ALMOST any reference book on Japanese history includes the dates of the most obscure shogun or emperor. But then there are the more basic historical puzzles, like -- how did the Japanese walk?

Some scholars here argue that from ancient times until perhaps 150 years ago, virtually all Japanese learned to walk in a special style called the namba, in which the right arm and leg swing forward at the same time, and then the left arm and leg swing forward.

Try it: these days it seems counter-intuitive. Almost everybody in the world now walks the opposite way, with the right leg and left arm moving forward at the same time, and vice-versa.

Yet in Japan, if these scholars are right, the namba at one time was almost universal. In fact people often did not swing their arms much at all, but at a minimum their right shoulder moved with the right leg and left shoulder with the left leg.

''In the past, Japanese were deliberately educated in how they should walk,'' said Masaichi Nomura, a leading cultural anthropologist at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka. ''They were shown by their parents how to walk in the home, in a tatami room. But now in modern Japan, there's no walking education at all. People walk any way they want to.''

If Professor Nomura and other scholars who have written about the namba are correct and it was common in olden times, then the training of young people in a particular walking style underscores the regimentation of life in ancient Japan. Conversely, the decline of the walk reflects the way society has opened up in the 19th and 20th centuries to a greater pluralism of ideas, values and even ways of walking.

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