When Commodore Perry arrived in Japan as an unwelcome guest in 1853, a small part of the initial interactions between the visitors and their reluctant hosts was devoted to sports. The Americans put on an exhibition of boxing and were found to be "scrawny." The Japanese exhibited sumo and the Americans discovered the wrestlers to be "overfed monsters."
Such was the troubled beginning of modern sport in these islands. Things native were kept quite separate from things imported. At the same time that "kemari" (a kind of kickball), sumo and various other hereditary athletics were being kept pure, however, foreign imports were being turned into something more suitably Japanese.
This fit the spirit of the times. Statesman Mori Arinori suggested that the country adopt English as the national language and one Takahashi Yoshi urged Japanese husbands to divorce their wives and marry Western women for their more robust physique and their "superior intellect."