Guns, Germs, and Steel
by Jared Diamond. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New Y ork. wwwnorton.com. 480 pages paperback. c. 1997. ISBN# 0-393-31755-2. $14.95 US.

This is a very thought-provoking book about how the West came to dominate the world arena. All too often, popular history reads like a self-serving tale of the inevitable rise of European and Western powers. The conquest of native tribal societies and Asia by Western conquerors and industry, as Diamond analyzes it, had nothing to do with a God-given blessing or the superiority of Western culture and religion. Rather, as the book's titles alludes to, it had more to do with the combination of several factors: advanced gun production, the spread of European diseases for which many non-Europeans had no immunity against, and the development of industrial power. Diamond also includes the domestication of the horse, the political status of Europe at the time of rapid colonizations, writing, and shipbuilding technology. Other societies had some of these characteristics, but not all of them. China, for example, was technologically far ahead of Europe for much of the ancient era, but had no political inclination to go beyond its borders.

Diamond has some really interesting theories about the rise of civilizations. He lays to rest the concept of a racial-based Manifest Destiny of the West, but he doesn't spare anything from critical analysis of non-Western cultures and their weaknesses.

As one example, Diamond takes apart how Francisco Pizarro and a very small band of Spaniards succeeded in toppling the whole Incan empire. Guns were mainly for their terror effect, he notes, because they were unwieldly and slow to reload. But the Spaniards had metal armaments and weapons, as opposed to the blunt clubs and quilted armor of the Incan army. They also had horses, which could cut off messangers and sent shock waves in the Incan troops when they first encountered these animals, and the Incans became besieged quickly by European diseases. The Spaniards were also literate, with a "huge body of knowledge about human behavior and history," Diamond writes. "By contrast, not only did Atahualpa (the ruler of the Incas) have no conception of the Spaniards themselves, and no personal experience of any other invaders from overseas, but ha also had not even heard (or read) of similar threats to anyone else, anywhere else, anytime previously in history. That gulf of experience encouraged Pizarro to set his trap and Atahualpa to walk into it..."

For any martial arts person who likes to argue the "what ifs" (what if the Chinese army had gone to the Americas?), Diamond shows the "what happened and why."

The Unfettered Mind
by Takuan Soho, translated by William Scott Wilson. Kodansha International Ltd., Tokyo, Japan. c. 1986. 104 pages, hardcover. ISBN# 4-7700-1276-4.

Zen Buddhism has influenced modern martial Ways greatly, and one of the great historical figures of Zen Buddhism in Japan was Takuan (who is supposed to have invented the pickled radish dish bearing his name). Takuan lived from 1573-1645. He became master of the Daitokuji Temple in Kyoto, and was banished by the shogunate for a while for his outspokenness, but eventually was pardoned, and became a trusted advisor of the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu. In close contact with Iemitsu, Takuan had occasion to discuss matters pertaining to Zen and swordsmanship with Yagyu Munenori, the headmaster of the Yagyu Shinkage-ryu school of swordsmanship in Edo. Munenori rose from being a martial arts instructor to the shogun family to become soh-metsuke, or overseer of the daimyo lords. Takuan had a great influence on Munenori, and two essays in the book are letters to Munenori regarding swordsmanship. These are the Fudochishinmyoroku and the Taiaki. The final essay, Reiroshu, are like the other two in that they take swordsmanship beyond mere technical matters and admonishes the reader to seek a higher, spiritual purpose in training. Wilson does an excellent job of translating what must have been very difficult passages into understandable, colloquial English.

Quote:
"All men are equipped with this sharp Sword Taia, and in each one it is perfectly complete. This means that the famous Sword Taia, which no blade under heaven can parry, is not imparted just to other men. Everyone, without exception, is equipped with it, it is inadequate for no one, and it is perfect entire.

"This is a matter of the mind. This mind was not born with your birth and will not die with your death. . ."

The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece
by Victor Davis Hanson. Oxford University Press, c. 1989. 246 pages, paperback. ISBN# 0-19-506588-3. $10.95.

Although Furyu the Budo Journal discusses primarily Japanese martial arts and culture, it is important for serious students of the martial arts to have an understanding of the general history and context of martial cultures in the world, and how they have affected our own societies for good and bad. Hanson, in the tradition of insightful writers of war like John Keegan, gives a valuable look at the origins of Western concepts of continental warfare, which not only affected the West, but much of modern Asia as well. He discusses the Greek concepts of combat and war as the beginnings of Western warfare. Hanson hypothesizes that the Greeks, among all the ancient peoples, conceived of a kind of war that would be short and decisive due to the nature of their citizen farmers, who needed to return to their fields and cities soon after armed conflicts. Thus arose the concept of decisive, massive, devastating and short warfare, and the nature of hoplitic combat.

That it was the right as well as the responsibility of free men to serve in their city's army led, Hanson says, to notions of Western democracy, and so our very foundations of modern society is based, in part, on the bearing of arms and voluntary military service. Greek ideals of citizenship, nobility, and community service all have resonance in the battlefield of the Greeks.

Hanson is hardly a dry academic in his writing. Based on his research, he gives a graphic account of what combat must have been like for the average soldier, and it is horrifying in its brutality. Yet how did such a society, which developed such a notion of total warfare, also be so full of thinkers so as to jump start all of Western culture? The two go hand in hand, Hanson says, and he offers a great deal of food for thought for the part-time philosopher, soldier, or martial artist among us. To what extent can we modify and control the impulse to wage war in ourselves and in society? How deeply ingrained are our notions of conflict, and is there a way out of the cycle of war? Hanson writes:

"The daylight collision of armed soldiers was originally for the Greeks a grim resolution to have the fighting done quickly and effectively with a minimum of fatalities, not a romantic stage to showcase brave resolve. But any nuclear conflict would of course be final and induce the end of civilization as we have known it. It is fearsome to think that Americans A(who alone have employed the nuclear bomb in wartime use) could claim a heroic purpose in such a scenario. How can there be satisfaction on our part if we have led ourselves to our final slaughter?..."

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