Muggings

When Jack Dempsey was in his 70s, he was the subject of an attempted mugging. Dempsey broke the man’s jaw. All such stories have a tinge of apocrypha, even those gleaned from newspapers, so I have some latitude for embellishment. In my version, the would-be mugger wakes up in a hospital bed, his jaw wired shut. He manages to say, “What happened?” through his wired jaw, and the orderly cracks up. “You tried to mug Jack Dempsey, asshole!”

Mugging is a high risk occupation, without much upside potential, so muggers tend to be pretty stupid. There was a locally famous student at the New York Aikikai many years ago, “Harry, the Muggers’ Mugger” as he was known. Harry was in his 60s, and liked to dress like a “pigeon,” mugger bait in other words, and go out walking in Greenwich Village late at night. He had decorated a wall of his apartment with switchblades, ice picks, and sharpened screwdrivers that he’d taken away from would-be muggers. I don’t know whether he did more than remove their weapons. Aikido, as I have said before, offers the option of being kind and gentle, but there are other options as well.

Dennis, who was a member of Aikido of Berkeley back when I first began the practice, was once standing at a bus stop in the rain with his umbrella over his head. A guy sidled up beside him and put a knife to his ribs, saying “Don’t make any sudden moves.”

“You mean like this?” Dennis said, and raised the umbrella up higher. The guy’s eyes went up to follow the umbrella…

The way I remember the story is that, after Dennis took the guy’s knife away from him, he remarked that the guy was lucky to still have all four limbs still attached, and possibly that such attachment remained optional. Again, as I recall, the guy then politely asked for his knife back. You may imagine the laughter that this produced.

As I say, mugging is not a career for the intelligent.

My friend Dale and his wife Susan were out walking one day, along with a friend of theirs. Susan was six months pregnant at the time. Two men jumped out of the bushes and tried to snatch Susan’s purse. Dale and the friend tried to pull Susan back out of harm’s way, but Susan was having none of it. She was a) holding onto her purse, and b) defending herself with what she had in her other hand, which was a folded umbrella.

She got one of them in the eye.

As the two fled, blood streaming from the one, his buddy called back over his shoulder, “You didn’t have to be so rough about it!”

Mugging is not … oh, hell, you know.

Fierce Women

In Battle Babes and Warrior Women, I was writing about a pop culture phenomenon: women who could hold their own in a fight, said fight being a feature of adventure fiction of all sorts. Previously, the role for females in adventure fiction had been almost solely limited to "the damsel in distress," or occasionally, the Ruler of the Hidden Realm (e.g. Haggard's She).

Life imitates fiction, of course, and vice versa. History finds plenty of, for example, intrepid women of the Victorian era who spent their lives in rough country, in large measure because they could not bear, for whatever reason, the limited nature of the conventional roles available to them.

Time passes and some other things get added to the mix, most notably the growing awareness in the West of the nature of various Eastern martial arts. These seemed almost like magic when they were first being introduced (and there is indeed some magic involved), especially in that often a smaller combatant can defeat a larger one in bare-handed combat. The "smaller combatant" can be female.

I've seen it suggested that, while the average difference in upper body strength between men and women is on the order of 40%-50%, the difference in lower body strength (torso, hips, and legs) is more like 20%. For forms like Aikido and Jujitsu, which derive most of their power from lower body movements, women are not at a great disadvantage. Some women take to the striking forms such as kung fu and karate, of course, and there comes another part of the insight: a trained fighter can defeat an untrained one. Also, underestimating an opponent ("she's just a girl") can have serious consequences. "He didn't see that one coming" has been said over many a prostrate form.

Sometimes people are drawn to Aikido (the art with which I am obviously more familiar) by its "non-competitive" nature. Some even believe that Aikido is fundamentally "non-violent." So some beginning Aikido students, and even some that become fairly advanced, develop a romanticized notion of being able to subdue an attacker without injuring them. I admit that such a thing is possible, but I warn those students not to count on it.

Of course some people begin martial arts training out of belligerence, and I've heard some students noting that Aikido does leach that out of its students as well. But it does not eliminate ferocity; sometimes it enables it, although it does provide some measure of control, if control is desired.

I have encountered those who I would classify as "fierce" in Aikido, and many of them have been women. In some cases, over time, I have watched as the layers of inhibition are slowly peeled away: the fear of hurting someone, the fear of retaliation, the caution in movement, the fear of making a mistake. All these are slowly worn thin during long hours of practice on the mat. What remains is more direct, an encounter with a deeper self, and less of a social construct.

Not all of this is good, naturally. Some people find a bully within themselves, and they must learn to deal with that. Each of those aforementioned fears takes its toll, and fears often do not so much depart as temporarily step out of the way. Later, the sensible mind looks back on some particular example of ukemi and says, "What were you thinking!?"

And you hurt people. Actually, some of the techniques are designed to cause pain, abeit without lasting damage. But sometimes something goes wrong, and someone does take some damage. It's often not even your fault, and you didn't intend it, but they do get hurt, and you were a part of it, and then what? You may adjust your practice, or you may not. But having hurt someone that you like and respect makes it a lot easier to contemplate hurting someone who has attacked you, or otherwise created a conflict. It amplifies the ferocity. It creates a warrant.

The social norm is to expect physical ferocity to be confined to men. Even emotional ferocity in women brings on slurs like "bitch." I'll concede there are women who physically abuse their spouses, but that is more of the bullying that I wrote of earlier, and emotional abuse is more common—in both directions—and has little to do with what I'm driving at here.

Fierce women have broken yet another set of chains that bind "civilized" behavior. Once broken, the chains are often picked up and draped upon the self as decorations, as jewelry that can be shed in an instant if the situation calls from something different from the social norms. We live in a world of secret identities. That soft talking lady may be able to throw you across the room.

Belting Out

Contract work is often a bit like the old Mission Impossible TV show: the Team is built around The Mission, which usually is subject to impossible constraints and the Team Members all bounce around trying to keep the makeup from slipping, and waiting for the Secretary to disavow all knowledge, etc.

And you get to meet management consultants, each and every one of them fully buzzword compliant and using all the fashionable tools to appear like they can actually deliver on whatever weird fever dream was sold to the organization that hired them. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, eh?

Anyway, one of the current fashions is Black Belts. There are Six Sigma Black Belts, Lean Black Belts, Process Management Black Belts, PFD Black Belts, and who knows what else. I just saw one business card that asserted the holder was a Master Black Belt, though it didn’t stipulate in what. Probably Six Sigma; I think that’s where this PR trick began, and, wouldn't you know it, it was a General Electric thing. There are, incidentally, also Green Belts in these things. I’m just glad they didn’t go for the whole rainbow, Yellow, Green, Blue, Brown, etc.

It’s the general opinion in at least my little stretch of the martial arts community that colored belts are mostly PR. It’s not like there is any licensing board that sets standards for the things. Anybody can hang out a shingle and award any colored belt to anyone they like, and many martial arts schools take the route of awarding lots of promotions quickly as a way of enticing students.

I can only report directly from Aikido, though I’ve had plenty of friends in other arts. For that matter, there are enough versions of Aikido that I can’t speak universally even for that one art. But generally speaking, my fellow Aikidoka don’t speak much of belt colors. For adults, it’s either white or black (In the first dojo to which I belonged, over 25 years ago, there were a few students who were informally given brown belts, but I haven’t seen that practice in over 20 years). The “black belts” are referred to as yudansha, and the first dan grade, shodan, basically means that the holder is now taken as a serious student of the art. There is also a tradition of beginning to wear a hakima (a sort of long black culotte), after promotion to shodan unless one’s sensei says to wear it sometime earlier. One of my fellow students once compared wearing a hakima to painting a big target on one’s back at seminars. It is certainly expected that someone wearing a hakima knows his/her limits in ukemi (having an aikido technique applied to you and surviving it unharmed).

And, of course, shodan (first dan grade) is only the beginning. Then there is nidan, sandan, yondan, and on up, though it gets mighty sparse above that. By the time you get to 5th and 6th dan, (godan and ryokudan) you might as well just give people’s names, since their art has become intensely personalized by then, and there are sufficiently few of them that everyone knows everyone else, more or less, and the differences in numerical rank become less important than their place in the community. More to the point, at that level, teaching is the important service, with Sensei (any teacher), Shidoin (instructor), Fuku Shidoin (assistant instructor), and Shihan (master instructor, or “teacher of teachers”) being the appellations.

I don’t really have a punch line (as it were) for these musings, except to maybe be glad that the Japanese terms haven’t been swiped as management consulting buzzwords. I don’t think I’d react very well to meeting a “Six Sigma Shihan.”

In case anyone is wondering, I began Aikido practice in 1980 at what was then called Aikido of Berkeley under Steve Sasaki Sensei. I had to quit in 1985, for health reasons, and I did not return to practice until 2000, at Eastshore Aikikai, under Elizibeth Lynn Sensei. I was promoted to shodan in the fall of 2005. It's a tradition to give certain promotions at the time of the New Year, and my promotion to nidan has just been announced.

Another Aikido Story

This is a second hand story, told me many years ago. At the time, the protagonist was named, so it’s of greater weight than an urban legend, but I’ve forgotten the name, so it’s still possible that it is apocryphal. Not that it matters.

The protagonist was an American, who had gone to Japan to study Aikido at Hombu Dojo, the school established by Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido, known as O Sensei, which translates as “Grand Teacher.” Hombu Dojo is the home of the World Aikido Federation, and my membership card informs me that I am the 188,047th member of that organization.

One evening, the student was on the train, returning home, and a man in workman’s clothing entered the car. The workman was obviously drunk, and was elbowing people aside, making insulting remarks, “spoiling for a fight,” as it were. The student thought to himself, “I have been studying Aikido for a long time, but I’ve never had the chance to put it to practical use. Perhaps now is the time.” So he blew the workman a kiss.

This enraged the man, and he began to stalk forward. But an old man on one of the seats called out, “Hey! What have you been drinking?”

The workman was momentarily confused. “Sake!” he said after a moment. “I’ve been drinking sake! I love sake!”

“Ha!” the old man replied. “I knew it! I love sake too!” He patted the seat beside him and said to the workman. “Sit here. Tell me about where you drink. Is the sake cheap and good?”

So the workman sat himself heavily beside the old man and began to talk. Within a few minutes he was in tears, telling the old man about his troubles. He’d lost his job. His woman had left him. He was broke and unsure how he’d pay the month’s rent. And so on.

The student retreated to the next car and got off at his stop, feeling like a fool.

My first Sensei once talked about the movie, The Outlaw Josie Wales, in which there is a scene where Chief Dan George watches an impending gun fight between Wales and some outlaws, where Wales made sure to come at them with the sun behind him, to give himself an edge, the Chief observes. “We always look for the edge,” my Sensei said. “Technique is an edge. Physical conditioning is an edge. Ki is an edge. Knowing what you want is an edge.”

Being able to fight is an edge, but so is being willing to not fight. There are a lot more options when you’re not fixated on the idea of winning the fight, and having options is an edge, too.

Note added 11/29/07: My Sensei informed me that this was a fairly famous story involving Terry Dobson Sensei. In fact, a little tracking finds it here. He tells it better, of course, but I note with some significance that despite having heard the story over 20 years ago, I still remembered the important details.

Enlightenment is not a Competitive Sport

One of the post-Firesign Theater “rock and roll comedy” groups was The Conception Corporation. They put out two albums, A Pause in the Disaster, and Conceptionland. Both were good for Progessive Radio play in the 60s, which is to say the early 70s. (As I understand it, there is a third, live album now available as well).

One of the cuts on Conceptionland was “Rock and Roll Classroom,” another “What if Freaks Ran Things?” idea (see also “Returned for Re-Grooving,” by Firesign Theater). In this case, what if high school were really hip, or at least trying to be?

In one bit, gym class is taught by “Fizz Ed” who announces to the class in a drill instructor voice, “Today, we’re going to learn to meditate! On three, one, two, meditate! One, two, meditate! You! Over in the corner, you’re not meditiating!”

In short, it was a lot like a Pilates class.

A fair number of Aikido practitioners also practice zazen, meditating in seiza, the standard Japanese sitting posture, knees and feet on the floor, buttocks resting on the feet (feet tops flat on the floor). Seiza is a natural and comfortable posture—provided you have been sitting that way since you were a child. For us Westerners, it can rapidly become torture; our bones, ligaments, and blood vessels did not grow into seiza as we matured, so at the very least, our legs tend to fall asleep, not to mention the cramps, aches, etc. that also accompany extended periods in seiza.

In zazen, a zafu, a small circular cushion, is often used to alleviate the seiza problem, but many students don’t use them, or they don’t use enough of a cushion to straighten the legs enough to really make the thing less of an ordeal. So then we get all sorts of rationalizations about “letting go of the pain,” etc.

It’s quite true that meditation is often used as a way of alleviating chronic pain, but pain isn’t actually the point of meditation. Meditation itself isn’t supposed to hurt, nor is the posture you’re in supposed to hurt. Actually, being in a painful posture during meditation is dangerous, since you are then basically ignoring an important message from your body, and you can cause or exacerbate an injury by doing so.

But, of course, “letting go of the pain” feels like such an accomplishment.

At a college reunion many years ago, one of my freshman buddies was there with his wife, and they were explaining their study of kundalini yoga. The posture in which you begin meditation is supposed to cause some group of muscles to stretch, though not to anything approaching pain. Then, as meditation progresses, the stretched muscles relax, releasing kundalini energy. The reason why advanced students wind up tying themselves into knots, so to speak, is that it becomes more and more difficult to give your muscles that necessary stretch, because the practitioner becomes more and more limber. But the limberness is not the point of it, the kundalini is.

“Kundalini energy” sounds like woo-woo Asian mystical mumbo jumbo, but actually, all of the related concepts, prana, ki, gi, chi, and all the related “energies” are fairly easy to perceive if you put a bit of work into the matter. As for the “woo-woo” part of it, one can just as easily talk about dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, and any of the other myriad neurotransmitters that have been discovered and studied. If freeing up kundalini energy went with an increase in dopamine levels, what then? Does that “explain” the matter, or just make it more palatable to a mechanistic world view?

In any case, the question becomes, what is all that energy for? In the martial arts, of course, we have one explanation: it makes you stronger, more able to practice the art, and, if necessary, win the fight. But there are other answers, some more prosaic, some downright cosmic. Meditation becomes yet another tool, whatever your goal, be it better health or a doorway into infinity. Whatever floats your boat.

It is noteworthy, however, that so much energy is expended in oneupsmanship. “I’m more enlightened than you” seems to be, on examination, a self-canceling statement. To have it issued (albeit usually indirectly) by someone who has achieved that state by spending hours staring at a wall and literally doing nothing, well, that just makes the leap into paradox, doesn’t it? But then, zen thrives on paradox, and art thrives on irony, even the unintentional sort.

Ancient Traditions – Bushido III

The bottom line.

Training in the martial arts has many virtues: discipline, concentration, physical conditioning, and, sometimes, an indefinable elevation of the spirit. "Cheated death again," I often say at the end of a class, and it feels like a real accomplishment.

Many of the Asian martial arts are also suffused with various philosophies, Buddhism in one or another of its variations being common, and that is the one that often appeals to Western students. The founder of Aikido, Morihei Ueshiba Osensei, was a devotee of Ōmoto-kyō, a mystical religion deriving from Shinto.

But martial virtue is martial virtue, and it would be foolish to believe that the Asian arts are somehow intrinsically superior to Western arts like fencing, boxing, wrestling, or long bow archery. The Western arts likewise have "ancient traditions" and if the links to ancient times is as tenuous as the connection of the modern Olympics to its Greek predecessor, well, that is par for the course, isn't it?

Likewise there are many philosophical and spiritual covers for the practice of warfare and the arts of war. I've mentioned Chivalry, which included the Christian doctrine of the "just war," and I'm sure that both sides often find their cause to be just, and that is course par as well.

When all of life is nasty and brutish, then the nasty brutishness of war does not seem like such a breach. But what does one do when the nastiness is lessened? What is the state of man when peace is an option?

I have, upon occasion, justified Aikido with these words: You understand the calm serenity that is the object of meditation exercise? Those practicing meditation spend long hours in darkened, quiet rooms attempting to find that center of peace. It is the goal of Aikido to reach that peace even on the battlefield.

A paradox, perhaps. But what to make of those who attempt to find war even in the midst of peace?

We train. Aikidoka train in that art. Other martial artists train in their own arts. Soldiers train. Competitive athletes train. Do we train for combat, real combat? If that combat never comes, do we feel that we have wasted our time?

What happens to the athlete who trains and trains but never gets to play the game?

What happens to the soldier who never fights in war?

Those seem like they should be different questions, because playing the game rarely kills people, so there is no obviously creepy downside to the simulated combat of competitive sports. Except perhaps that the sports themselves are considered simulations of war, and the winning player of games looks to find a more exciting game.

They sometimes call it that. That's how the British referred to the contest with Russia for control of central Asia in the 19th Century. Quite a lot of blood was spilled. The idea was to "civilize" Asia—a truly laughable notion given the respective age of the civilizations involved.

Warriors are rarely philosophers and philosophers are rarely warriors. But warriors do fascinate philosophers, who often yearn for the "reality" or the "authenticity" of war and fighting. Read Norman Mailer on boxing, or Hemmingway on bullfighting. But do not read them for real insight into boxing or bullfighting; what you will find instead is the writers' projections of their own internal conflicts onto the external reality of the fight. If you want to learn about boxing, put on the gloves and find a teacher.

When the philosophy of war is formulated, the Necronomicon is opened. People who read and fantasize about war puff themselves up with martial spirit. They imagine themselves as heroes, never as cowards. They lose their real selves in the distorting mirror of wannabe. They feed off what they imagine to be the experiences of others.

Is there a martial artist alive who has not imagined himself/herself fending off an attacker with some artful move or maneuver? God knows I have. Sometimes I also make myself pay penance, by imagining myself simply handing over my wallet to the mugger, or darting down the alleyway, running away, as fast as my aging legs can take me. But the lure of the imagined fight remains. I'm lucky; I get to put these fantasies into fiction, where I know that I'm the puppet master pulling all the strings.

Find the strings. I guess that is the nub of what I'm saying. Follow the strings back to the fingers that pull them. But don't be surprised if you wind up staring at your own hands.

Ancient Traditions – Bushido II

In my essays on Privation Morality, I tried to get a handle on how the authoritarian tradition begins, in times of privation, when the world reduces to zero sum, the game becomes not just a matter of "him or me," but rather, "us or them" and the "us" includes your family, your children, all you hold dear. Is there one among us who would not steal for their children, lie if it meant the lives of your parents, kill if the option were the deaths of all you hold dear?

So who do you pray to and who do you prey upon? Those are real world questions when the times are sufficiently rough.

The nuclear family becomes an extended family, and families merge to form tribes. And tribes war upon each other, conquer or be conquered. Is there a single human on the planet whose ancestors did not pass through this cultural experience? Is there a one of us who can claim a single lineage that did not?

I've been trying to find a passage that I believe I saw on the blog Orcinus, written by Sara Robinson, who has become one of the better analysts of the authoritarian culture. It outlines the authoritarian family bargain: The husband is the leader, the voice of the highest authority. His command is law and all must do his bidding and attend to his wishes and comfort. In return, he provides for the family and defends it with his life, if necessary.

The Paterfamilias has the power of life and death within the family. It falls to him to decide if a newborn infant is taken into the family or left to die of exposure. If any family member angers him sufficiently, he may kill them with impunity. "My home is my castle" is not just a figure of speech to a true authoritarian.

Over time, tribes merge with other tribes. Cities arise and different needs emerge. The story goes that the tradition of Paterfamilias in Rome was broken when a father ordered the death of his son—who happened to be an important Roman general. Whether the tale is true or not, the power of the head of a household is bound to ebb when the household is connected to a larger society.

One way that power is restricted is through the power of law, or the precursor of law, tradition. Familial roles become codified and legalized. The power of the father becomes the power of a caste. Since the most important role is aggression and defense, there comes to be a warrior class. The power of tradition and law often comes to rest with the priests. The True King requires the support of both.

None of this is very controversial. What comes next is where the real meta-combat begins.

The 19th Century upended everything. Distance was obliterated. Every sort of production exploded, and every commodity market in the world found itself in a game of crack-the-whip. Napoleon remade the map of Europe and the New World colonies of Spain and Portugal nominally freed themselves from their former masters, only to experience a different sort of colonialism, with economies tied to the aforementioned commodities, whose markets were not under their influence or control. Those few nations in possession of modern weaponry conquered the rest of the world with almost pitiful ease.

All the "ancient traditions" were rewritten in the new light. What became the new codes of conduct were called by the same names as the older codes, but it was a new world, and it was not the same.

The Japanese code of Bushido, the code of the warrior, was not written by warriors. It was written by a "warrior class," the Samurai, who were perhaps descended from warriors, but by the 19th Century, most of them were administrators, bureaucrats, at most policemen. Their martial experience was in the dojo, not the battlefield. Actual warriors rarely articulate philosophy, and philosophies are rarely written by warriors.

Even now, you can see the "martial spirit" in the southern United States, an echo of an echo of an echo. The Antebellum plantation elite considered themselves to be the heirs of Chivalry. They fought duels. They carried the favors of their ladies with romantic flourish (and visited the slave quarters when their carnal needs arose). They devoted themselves to fine houses and fine clothes.

And when they lost, they spent the next century mourning the "noble cause" and convincing themselves that their culture was something special, unique, lost in a torpor of nostalgia for an "ancient tradition" that never existed, could never have existed, and which, in any case, was utterly inappropriate for a time when war is simple slaughter, without glory, without honor, and largely without purpose. But the mythology lives on, first transmuted by romantic literature into the noble gunfighter of the Old West, then to the Top Gun aviator of the dogfight in the air. Denatured still further we get Spectator Sports, those little Kabuki Plays that simulate warfare as unrealistically as the playing fields of Eton simulated Waterloo (or am I the only one who always found that sentiment to be a crock?).

The Wikipedia article suggests these as the hallmarks of Bushido:

• Rectitude
• Courage
• Benevolence
• Respect
• Honesty
• Honour, Glory
• Loyalty
• Filial piety
• Wisdom
• Care for the aged

A recent essay by my sensei's sensei called out these:

• Courage
• Endurance
• Nobility
• onesty and Faithfulness
• Unsullied Integrity
• Simplicity and Directness
• Compassion (toward the weak)
• Honor
• Self-sacrifice
• Non-attachment to worldly importance (including life and death)

One might think that these are all noble sentiments, as indeed they can be. So how is it that the spirit of Bushido found its way into Japanese militarism in the early 20th Century, one of the greatest national disasters in history?

Well, here is an example of the code of Chivalry:

• Thou shalt believe all that the Church teaches, and shalt observe all its directions.
• Thou shalt defend the Church.
• Thou shalt respect all weaknesses, and shalt constitute thyself the defender of them.
• Thou shalt love the country in which thou wast born.
• Thou shalt not recoil before thine enemy.
• Thou shalt make war against the Infidel without cessation, and without mercy.
• Thou shalt perform scrupulously thy feudal duties, if they be not contrary to the laws of God.
• Thou shalt never lie, and shall remain faithful to thy pledged word.
• Thou shalt be generous, and give largess to everyone.
• Thou shalt be everywhere and always the champion of the Right and the Good against Injustice and Evil.

That gave us the American Civil War. Somehow, I don't think that it is the Words' fault.

Ancient Traditions – Bushido I

CP Snow once said that all ancient British traditions date to the second half of the 19th Century, and his only error was to limit this claim to Britain. The great majority of real traditions having been swept away or reduced to irrelevance with the rise of capitalism, the 19th century saw the rise of a whole set of new ones, which were then fixed in shape by the system of nation-states, each with their own newly-codified language and officially sanctioned history that took shape at the same time. – John Quiggan

There are basically no publications in English on ninja worth reading–it’s all junk. The only serious academic scholarship available outside Japanese language publications would be the material on Roy Ron’s website at ninpo.org. Roy is a (fairly) recent PhD graduate from U Hawaii, and has spent a number of years doing research on ninja and related topics.

The most reliable reconstructions of "ninja" history suggest that "ninja" denotes a function, not a special kind of warrior--ninja WERE samurai (a term, which didn't designate a class until the Tokugawa period--AFTER the warfare of the late medieval period had ended--before that it designated only an occupation) performing "ninja" work.

Movie-style ninja, BTW, have a much longer history than the movies (although the term "ninja" does not appear to have been popularized until the 20th century). Ninja shows, ninja houses (sort of like American "haunted houses" at carnivals), and ninja novels and stories were popular by the middle of the Tokugawa period. The "ninja" performers may have created the genre completely out of whole cloth, or they may have built on genuine lore derived from old spymasters. Either way, however, it's clear that much of the lore underlying both modern ninja movies and modern ninja schools has both a long history AND little basis in reality outside the theatre.
--Karl Friday
Instructional Coordinator & Associate Head
Dept. of History
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602

Another problem stems from the nature of Japanese society and Japan's social history. From the early seventeenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century (Meiji Restoration) Japanese society was locked in a rigid class structure that allowed very little or no mobility at all. That meant that members of a social group within a certain social class had no choice but to accept their place in society. In addition, there was a clear distinction between the ruling class--the samurai--and the other classes--peasants, craftsmen, and merchants. Within each class as well, there was a certain hierarchy according to which members of the class had to act their social role with little opportunity to change their status. This reality have produced strong identifying characteristics for each social class to which the individual had to conform. Outside these social classes, as they were designated by the ruling samurai elite, were the classless people and outcasts who were placed bellow everybody else. Ninjutsu, for the most part, was the fighting skills and methods practiced by a small number of families who belonged to the lower samurai class, peasants, and even outcasts, and only rarely by warriors belonging to the samurai elite. Consequently, ninjutsu since the Edo period has been identified as different than the noble traditions of the samurai, and those practicing it were usually regarded by the rest of society as lowly people. In other words, ninjutsu was anything but conformity to the pre defined social rules. As such, it could have never received a seal of approval as a recognized martial tradition, not even when those samurai were actually employing warriors proficient in ninjutsu.

The social conditions and the strong tendency for conformity I have just discussed produced another problem. Fighting methods or weapons that were not practiced by the samurai elite were considered mysterious at best, sometimes demonic, often super natural, and certainly unworthy of respect. Here again is the problem that rises from social conformity. For the samurai elite who were bound by rules of behavior and a code of honor and ethics, fighting methods were confined to a small number of weapons, namely bow, sword, staff, jutte, and spear. This resulted in little creativity in fighting. However, for warriors other than the samurai, those who were not constrained by their position in society, creativity was a necessity for winning. They have maintained unusual and innovative fighting methods and weapons that were developed in earlier periods, while systematizing, recording, and adding to it during the Edo period. Consequently, ninjutsu came to be perceived very negatively, and when Japan moved into the modern period ninjutsu gradually disappeared while its dark and mysterious image, which already became folklore, was now viewed as an historical fact.
--Roy Ron

And yet, in the 1921 Ryūkyū Kenpō: Karate, the first fully published karate text, little of this [historical development of karate traditions] appears: karate is not a dō, lacks mythology, and is frank about recent Chinese influences. Reaching further back, to the unpublished writings of Itosu Anko, karate lacks even a name, makes no claims on the spirit, and mentions history not at all. Beyond that, the writing is in Chinese. Strangest of all, and most easily overlooked, is that through the 1920s there was only really one name: karate, the Chinese hand…

But the historical imperative was not a simple descriptive one, for it included certain strategic silences. They needed to know the details of their mystical origins, but they also needed to be at a loss to make a full accounting of the middle of karate history. Make no mistake: karate history soon had a middle, but it was indistinct—an outline with many precise gaps, a carefully composed picture of fog—because along with the questions that required answers were ones that could not be asked at all… --Craig Colbeck: Karate and Modernity, A Call for Comments

Bushidō, meaning "Way of the Warrior", is a Japanese code of conduct and a way of life, loosely analogous to the European concept of chivalry. It originates from the samurai moral code and stresses frugality, loyalty, martial arts mastery and honor unto death. Bushidō developed between the 9th to 12th centuries as set forth by numerous translated documents dating from the 12th to 16th centuries (as mentioned below). However, some dependable sources also state the document might have been formulated in the 17th century.

According to the Japanese dictionary Shogakukan Kokugo Daijiten, "Bushidō is defined as a unique philosophy (ronri) that spread through the warrior class from the Muromachi (chusei) period." Nitobe Inazō, in his book Bushidō: The Soul of Japan, described it in this way. "...Bushidō, then, is the code of moral principles which the samurai were required or instructed to observe... More frequently it is a code unuttered and unwritten... It was an organic growth of decades and centuries of military career."

Under the Tokugawa Shogunate during the Edo Period (1603-1867), Bushidō became formalized into Japanese Feudal Law. –Adapted from the Wikipedia

Battle Babes and Warrior Women

Which reminds me...

Emma Peel first appeared on The Avengers TV series in November, 1965, in the U.K. This was followed quickly by the series’ appearance on ABC television in the spring of 1966. 1965 also marked the appearance of the first Modesty Blaise novel, in both the U.K. and the U.S. The Modesty Blaise movie appeared soon afterwards (1966), but it was a severe disappointment to Modesty Blaise fans (and there were a lot of us, very quickly), because the movie played the whole thing for laughs.

You can stretch both the Modesty Blaise and The Avengers chronology of the “battle babe” back three years, to 1962, when the MB comic strip first appeared, and when Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman), showed up in The Avengers. Honor Blackman, of course, later became Pussy Galore, in Goldfinger, first knocking 007 on his ass, then succumbing to some combination of judo and masculinity to give up her lesbian ways for some Bonded sex. Clearly something was going on in the adolescent male libido in the mid-1960s, that had been submerged in popular culture during the 1950s.

The transformation of Wonder Woman from the 1940s version to the 1950s version may hold a few clues on the submergence. Wonder Woman was created by William Moulton Marston, a psychologist and consultant to D.C. comics. Marston instilled some overtly Freudian themes in the original Wonder Woman, including the trope that her wrist bands were needed to keep her from going berserk. The strong bondage elements in the 1940s Wonder Woman comics were an obvious target for Frederic Wertham’s book Seduction of the Innocent and the Kefauver hearings that made such effective use of Wertham’s work. The result was a drastic taming of the content of Wonder Woman, muting her dominance and amplifying her love of Steve Trevor to effectively become the reality that the previous bondage symbolism had only alluded to.

Supergirl appeared in 1959, and her initial fortunes are perhaps all-too-emblemic of the times. Here she was, the only other survivor of a destroyed world, and what does her cousin do to her? He sticks her in an orphanage and keeps her identity and very existence a secret. She also undergoes Superman’s trick-her-to-teach-her-a-lesson ordeal only slightly less often than Lois Lane. It’s not that surprising when she falls in love with her horse (who turns into a handsome man when a comet comes by). Who else does she have?

But something was obviously brewing underground, tamped down by the happy-suburban-housewife weight of the 50s, and the eruption found all sorts of vents in the 1960s. Sue Storm went from having just the power to make herself invisible to tossing around force field projectiles in only a couple of years. Modesty Blaise escapes from her prison camp, and Emma Peel takes up espionage as a hobby.

There’s a direct line of succession from Modesty Blaise to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” In fact, the connection is through a single comics writer, Chris Claremont, writer of the X-Men for 16 years. Claremont set out to write strong female characters into the book, and one of his first actions was to model the origin of Ororo/Storm after that of Modesty Blaise. Kitty Pride also stands out as an exemplar of teenage supergirl, having the ability to walk through walls. In general, if the hallmark of pulp fiction is that, when the action shows you send a man through the door with a gun, Claremont would have the person be a woman, still with guns blazing, but maybe even coming through the wall, rather than through the door.

Joss Whedon, creator of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Firefly” has spoken of his lifelong love of comics, and credits Kitty Pride as a model for his strong teenage characters, as well as the Dark Phoenix saga for informing the “Dark Willow” arc in the sixth season of Buffy. In “Firefly”, the character of Zoe, a former soldier, is referred to by her husband as a “Warrior Woman,” (along with an indication as to how this makes her good in bed). Whedon is currently writing an X-Men comic for Marvel, and has been announced as doing a Wonder Woman movie.

The incidence of the battle babe in popular culture went from a nadir the 1950s, to the torrent seen in the last decade, but what do we make of it? On the one hand, it appears to be the male adolescent version of the “enforced seduction” archetype in gothic romances; a strong character of the opposite sex takes a great deal of anxiety out of the process. The reader/viewer can assume a passive role, while all of the initiative is taken by the strong Other.

The flip side is that one cannot really come on too strong with a battle babe. If she doesn’t like what you’re doing or saying, she’ll just kick your ass, without bothering with any legal stuff. If she does like what you’re doing, she’ll still kick your ass, but you’ll wind up having sex with her (“When did the building fall down?” asks Buffy after her first time with Spike). For confused men who claim to not knowing the difference between compliments and harassment, the simplicity of the arrangement is appealing.

Whatever the deeper reasons, it’s pretty obvious that “nice girls” don’t become warrior women, and that the adolescent male would rather have someone other than a “nice girl” to fantasize about. Given the popularity of many of these icons with adolescent females, it remains to be seen just how many of the boys will grow up to deal with the reality that the fantasies can create.

Dominance

• In Aikido, one blow can determine life or death. When practicing, obey your instructor, and do not engage in useless contests of strength.
• Aikido is an art in which a person learns to deal with not only one but multiple attackers. It therefore requires that you practice at all times with careful awareness not only in front of you but in all directions.
• Practice at all times with the feeling of pleasurable exhilaration.
• The teachings of your instructor constitute only a small fraction of what you will learn. Your mastery of each movement will depend almost entirely on individual, earnest practice.
• Daily practice begins with light movements of the body, gradually increasing in intensity and strength. There must be no excessive strain. That is why even an elderly person can continue to practice pleasurably without bodily harm, and will attain the goal of his or her training.
• The purpose of Aikido is to train both body and mind and to develop a person's sincerity. All Aikido techniques are secret in nature and are not to be idly revealed to others in public, not shown to rowdy or unprincipled people who will misuse them.
  --Etiquette for Practicing Aikido (by Morihei Ueshiba O'Sensei)
  

The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. --Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (1996)

Unarmed fighting techniques can be loosely divided into three categories: strikes, holds, and throws. There is also the wealth of ancillary behavior, which mostly comes down to either countering moves (blocks), or getting into a good position to use the techniques (called “irimi” or “entering” in Aikido).

The folks who are adamant that Aikido is of no use in a “real fight,” are generally hypnotized by the throwing techniques. But Aikido is also holds, and Aikido holds overlap substantially with other martial arts, and also form part of the core of most police and military unarmed combat techniques.

There are a set of Aikido holds that are essentially numbered (in Japanese) techniques: ikkyo, nikyo, sankyo, yonkyo, gokyo, and rokyo, the latter two being generally considered to be knife taking techniques, but they work against an unarmed opponent just as well. Most of these have analogs in other schools; ikkyo is commonly called an “arm bar” in wrestling, as is a related technique, ude gateme, which also looks a bit like a half nelson. I’d also add another couple of techniques, kote gaeshi and shiho nage to the core list of things that makes anyone claiming that they “wouldn’t work in a real fight” either ignorant or a blithering idiot.

Throws are a different matter, and throwing techniques generally depend upon the movement and balance of an attacker, and it’s generally true that opponents who do not “commit,” i.e. who do not throw the weight of their body into whatever they are doing, do not grab, etc. are difficult to throw. It’s also true that if someone isn’t even attacking you, it’s very hard to throw them. I’m all in favor of not using martial techniques of people who aren’t attacking you.

It’s also commonly believed that Aikido does not use strikes, punches, or kicks. This isn’t true, since it’s necessary to defend against such attacks, so the Aikido uke must simulate punches, knife thrusts, etc. with some verisimilitude, and not being “sincere” about the simulation can get you scolded.

There is also a event called “atemi,” which is a strike of some sort. Some practitioners de-emphasize atemi, believing it to violate the “non-violent” aspect of the art. Others emphasize that the Founder taught atemi as central to practice (notice the first sentence in the quote that begins this piece). The difference is most often split as holding atemi to be a feint of a sort; pulling the attention of the attacker in order to do a technique. But I’ve heard instructors who were pretty blunt about the notion that if you’ve used a wrist lock on an attacker to bring him to his knees, kicking him in the face may well be the most reasonable next step.

As I said in my original essay, “But Does it Work?” sometimes those fancy rolls are because the next event in a “real fight” would be a strike to the throat.

In re-reading that essay, I notice that I missed one of the reasons why I think some people have such an investment in arguing that Aikido is “fake,” and “wouldn’t work in a real fight.” I did note that most “real fights” aren’t exactly “real,” at least not in the sense of proceeding until one or the other participants is unable to continue. No, the idea is for the other guy to “cry uncle,” that is, to concede dominance. The practice of Aikido does not lend itself to showing dominance, “winning,” in other words. Practice is supposed to be harmonious. It’s not a sport, or a “contest of strength.”

I’ve been in three, well, let’s call them “physical altercations” in the last 30 years. That’s a pretty low count, I think, and I’m obviously not much of a brawler. I haven’t written about them previously, partly because there were more than two people involved (which is usually the case), even though only two of us were fighting. But mostly I’ve refrained because I’m a little ashamed of one of them and a lot ashamed of another. So please excuse me if I leave out the reasons for the fights and other things that would make them better stories, perhaps, except not so much better for me. This means that I’m leaving out a lot of prologue in each case. Sorry.

We’ll join the first encounter with the guy throwing cold coffee in my face after I’d rolled down the window to demand that he move his truck from blocking my way. We will ignore the question about whether under slightly different circumstances the coffee might have been scalding hot.

This was several years before I began Aikido training. As a consequence of frequent nose bleeds as a child, I never learned boxing, but I did wrestle for a time at the YMCA. I believe that my weight at the time of my “competitive wrestling career” was roughly 85 pounds. But grappling was pretty much all I knew and I did weigh more than 85 at the time of this particular fight.

I don’t think the guy was expecting me to get out of the car to attack him. I’m positive he didn’t expect me to rush at him, coming in low, to grab him between the hips and knees and lift him completely off the ground in a takedown maneuver. Under other circumstances, that would have been very bad for him, because falling onto pavement, on your back, with someone else’s full weight on you can do pretty unpleasant things to you very quickly.

However, he was standing in front of the open door to the cab of his pickup truck, so we instead went back onto the seat. There was a general struggle, which finally ended when he managed to get his hands to my face and threatened to gouge my eyes. I released him and backed away.

He was pretty much still yelling insults at me as I got back into my car and drove off.

Did I “win” that fight? He could have put my eyes out, remember, or at least he could have made a try for it, and it might have worked. Whatever. It didn’t feel like I’d won anything.

The next one is the one that I’m thoroughly ashamed of, because it was at least 80% my fault, in part because I’m the one who made the threat that initiated the fight. The closest thing I have to an excuse is that it was several years into that-which-we-will-not-call-chronic-fatigue-syndrome, and I was susceptible to mood swings and flashes of rage. I was also still weak, often fuzzy-headed and I hadn’t practiced Aikido for several years, so what occurred is no reflection on that art.

The other guy was small and sturdy and built like a wrestler. In any case, he was a natural grappler, and pretty much marched straight through any techniques, Aikido or wrestling, that I could remember or try. I gave ground and tried to get lower; a tall man can be at a considerable disadvantage against a stronger man who is shorter than he is. Eventually, I wound up on my back, though I’d managed to keep my legs between me and him.

We were in an industrial district in Oakland, in one of those buildings that had been converted to (basically illegal) “live/work” spaces, and we were on top of a large wooden platform that formed the roof of some of those spaces. The platform was maybe 15-20 feet high, and our scuffle had put us maybe 5 ft. from the edge of what amounted to a balcony with no guard railing. His back was to the edge, and I had my legs cocked between him and me.

I whispered, “Keep it up and you’re going for a ride.”

His head snapped around and he realized the danger. He pulled off of me and stomped off. I think there were some more insults involved. It looked for a little while like there might be a rematch, but the words finally cooled, and certain explanations were made. There were no apologies, but some things became better understood.

Did I win? Lose? Would I have risked seriously injuring or killing him? When the matter had been mostly my fault? As I say, I’m just thoroughly ashamed of the altercation.

The last incident took place a few years ago, after I’d re-entered Aikido training. I was working for a time in a “rough neighborhood,” running a thrift shop for a non-profit agency during the Dot Com Bust period. I never felt endangered in the area, but I was aware of the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways that some people act to establish a sense of physical domination of the people around them. This is, I think, automatic for them, and doesn’t really reflect so much on them personally as their surroundings. In other times and places, the dominance behavior is more abstract, more socially derived, less physical and personal.

There was one fellow who I actually like quite a bit, but he was in the habit of doing those little physical dominance things. Joking threats and dominance hypotheticals, as it were. I’d gotten a little tired of it.

One day, when I was out on the sidewalk talking to someone, he came up behind me, stuck his finger in my back and pretended it was a stickup, sorta, kinda jokingly, was the idea, I expect.

I probably recognized his voice, but as I say, I was tired of that sort of thing. Also, he’d stuck something in my back; I did not know what it was. What I did next, I did in much less time than it takes to think it over.

The move is called tenchi nage. As I spun around, my left hand caught his right arm between the wrist and elbow, knocking it aside. (If he’d been using the other arm, I’d have used a different technique). My right hand went up, more or less parallel to his body, sliding off the center line just before it reached his head. He reacted pretty well, flexing backwards to avoid the strike to his head, but the fact is that I could have easily hit him in the throat, chin, or face with a fist or the heel of my palm, if I’d wanted to.

Instead, my arm was outstretched across his body, and he was off-balance, bending backward. All I would have had to do was take a step forward and turn my hip and he’d have been out into the middle of oncoming traffic. Instead, I stepped back and smiled at him.

He smiled back. He never tried anything like that on me again.

Aikido gets called “fake” because it is seen as not using punches or strikes, because it is not aggressive. It doesn’t have tournaments; it’s not a sport, so it doesn’t make for a competition where there are winners and losers.

But I’m pretty sure I won that last one.

But Does It Work?

Yes, I'll get to copyrights, but I'm still thinking about it. Besides, there's something else I want to write, and I need this up here first.

[originally posted to my newsgroup on Mon 19 Jun 2006]

This past weekend I rode over to San Francisco with another member of Eastshore Aikikai. On the way, we got to talking about Aikido on the net, me about my recently going to YouTube and looking over the Aikido videos, her about how she used to read the rec.martial-arts newsgroup.
She spoke to something I noticed on the YouTube comments, that a major theme of any public aikido discussion is whether or not aikido is “real,” i.e. whether or not it would actually be of use in a “real” fight. Moreover, she noted that this kind of question was almost entirely confined to aikido; no one seems to ask it about karate, tai kwon do, kung fu, etc.

So I’m left with two related questions, why aikido, and why not the other martial arts?

Certainly it would be a fair question to ask of any martial arts training, because that’s what it is: training. You can train a soldier to a fair-thee-well, but you won’t know how he’s going to behave in combat until he’s actually been in combat, until he’s been “blooded” in the jargon of the trade.

That’s not to say that there aren’t various methods that attempt to simulate combat in one way or another. For the military, this is “war games” or “maneuvers” of one sort or another. Such simulations can remove some of the unknowns from the equation, like snarled communications, supply disruptions, and sudden gaps in the chain of command. “The Fog of War” is a useful concept, and every time it’s different, so it’s a good idea to give the men a taste of it. But it’s not the same thing as being under fire.

In the martial arts, there are different kinds of simulation. Some arts make the transition to a sport, so you get competition, the pressure of public performance, and so forth. Unfortunately, to make a martial art into a sport, you have to have rules, otherwise it’s far too dangerous. So either you eliminate what might be considered your strongest moves—the lethal ones, in other words—or you pull the punches, as it were. You can, like in fencing or boxing, use special equipment, padding, foils with blunt tips, gloves that protect the hands (though ironically, boxing gloves make the sport less dangerous to the hands and more dangerous to the brain). But such modifications change the essence of the art; there are moves that would be insane in a real situation that are perfectly sensible ways of scoring points in a sport.

Some martial arts are almost pure kata, ritualized forms that are meant to give the student a set of well-practiced reflexes. That is pretty much the way that everything starts out; you can’t learn the language until you have the vocabulary. In those arts, the way of adding some real consequences to the training is through testing. That at least adds some personal ego involvement, which adds some real pressure to the matter.

A major reason why the “does it really work?” question occurs so often for aikido is that it often looks faked. The uke (attacker) comes at the nage (the person doing the technique), the nage does the technique, and the uke goes flying, all as pre-determined as a Wrestlemania bout. The encounter is usually pretty stylized, but the idea of “the uke is just going along with it,” misses an important point. Usually, the rolls, falls, twists and turns, etc. are there because the alternative is much worse. Yes, the guy bends his back and that makes him easy to knock down, but the alternative was an elbow in the throat. We don’t do the elbow strike, but we know it’s there.

As for the throws and all those pretty rolls and slapping falls, yeah, they don’t hurt us. But taking the fall isn’t really optional; the choice is between taking it correctly or getting hurt. I once saw a sensei yelling at his uke, “Protect yourself! Protect yourself!” Doesn’t quite jibe with the “it’s all just a fake” notion, does it?

At Aikido of Berkeley in the early 1980s, there was a student who confided to me that he’d taken up aikido because he found that guys would often try to pick fights with him in bars. He didn’t know why they did it, or even why it was guys who were, in his words, so easy to beat, but he wanted some alternative to pounding the crap out of them. Aikido gave him alternatives.

Don’t laugh, but I once used an aikido technique to take a butter knife away from a 5 year old. He was waving it around, and I was literally worried that he’d “put someone’s eye out.” So I caught his hand in a grip called kote gaeshi, twisted slightly and the knife just slid into my hand. It didn’t hurt him; that was pretty much the point, of course. But he did look awfully surprised. Sure, I was a lot bigger than he was. The outcome wasn’t in doubt. But it certainly helped that I knew exactly how to take it away from him with a minimum of force.

Occasionally, you run into someone who brings some external issues “onto the mat” as the saying goes. Once, I was performing a technique called “nikyo” (Hold your hand out as if to shake someone’s hand, then flip it over so the little finger is uppermost. Now grab that hand with your other hand, thumb on top, and try to bring the first hand’s wrist to your body, with the little finger going up to your nose—that’s nikyo). My uke straightened his arm, went down toward the ground, but tried to grab my leg, to maybe lift me off the ground. I automatically shifted my grip and brought my elbow over his in a related technique called ryokyo. Ryokyo is usually considered a knife taking technique because it is not at all kind; it takes power from hyperextending uke’s elbow. My uke forgot all about lifting my leg, since he was suddenly very concerned about not having his elbow dislocated.

I might not have done it if I’d thought about it, but then again, the point of the training is to teach your body how to do those things. Your thinking has to catch up later.

I’ve been in a number of physical fights in my life, but I’m not sure if I’d classify any of them as “real.” The vast majority of fights are about dominance in one way or another, stopping well short of serious injury, because that isn’t the point of them. In fact, they usually end when one or the other party threatens real injury. On the other hand, I have witnessed fights that were deadly serious, that would not end until someone was badly injured, dead, or the cops showed up. When someone who is used to the one sort runs into someone who is prone to the other sort, Very Bad Things can happen.

I have some confidence in my own ability to Do the Right Thing, if pressed, but also the fear that I nevertheless might fail to react properly. So whether or not aikido would aid me in a "real fight" is an open question. What I do know is that I will expend considerable effort to insure that I never get the answer to that question.