Originally posted by LOEP
[b]

You're welcome! Budo history is a serious hobby of mine and I do tend to mouth off at any given opportunity.

What part of the world are you in ... maybe I can make some referrals.

Do/Michi = Path, Way (also used to denote some streets and lanes in Japan).

Jutsu = Art, science, technique.

Fact of the matter is that there's NOT much difference, and your observation is pretty much spot on. Some folks LIKE the idea that their DO art is vastly superior and oh-so enlightened, unlike those nasty jutsu arts. And some jutsu folks really, really want their arts to be 'combat-effective' and nothing at all like those namby-pamby DO arts ...

Both are ignoring the fact that DO terms were in use by guys doing sword and body stuff way before Meiji and JUTSU has been used to identify arts that are focussed more on the esoteric and spiritual than physical combatives ...

Sigh. What it boils down to is that the old guys in Japan used DO and JUTSU pretty interchangeably much of the time. Some instances, one or the other predominated, but mostly, they were (and are) considered by martial scholars and historians to be complementary facets rather than antagonistic opposites.

Lots of the alleged schism can be traced to the late D. Draeger and his excellent and groundbreaking books on budo. He tried hard to explain things to a western audience, and as a result couched some things in western terms. That's been taken as gospel by some and rather than do as _I_ think Draeger intended and explore more deeply, they are content to say THIS is DO, a morally superior art that has evolved from the barbaric JUTSU arts (or this JUTSU art is superior because it's 'authentic' and 'combat-tested' ...)

It's all pretty much semantic hog, er, whitewash.

I like the idea that what you do in the dojo is JUTSU (technical training, practice, etc) but what you take from the dojo into your life is DO ...