As Japan entered a period of peace, the Tokugawa period, armour gathered dust and unarmed combat began to thrive. Proficiency in jujutsu, a generic term for a variety of fighting systems, its exponents being minimally armed, became the measure of fighting ability. Their techniques were based on abstract ideas from Chinese philosophy. The idea of ju yoku go o sei suru, "flexible masters hardness" became their main theme. The Japanese over time altered the meaning behind this giving it such connotations as "the soft conquers the hard" and "in yielding there is strength".

"Jujutsu is a generic name. It only gives you a general idea. The word did not develop prior to the edo era, that is 1600 plus. There is no evidence of it. Jujutsu (the word not the art itself) is largely the development of a non-professional, an average person, who doesn't quite know what he sees, and he needs a name to identify it."

Don F Dragger 1976 at the University of Hawaii

Jujutsu has been known by many names. A different school with a different philosophy or a different tactic needed a different name to distinguish itself from the next. Also, it was not uncommon for a single ryuha to contain several different names to describe its forms of jujutsu. Also the fact that jujutsu was not coined up until the seventeenth century probably contributed to the use of different terms for what is now generally known as jujutsu.

Below are some of the names which have been used to describe jujutsu and jujutsu like arts: