ABSTRACT
The Port Island Culture Centre is located on a small man-made island, a short train ride from the centre of Kobe city, Japan. Practitioner-anthropologists of dance and martial arts, who use images ethnographically do not, as a rule, make such ambitious claims for their phenomenological status. The body of the anthropologist who practises martial arts in Japan is also a body that must train itself to write in Japan. The difficulties outlined around the negotiation of self and sensory modalities in relation to vision recall an epiphanal moment in Dorinne Kondo's ethnography. In the context of martial arts practice in Japan the body is never experienced purely as the instrumental mechanism which figures in the textbook choreography of visual representations. Practitioner-anthropologists of dance and martial arts, who use images ethnographically do not, as a rule, make such ambitious claims for their phenomenological status.
