Kodokan Goshin Jutsu is not a kata (again)

Some time back I had a discussion with several bloggers about Kodokan Goshin Jutsu.  I contend that It is a group of exercises or drills or starting points and not a formal kata.  Some of my honorable opponents contend that it is a formal kata with one right way to do it.  We basically agreed to disagree.

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Today, upon revisiting the JudoInfo page on Kodokan Goshin Jutsu, I came across this that I found interesting...

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re: Haimen zuki (pistol against the back) - the last technique in the set.

Attacker steps forward with the right foot. As gun is placed against the back as the attacker says te o age (or hands up). The defender glances to see what arm is raised. As attacker reaches for wallet, defender turns to the right, drops the right hand under the gun hand, raising it up to lock the gun arm against his chest. He then grabs the gun with other hand disarming attacker and striking him with it or applying kote gaeshi to throw him.

I thought the option there was real interesting.  Take the gun away and either pistol-whip uke with it, or throw uke with kotegaeshi.

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Off the top of my head, I can't think of any formal kata in which there is an "either-or" in the description of one particular technique.  Sure, there are either-ors in Junana and in Koshiki where uke's reaction forces either this technique or that one.  But this is within one technique in which tori has an option A or B.

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To me, this seems to support my idea that these are not formal kata techniques, but bullet points for discussion and exploration - categories of things to work on in a self-defense program.

Want to discuss this blog post?
Come find me on Facebook at my Mokuren Dojo FB group

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Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com

Diversify for survival

There is a lot of talk these days on Facebook and even some on the more traditional news sources about some combination of the Government and the UN and the Democrats (and maybe even alien invaders and undead communists) plotting and planning to take away our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

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I can't ever figure out who to trust - I'm certainly not going to get my news from Facebook, and sources as diverse as Public Radio and FOX news are all at times both reasonable and ridiculous - so I will not weigh in today on the likelihood of our gun rights ever being seriously abridged.

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But I did want to make a comment - and this applies to whichever side of that gun control issue you think you're on.  Don't rely solely on guns (they're just machines, for goodness sake!) and don't count on the perpetual good-will of the government toward your use of a gun.

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You would be well-served to diversify your self-defense and survival skill-set.

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Sure, you should practice with your guns and you should continue to lobby to protect your right to keep and bear arms, but you should hedge your bets.

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Practice Proficiency in ...

• BULLETS
• BLADES (knives and swords)
• BLUDGEONS (sticks and clubs)
• BODY (unarmed)
• BRAIN (the art of strategy)
• BRAWN (strength, endurance...)

...for Protection.

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One B is not enough.

(Can you tell I was feeling assonant today?)

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Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com

Thoughts on Tueller

I'm not a law enforcement officer.  I don't even play one on TV.  In fact, I didn't even stay at the Holiday Inn Express last night.  But Nathan at TDA Training did ask me to contribute some ideas to a week-long discussion of the famous Tueller Drill.  Check out the video at Nathan's blog, and while you're at it, check out this gruesome example of the 21-foot rule played out in this police reel.

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I enjoyed TGase's post about the flaws within the Tueller experiment and I appreciate his assertion that Tueller's results did not validate any sort of claim about the superiority of any particular weapon (a knife) over any other particular weapon (a gun).  I intended to write this post on the idea that what Tueller does demonstrate most effectively is that a gun is not a magical talisman that automatically assures victory - but Paul at Tactical Arnis beat me to that point.  Kudos to both of y'all for excellent, informative articles.

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In my opinion, one of the take-away lessons from Tueller (perhaps unintended by the original author) is that a knife in the hand of a person with the right mindset is the most versatile, effective, gruesome, demoralizing weapon invented in the last several thousand years.  Sure, the handgun is (I suppose) the centerpiece of police force projection, but again, the handgun is not a magic talisman.  This point is effectively demonstrated by Tueller.

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Also, Tueller's results were intended for police consumption.  Using it to justify anything in the civilian self-defense context is a stretch - particularly because of the simple fact that most civilians will not have access to a handgun most of the time.  But Tueller does illustrate an important point that is one of the centerpieces of our aikido system.  That is...

You can never afford to underestimate the potential of your opponent.

Or, put another way, you have to treat every single training encounter as if your opponent is the most dangerous bad guy imaginable, armed with the most awful tactical advantage imaginable. Or, in shorter form, "You can never tell who you're standing beside."  To us, that means we try to assume that all opponents are armed with a knife.  You have to design your practices around the assumption that your opponent has the potential to kill you if they have the ability to touch you.  That's pretty stringent, and it leads to practices like stab-twice randori, starting already stabbed, and progressive chaos.

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As we have done knife randori like this over the years, we have come up with a few pretty reliable pieces of information. First, all of aikido (and probably most all of self-defense) is based on a couple of techniques that we call shomenate (A.K.A. the palm jab to the chin) and aigamaeate (A.K.A. iriminage, a palm jab to the chin done from outside the opponent's arm). The tactical idea behind both of these techniques is the same:

• get out of the way at least a little bit.
• get at least a little bit of control of the weapon arm
• crash into the opponent's center with your whole bodyweight, spearing into his head violently with a stiff-armed palm, locking his neck, and throwing him away.
• disengage and run away immediately.

All of our randori over the years has verified this basic idea - if you go into a knife encounter with any plan but the above, You're likely to get killed.  But the above plan saves you a remarkable percentage of the time.  

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It turns out that all the other stuff in aikido - all the stuff you think of as aikido - the cool wristlocks and the airy breath throws - those are just backup plans.  This basic plan enumerated above makes up easily 80% of aikido, and all the cool stuff fills in around the edges.

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And you know what's cool?  Tactical guru, Dave Spaulding agrees with me!

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So, in summary of this somewhat rambling, stream of consciousness...

• Tueller is an interesting experiment that has implications primarily for police, but that us civilians can also learn from.
• A gun is not a magic talisman that assures victory - particularly if you allow you opponent within a few paces of you.
• A gun is a powerful and useful weapon, but IMO, a knife is demonstrably more versatile at close range.
• You can never afford to underestimate your opponent's potential. You must take this idea into every single training encounter.
• You need some variety and speed and resistance in your knife defense practice - not just the slow zombie attack over and over again.
• You have to have a fundamental tactical plan that makes up the vast majority of your system that is simple, easy to remember, works under pressure, and involves evasion, automatic control, and immediately-disabling atemiwaza (strikes)

[photo courtesy of Jesse Millan]

____________________ 

Patrick Parker 

www.mokurendojo.com

Tueller Drill - The 21-foot rule

When I started blogging several years ago I sent out some emails to the best bloggers in my niche asking for advice and assistance.  One of the most helpful of these folks was Nathan Teodoro, who was running the TDA Training Blog, far and away the best martial arts blog with the highest readership at that time.  Turns out that not only was Nathan the big dog of the martial blogosphere, but he is a nice, personable guy - easy to work with and a lot of help to me. (He may not be too comely, but he's got a great personality ;-)

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Next week, Nathan is running a series on his blog on the famous Tueller Drill which resulted in the commonly-known 21-foot rule.  That is, Tueller and his cohorts found that a man with a knife could consistently advance about 21 feet and cut an officer before the officer would be able to draw his sidearm and fire.  Imagine that!  21 feet!  Get up and march that out so you can see the distance I'm talking about.  Let that sink in.  Check out the video intro at Nathan's blog.

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That means that if you let an aggressor with a knife get within about 21 feet of you and you do not already have your weapon online and firing, that your sidearm is irrelevant.  You have been effectively disarmed!

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Not only is Nathan running this series on his blog next week, but he has asked me to play along, and provide a guest post.  I'll be honored to present a guest post on my thoughts on The Tueller Drill and the 21-foot rule next Wednesday  I am definitely the least among giants with regard to the guest posters - you can also look for articles by TGace (author of The Things Worth Believing In) and Adam (of Low-Tech Combat fame)!

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So, stay tuned here at Mokuren Dojo and definitely watch Nathan's TDA Training blog next week!

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Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com

Weapons in martial arts

One thing that is interesting to me is which weapon systems go with which empty-hand arts.  For instance...

• In karate classes, you most often see long staff, nunchaku, tonfa, and sai.
• In kung-fu classes, you see longstaff, spear, and saber.
• In aikido, you see knife, short staff (or spear), and sword.
• In judo, the little you do see involves stick, knife, and gun.

Of course in each, you see other weapons but for the most part the above seems typical.  Why do we never see bo work in aikido?  I know the answer is because it just isn't done.  But it doesn't make sense that you can weild a jo in an aiki-like fashion but those principles don't translate to the bo.  Why couldn't someone (for instance) do aiki-bo?

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When I first started doing karate in college, we did staff work but I haven't done much of that for a long time.  I figure it's time that I dusted off whatever remnant still lies in my brain...

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United Nations Aikido Ninja

Who'da thunkit? The UN has aikido ninjas? The really interesting part begins around 1:00.

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Patrick Parker is a Christian, husband, father, martial arts teacher, Program Director for a Cardiac Rehab, and a Ph.D. Contact: mokurendojo@gmail.com or phone 601.248.7282 木蓮
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The penultimate self-defense technique

This is one of the greatest self-defense videos I've seen in a long time - The ultimate martial arts self-defense technique is demonstrated starting at about 1:00.  Well, at least the penultimate SD technique.  This is the ultimate, best martial arts technique of all.  But still... check out this video and marvel at this master's prowess!

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Comment via email or let's hook up on Facebook or Twitter

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Patrick Parker is a Christian, husband, father, martial arts teacher, Program Director for a Cardiac Rehab, and a Ph.D. Contact: mokurendojo@gmail.com or phone 601.248.7282 木蓮
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Name that atemi!

Photo courtesy of Bobster855

Cool old photo of WWII era marines training an aikido atemi as a defense against a bayonet thrust.  Question for my aiki-geek buddies: is this particular atemi technique shomenate, aigamaeate, or gyakugamaeate?  It has elements of each, but is also missing elements of each.  Very similar to some of the Sankata jodori techniques.  Also notice the sneaky footstomp kuzushi - one of my favorite tricks!

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Patrick Parker is a Christian, husband, father, martial arts teacher, Program Director for a Cardiac Rehab, and a Ph.D. Contact: mokurendojo@gmail.com or phone 601.248.7282
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Suggested great books on aikido, judo, and strategy.
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Aikido is great for self defense!

Thanks to Todd for pointing this out to me. I'd skimmed over it and missed it the first time. Tgace quotes Dave Spaulding:

My opinion - based solely on personal experience - is that when confronted at double-arm’s length, you need simple-to-perform (but quite effective) hand-to-hand combat techniques, such as knee, elbow, palm-heel, forearm and head-butt strikes. Unfortunately, these skills are being replaced with more complicated subject-control techniques, such as wristlocks, pressure points, grappling and arm-bar takedowns. This is regrettable, because to disengage and create the space needed to employ a firearm, you must make aggressive strikes to soft parts of the body.

Exactly right, thus all the things we preach and practice all the time in aikido:

• Try to stay aware enough to at least get a two arms length margin (ma-ai)
• If they start to move within this two arms length margin then you must act immediately or you will likely be engaged in a standing fight.
• Your first idea should be to push back to greater than two arms length to regain this margin (of safety and time to think).
• If they are not letting you push back, you need to be doing something simple, reflexive, and extremely effective. Something like shomenate, aigamaeate, or gyakugamaeate. Or, if you don't do Japanese aikido jargon, if they won't let you disengage, bust them in the face with a palm-heel and drive them off of you.
• Everything else in aikido, all the wristlocks, throws, etc... is a backup plan for the above. These are all special purpose things that help fill in the corners in situations that a good palmheel to the chin won't solve.

Pretty impressive that all these great core aikido teachings are coming nearly verbatim from a tactical firearms instructor.

Minimally acceptable outcomes

How hard is it in your art to obtain a minimally acceptable outcome? Is it ok for you to push an attacker off and run away or do you think that the least you can do and still be successful is to claw his eyes out, break his leg, or kill him?

Don’t read me wrong – I'm not talking about some hippie love ideal.  This is not only a moral issue but also a pragmatic one. If you define your minimally acceptable outcome more broadly, your art will be more robust and technically easier to execute. If you define your minimally acceptable outcome more narrowly, it will be less reliable and more technically difficult to obtain that objective.

Take for example, any throw in aikido. If you decide that in order for that throw to be a success uke must fall through the air a certain way, it will be very hard to create a successful outcome unless you have a compliant partner. But if you are willing to call it a success for uke to stumble away from you and maybe hit the ground, this objective is much easier to succeed at.
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Look at judo kata competition as another example.  If the judges didn't especially care how uke falls from each throw, there would be much more variability in the performances.  One could reasonably demonstrate the concepts of the kata in many different ways and it would be impossible to judge.  Lack of specificity would make the competition too easy and the judging too hard.  So, for official kata competitions, uke must take a fall that looks exactly so, or points are deducted.  This specificity forces the competitors to be more skilled and makes the judging easier.

This same idea goes for karate – what is the minimal acceptable effect that a punch or kick will have?

Same goes for weapon arts – what is the minimum you can do with them and still be reasonably assured of obtaining a good outcome?

Helpful handful: Smart investment in hard times

In the past few months some of our blogger buddies have warned us about coming hard times and have suggested some safe investments. I thought to offer my own handful of suggestions now. It may be late but its not too late.

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• Pay off or pay down your home and your credit cards ASAP
• Invest in handgun and tactical knife training and consider purchasing a handgun and folding knife.
• Find about ¼ acre that you can plant and invest in a tiller. Don’t let the hardware store guys talk you into getting a rear-tine tiller. The front tine tiller is half the price and perfectly fine for a garden of ¼ acre (plus it is more exercise, which will make you more fit to survive hard times). Talk to the county agent, university extension, or co-op guys about what staple crops to plant for your area. Don’t forget fruit and nut trees. Learn how to preserve.
• Invest in martial arts lessons – something street combat practical but still useful for more than just combat – something like aikido or perhaps judo.
• Invest in your neighbors and your community. Join a church and get deeply involved with the members. You remember when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast? Let me tell you from firsthand experience - FEMA was useless, state emergency folks were useless, Red Cross was useless, and National guard and city officials had their hands full. The first responders and the best, most effective disaster relief responders were local churches caring for their own congregants and then extending that caring into the community.

Aiki buddies gathering - Surviving armed assaults

This fall (October 31 and November 1), we will be having our third annual Aiki Buddies Gathering here at Mokuren Dojo. We are likely to have aikidoka from all over the southwest US come practice with us and the theme this year will be the role of the knife in aikido. We will be working on the knife part of the system, including basic knife evasions, the knife sections of sankata and rokukata, and knife randori, and I will be showing how the knife components of the system are a vital piece of the un-armed self-defense picture.

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With that in mind, I wanted to share a handful of quotes from Lawrence Kane's excellent book, Surviving Armed Assaults, that I recently reviewed. While I am not really using this book as a text for the Aiki Buddies Gathering, some of these ideas underlie what we will be working on and y'all can get a head start by giving some thought to Kane's ideas...

When dealing with weapons, awareness is the best defense followed immediately by avoidance and strategic withdrawal. (p. xix)

No matter what martial style you practice, controlling an opponent's arms (or elbows) and disrupting his or her balance is a sound strategy... (p. xxiv)

Armed assaults with edged weapons are becoming increasingly common since they are much easier to obtain and conceal than handguns, and are carried by far more people. Their relatively low-cost, silent application, and comparative ease of disposal are definite bonuses for the criminally minded (p4).

Self-protection in general, both forceful and non-forceful, reduced the risk of property loss and injury, compared to non-resistance. A variety of mostly forceful tactics, including resistance with a gun, appeared to have the strongest effects in reducing the risk of injury ... Combined with the fact that injuries following resistance are almost always relatively minor, victim resistance appears to be generally a wise course of action (p7).

Because you simply cannot tell by appearance alone whether or not that gentle-looking man or woman walking down the street next to you is a harmless accountant, a violent rapist, or even a mass murderer, you must always be on your guard (p9) ...

...in self defense...The closest thing to an absolute...is that it is critical to maintain sufficient distance between yourself and a potential assailant to give yourself time to react (p43).

...who attacks you will consider himself bigger, tougher, meaner, and more experienced than you are. Either that or he will employ a weapon to win, likely from an ambush (p56)...

That's only a handful of quotes that I marked in my copy of the book - only a taste of what the book is about. I highly recommend the book as an interesting, educational read if you want to think that your martial art has something to do with armed violence.

Commie jokers!

After noticing a recent spike in gun sales, a television station sent out a reporter to find out what was going on. The reporter found a redneck toting a shotgun over his shoulder and asked him, "Excuse me, sir, Why do you think guns have been selling so well lately?

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He responded immediately, "Haven't you heard? Russia invaded Georgia a while back! Just let those commie jokers try that with Alabama!"

No education for me, thank you.

After writing the previous post on gun safety, I got to looking for vids on YouTube on the subject, and found this travesty. This is one of those rare instances where everyone involved would have probably been better off not being educated. This was one of the scariest things I've seen in a long, long time.

And what's more, the agent had the balls to sue the DEA (his own agency) for releasing the video and thus tarnishing his reputation.

Teaching gun safety

I have to admit, I have an aversion to handguns that borders on phobia. In college, my roommate, a black belt in multiple arts and a wartime veteran, made me handle an unloaded pistol to make a point in a discussion we were having. I couldn’t tell you what the point was because I was so freaked out at just having to touch the thing. So far as I know this attitude was not a taught thing – just an innate and extreme distaste for that particular weapon.

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Lately I have been considering buying one of the realistic simulation air pistols that fires BBs – so that I can face that phobia to some degree. But then this happened…

Walthall County sheriff’s deputies are investigating the reported shooting death of a 2-year-old girl in the Darbun community. The shooting occurred about 11:20 a.m. Sunday. Deputies said the child was shot in the chest by an air gun being handled by another child. The girl was taken to Marion County Hospital, where she later died. The shooting is believed to be accidental, and Walthall County Coroner Shannon Hartzog said an autopsy has been ordered. Authorities did not release the name of the girl.

Tragedies like the above bring the gun issue to the front of everyone’s mind. This particular case was especially shocking to me because it was a BB fired by an airgun! Around here, airguns are generally considered (if not actually toys) pretty innocuous so long as everyone is wearing eye protection but this child was killed by a BB into the chest.

Does this mean that I think airguns or even ‘real’ guns should be banned? I don’t think so. For better or worse, guns are part of the equation of modern American life and they are not going away any time soon. I certainly don’t think that ignoring them will make me or my kids any safer. I have been teaching my 7 year-old gun safety rules and safe gun handling using a Daisy Buck BB gun and I’m still thinking about getting an airsoft pistol.

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For more info on this topic:

• Gun Safety info for Parents
• Gun Defense at TDA Training

God help us - another school shooting

This happened this morning - a teacher's husband ran into her schoolroom and apparently stabbed and shot her to death in front of her students, then fled.

Los Angeles SWAT officer killed

This is a shame. A 27-year police veteran was shot and killed in the line of duty. This was the LA SWAT team's first fatality in their 40-year history. Let's pray for this officer's family, friends, and comrades - as well as those of the shooter and the other victims.

Personally, I like police

Dojo Rat has posted a great police video on his blog and has asked some good, thought provoking questions. Y'all ought to get over there and check it out and leave a comment or two. I thought I'd post here as a sort of Devil's Advocate ;-)
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I've heard a police forensics guy say, "the problem with cops is they're always there when you don't need them and they are never there when you do need them." I've done some research with some of the wildlife enforcement guys here in Mississippi (one of the most dangerous LEO jobs there is) and they are woefully undertrained in combatives and maintain poor physical fitness standards. Dojo Rat tells a couple of stories like one about some cops that pinned a knife-weilding crazy lady with grocery carts and shot her because they couldn't figure out what to do with her. You hear stories like this all the time.
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But I still like police. They are the good guys. The blue wall between us sheep and the wolves in society. Like any domain of practice, there are some cops that suck at their job, but overall, in my experience, the police I've run across have been well-trained, well-intentioned professionals. I know several of the local police and I had a particularly good experience with one of our local policemen (Officer Kenny) a year or so ago.
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How about the following as a counterexample to DR's video. An example of well-trained, good-hearted policemen. This sniper took a lot of flak for this shot, as did his superior that authorized it. But they took this shot instead of the fatal one anyway.



So, what do y'all think? Have the majority of y'all's interactions with police been positive, negative, or neutral? Come on, I want to hear juicy details!

High-resolution jiu-jitsu and low-resolution judo

Martial arts randori or shiai or sparring is to a large degree a pattern recognition problem. You have to find the right opportunity to apply the tactics and techniques that your strategies and principles suggest will help your situation. This is the Observe-Orient-Decide part of the OODA loop - finding the pattern in the chaos of combat.

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Techniques are just named reference positions, labels that are placed on commonly-occurring motions just to have a shorthand way of talking about that type of motion or situation. Part of the pattern recognition problem involves the number of techniques in the system from which you have to choose, the number of categories you have to recognize.

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This is similar to the problem of resolution in a computer monitor. The greater the resolution, the greater the scan time required to keep all those pixels refreshed and lit up. In the olden days (10 years ago or so) this problem was solved by moving the gun farther back from the inside of the screen so that shorter gun motions described a wider arc on the screen. The problem was this led to much larger (deeper, heavier) monitors. It took a while to develop the technology to make fast, hi-res, flat panels.

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In the same way, you can increase the resolution of your martial art by labelling more and more of the motions that you find in randori/sparring/shiai. For example, the escape from the mount (tateshiho) in judo or BJJ. If you do some randori for a while you can probably come up with a dozen or more decent ways to get out of tateshiho. Keep doing randori and each of those dozen will recur at least once. So there you have it – recurring motion! Let’s name it and call it a technique and teach it as part of a high-resolution syllabus. Problem is, it takes time to learn a technique and it takes time to scan thru those techniques during a fight to choose the right one. Thus leading to a larger (deeper, heavier) jiujitsu.

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What you need in your martial arts system is sufficiently high resolution with minimal scan time. Technical resolution has to be great enough to solve many of the likely problems you will encounter but it needs to be small enough to minimize scan time. Scan time has to be minimized and your system has to be relatively light so that it is not too hard to pick up (to teach and learn).

The Bourne Aikidoka

Here is a good example of one phenomenon that I talked about at the seminar this past weekend. In these film clips, the point of view changes rapidly from one angle to another to create the illusion of hyper-speed motion. Notice that even when Bourne is just standing still holding a gun, the camera jiggles a little bit, creating an illusion of motion and urgency.
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Well, the same thing happens in aikido. If tori allows his eyes to flit from one place to another, it changes his point of view. Not only does this spoil tori's sense of distance and angle, but it makes the conflict appear to take place at hyper-speed.
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We worked some randori with one partner assigned to lock his gaze on the center of mass of the other one's head while the other partner was instructed to constantly shift his gaze from his partner to the nearest corner of the room. Everyone agreed that this shifting of gaze angle and focus was not only disorienting, but it was physically exhausting because it seemed like the randori was going so much faster.