By Ray Hulm
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On the day that I retired from my final job as a lockkeeper I left the following on the wall. …… ” I started work at fifteen years of age. Worked on the river and at sea but I also worked in factories and fields, in the circus and in films. I never achieved much. But I never crossed a picket line. Never judged a fellow worker by their colour or creed Nor sucked up to the bosses for my own ends”….. Pretty much sums it all up.
Yukio Tani
During the second half of the 19th century,as Japan was emerging from it’s isolated feudal past and rapidly becoming an industrialised nation, the Japanese started to visit abroad and large numbers of Europeans were for the first time visiting and working in Japan. It must have been frustrating for the Japanese, that just as they were trying to take their place in the modern world, it was the ancient and now somewhat discredited art of jujitsu that fascinated the foreigners, especially the Brits.
Among these Victorian martial arts fans was one W E Barton Wright, an engineer on a tour of duty in Japan. Barton Wright had decided that upon returning home he would open a jujitsu academy in London teaching his own “westernised” system that he had modestly named “Bartitsu”. Just to be on the safe side and to ensure that he wasn’t put on his arse by the first punter to walk through the door, Barton Wright also decided to bring back a genuine Japanese instructor with him, the nineteen year old Yukio Tani.
Bartitsu got off to a good enough start and for a time was the talk of the town. Having Sherlock Holmes use it to overcome Professor Moriaty in their little set to at the Reichenbach Falls helped of course. It couldn’t last, the bubble was bound to burst before long and soon the flood of hopeful trainees dried to a trickle. In a last effort to drum up business Barton Wright put his teenage instructor on the stage. Tani was to appear nightly in the capitals music halls not only giving demonstrations of his art but taking on all comers as well.
Barton Wright and Bartitsu were soon forgotten, not so Yukio Tani. The British public took the little man to their hearts as thousands of miles from home and with no other way of making a living he really did take on and beat all comers. Touring the country night after night he offered an open challenge to boxers, wrestlers and God knows what bar room brawlers to step right up and have a go. Only five feet two inches tall and never weighing more than nine stone, how on earth did he do it?
Of course there was his undoubted skill, even though he always modestly claimed that in Japan he would be considered as no more than a good third rater. What was probably even more impresive was the level of mental strength that he must have had.
Yukio Tani settled in London and when he finally retired from his music hall career was to become the first chief instructor at the now famous Budokwai Judo Club.
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