It goes almost without saying that the development of Japanese martial arts in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were part of a nationalist project begun by the Meiji Restoration and culminating in the Fifteen Years’ War of colonial expansion. Studies on the structures of these martial arts–such as the kyu/dan rank system of Judo (which Funakoshi Gichin adopted for Shotokan Karate-do in 1924)–are robust, but this presentation considers what an ultranationalist martial art feels like in one’s body. An early image of Funakoshi and many of his higher-ranking students performing kata, for example, shows the narrow, high stances typical of the Okinawan styles in which Funakoshi trained as a child. As his son, Funakoshi Gigo, began to modify the system during Japan’s increasingly authoritarian march toward fascism, the embodiment of Shotokan changes: stances widen and become more upright, more fluid Okinawan techniques and principles like chinkuchi (the momentary jolt of a strike) are replaced by more powerful feeling principles like kime (the more rigid snap-lock now indicative of karate practitioners). Combining ideas of embodied knowledge with how embodiment can articulate and extend political ideas, this paper asks: can a stance be fascist? If so, what does it mean to mould one’s body into these shapes in a world where authoritarianism is on the rise?