John Quiggin opens The invention of tradition (karate edition) with a general point about tradition:
CP Snow once said that all ancient British traditions date to the second half of the 19th Century, and his only error was to limit this claim to Britain. The great majority of real traditions having been swept away or reduced to irrelevance with the rise of capitalism, the 19th century saw the rise of a whole set of new ones, which were then fixed in shape by the system of nation-states, each with their own newly-codified language and officially sanctioned history that took shape at the same time.
He then goes on to cite Craig Colbeck’s Karate and Modernity, which questions karate’s mythic past:
And yet, in the 1921 Ry?ky? Kenp?: Karate, the first fully published karate text, little of this appears: karate is not a d?, lacks mythology, and is frank about recent Chinese influences. Reaching further back, to the unpublished writings of Itosu Anko, karate lacks even a name, makes no claims on the spirit, and mentions history not at all. Beyond that, the writing is in Chinese. Strangest of all, and most easily overlooked, is that through the 1920s there was only really one name: karate, the Chinese hand.What are historians to make of this? Shall we dig through the historical record to discover the origins of these various traits? Plucking belts and uniforms from the history of jud?, synchronized movement from the colonial period obsession with military drill, the division of new, jissen styles from their “traditional” parents — deriving their sport-orientation by the subtracting traditionalism of the latter?
I can remember being taught all sorts of mythic lore back at the strip-mall McDojo, including stories about the origin of the black belt. Look, we know the origin of the black belt. Jigoro Kano invented it, and the entire belt-ranking system, when he invented modern judo from traditional jujutsu in the 1880s.