Modern history of East Asian martial arts

East Asia, the region dominated by Chinese, Japanese and Korean culture, was greatly transformed following its contact with the West in the 19th century. This defining period can be considered as the start of the modern period of East Asian history, and also happens to be the time of origin of most schools of martial arts of East Asian origin practiced today. New approaches and ideas about martial arts were created that are distinctly different from the previous history of martial arts, especially under the influence of nascent nationalism in the region, which took the respective traditions of martial arts as being part of the nation's heritage to be polished and standardized into a pure form and showcased to the rest of the world.

As a result, the modern martial arts of China and Japan are for the most part a product of the nationalist governments in power during the 1920s and 1930s, in the case of Korea developed under Japanese occupation and cast in terms of a Korean national art during the 1950s. The modern history of Indochinese martial arts is closely related, and especially modern Muay Thai was developed in the years leading up to and following the Siamese revolution of 1932.

In many countries local arts like Te in Okinawa,^[1] kenjutsu and jujutsu in Japan,^[2] and taekyon and soobak in Korea^[3] mixed with other martial arts and evolved to produce some of the more well-known martial arts in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries like karate, aikido, and taekwondo.