I've posted about Donn Draeger previously. Below is an excerpt from an article about this giant in bringing Asian martial arts to the west that appeared in Budo Japan. The full post may be read here.
It must have been around 1977. I was only ten years old and my fascination with Japan was
already going strong, with all the strength a child of 10 can muster
and I was always pressuring my father to buy me any books related to it
and its culture (I didn’t call it “culture” back then –it was just
“anything about Japan”).
Knowing that I was enthralled by the stories of an old war buddy of
his, a war correspondent in the Korean War and one of Greece’s judo
pioneers regarding the martial arts, one day he brought me 3 slim tomes
from a series titled “Practical Karate” filled with pictures of a
middle-aged rather plump Japanese and a big, tall Westerner showing
self-defense applications of karate techniques; the two men were the
books’ authors and they were Masatoshi Nakayama and Donn Draeger.
This was the first time
I came across the name “Donn Draeger”; with time, I would see it again
and again in English-language publications related to the martial arts
of Japan. But it would take another 10 years until I discovered in a martial arts’ bookstore, the only one in Athens, the work that I later found out was considered by most his “magnum opus”: the trilogy Martial Arts And Ways Of Japan comprising of Classical Bujutsu, Classical Budo and Modern Bujutsu & Budo. Like most people outside Japan, this was my first exposure to a systematic chronicle about the martial arts ofJapan and their development from the times of the Hogen Monogatari and the Heike Monogatari
to Shorinji Kempo, the most modern style recorded by the time the books
were written (i.e. early 1970s). And like many people outside Japan, I was captivated.
As captivating as his
subjects were, was Draeger himself: he wrote with an authority
displaying a knowledge of his subject far deeper than that of most
academic researchers –and if those pictures of the “Practical Karate”
books were any proof, it looked as if he had done some training himself
so I knew I had to find out more (remember, this was pre-Internet and I
was living in Greece so I believe I’m allowed some ignorance). So I
started searching in books’ databases and libraries and martial arts
magazines and slowly and painfully an amazing story started unfolding:
this man was so much involved in pretty much everything related to the
martial arts –and not only of Japan, even though he seemed to have
specialized in those- that it was impossible to have trained in all of
them to the extent and depth his writings suggested.
With time I came to
realize that he had. Although he never went for the spotlight, others
wrote about him –among them his friend and collaborator Robert W. Smith
(1926-2011) an ex-marine, ex-CIA employer posted in Taiwan in the early
1960s, a prolific writer in the subject of Chinese martial arts and one
of Tai-Chi’s most strong supporters and evangelists in the eastern US.
Despite being very emotional (not to mention loquacious) in his writing
–they were close friends, after all- his account of Draeger as narrated
in his 1999 martial arts autobiography Martial Musings gives a
quite detailed sketch of the man and his numerous accomplishments. And
when I say “numerous” it is not a figure of speech: if it wasn’t for
many eminent martial arts’ teachers and practitioners, Westerners and
Japanese corroborating the facts, it would be hard to believe that one
man could have done so much in just 30 years.
Sometime along the way
the Internet came and access to information became much easier; in the
meantime I had also developed a personal network of people who had lived
or were still living in Japan so I had the opportunity to ask more
about this remarkable man, Donn F. Draeger (this was how he signed most
of his work and this is how he is usually mentioned in writing). And
more begat more and with time I came to realize that there was little
exaggeration when it came to Draeger’s life in the martial arts: he had
indeed been there and done that –whatever “that” was. Moreover, he had
done it well enough and earnestly enough to earn the respect of pretty
much anyone who met him. In a world as subject to pettiness and
small-mindedness as any, I have yet to hear one bad word for Donn F.
Draeger.
When I came to Japan I
started looking for him; not the man himself of course since he had
been dead for over 25 years but for his footprints in bookstores,
libraries and dojo. And while in the beginning I was astounded by the
fact that there weren’t any, with time I came to realize that it made
sense: by all accounts, Draeger was a very private person and really
devoted to his work researching the martial arts and his training. His
closest collaborators in his martial arts’ research were also foreigners
who with time (before or after his death in 1982) had returned to their
countries and even though most of them made sure to keep his memory
alive in stories told to their students or in publications, online or
paper (like Smith’s) he didn’t leave any students in Japan while the
organization formed to function as a focal point for his research, the
International Hoplology Society, was also based in the US.
So apparently little has been left of him in Japan,
the country that was his home for half his life and to whose martial
traditions he had dedicated his life. There are memories of him still
surviving in the minds of some of the (now elderly) Japanese budoka who
met him and trained with him in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s but not a
record of his actual trip. This article as well as the one that will
follow in a future issue is an attempt to collect some of these memories
and introduce to a younger generation of Japanese this really important
man.
