Connections between Junokata, Koshiki, and Nanatsu!

You know what is really cool?  When you have both enough time in a body of work, and the opportunity to step back from it far enough that you can see the themes and motifs running through it.  Judo is like this.

A shadowy chicken and egg thing

A doctrine that is often attributed to Kano and his successors is that a technique is composed of three (some say 4) parts - kuzushi, tsukuri, kake (and some people add zanshin).

Mutual Fault and Blame-sharing

I have said it many times, and my instructors before me, and theirs before them all the way back to Kano - Judo is about Mutual Welfare and Benefit.  I know that's sort of a loose translation of the principle of Jita Kyoei, but it's a common translation and as good as any.

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But Human Animal Males (HAMs) tend to fail to get the mutual benefit thing, or we get it in an incomplete sense.  It just does not make deep visceral sense to some of us that we are doing a deadly martial combat thing with a partner instead of an enemy - that our main goal is to improve both the self and the other.

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Sometimes we start class out with some vague admission or nod to Jita Kyoei, or at least with some pseudo-Japanese etiquette, but then we inevitably end up with an uke that doesn't work quite like we want and we get into this vicious cycle of pushing harder, causing uke to resist harder or do ukemi more un-naturally, which causes tori to struggle more, which makes uke more miserable...

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So, let me try to put it in different terms - one syllable each...

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If your arm gets hurt it is both folks' fault.

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If your elbow (or whatever else) gets bent, tori should not have pushed that hard, and uke should not have stood there and let tori push that hard.  It is almost always possible for uke to yield (and to yield productively) to force rather than to stand against it.  It is almost always possible for Tori to get the effect you're looking for with far less struggle.

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But since this issue  ALWAYS crops up, maybe we're all just knuckleheads who are addicted to power and bent on making our artistic pursuits so difficult that they are self-destructive.  I think that is likely the case.  We are all idiots.

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So, maybe it would do us some good to approach our practice from the angle that we really are ALL idiots, and search for ways to prevent the other guy from mashing our own personal triggers that throw our own personal form of stupid into high gear.  What are my triggers that make me stupid, and what are the ways that other people push those buttons during a conflict?  How can I respond productively to someone mashing my stupid button?

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Maybe we should approach aikido and judo from the idea of working on ourselves rather than from the perspective of applying the power of our will effectively to someone else.

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Have I heard that idea somewhere before?

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The REAL reason for terminal rank

Why is it that in judo, 10th degree black belt is the highest rank attainable?

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I have no way to find out, but I suspect (pure conjecture) that it has to do with the expected time-in-grade for each rank.  As I understand it, the time-in-grade in years for each rank is equal  to the rank. So it takes 2 years to get to nidan and 3 more years to sandan and 6 years to rokudan, etc...

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So, assuming that the practitioner is an adult (mid-20's) when they get their shodan, it will take about 54 years to get to 10th dan.  That would put the practitioner near 80 years old (like Karl Geis).  Another 11 years for 11th dan would put him in his early 90's (like Helio Gracie), and another 12 would put the practitioner near 105 (like Keiko Fukuda).

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Now we have certainly improved life expectancy over the years, and we like to think that with good fitness and healthy habits, more people have the potential to reach those advanced ages, but there is still an effective cap on maximum age - and that glass ceiling is around 115-120 years.

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The old dead guys that came up with the ranking system didn't just pull the 10th dan out of a hat and say, "That'll be the highest rank."  It's just that not many folks live healthy active lives capable of practicing and/or teaching judo into their 90s and 100s.  

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This guess of mine also sort of makes the story make more sense about the Judo powers-that-be awarding Dr. Kano 12th dan as the founder to put him "beyond the rank system."  It's not that the number 12 is magical, it is just nearly inconceivable that someone could live and practice and teach judo for another 23 years after getting a 10th dan.

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Terminal rank

Over the years, a lot of folks have recognized that the modern colored belt kyu-dan thing that Kano-san came up with was an imperfect thing.  I think even Kano realized during his lifetime that there were problems with it, but instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, he kept the rank system and emphasized the positives and de-emphasized the negatives.

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Also, over the years, people have suggested tweaks to make the advancement system more stable or equitable.  One of these potential adjustments is the idea of Terminal Rank.

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Terminal rank is the idea that not just everyone has the potential to rise to the highest rank levels.  Folks that tout terminal rank as a solution have some pretty good arguments...

• Just because someone manages to practice judo long enough to get lots of time-in-grade doesn't mean they should be promoted to the highest of ranks.
• Regardless of how hard they try, some people will not be able to obtain skill commensurate with the highest ranks in judo.
• The highest ranks are considered teaching ranks and some practitioners never teach.
• They don't want to de-value the highest ranks by turning them into a "participation award" like we see in youth soccer or tee-ball.
• Extraordinary ranks should only be given to people with extraordinary skill and service to the art.

Those all sound pretty reasonable to me, but the terminal rank idea also has a couple of major glitches...

• What is going to be the terminal rank for most folks?  With average attendance and time-in-grade and average effort and potential, do you throttle back on their ranking at shodan or is it sandan or is it godan?  Wherever you place the cutoff, it is arbitrary.
• Wherever you set the terminal rank, what are you going to do with all the people in the organization that are already beyond that rank?

As a buddy of mine pointed out a while back, most of the folks advocating loudly for terminal rank are folks that are already beyond that rank.  Nobody wants to put that hurdle in the way of their own advancement.  So that buddy's response to the guy that said terminal rank should be godan... "What do you think YOUR terminal rank should be?"

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Judo rank vs. karate rank

When I was digging through Wikipedia for information for that last post about karate ranks I noticed an interesting thing.

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When you read through any of the articles on the famous big-name judo guys, almost all of them contain pretty extensive detail about when they received each of their ranks.  for instance, 

After 15 months of training, Mifune achieved the rank of shodan ('beginning dan,' indicating 1st dan ranking) in Kodokan judo,[2] and after the remarkably short time of four more months, nidan (2nd dan).[2] Through timing and speed, Mifune quickly gained a reputation, and was never defeated at the annual Red and White Kodokan tournament.[2] By 1912, he was ranked rokudan (6th dan) and an instructor.[2] He was already being called the 'God of Judo.'

and...

Tomiki was one of the early students of the founder of aikido Morihei Ueshiba, beginning in 1926, and also of Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo.[2] In 1928 he obtained 5th dan in judo and in the following year he represented Miyagi Prefecture in the first judo tournament held in front of the Emperor—this tournament became the All Japan Tournament the following year. From 1936 till the end of the second world war he lived in Manchukuo (Manchuria) where he taught aikibudo (an early name for aikido) to the Kanton army and the Imperial Household Agency. In 1938 he became an assistant professor at Kenkoku University in Manchukuo. He went on to be awarded the first 8th dan in aikido (1940) and an 8th dan in judo (1978).

But when you look at the articles about the big-name karate guys (Shimabuku, Egami, Harada, Itosu, etc...), trying to find info about their ranks, it's mostly absent...  There could be several reasons for this relative lack of info...

• Maybe it took a while for the karate guys to adopt Kano's kyu-dan belt rank system.
• Maybe karate was at that time more of a rural thing and they weren't as interested as the cosmopolitan judo guys in record-keeping.
• Maybe this was just a curious oversight on the part of the Karate authors at Wikipedia.

Or maybe this suggests a real difference between judo folks and karate folks in how they think about the rank thing.

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Syllabus and drills are encoded in the kata

What does kata give to judo as an art?  A lot of things, but the one I'm thinking about today is - Kata gives your instructor a syllabus and a set of suggested drills - sort of like a set of bullet points on what to teach when.

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Take for instance, Nage no kata.  This kata can serve as a reminder to instructors of appropriate skills to work on...

• Nage shows some suggested possible defenses against three of the most common attacks experienced on the street - an overhand right to the head, a two-handed chest-level grab/push, and an encircling low grappling sort of hug.  Three things that can easily get overlooked if we concentrate too much on how to win tournaments.
• Nage shows a wide range of technical responses - hand throws, hip throws, foot throws, and two kinds of sacrifices.  This is a huge technical range that is easily enough to stretch any instructor into teaching beyond his tokuiwaza.
• Nage shows some lessons about how to vary throws based on uke's resistance - for instance, the ukigoshi-haraigoshi-tsurigoshi sequence.
• Nage shows some lessons about good ways to teach particular actions - for instance, the side-to-side okuriashi action is a good drill to get folks working on okuriashi, but it seems to never occur that way in randori.  In randori it happens stepping around the corner, but it seems to be harder to teach stepping around the corner into okuriashi to beginners whereas the side-to-side okuri is an easy introductory drill.
• Nage teaches uke how to handle a wide variety of falling actions.

The list could go on and on.  So, Nage no kata is like a set of bulleted reminders to the teacher about what to teach and how to try teaching it.

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Ju no kata is the same way.  It's hard to see specific ways that the techniques (as demonstrated) in Ju no kata can be used in randori (which Kano said was its purpose), But when you look at it like a set of reminders of topics and prescribed drills, it makes much more sense instantly.  Take the first technique, for instance.  To be able to do this movement, ...

• Uke and tori must develop a good perception of ma-ai, a smooth, graceful tsugiashi, and an understanding of how to deliver and receive a deceptive attack to the face -  so the 3-step approach works as a drill.
• Tori is learning to yield out of the way and disrupt uke's timing and balance.
• Uke and Tori are both learning a very common reversal for a rear attack and tori is learning how to diffuse that reversal.
• Uke is learning to know when he has been had - while still testing tori's control (by bridging back onto tori)

The fact that this technique is first, and is similar in structure to the rest of Junokata suggests that is a good way to teach any technique - that is,...

• Teach how the technique develops during the transition from hamare to kumi judo.
• Teach the technique from both points of view - uke and tori.
• Make sure that the technique fits the Ju ideal of judo.
• Teach how to reverse it or the weaknesses where the technique can be broken.
• Teach how to recover a broken technique.
• Teach uke how to safely submit when he is truly compromised.

Once you have taught one good (ju-ish) technique from both perspectives(uke and tori), and how to counter it and how to counter the counter and how to submit you now have all you need to start doing randori!

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Major throws on non-dominant side

Every so often someone asks me something about learning throws on their non-dominant side, or someone recommends to me or my students to learn to throw left seoi or left osoto or something. I have mostly resisted this because one of my teachers recommended some years back that we should learn a few small ashiwaza on both sides but probably not major throws like seoinage. He had a few reasons -

• You will always have a dominant and a non-dominant side and regardless of how many reps you put into it, your non-dominant throws will not be as good as your dominant-side throws. 
• It takes more than twice as long to learn a throw on both sides because you need some number of reps on your dominant side and maybe 2-3 times more reps on the non-dominant side just to feel competent. So, learning throws only on your dominant side lets the students progress mroe than twice as fast. 
• You will not miss throwing opportunities only throwing one-sided because any opportunity for left osotogari (for instance) can be thrown by some other throw (right kosotogari comes to mind). 

But regardless, you should be able to throw some portion of your throws on the non-dominant side. There are reasons on this side too -

• Kano intended judo to promote balanced physical development - to teach left and right actions both big and small. Learning to throw on your non-dominant side fits the spirit of judo (gentle, yielding flexibility) the same way that learning 40 ways to throw the guy down fits the spirit of judo better than only practicing 3 (dominant-sided) tokui fits that spirit of judo. 
• It's good for our ukemi skills to be able to take falls on both sides with more-nearly equal facility. 
• It's good for your brain to learn to work both sides of your body. 

Note I'm not saying necessarily that we need to learn to throw all 40 (or 67 or however many) throws on both sides. But for starters, Kano suggested 15 throws that should be learned on both sides (nagenokata)...

• ukiotoshi, ippon seoinage, kataguruma 
• ukigoshi, haraigoshi, TKgoshi 
• okuriashibarai, sasaeTKashi, uchimata 
• tomoenage, uranage, sumigaeshi 
• yokogake, yokoguruma, ukiwaza 

I might add to that some throws from what I consider the kihon of judo...

• deashibarai, kosotogari, hizaguruma, osotogari, ukigoshi 
• kouchigari, ouchigari, ogoshi, seoinage, koshiguruma 

This would suggest that we should work perhaps as much as half of our throws bilaterally. As it is, my pre-nagenokata students mostly only work on a handful of throws on both sides ....

• deashiabarai 
• okuriashibarai 
• hizaguruma 
• kosotogari 
• ukiotoshi 

I don't think I want to blow up my time-in-grade requirements right now by making my students practice half the gokyonowaza on their non-dominant sides, But I do think I want to expand our repertoire some this year. How about we start by devoting significant effort to learning/practicing the following on our non-dominant side this coming year...

• ippon seoinage 
• osotogari 
• ukigoshi 
• kouchigari 

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Take the Damn Fall!

A couple of days back I received a pretty cool rant from a pretty cool dude.  Since I like to publish pretty cool stuff here on Mokuren Dojo, I asked if I could copy it over here as a guest post, and here it is...

A Kind Suggestion from a Bewildered Judoka: 

I don't need to tell you that many judoka neglect the study of ukemi. It is too often treated as a beginner subject, which is taught intensively for the first few classes as a white belt and maybe worked on sporadically until green, at which point the student is expected to take falls well enough to survive them. Here, the skill of ukemi plateaus, and it pretty much remains at this level until the judoka decides they are too old / too high rank to take falls any more, after which they forget it almost entirely. I don't like this paradigm, but I can accept it.

What shocked me, and I mean really dropped my jaw, was the realization that some very respected and competent sensei are teaching their competitors, from children upward, to turn out of throws and land on the stomach, or cartwheel out of them by extending a hand. Until a loophole was recently closed by a (for once reasonable) rules change, it was even favored among elite competitors to land in a "bridge" position on the heels and head, thereby avoiding back contact and ippon. Oh boy, where to start? 

If you look at the old film strips of Kano, Mifune, Nagaoka, Fukuda, and the other greats, their ukes always land on the back or side, even in randori. This might be minimally compelling, because the camera was rolling, and who would dare make an insturctor look foolish by carwheeling or turing out of a throw during a filmed demonstration or randori, particularly in Japan and back then? But, if these methods of falling are considered skillful, worth learning, even appropriate to include in the dojo curriculum, why not demonstrate them? 

Even in old films of shiai, and I mean competitive, brutal, win at all costs shiai, no one turns out. Had they just not thought of it? Is it so aesthetically displeasing that the formal Japanese of yesteryear couldn't bring themselves to do it? I would not guess so. Even Fukuda Keiko, until her recent death the final word in American Kata and a beautiful technician, was not above rough, wham slam inelegant randori in her younger days. If you doubt me, take a moment to see for yourself:  The falls aren't kata falls, and certainly no one is "letting herself be thrown" or "jumping". So why was this clever innovation in competitive ukemi not implemented earlier? 

I have some ideas: 

It is tactically unfavorable. Do a quick experiment for me: lay down on your stomach, and let someone sit in a kesa gatame position and hold you. They don't even need to get an arm around your neck, just sit nice and tight in the armpit and apply some pressure. You can't get out. Bridging is impossible from the stomach, as is shrimping, as is getting a leg up to pull guard or attempt a triangle or shove them off. Worse, from a (ghasp) self-defense standpoint, it is impossible to ward off blows with the hands, or mule kick, or gouge the eyes. You can't even curl up to avoid being pummeled. There is a reason the (sadly often more practical than us) bjj folks value taking the opponent's back so highly. Why on earth, when you've been knocked down by a throw, would you ever, EVER, roll to your stomach? If you say, "this is just for shiai, we wouldn't do this in a fight", I ask you to reconsider this sentiment. Shiai is a test of one's skill in the martial art of Judo. If you want to come out and say it's an end in itself, a sport done for sport's sake, that's a resaonble stance. But don't call it Judo. "Wrestling in pajamas with all the good leg throws taken out" might be a more appropriate name.

It risks injury. This is the obvious one. Falling on your front is bad news. Anyone who has worked with me knows that I love ukemi, and I take as much of it as possible, from all kinds of throws at full force and height. I will gladly take kata guruma from a six foot tori, and only bother with a crash pad if we're going to be doing it many many times. I'll take uchi mata makikomi all day, but I hate flat front falls. The back is just better engineered for taking a fall, period. When you fall on your face, there is no safe way except to eat more of the energy with your arms, because you can' exploit a slight curve to dissipate force as you can with a fall to the back. 

It is athletically exclusive. I'm probably going to catch the most flack for this, but I belive Judo is for everyone. While any able bodied person can learn ukemi, many are just not athletic enough to cartwheel or spin out of throws midair without serious and immediate injury. This is just an opinion, but I prefer randori and shiai to favor the player who does more skillful judo, not the player with the most gymnastic skill. By teaching your players to avoid a score when they have been legitimately thrown, your are teaching exploitation of what should be an irrelevant physical advantage. I've said this many times and I'll say it again, shiai can be a sport, but Judo is not. So, should players just accept that as soon as kuzushi has been done to, they are going to land on theirs backs and lose? No. I am not advocating "jumping" into throws, or taking kata style formal ukemi in shiai. There are many ways to block a throw before being launched and rotated. Everyone knows how to hip in and stuff a forward throw, but what about relaxing at a key moment and becoming unthrowably grounded, or better yet, accepting the kuzushi with so little resistance that you can step through it back to a favorable position? Mifune is the cannonical example of these skills, which are largely going untaught. Since I became intersted in Mifune's groudning ability, partly due to my Aikido crosstraining, I have developed the ability to "go dead weight" very briefuly and successfully stop larger, stronger, higher ranked players from throwing me. I'm not saying it's a magic bullet, but I am saying there are many defensive skills applicable before the opponent has exectued a throw. How about we teach defenses that apply while defense is safe and in the spirit of Judo, not attempts to dangerously snatch back a victory after the opponent has earned it? 

Finally, let me just say that proper Ukemi is offensively useful. I'm not talking about judo shiai, which of course ends at ippon, but in bjj, taking a clean, beautiful fall is advantageous. It some cases it creates separation between uke and tori which allows the recently thrown player to maneuver before the opponent is on top, and apart from falling into the fatal trap of being pinned on your stomach (see above), a good fall also insures that a player does not land injured, stunned, or with his breath knocked out. In a fight, a person on their back can mule kick with the full force of their legs and torso using the brace of the ground behind them, or post up and stand while maintaining their defense against kicks and blows.

So please, take another look at ukemi as the old-timers did it. They knew what they were doing, really.

Andre Goran is an enthusiastic martial arts nerd. He has studied Tracy lineage Kenpo, Judo, and Shodokan Aikido, and holds the rank of shodan in the latter two with Kaze Uta Budokai, as well as shodan in judo with the USJI. He currently lives in Philadelphia, where he trains at Osagame Martial arts under Ray Huxen Sensei and Alma Qualli Sensei.

[top photo courtesy of Isa Walde]

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Ryuha descending from Kodokan Judo

I was chatting with Chad from Akari Dojo this weekend and I brought up an incident that interests me.  In my club, we teach judo tachiwaza trying to end every throw that we can with ukigatame (floating hold - a.k.a. knee-on-belly).  Then we begin our newaza instruction in ukigatame - so the knee-on-belly is basically our most favorite transition from standing into groundwork.

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Chad didn't think that was all that interesting.  "Doesn't everyone do that?"

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Apparently not - I was at a seminar some time back and there was a call for the instructors to show some transitions between standing and groundwork.  "OK, I thought, this is going to be a nice, short session on ukigatame." 

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But the first instructor got up and showed (If I remember right) standing wakigatame transitioning into the ground. "Cool," I thought.  I'd seen that before but we don't do it much.  Then the next instructor got up and showed something else (IIRC kouchi passing the legs as uke falls).  "Interesting.  I'm sure ukigatame is coming soon."  Instructor after instructor got up and demonstrated different entries into groundwork and none were ukigatame.

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Well, some time later I wrote a blog post on ukigatame and how we use it as sort of a universal joint between a standing and a grounded judoka.  Some real olde-timey judoka with plenty of experience commented, "What the hell is ukigatame?" and when I explained that it is the old knee-on-belly thing they said, Yeah, I'd seen that, but we don't do it much."

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I'm not trying to say one or the other groups does something wrong - what is interesting to me is this suggests a couple of separate lineages (ryuha) passing judo knowledge down through the generations.  My first instructor (and Chad's) was adamant that we end everything in ukigatame.  Presumably that instructor got that practice from one of his instructors...  But this other group doesn't do that, and neither did their common instructor, and presumably neither did that teacher's teachers.

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It sorta suggests that at some time in the past, some prominent instructor started using ukigatame to great effect, and passed that down through his students to their students and through my teacher to me and Chad, while other prominent teachers passed other stuff down through the generations.

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So, ukigatame seems to be an example of the division of judo knowledge into different streams of thought (ryu or ryuha).

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It seems to me that at some time in the past (early 1900's? early post-WWII?) there must have been some large, diverse body of judo knowledge, and each of the prominent instructors got a subset of that judo knowledge and they began passing their subsets down.  There was, of course, some cross-pollination of ideas between different lines, through tournaments and seminars, and videos and books...  It also seems to me that the overall cloud of judo knowledge has decreased as compared to what that original cloud of judo must have been - perhaps due to standardization of kata for competition judging, or champions teaching wanna-be champions their tokuiwaza, etc...

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Wouldn't it be interesting if we could trace the streams of thought of the major instructors down through the generations from Kano et al. to today, so we could determine what ideas were added or lost and when and by whom and under what circumstances?

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Kito ryu probably gave us ashiwaza

Yesterday, when I posed the question, "What Koryu did the modern Kodokan ashiwaza come from?" I suspected I already knew the answer, but I wasn't sure.  Nick reminded me that Nagaoka has been called "The inventor of modern ashiwaza," and supplied me with a link to some biographical info on Nagaoka...

(per Wikipedia) Hideichi Nagaoka (Japan, 1876–1952) (his first name is sometimes mispronounced as either Hidekazu or Shūichi) promoted to Kōdōkan 10th dan in 1937. He was the last of only three people to be promoted to 10th dan by Kanō-shihan himself.

(per Judo Channel) Shuichi Nagaoka studied the Kito-ryu style in Okayama under Kensaburo Noda. He came to Tokyo in 1892 and entered Kodokan in January of 1893.

But the 1895 syllabus of the Kodokan already contained a wide variety of ashiwaza under the names we know today by the time Nagaoka was shodan or nidan - just 2 years after he started at the Kodokan.
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So, much of the ashiwaza must have predated Nagaoka.
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In fact, Daigo says in his Kodokan Judo Throwing Techniques book that the early Kodokan demogods used small ashiwaza almost exclusively to demolish their field of competition in the 1886 Metro Police Tourney.  So, they were making good use of sophisticated ashiwaza years before Nagaoka.

I do not, however, think that it is a stretch to suggest that the ashiwaza that was present in the Kodokan in the 1890's resonated with Nagaoka - probably because of his prior training and experience - so much so that Nagaoka became known for his ashiwaza.  Something in his past jived nicely with the ashiwaza that Kano had instituted at his school.  I think that past something was probably Kito ryu.

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So, it appears that the ashiwaza of Kodokan probably came from Kito Ryu.  That jives nicely with my Kito guy that showed me some weird and gruesome footsweeps a few weeks ago, calling them, "old Kito stuff."

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But that idea - that the ashiwaza came from Kito Ryu - just took me by surprise, I suppose because there is not even a hint of ashiwaza in the Koshiki no Kata that Kano passed on to us.

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Where did Kano's ashiwaza come from?

The story goes that Kodokan judo was derived primarily from Tenjin Shinyo Ryu jujutsu and Kito Ryu jujutsu - with some interesting tidbits from a bunch of other schools thrown in.  So, we watch some demonstrations of Tenjin Shinyo and of Kito Ryu...

Now, I realize these are not demonstrations of the entire systems - but one would think these demos would be largely representative of the overall flavor of the strategies embodied by the two systems.

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So, the question arises, Where did the wondrous variety of ashiwaza in Kodokan Judo come from?  The only ashiwaza that I see in the above demos are a couple of osotogari/kosotogari type things.  Granted, those Kito/Tenjin demos are ostensibly battlefield ideas and some of the modern judo repertoire of ashiwaza would be impractical for that purpose.  If you look at the Kodokan Goshin Jutsu and Kime no kata, you get a similar range of ashiwaza - mostly only osotogari.

So, even if it was some of the Kodokan demigods in the 1890's that came up with all these ashiwaza from their randori/shiai experience, you'd expect some of those ashiwaza ideas to be reflected in the older material.

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So, where (in the Koryu) does the gendai ashiwaza come from?

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Toward an Aiki Renaissance

Much of Tomiki's contribution to aikido was in the formation of rational, sequential teaching methodologies for getting beginners up to speed rapidly.  He was teaching in a University setting and only had the students for a few years - maybe 3-5 years - and wanted to get them up and running, exploring and working on aikido within that time.

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So he created primers - small sets of techniques - 12 taiso, 7 offbalances, 15 (later 17) techniques... That represented a rational way to get students emulating Ueshiba's intuitive genius - particularly with respect to getting students doing randori quickly.

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But here's a thought for you - In what other domain of knowledge do grad students recite their primer or their catechism for most of every class, year after year?  I'm not trying to downplay Tomiki's teaching and organizational genius, but these things that he gave us are primers (very good ones) meant for kyu grades.

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So, along comes Hideo Ohba, another very talented student of Kano, Ueshiba, and Tomiki, and he organized a group of 5-6 kata (#3 might have been Tomiki's work) representing some of the pieces of Ueshiba's art that didn't fit into Tomiki's primers.  These kata represent most of the "advanced" work that we do in most Tomiki aikido classes.  But these things are still like High school textbooks - they point and hint at phenomena within the larger world of aiki but they are still somewhat superficial.  It is hard (if it is even possible) to get to the magical aiki by repeating those 6 kata ad infinitum.

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In my opinion, we need to continue studying Tomiki's primers - they are just too good a method to dispense with.  And we need to continue studying Ohba's Koryu work as a set of hints at directions that we can take our research.  But I think we need to broaden our explorations even beyond that.  Similar to the previous post where I was talking about communication between Graduate students in Medieval and Renaissance colleges - we need to be working with instead of separately from Aikikai and Yoshinkai and the innumerable independent aiki instructors, and the Daito guys, and the Kito guys...

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We need to move out of the Dark Ages of organizations that preach that they have the only true aikido.  We need to get past the Medieval aiki feudalism into a Renaissance of aikido.  We need to join The Conversation of Ideas - and I don't just mean absorbing Aikikai and Yoshinkai and Daito methods into our own, but also demonstrating and offering Tomiki-lineage ideas to the rest of the aiki world.

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More on this thread later - stay tuned...


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Patrick Parker
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Mutual benefit with undesirables

Most folks in judo pay some lip service to Kano's two ideals  - as if they are mottoes that we are supposed to recite at the beginning of class and then never think about again.

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NO!  Kano actually intended to create an ever-increasing group of people who made best use of their strength and power in order to help improve each other's lives and society.  This is documented.  I bet you'd be hard pressed to find a transcript of a lecture by Kano where he did not mention improving society or mutual benefit or efficient use of effort and resources.

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This ideal is so much the foundation of judo that I've said it before and I'll say it again - Judo classes cannot function without all the participants buying into that ideal to a larger degree than just lip service.

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Here's a particularly challenging example of applying the judo ideal...

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What about when you have an undesirable partner or judo classmate?  Maybe he's a mat bully or a warrior wannabe, only out to learn to fight.  Maybe he's dangerously unpredictable in randori.  Or maybe he's lazy and wants to do 1-2 reps then sit on the side of the mat and chat. Or maybe he monopolizes your training time working at his pace on his material and you never get to work on your own stuff?  Or maybe you hate how his roughness infects you and makes you want to be rougher and rougher in a vicious circle.

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Whatever it is, this fellow is a pain in the ass!  Every time you work with him he agitates you more and you do your best to write that guy off as an asshole and find some other partner to work with in class and hope that you can avoid the undesirable until he eventually quits.

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Is this an application of maximum efficient use of power toward mutual benefit?  Obviously not - the undesirable partner is apparently not trying to help anyone but himself.  But are you using all of your powers to help this undesirable fellow improve himself?  Are you helping your other partners, who end up having to work with him?  And if you do succeed in ignoring him until he goes away, how are you going to help him improve himself then?

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Here's another thing to think about - from a practical self-defense perspective, what are we in judo to learn?  We are in judo to learn to deal with unpleasant, chaotic, unpredictable, violent people by means of gentle (genteel) grace.  So, this undesirable fellow might just be your ideal partner. 

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Sure, this is setting the bar high, and sure, you have to keep yourself and your partners as safe as you can, and it's not easy learning to deal safely and gently with violent people, but who ever got into judo to learn how to dominate only placid, compliant Milquetoast partners?
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And here's a crazy idea - What if we got so good at applying these ideals to control unpleasant partners with grace and gentleness that we could reliably and safely view real bad guys on the street as undesirable partners that need help to change? 

• I'm not claiming to be great at applying the judo ideal with undesirables, but I can tell you that the answer involves Kano's ideals of maximum efficient use of power toward mutual benefit.  
• I can also suggest that this skill is related to the verbal aikido idea.
• One place that I got a GREAT lesson on this is from Sensei Bob Rea's discussion on de-escalating your judo partners so that they remain in an optimal learning state-of-mind.

photo courtesy of Wikipedia

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Patrick Parker
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Kano's two ideals for judo

Jigoro Kano (Founder of Judo) had two ideals upon which he based Judo.

• Jita Kyoei - You and me get better together.
• Seiryoku Zenyo - Make the best use of your power.

Of course, Japanese is notoriously hard to translate literally, so those are loose translations.  When I am talking about these two ideals to my kids' classes I try to put them in simpler terms...

• Jita Kyoei - You and me both win.
• Seiryoku Zenyo - find the easiest way (for me and you to both win).

...and to drive the point of those ideals home, I quiz the kids each time, "What is your main job in judo class?" The correct answer to which is, "To make everyone else better."  Often I'll ask each participant in the class, "What is your main job in judo class?" and make them acknowledge that they are here to help everyone else in the class get better and/or win.

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I don't do this just to have some nice morals to talk about to the kids.  The judo ideal is a super-important lesson, without which judo classes devolve rapidly into a fight club situation.  Judo classes simply do not operate when everyone is a mat bully who is out to get what he can get at the expense of the others in the class.

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Judo does not work unless everyone in the class keeps in the forefront of their minds all the time that their main objective is to nurture the development of the other participants.

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And this applies just as much to adults as to kids.

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And it applies to aikido (A.K.A. separated judo) as much as to judo.

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Stay tuned tomorrow for an article on perhaps the most difficult situation in which to apply these judo ideals!

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Patrick Parker 

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Koshiki and Ju - brothers from another mother

I don't have the exact quote because I don't have the book in front of me, but last time I read Keiko Fukuda's Ju-no-Kata book, I was struck by her statement that she didn't ever understand Ju no kata until she had years of experience working on Koshiki no Kata.

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I've spent some time over the past year or two (admittedly it wasn't ever a priority in my practice) looking at Koshiki no kata and couldn't ever figure out what it was in that kata that clued her in to Ju no kata so much. It's hard to see past the window dressing in the Kodokan form of the thing - all the waddling about pretending to be Armored Robot Samurai Executioners (ARSEs).

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But then a couple of months ago we found this very Ju-ish variant of Koshiki, and I can't stop watching it.  I watch it several times every day.  We started a while back working on this kata as a falling exercise (instead of a set of Deadly Onerous Ninja Unpleasant Techniques (DONuTs for short) in all my classes - and guess what!?

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I think I'm beginning to see and feel some connections between Koshiki no kata and Ju no kata!  I might have to alternate watching Kano do junokata with watching these fellows doing koshiki.

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Aikido, doff thy name

Tis but thy name that is my enemy;

Thou art thyself, though not Jujutsu.

What's Jujutsu? It is nor hand, nor foot,

Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part

Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!

What's in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet;

So Aikido would, were it not Aikido call'd,

Retain that dear perfection which it owes

Without that title. Aikido, doff thy name,

And for that name which is no part of thee

Take all myself.

Every so often, we in our extended martial arts group have an identity crisis.  Are we doing aikido even though it's not quite what Ueshiba did? Or are we doing judo even though it's not quite what Kano did?  Is it Tomiki aikido even though it is not really Shodokan?  Should we call it hamare judo or just plain old Aikibudo?  Is it really just a new form of the ancient Kito school with a couple of drops of Daito flavoring?

• What it is and What it aint
• Tomiki's false modesty
• Chocolate in my peanut butter

Who knows?  Who cares?  What does it matter?

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I personally do think it does matter. Names make a difference. See this thread of articles about how the name, shihonage, affects how you do the technique.  But I still haven't come up with a satisfactory answer for myself about this - what-do-we-call-what-we-do problem.

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JuDokie from Muskogee

Musashi wrote that we should be experts at 1-2 arts but familiar with all arts.  The old, dead budo masters seem to have had a thing for writing poetry.  Morihei Ueshiba was especially prolific with his doka (budo poems).  I don't do much original poetry, and what I do is horrid, and only for my wife's amusement, but I do have a fondness for re-writing popular songs with budo lyrics.

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This one's dedicated to our Okie-dokas.  I don't know if we actually have Okies in Muskogee doing our flavor of aiki and judo, but after this song was written, I think all Okies started claiming to be from Muskogee.  Shoot, I've even declared myself to be an honorary Okiedoka from Muskogee!

We don't do Hapkido in Muskogee
We don't take no trips on Kuk Sul Won
We don't punch and kick in Oklahoma
We like throwin' down and bein' done!

I'm proud to be JuDokie from Muskogee
A place where even squares can roll and fall
We still do our judo like Okano
And deashi's still the biggest thrill of all

We don't make a party of randori
We like grabbin' hold and pitchin' you
We don't like our techniques long and fancy
Like the hippies down in Austin like to do!

And I'm proud to be JuDokie from Muskogee
A place where even squares can roll and fall
We still do our judo like Kotani
And deashi's still the biggest thrill of all

Plain gi are still in style for manly matwear
Rash guards and corporate sponsors won't be seen
Guruma's still the roughest thing on campus
But sometimes makikomi can be mean.

We still do our judo like old dead guys
In Muskogee, Oklahoma, U.S.A.


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____________________
Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com

Kitoryu - dead art or not?

Some years back, Our teacher hosted Tsunako Miyake sensei, and one of the things she said she wanted to teach during that visit was Koshiki no Kata.  "What's that" was most everyone's response.  Of course, there were some of us that knew that Koshiki existed, but nobody really knew what it had to do with anything.  Well, it turns out that Koshiki no kata has more to do with what we do than anyone understood.

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During that visit, Ms. Miyake penned a calligraphy (on her keikogi! which she gifted to one of the dojos!) that interestingly said (approximately), "Daitoryu aikido + Kitoryu (as seen in Koshiki no kata) = Tomiki aikido).

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Koshiki is the main surviving remnant of the Kitoryu school of Aiki-jujutsu - preserved in the Kodokan Judo curriculum.  Kitoryu gave rise to Kodokan judo, and was also influential in the development of aikido.  Morihei Ueshiba studied Kito for some time, and Professor Shishida even suggests that Ueshiba's aikido may have been largely developed as a counter to judo (that is, using the Kito and Daito that Ueshiba knew to bust the Kito and Tenjin that Kano's students knew).

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It is easy to find Daito folks if you're willing to travel, but trying to find someone with a certificate in Kitoryu is so nearly impossible that we'd figured/guessed that it was a dead art (except what is preserved in judo as Koshiki no Kata). 

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But lo and behold - I have managed to locate someone who (I think) has a certificate in Kitoryu!  A few years ago a friend told me that he knew an aging sensei that had studied Kito as a young man and even had a certificate.  I had heard good things about this instructor but had never gotten to work with him or talk to him - but over the past year I've gotten to work with him and talk with him on a couple of occasions, and he seems like the real deal (he does exquisite aikido, as do his students, and he has some pretty obscure historical knowledge that I managed to verify later.) 

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I got to talk to him about Kito a few weeks ago.  He said that he doesn't like to teach Kito/Koshiki because it is so rough and violent that it borders on abusive to the students - and that matches what we knew of Koshiki no kata - Everyone that went to Ms. Miyake's Koshiki clinic talked about being beat up and sore as hell for a while. My Kito source also said that Koshiki was not all of Kito - that there were auxiliary arts and other kata, including horseback techniques - and that checks against what we know of the other Koryu - they were typically very diverse schools.

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Anyway, It looks like I'll be able to pay another visit soon, and perhaps hear some more fascinating history and maybe see some documents.  I would love to work on Koshiki no kata (and whatever else he wants to play) with this man!

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Patrick Parker
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Shishida on Kano's ideal judo

Fumiaki Shishida demonstrating Itsutsu no Kata.

Professor F. Shishida makes a really interesting assertion in an article titled, Counter techniques against Judo: the process of forming Aikido in 1930s.  His assertion is that Morihei Ueshiba's aikido was largely developed as a foil or counter-art to Kodokan Judo.  Initially, this sounded like a stretch, but the more I think about it, the more it seems to fit with pieces of the judo and aikido apocrypha that we have talked about for a while.

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For instance,  There's the famous story of Kano's visit to watch Ueshiba in 1930, after which Kano supposedly said something confusing and mysterious along the lines of, "Kodokan Judo is the Judo of 90 degree angles and Aikido is the Judo of 180 degree angles.”

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I've had my pet theories for a good while about the meaning of this statement, but Shishida's article suggested an alternate meaning.  What if Kano was saying, "Kodokan judo is regular (proper, 90-degree, upright, orthogonal) judo, and aikido is the flip-side (or 180 degree or counterpoint) to Kodokan judo."  What if Kano was saying that aikido is a counter to judo.

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I know, the whole supposed statement is a historical stretch, and this interpretation might stretch it a bit further, but it makes for an interesting what-if.

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That idea also makes sense when looking at Mifune's and Hirano's judo counter katas.  Watching these things (especially Mifune's) the viewer gets a creeping suspicion they are doing aikido to bust uke's judo maneuvers.
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I and some of my teachers have thought for a while that aikido generally makes a pretty good foil to judo, and it is interesting to see someone much smarter than me (like Shishida sensei) say something similar.

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Patrick Parker
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