I realized early on that it would be silly to simply drop readers into a bunch of interviews with no context whatsoever. To understand how and why karate came to America and became so popular we also have to understand the role of other arts. For example, Judo was the premiere Eastern fighting art in the country before the 1960s. Why was that? Why wasn’t it Kung Fu, considering tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants came to America during the time of the gold rush out West?
The first main content section of the book is going to answer a lot of these questions. It will discuss how America first worked to open the doors of closed countries in the East and how the martial arts eventually seeped their way into the United States. This will set the stage for the Western Generation and provide historical insight for just how much impact they had on the direction of martial culture in America.