When Jiu-Jitsu was German

Abstract

In 1937, the Nazi leisure organization Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) released a series of promotional posters advertising some of its offerings in physical education and sport. Among the posters depicting, in striking graphic images, swimming, horseback riding, gymnastics, and general physical training (Leibesübungen), one in particular stands out, given the contemporary political and ideological climate—a poster for jiu-jitsu. What makes this poster all the more remarkable is that because the series relies on the visual power of stylized silhouettes on monochromatic backgrounds, with only limited captioning, jiu-jitsu is presented as a known quantity to the German public, essentially interchangeable in its ability to be recognized and understood from a single image. The very existence of this poster, much less the fact that jiu-jitsu is presented alongside more “traditional” German sports like rhythmic gymnastics and Leibesübungen, raises a series of questions that this chapter proposes to answer. How was jiu-jitsu able to be incorporated into the mainstream of German sporting culture to the extent that it was just one among many options within the leisure culture of the Third Reich? What was it about jiu-jitsu specifically that made it adaptable to German notions about the purpose of sport and physical training? And, finally, what can the adoption of jiu-jitsu as a German sport tell us about the nature and shape of the German-Japanese relationship during the first half of the twentieth century?