The Aikido of Morihiko Murashige

 

Traditional and Modern Karate

An excerpt from another insightful post at Budo Journeyman is below. It discusses just what is "traditional karate," "modern karate," and points in between. An interesting read. The full post may be read here.

‘Traditional’, call it a label of convenience; call it a handy pigeonhole to categorise what is done. You can even use it as a hallmark of quality, if you want. But how helpful is it, and who cares anyway?

Clearly some people care, or they wouldn’t keep using it. Some wear it as a badge of honour. To the detractors and critics it becomes yet another thing to take a swing at, a convenient target, their favourite strawman.

What does ‘traditional’ mean?

A key part of my college training was to look at the early history of advertising; selling through the message and labels were important. We were told that if you wanted to sell something to the Americans you attached the words ‘New Improved’ to it; but if you wanted to sell to the British you were better off using the word, ‘Traditional’. (‘Traditional Marmalade’ gets my vote every time).

I was listening to a political podcast recently in which ex-politician Nick Clegg was asked what it was like working in Silicon Valley (he has a top job with Meta). Clegg said that the interesting thing about the Valley was that everything is focussed on the future; because the industry has no past. He contrasted that with the UK where he was of the opinion that some of the Brits from the hard right were so sucked into a mythical image of Great Britain’s past (one that never existed in the form they assumed) that they seem unable to develop any forward-thinking future ambitions; other than turning it into some kind of warped image of a fictional England.

The past is not only ‘a foreign country’ (as L. P Hartley said) but it’s also inclined to be a toxic swamp.

So why, in martial arts, do we give ‘tradition’ so much kudos?

In the martial arts we make an assumption that it’s because the product was tried and tested, like some historical Darwinian quality control exercise. There is one obvious flaw with that idea; the assumption that the process is continued forward in an unbroken line.

The great crucible that was the hundreds of years of Japanese civil wars is a prime example. For the development of martial skills this wasn’t the steady civilised and disciplined refinements found later in the Edo Period, no this was a total meat grinder. (The battle of Sekigahara in 1600 had an estimated body count of 30,000). It was closer to chaos than it was to organised tradition.

What we know of the surviving Koryu (Old School Budo/Bujutsu), the majority of them were developed and coalesced in the later periods of peace, when they had the luxury of evolving their lineage and traditions, uninterrupted by warfare. This doesn’t lessen their fighting ability (unless the lineage is allowed to drift into decay, as has happened), if anything it gave them scope to really refine the skills and imbue them with a greater humanity – which is always paradoxical in martial arts.

The specific case of karate.

Karate as it is consumed in the West (and in Japan) is a modern thing. Can we attach the word ‘tradition’ to something that is so recent?

In Japan it’s classified as ‘Gendai Budo’, 現代武道 ‘Modern Martial Way’. A line is drawn at 1868; in the years before that it’s ‘Koryu’.

Karate jumped from the rural domain of Okinawan to mainland Japan in the 1920’s and underwent many changes; including elements of militarisation, modernisation and westernisation (consider the influence of the Olympic ideas of Baron De Coubertin which spread across Japan). So, although you might talk about the ‘Olympic tradition’, it would be odd to start referring to ‘Traditional Olympics’ because it would sound so retrograde.

Cobra Kai.

To highlight the clash between traditional and new; modern western culture has set up a cartoonish karate model as a framework to attach a storyline to, which began in 1984 with the springboard of the ‘Karate Kid’ movie franchise and has been warmed over like turkey dinner for the streaming platform generation.

For those of you who know it (and those who don’t):

In a nutshell; Cobra Kai = modern progressive karate, American style, strip mall Dojo, all noise and thunder and no morals.

Miyagi Ryu = Old-fashioned (traditional) karate, clear link to a Japanese/Okinawan figurehead, high moral standard, set up as an antidote to the above. Looks a lot like Goju Ryu (deliberately).

Cobra Kai leader, John Kreese, All-American military guy, Mr ‘No Mercy!’, ‘No fear!’ The cinema-going audience know this is ‘black hat, white hat’ stuff, they are supposed to be repelled by this version of ‘modern karate’.

Miyagi Ryu master, Mr Miyagi; unassuming handyman dude, reluctantly acts as karate mentor to teenager Daniel LaRusso. Indeed, for most of the story Daniel is his only student. The writers have fun with Mr Miyagi’s unorthodoxy, e.g. “In Okinawa, belt mean no need rope to hold up pants”. Miyagi is so traditional, he’s beyond traditional.

Cobra Kai is shown as what the west has done to the noble Japanese tradition, not only have they sportified it, they have taken the humanity out of it.

 

 

Crossing the Threshold

At Budo Journeyman, there is an interesting post about the generations of Japanese martial artists who were active as the transition was being made from the traditional classical martial arts (koryu) into modern(ish) budo.

An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here. 

A theory that there was one snapshot in Japanese history that created a uniquely fertile environment for martial art growth. A historical ‘perfect storm’.

I am grateful to my friend Carl O’Malley for prompting this train of thought.

1890’s or early 1900’s Japan. Otsuka Hironori (then known as Otsuka Ko) was just a boy, but he remembered distinctly first-hand experiences of the remnants of the then defunct and disenfranchised samurai class.

In his book he mentions a certain Mr Suzuki Yoshio, who he described as a seventy-five year old samurai; an elderly warrior from a different age, who had been obviously dramatically and suddenly made obsolete and virtually unemployable as a result of the restructuring of Japanese society in the 1868 Meiji Restoration.

Otsuka Ko describes Mr Suzuki’s demeanour; his look of distrust; even a small boy could be seen as a potential threat. Reading between the lines, for me there seems to be more than a hint of toxic hyper-vigilance, as well as a man being out of his time.

Similarly, Otsuka’s mother’s uncle was another elderly relic. Whether he lived with the family or nearby, I don’t know, but Ebashi Chojiro was a retired/redundant martial arts teacher of the Tsuchiura clan, then based in Ibaraki and disestablished in 1871.

Ebashi’s presence in the youngster’s life was not insignificant. I mention this because these characters were on the tail-end of the historical social circumstances that swirled around the young Otsuka and his extended family.

As he was maturing and growing up, Otsuka’s cultural references, his markers of identity, of who he was, where he came from and where he might go to, gives us a picture of an individual pulled in two directions; the historical past and the modernising future.

A personal reflection.

Now, you might say that doesn’t make him unique… because, aren’t we all in the same boat?

If I look at my own situation.

I was born just thirteen years after the end of WW2; my grandparents were Victorians (granny was born in 1888, the year that Jack the Ripper was prowling the streets of Whitechapel) massive generational differences there.

To a lesser degree than Otsuka’s, like everyone from my generation, I think I can also map out my own life into two distinct epochs:

Internet age and Pre-Internet age.

There is nothing insignificant about those two eras and, in a way, I feel fortunate to have experienced both of them.

But, to return to the martial arts theme.

Otsuka and the other Japanese martial artists crossing the eras.

As mentioned, it was Carl O’Malley who proposed the idea that maybe the Japanese martial artists from that particular timeframe had something special that was not available to the later generations.

As a kendoka; he suggested that younger kendo practitioners had only ever known the modern iteration of kendo as a sport. Whereas for those who trained in kendo in the very early 20^th century, it is possible that a large percentage of them had experienced the older forms of kenjutsu, with the blade and the bokken, (not the shinai), and everything that entailed. They would have had Koryu (‘Old School/Tradition’) roots. They were swordsmen first and sporting kendo practitioners second.

Time for some concrete evidence.

First example; Nakayama Hakudō (1872 – 1958).

Here we have a perfect model of a swordsman who bestrode both eras. Look at the years…

Nakayama is cited as started his sword training in a traditional Ryu (Shindō Munen-ryū) in 1891, (this was the school founded in the early 18^th century by Fukui Hyōemon Yoshihira, a man who sharpened his skills through duelling in death matches). But, he was actually learning some aspects of swordsmanship from the age of eleven.

Nakayama’s training in the Old Schools would have been very traditional, but based on the deadly serious business found at the edge of the razor-sharp sword.

Nakayama’s dedication to the sword art inevitably involved the bold move of modernisation and significant revision of the older material through kendo and Iaido. My brief description does him no justice – for a fuller story, follow this link: https://www.budokanworld.com/theforgottenlineage

  

 

 

 

The Aikido of Kyoichi Inoue

Kyoichi Inoue, along with Takashi Kushida, developed the training system that we now recognize as Yoshinkan Aikido. Below is a video of his aikido.

 

 

 

Overview of Different Styles of Taijiquan

At Thoughts on Tai Chi there was a post that provided a nice, concise overview of the different major styles of Taijiquan. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

 

Here is a brief guide to the different styles of Tai Chi Chuan. There are five main styles, five big ones and then there are also a whole bunch of several lesser popular arts. Some of the smaller ones have quite a big amount of followers as well. Here I will list 8 of those smaller Tai Chi schools that are reasonable enough to call individual styles. This means that a total of 13 (!) different Tai Chi styles will be discussed here.

Off springs and variations that belong mainly to any of the larger schools as Cheng Man Ching’s Yang and Dan Docherty’s Wudang Practical Tai Chi Chuan (Wudang PTTC) are not considered. here. But if we were to actually add every school with decent popularity, we would probably get a list of well more than 20 schools.

(Also: Please, don’t get offended by my intentional ironic and disrespectful tone in this post.)

The five main Tai Chi styles

The five big traditional styles are:

• Chen Style
• Yang Style
• Wu Style
• Wu (Hao) Style
• Sun Style

The Tai Chi styles of Chen, Yang, Wu, Wu (Has) and Sun are all recognized, well known and has many practitioners throughout China and the whole World.

Chen Style Taijiquan

Chen style is said by Chen stylists to be the oldest of the modern Tai Chi styles found today or the original art of Tai Chi, something that is usually accepted by Yang stylists as Yang style creator Yang Luchan admitted that he had studied with the Chen family. In the first half of the 20th century it was suddenly decided by the government that Chen Wangting (1580-1660) should be regarded as the inventor of the whole art of Tai Chi Chuan, a person suddenly discovered, that no Chen Tai Chi master knew anything about and no one had mentioned anytime before in any text about Tai Chi Chuan. Chen style was later popularised in the 20th century by Chen Fake (1887-1957) who was very upset and got revengeful when other Tai Chi masters told him that what he was doing was Shaolin and not Tai Chi.

Chen style has both slow and fast movements, often performed with sudden outbursts of “fajin”. It also has Shaolin movements not found in any other of the five main styles so that other stylists often says that Chen Style is just Yang Style with Shaolin stuff infused.

The main idea of body mechanics in Chen style is summarized into “spiraling silk reeling” where spiral movements are initiated from the belly area and connected throughout the whole body.

There are several big popular formal and informal lineages and traditions in Chen, As “the Village style” represented by Chen Xiaowang, “the Beijing style” represented by people as Chen Yu and Chen Practical Method lead by Chen Zhonghua. And “Chen Small Frame” is usually practiced in other lesser well known lineages.

Pros
Maybe the easiest style for development of strength and power.

Cons
Might be harder to and take longer time to develop calmness and deep relaxation compared to the other five big ones.

Chen Style Taijiquan is recommended for:
Anyone who wants to keep fit and healthy and everyone who wants to study a smart and very powerful martial art.

Yang Style Taijiquan

When people think about Yang style Tai Chi, they mostly think about slow, large movements performed in an even pace. Large frame Yang Style was created by “The Invincible” Yang Luchan (1799-1872) who killed a younger female relative with his spear when practicing. This style was wildly popularised as a health exercise by his illiterate grandson Yang Chengfu (1883-1836) who sold his name to a ghost writer for a book and got really obese and died young by eating way too much.

Yang Style is the most popular Tai Chi style, widespread “all over the globe” (citing Flateartherners expression of the popularity of their own movement), much due to several lightweight watered down versions with shorter and less demanding forms. Those are taught rather fast with little attention to detail. In the middle of the nineties for instance, going to Beijing to learn the 24 form in a few weeks and teach it in the west was rather popular. But fortunately the traditional Yang long form variations are very popular as well, and many practice it as a complete martial art.

Don’t be fooled by the calm, harmonious movements. Yang Stylists can be pretty good fighters and like to toss their opponents far away rather than offering a good punch, something that is mostly given to and restricted for the stupid ones who tries to attack them again.

There are also several off-springs and sub-styles of Yang Style as Cheng Manching’s version and Dong Style, sometimes recognised as an individual Tai Chi styles. A school as Erle Montaigue’s Tai Chi organisation claim that they do the “Old Yang style” from Yang Luchan.

Pros
Quite easy to find somewhat good traditional teachers and very easy to find teachers from various health only variations.

Cons
Hard to find people who teach anything similar to power generation for punches and other finishing methods necessary in any complete martial art.

Yang Style Taijiquan is recommended for:
Anyone and everyone on this planet without exceptions.

Wu Style Taijiquan (Quanyou/Jianquan)

Wu style is characterized by large movements performed with whole body leaning, something many Yang stylists say is wrong and contradicts basic Tai Chi principles. Wu Quanyou (1834-1902) was one of Yang Luchan’s students but became a disciple of Yang Banhou, and Wu Jianquan was his son and taught it publicly. Wu Jianquan was also one of those guys who popularized Tai Chi for the big masses together with Yang Chengfu.

One modern branch is called Wudang Practical Tai Chi Chuan created by Dan Docherty and focuses a lot on no-nonsense combat and realistic self-defence applications.

Cons
You’ll be hearing all of the time from people from other styles about how wrong you do things.

Pro
Has everything that Yang Style has, is seldom as watered down as much, and much easier to find good traditional teachers.

 

 

 

Classic Japanese Martial Arts Documentary

In 1978, Budo: the Art of Killing, a documentary on Japanese martial arts was released.

 Despite it's unfortunate title, it remains a classic and may be viewed below.

Enjoy.

 

Balance in Kyudo

From the Zen Sekai - Japan 2 @ 70 blog. About the author's search for balance in his kyudo practice. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

 

The Quest for Balance in Kyūdō: More Than Push and Pull

In the stillness of the dojo, a single arrow flies. To the outside observer, it may seem a simple act—draw the bow, release the string, let the arrow fly. But to the practitioner of Kyūdō—the Way of the Bow—it is a profound meditation on balance.

Balance is the silent master in Kyūdō. It speaks in whispers, not in shouts. It is not just the physical symmetry of right and left, push and pull, but the harmony of inner and outer worlds, the unspoken conversation between body and mind, effort and surrender, practice and pause.

The Body: Divided, Yet One

At the heart of Kyūdō is the Yumi, the asymmetrical bow. Already, balance is challenged. Unlike the symmetrical bows of Western archery, the Yumi demands a different kind of equilibrium. In the draw, there is not just pull with the right hand and push with the left, but a spiraling expansion of energy—Nobiai—a dividing and yet unifying of forces. The elbows extend outward in opposite directions, and in that division, unity is born.

Balance begins in the Ashibumi—the stance. Feet planted shoulder-width apart, stable like mountains, yet not rooted like stones. The knees remain soft, the pelvis gently tucked. The shoulders must be low, but not collapsed; open, yet not tensed. In the Daisan, the arms rise, and tension begins to accumulate—but it is a natural tension, like a bowstring waiting to sing. It must never become stiffness.

Here, balance is found in paradox: tension that supports relaxation, structure that births freedom.

The Mind: Focused, Yet Free

If the body seeks balance through form, the mind seeks it through stillness. Yet this stillness is not blankness. It is the Zanshin, the remaining mind, the lingering presence that follows the arrow long after it has left the string.

Focus is essential. In Kyūdō, every breath, every blink, every step is a point of concentration. The mind must attend fully to the task at hand. And yet—here again—we meet paradox. That very focus must be free of attachment. The matomae (aim) is precise, but the archer must let go of the desire to hit the target. The kaiken-chu, the release, is cleanest when it arises without self. The archer disappears; only the arrow flies.

To aim with all your heart—and yet not mind where the arrow lands. That is balance.

The Rhythm of Training: Effort and Rest

Too much training, and the spirit hardens. The body grows weary, and the joy fades. Too little, and the body forgets the form, the breath, the center. Balance must be struck in the rhythm of practice itself. The bow does not reward aggression; it responds to rhythm, timing, and sensitivity.

The seasoned practitioner knows when to practice and when to walk away. When to focus on Kihontai—the foundational body movements—and when to simply draw the bow and breathe. There is a time for technique, and a time to let the technique dissolve into presence. 

 

Learning in Martial Arts

At the Shugyo blog, there is a good article about how we learn in martial arts training. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

It can sometimes be very rewarding to teach beginners as they have few expectations and biases and are a mostly empty cup to fill.

Putting your brain into the student mindset

Those of you who have been living in my eyebrows for the last few years will know that my budo interests have been steered towards improving budo coaching through some shallow dives into sports coaching theory. These dives have taken me past the colourful coral gardens of ZPD, scaffolding, the GROW model and other interesting underwater features. These have been very much focussed on the role and workload of the coach/teacher/dojo leader and has treated the receiving side as a pretty much homogenous mass of pink jelly that responds to the occasional blast of sound vibrations or poking with a sharp stick.

This year I have so far spent just over 9 weeks in Japan doing a lot of training in Ishido Sensei's dojo, and a little in other dojos. Something that occurred to me in my latest journeys was a noticeable difference in the responses of students with regard to feedback from various teachers. This hasn't been isolated to Japan; once it came to my interest in Japan I started noticing it in the UK and Europe as well.

Before I jumped into writing this, I did some light academic research looking at various articles on the subject of corrective feedback in coaching. I have extracted a few lines from the articles that I found relevant and interesting to just set the scene. These are not only useful for the student but also a superb set of pointers for coaches as well:

The Organization of Corrective Demonstrations Using Embodied Action in Sports Coaching Feedback

"However, unlike classrooms and medical internship discussions, sports coaching is a bodily affair; there is no “talking through a subject” to get the job of these settings done. Errors then are not a matter of what one knows but what one does. Error correction is a matter of showing the athlete(s) what they did wrong and showing them how to do it right. Talk is an instructive guide on where to find the action, but re-enactment is the central part of this setting’s instructional work."

Five Principles of Reinforcement

"Coaches should strive to use only reinforcement – mostly the positive kind – to shape player behaviours."

"Nonetheless, if you say “well done” when the athlete has not performed the skill very well, it’s false praise, and the odds are that the athlete will know it’s false praise. It’s tough being honest sometimes, but if you have built a supportive but challenging climate and you support your players striving to improve, then you’re in a good position to give honest feedback." 

...

[⚠️ Suspicious Content] I noticed in particular in Japan that the older students tended to skip the disappointment and acceptance stage. They might spend a bit more time improving their comprehension by asking for more detail and confirmation. 

In both Japan and Europe though, the younger and often more talented students seemed to need to go through a disappointment stage and a protracted emotional acceptance stage, sometimes asking for evidence or proof to back up the feedback.

I should add that I have always encouraged the people who have asked to learn from me to be sceptical (I'll come back to this sceptical mindset subject a bit later) of everything including anything that I have taught. This disappointment stage though isn't what I mean; it's an emotional reaction based on a range of the following mindsets in the student:

    "I thought I was doing it right and you're telling me that I was wrong."
    "I have devoted so much time to doing it this way and now you're saying that I wasted my time."
    "You could have told me this sooner."
    "You're being inconsistent in your teaching of the subject."

In one example of this, while I was in Ishido Sensei's dojo recently, there were quite a few other visitors there from Europe and China. One visitor, who will remain anonymous but is a very skilful and dedicated iaidoka from Europe, was training a notoriously difficult seated okuden kata. They were doing it with a lot of speed and fluidity as is appropriate for okuden. After a short while, Ishido Sensei came up to them and explained that they had misunderstood the kihon (basic version) and showed them what they should be doing. The visitor worked on this for a while but was having difficulty achieving "satisfaction". Of significance though was the surprise, or even shock, on the face of the student that what they had been training turned out to be incorrect. When they took a break during training I heard them express disappointment in themselves and were clearly confused. 

And I get it! This person had been instructed a certain way a few months previously (I think by Ishido Sensei) and they were now being told this was wrong. Had the koryu changed? Had they misunderstood the original instruction? 

Trying to resolve the question, had the koryu changed, takes us down a different road that I don't want to explore at the moment in any detail; suffice to say that any instruction will change in time; the teacher's perspective and level changes, the student changes - change is inevitable and we should be always mentally and physically prepared to accept that change. As is the motto of iaido, tsune ni itte, kyu ni awasu (be in the moment, adapt to the situation quickly).

This isn't limited to non-Japanese budoka either. I have witnessed many times even in Ishido Sensei's dojo, Japanese students making sounds of exasperation or disappointment when being told that they were doing something incorrectly, or that there was a "better way". There would then be a period of non-aggressive "arguing" (by this I mean, the student was trying to establish why they were being corrected) and then, after some time, they would then accept the advice and try to implement it. 

 

Happy Fourth of July!

My favorite 4th of July Video: