Get some jo in your aikido

I read it somewhere - not sure where - that the old jodo guys said that it was relatively unimportant to correct students on the things that go on in the middle of the kata.  He was saying that the really important thing to get right was the beginning and end of the kata.

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This jives to a large degree with what little teaching I've had from SMR jojutsu guys - they were very peculiar about the beginnings and the ends, and they seemed perhaps slightly less interested in the in-between actions than I was.

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They were emphasizing principle over tactics - the intangibles - ma-ai, kamae, metsuke, zanshin.  By paying close attention to the beginning and to the end of the encounter you get reinforcement in these intangibles.

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You see this same sort of attention to beginnings and ends in some of the pre-war aikido folks (like Tomiki and Shioda), and perhaps a little less in some of the post-war guys, though I have heard Doshu Moriteru Ueshiba speak on his videos about the importance of precision in setting up the conditions before each technique.

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In experienced jo guys there is a psychological (or dare I say, "psychic") pressure between them, as if there were terabytes of interaction being beamed back and forth between their eyes.  Because of the extreme consequences (jo or sword embedded in skull), neither partner dares break that line-of-sight communication until they see how it all works out.  I have found as an observer, it is easy to get drawn into and lost in that psychic communication between two good partners.  Often I have to make a concerted effort to watch their feet instead of their faces, or I won't know what happened after they are through with a kata.  

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There is value in carrying this type of practice with you when doing aikido taijutsu - (improvement of ma-ai, kamae, metsuke, and zanshin) but there is also potentially stupid tangents (e.g. the zombie attack, the no-touch ki masters), so beware the stupidity, but be aware of the potential value to your practice.

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Kihon and suburi - keiko and renshu

The basic practice in Aiki-jo is called suburi (swinging), while the SMR jo guys do a bunch of kihon (fundamentals).  These practices are largely similar, large motion fairly atomic-level foundational practices, and it is fairly easy to treat the two practices as the same.  

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It may be a false distinction that I am making, but I think the two practices are distinct and each is valuable.  To me, the difference between kihon and suburi is very similar to the difference between keiko and renshu practice modes.

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To me, kihon is almost like miniature kata that are often-repeated and used as building blocks for other, more complex kata...

• there are prescribed right and wrong ideals of how to do each kihon
• the kihon are often practiced in a series of steps, or postures practiced in a 1...2...3... manner
• Kihon are frequently done fairly slowly to give time to get the mind working the body right.

While suburi has the same foundational feel as kihon ...

• Suburi is about repetition...repetition...repetition
• Suburi folks often talk about muscle memory, and they like to talk about doing so many repetitions that they exhaust the practitioner into figuring out how to swing efficiently.
• There is not so much a right and wrong way - just better or worse.  If you are not as "right" as whatever ideal you have, don't analyze it too much - just swing the stick another thousand times and you will either be closer to the ideal or you will have a better idea of what the ideal is.
• Suburi are often done faster and more fluidly than kihon - so that you can get more reps in 
• Suburi are often done with longer, heaver practice weapons (suburito) to build strength and endurance.

[photo courtesy of Daniel Imfield]

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Intersection set aiki jo-jutsu

I could probably count the things I know for sure about jodo on 3 fingers or less.  But in some ways, jo is falling into place for me - or perhaps I'm just starting to come to peace with the jo.  I thought today I'd enumerate some of where I'm at in jo right now...

• Intersection-set jo - For me, aiki-jo and SMR jo and kenjutsu and etc... have got to be the same thing.  I don't have the time left in my life, nor do I have the personality or patience to learn two or three distinct weapon systems and be able to keep them separate from each other.  I am content to spend 80-90% of my practice time on the intersection set between aiki-jo and SMR and etc...
• Principles based jo - The weapon has got to be an extension of my body such that I can apply aikido strategies and heuristics and principles that I already know. Just like I can't deal with multiple weapon systems, I can't handle even one weapon system that teaches me to behave differently than I do in the context of taijutsu.
• Weaponizing the jo - Lately, I've been thinking that my kihon should be even simpler and more atomic than it is in the SMR kihon or the aiki-jo suburi.  For instance, there are only about 3 ways you can hold the stick to use it as a weapon (honte, gyakute, sakate), and there are about 4 real common ways we hold a stick when we are not using it as a weapon (hanmi, tsune/sage, ichimonji, monomi) so lately I've been working on drilling how to get offline and manage ma-ai while weaponizing the jo from each of the 4 starting points to each of the 3 grips.
• Poke and whack - When you get down to it, once you get the stick in one of those 3 grips, there's only about 2 things that you can do with it - swing or thrust.  So, for me these days, jodo has largely become a practice of figuring out how to 1) weaponize the stick, while 2) moving like I'm used to in aikido, and 3) swinging and thrusting effectively from whatever grip I have.
• Henka in jodori and jonage - We've also been practicing the jodori and jonage from each of the 3 grips, because you can't tell how you will be holding it when they grab it.
• Aiki-cane jutsu - and lately I've been thinking a lot about tanjojutsu...

I'm sure all that will bore the hardcore aiki-jo or SMR enthusiasts to death, but for me, "intersection-set aiki jo-jutsu" provides plenty of entertainment!

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More on men suburi

Ok, I'm belaboring the point and I know it, but here's some more video examples of men giri - how to make a vertical downward cut with a sword.  Last time we saw that there are some technical differences between men cuts done by different schools of aikido, kenjutsu, kendo, iaido, and jodo - mostly because they are trying to accomplish different things in their training.  So this time all the samples are from aikido folks.  We would expect to see more commonality.

Now, this next fellow looks like a raving lunatic dancing about and flailing the sword, but this is Shirata sensei - one of Morihei Ueshiba's close buddies and reportedly a pre-war badass.  For purposes of this discussion, ignore all the screaming and dancing about and look how clean and controlled his downward cuts are! (the sword swinging doesn't start until about 3:45)

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How to swing a sword

Time for another break from tachidori to look at uke's attack again.  Uke is primarily doing vertical men cuts in the tachidori, so the question comes up, how do you make a proper vertical men cut?  Turns out that it depends on who you ask.  Aikido guys have different cuts from iaido guys, and the kendo and jodo guys are subtly different from the others and from each other.  But you can see some commonality - makes sense - it's all humans cutting vertically downward with very similar weapons.  So my basic idea on this one is to pay most attention to the commonalities and try to make intelligent compromises when instructions differ.

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Sugano tachidori shihonage

So, what does tachidori teach us (besides how to take a sword from a swordsman (yeah, right)?  For one thing, it helps to show us what is the principle at the heart of various techniques.

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This particular tachidori shihonage, for instance, yells at me, "Don't get stuck in the Junana/kihon form of the thing - that's not shihonage.  At least, it's not the only shihonage.  Kihon shihonage is dressed in some nice clothes to make it presentable to beginners." 

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This shihonage is interesting to me because it is a more horizontal than vertical circle, and because it does not force uke down backwards (how uke falls doesn't define the technique), and because of the "Gimme that sword!" feel in tori in the end.

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Dan Penrod tachidori

Now this is a beast of a whole different color!  I really like this the best of any of the tachidori videos that I've posted this week.  This aikidoka has a lot to commend his performance...

• Tori is much smaller stature than uke - he is giving up far more with respect to ma-ai than would a larger tori but he still overcomes that disadvantage with relaxed but decisive irimi.
• Atemi, atemi, atemi!  Tori thumps uke in the solar plexus or side of the neck each time, further leveling the playing field.
• His technical range is larger than the 8-10 tachidori that everyone does - and the standard ones that he does do, he does in interesting directions after following uke for a step or two.  This demo has a distinctly randori feel to it.
• But what I really like the most is his relaxed demeanor.  No big deal, it's just a big guy swinging a sword.

Overall, this performance points at what tachidori could be - more than a nod to the past, more than just another set of 8-10 things to have to do for rank.  This is verging on randori with a sword (or stick).

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Personally I think a format similar to this, with foam bats or kendo armor and shinai, would be a much more interesting mode to play Tomiki aikido shiai in than the rubber knife thing.

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Chris Mulligan tachidori

More tachidori - much the same, but in this presentation you can see a couple of things more distinctly than in some of the other videos.

• This Aikidoka, for instance has a nice irimi with a gesture across uke's face indicating where he could insert an atemi, but also demonstrating that he is entering into the right space - sort of like a measuring stick.  A third possible benefit of this gesture is it helps to keep his hands out of the arc of the sword.
• Also shown is a beautiful explanation of the spinning sokumen iriminage (sort of a gedanate from a release 5 entry).  In many of the other films, this move looks like it's just a bit of fancy nonsense, but at about 2:00 in this film it is demonstrated beautifully with a sword-wielding tori. 

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Men - the vertical cut

One of my practice principles at Mokuren Dojo is that if we make uke better then tori will have to become better.  I think it's a good thing for folks to take some boxing or karate, and if it's available, some kendo or kenjutsu, because if uke gives us sorry attacks, our responses to those attacks will be sorry.

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So, in our autumnal focus on tachidori, we ought to pay a bit of attention to how to make a proper vertical cut (menuchi) because that is the majority of what we are responding to in the basic tachidori.  Following are some good exercises for menuchi.

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Hitohiro Saito tachidori

This is Morihiro Saito's son, Hitohiro Saito demonstrating the Iwama tachidori.  Again, this is much the same as the previous tachidori films - I guess that is to be expected because there are only so many plausible options when uke has a 3-foot razor-sharp knife. But this demonstration has a nice live-action tempo to it as opposed to the kata or teaching feel of the previous films.  There is also an outstanding guruma that took me by surprise in there.

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Morihiro Saito tachidori

Here is another very nice take on tachidori from Morihiro Saito.  These are much the same as the tachidori and jodori that Tomiki taught.  In fact, it's kind of interesting and surprising how similar these two sets are technically because of the time that passed between Tomiki and Saito (Tomiki was learning this stuff before Saito was born, and Tomiki was 8th dan in aikido before Saito began.)

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We always hear about all the differences between the earliest pre-war aikidoka and the post-war aikidoka, but what Saito is doing in his 13 tachiwaza is largely what Tomiki left us in the tachidori and jodori.

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Now, admittedly, Ohba was apparently largely responsible for the Koryu no kata - including the tachidori and jodori - and that would help explain the similarities because Ohba was studying with Ueshiba much closer to (but still prior to) Saito's time.  But Sankata (which contains the majority of the tachidori and jodori) is widely thought to be Tomiki's development - not Ohba's.

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In any case, Saito's performance here is lovely and interesting.

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Laser-focused autumnal tachidori

We have a small dojo space with limited headroom, so almost all of our long weapons practice (bokken, jo, etc...) is done outside on the driveway or lawn.  The only problem is it is usually scorching hot and 100% humidity outside in the summer here in southwest Mississippi, so summertime becomes our taijutsu (empty-hand) and tanto (knife) season, when we can practice in front of an air conditioner, and fall and spring become our taijutsu and long-weapons season when it is pleasant outside.  We don't quite hibernate in the winter-time, but that is our season to do more tandoku (solo practice) and much less falling while the mats and our bodies are cold.

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We've been doing this for several years this way, but our weapons practice has not been as focused and productive in the last year or so (or perhaps I've been paying more attention to it and have just realized how sorry we are in the past year or so ;-).  So I decided that this year for our autumnal long-weapons practice we would have a laser focus on one particular aspect or kata or facet instead of doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that and then not seeing it again for several months.

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So I asked Whit what facet of weapons he wanted to work on this Fall and he immediately said, tachidori! (Taking a sword from uke as you throw him!)    Really - the toughest aspect to practice outside (unless we drag a mat outside each day.  But you know what?  I'm up for it if he is!

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I figure for the next 2-3 months to devote all our outside weapons practice to tachidori and collateral skills (kihon, maybe some jodori, maybe even some sparring or kumitachi with foam sticks?).  

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Here is a list of the 9 Tomiki tachidori...

Tomiki Tachidori
Sankata

• men maeotoshi
• men shihonage
• men aigamaeate
• do oshitaoshi
• men hijikujiki

Rokukata

• men oshitaoshi
• men wakigatame
• men hineri oshitaoshi nage
• men kotegaeshi

And a couple of videos...

Sankata tachidori (starting at about 6:00)

 

Rokukata tachidori (starting at about 2:00)

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Tachi-tai-tachi and permission

I'm getting ready for the 2013 Aiki Buddies Gathering this weekend and I've been reviewing Koryu Dai San (Sankata).  Looked up some films and found this thing that I'd seen before and categorized in my mind as curious and hadn't thought about much more.

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This is an extreme variant of the last section of Dai San - and I mean EXTREME variant!  different number of techniques, the ones that are in common with what we know are in a different order and performed wildly differently - plus it has 1-2 new things not in our regular version.  The variation is so extreme here that I'm tempted to say this is not the Dai San Tachi tai Tachi, but just a couple of guys fooling around with things of interest when both guys have swords - but for a few things-

• These are Tomiki Aikido practitioners
• They are apparently doing a demo (there is clapping at the end)
• The video is labelled Tachi tai Tachi, which is what Tomiki folks like to call the end of San Kata.

Today when I watched this again, it suggested a different story to me.  The extreme variation in this section of San Kata (probably the most important set piece of advanced Tomiki Aikido practice) suggests to me that San kata is not so much kata as it is a repository of things of interest.

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I've heard it told before that San kata was primarily comprised of the left-overs from Tomiki forming his Randori-no-kata.  All the stuff that didn't seem to fit with the toshu randori stuff in Junana was collected into San kata as a sort of repository of old ideas that Tomiki didn't quite know what to do with wrt a randori system.

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The extreme variation in this demonstration of Tachi tai Tachi seems to fit with that assertion.  If San kata were something less than Kata-with-a-capitol-K-passed-down-from-God-to-Tomiki then there would be nothing wrong or unseemly about these practitioners removing that entire section and replacing it with some sword-v-sword stuff that they liked better.  That's cool, because there's a lot of sword-v-sword stuff that I'd like to play with.

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This gets at something I've been thinking about a lot lately - permission.  Folks seem to need permission to take their KATA and start making them Kata, and eventually kata and kata and kata. To start taking the capitol-K out of the thing and disassembling the thing and tearing it into pieces and rearranging and reconstituting and reforming the whole system and making it your own.

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If you are the type that needs permission to take ownership of your martial art, here it is...

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I hereby give you (and me) permission to take the stuff that the old dead guys did and totally wreck it and rework it into something that speaks to your soul - an art form that you think is so cool that you want to practice it every day for the rest of your life!

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Explicit & implied in Tomiki-jo

Any artform is necessarily limited in scope.  Martial arts are no different.  In our aikido and judo there art things that are explicit and things that are implied.  Different arts, and even different teachers within a single art, will make different things implicit or explicit in their practice.

But I think it is importantant to know what the implicit things are - what are you assuming and ignoring  for the sake of your practice?

In Tomiki's expression of aiki-jo ( as seen exclusively in Sankata and Rokukata) there are jo and sword take-aways (jodori), jo-retention throws (jonage), and sword vs sword (kumitachi).  So, what's that represent?  For the most part, this is the grappling part of the encounter - it leaves out or implies the free-motion phase where tori is moving and jiving and maintaining space and poking and cracking with the stick.  I think Tomiki (or Ohba) assumed you know to move around and crack the bad guy with the stick until the bad guy manages to grab you or the stick. And that might not be a bad assumption in a society where schoolkids are universally exposed to kendo, but in the west in the 21st century, there are loads of folks that dont know anything about swinging a stick except what they see at the baseball games.

So, I think it would probably help our aiki-jo a great deal to make some of the free-movement phase of the encounter more explicit in our teachings.

If you look at the Saito or Nishio lines of aiki-jo, you see a much more explicit teaching of how to do moving and striking with a jo.  They also have the grappling components - much the same as Tomiki - but they do a better job (or at least make the attempt to explicitly teach) the striking part.

This makes sense.  Tomiki/Ohba was interested in the taijutsu and randori aspects of the art but he was making at least a nod to the older line of the school.  I want to make a bit more than a nod.  I think we should make the striking part of aiki-jo (as in 31-jo and 13-jo kata) more explicit.

Incidentally, Saito aiki-jo has solo practice elements - a useful mode that Tomiki-jo is also missing.  Also, a nice side effect - if we make the aiki-jo ukes/attackers more competent, they will in turn, make tori more competent at his thing.

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An aiki recipe for jodo

Tomiki aikido has a pretty limited (but interesting in its own respects) set of jo material, so a lot of us in our aikido group study Seitei jo or SMR koryu jo.  SMR is its own thing, separate and awesome on its own, but for my part (and I suspect there are a bunch like me)  I like to do these jo arts because they are aiki-like and I want to see what the jo can teach me about aiki or how i can express aiki through the jo.

As such, I am not as interested in learning dozens of kata as i am in seeing where the aiki is hiding in the kata I do know. And it turns out that in the parts of Seitei and Omote that I have seen, there is a sort of heuristic or recipe that applies to most of the kata.

In the kata, jo usually...

• evades off the line of attack
• fixes the distance so he is outside of sword range but inside jo range
• attacks/controls the centerline
• gets a kuzushi
• then, either destroys the sword-man or gets another controlling kuzushi when the sword-man tries to recover.

In some of the kata the order of these elements get rearranged, but they are mostly all in there (like Ragu - it's in there!)

...and, incidentally, that is also a basic recipe for doing aiki techniques - evade, control distance, control centerline, control balance, then execute.

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Jodo seminar notes

This past week I had the pleasure and privilege of getting to talk and work with Sensei Jack Bieler of Denton TX on my jodo.  The practice was sublime as usual, but this time I really had the feeling that Sensei was tailoring and directing his instruction right at me and my problems and foibles (I'm fairly sure that the other participants felt like they were receiving special attention from Jack too - he's that great a teacher!). Following is my list of notes and pointers from the jodo sessions.   As usual, any mistakes or foolish misunderstandings are mine - not Jack's.

• Trust the kamae, when properly structured, to do what they were designed to do, either protect you and/or forestall Sword.
• Widen the feet a bit to counterbalance the jo
• Shochugeiko can mean "grip practice"(if stretched a bit, or made into a pun)  ;-) - In honte the jo lies diagonally across both hands.  In gyakute the jo lies in-line with the knuckles of both hands with the door-knocking knuckles of both hands on the 'edge' of the jo.
• Don't draw backward such that a lot of the jo lies behind you.  Rather, stretch forward to encompass the jo so that most of it stays in front of you.
• Honte is honte - weaponize the jo before you use it - The jo must be in honte before you apply leg/body power.  Don't use leg power to lift the jo, use arm power to lift and position (weaponize) the jo, then apply leg/body power through it.
• Jodan is jodan - both of these positions (honte and jodan) recur throughout the art, and their structure and use should be uniform.
• Tsukizue and monomi are mirror images of each other in several ways - one steps forward to the right, the other back to the left.  Both control/threaten the entire centerline.  One applies kuzushi into the back heel, the other applies kuzushi into the front toes.
• Hikiotoshi - set kamae so that jo lies in proper plane before you start.  Throw the stick using front-hand grip power.  Back hand has to follow rather than propel b/c when back hand propels, the body stops and you can't catch up with your own jo in time. Contact near middle of jo and twist hips so that the back heel comes up.  Stretch yourself forward almost into sutemi, then step. Project the sword 3'x6' behind, as in sumiotoshi.  must control Sword's hips.  In paired practice, responding to this gives Sword practice in tsugiashi and ayumiashi.
• A cool drill - Sword drops his tip a bit so that hikiotoshi misses and Sword takes control of chudan.  Jo bounces off ground and reverses path, sweeping sword from below and controlling centerline with honte (this feels like tsubamegaeshi to me) - this comes from the end of Ranai.
• Hold the kamae without bobbling if Sword disappears.
• Hiding in the shadow of the jo - as in gyakutezuki, etc...

Incidentally, re. the italics above - 

"Back hand has to follow rather than propel b/c when back hand propels, the body stops and you can't catch up with your own jo in time."

This was Sensei Bob Rea's same lesson to us re. okuriashibarai!  the following foot has to follow and must not propel, because you stop and lose timing with uke when you try to propel!  The synchronicity between instructors at this seminar was incredible!

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Yoshinoro Kono Sensei

We are currently feeling ripples of this teacher's influence in some of the things that we do.  Pay attention to this fellow's research...

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...and watch how he moves!



There's actually a ton of material on YouTube about Sensei Kono



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A pair of Aikijo books

On Wednesdays I've been doing short, quick book recommendations.  Today is a pair of Aiki-Jo manuals - the first of which (Autrelle's) I have found very useful in my studies, and the second of which (Kalkhof's) looks very handy - though I haven't gotten a copy yet.  I very much enjoy Kalkhof's illustrations and Autrelle's detailed textual descriptions.  Both are available on Kindle, and both are  very inexpensive compared to the information provided.

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Cognates for tsuki

Consider the lowly thrust, lovely in its directness...

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Gazing at far-distant mountains

People occasionally look upward - at a stop light or at a road sign, or occasionally at a startling cloud or sunset, but for the most part we keep our worlds within about 4-5 feet of the ground.  Especially if you work at a desk or at a computer.  We look downward a lot and this becomes habitual.

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There is a great practice in jo and sword work to help counter this - when working solo kihon or suburi, you want to find a reference point in the distance - upward from the horizon.  Trees and the corners of buildings often work nicely for vertical strikes like menuchi and honteuchi.  Focus your eyes on these reference points in the distance and pretend that your jo/sword is a giant paintbrush and paint a stripe down the tree or down the distant corner over and over.

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The old dead guys referred to this as enzan no metsuke - gazing at the far-distant mountains, and it is an important practice in creating a good mindset as well as proper posture.

Photo courtesy of Brice Canonne

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Patrick Parker
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