would say that all the various jujutsu arts that judo was derived from as well as some of the more combat-oriented aikido styles that share the same roots have much more developed throwing. Judo threw out some of the throwing techniques that were not appropriate for sport application and in other cases modified techniques to focus on point scoring. Many throws like o soto gari and kata garuma are done differently in judo because you’re trying to make your opponent fall flat on his back to score points. In a more combat-oriented art, the throws are much more effective - faster to enter and harder to counter because you’re not limiting yourself to sport applications.
Still, I agree with your basic premise that the Japanese throwing arts are much more sophisticated than the throwing arts I’ve seen elsewhere (in my limited experience).
Modern judo, or judo as it was originally developed? I know little about judo’s history, but everything I’ve heard/read discusses how Kano was a 99-pound weakling and looked for something to defend himself with. After much study, he developed judo. Since then, it’s evolved into a sport.
