Читать книгу Ali vs. Inoki. The Forgotten Fight That Inspired Mixed Martial Arts and Launched Sports Entertainment онлайн

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The situation at Hanford Engineering Works, however, could have been catastrophic. Uranium slugs for the atomic bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, Rikidōzan’s adopted hometown, were produced there and the balloon bomb triggered the reactor’s safety mechanism. The fail-safe system had not been tested, and everyone was relieved when it worked as designed. The reactor remained cool enough not to collapse or explode—ensuring the Fu-Go Weapon would be remembered as no more than a missed Hail Mary attempt by Japan to turn the tide of the war.

The end of hostilities and subsequent allied occupation did not immediately return Japanese life, including the martial arts, to their premilitarized social order. The Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, instituted numerous edicts, among them directives aimed at removing and excluding militaristic and ultranationalist persons from society. Schools that briefly resuscitated martial arts instruction after the end of the war stopped, and the Dai Nippon Butoku Kai was shuttered. The tangled mess resulted in a purge of people apparently sympathetic to the defeated Japanese Empire, many of whom were seemingly connected to the Butokukai that had been corrupted under the fascist regime. This was the crux of the General Headquarters budō ban that lasted until 1950—not the shelving of martial arts, per se, just their perversion.