I
am sitting in Los Angeles Airport waiting to find out if my flight is going to
Tokyo today or not. There is a budo
retreat with one of the top classical budoka in Japan that I am privileged to
have been invited to attend. After deep
negotiations with my family, I’m supposed to be on a plane flying there. The opening is in just a few hours, so I’m
going to miss that, but I should be there for the last 4 days of training.
What
could possibly motivate someone to spend a full day traveling to, and another
very full day traveling back from, a martial arts retreat? In the 21st century, unless you
are in the military, the police, or providing security, the martial arts are
basically a hobby. So why go? Firstly,
the training is incredible. It’s not
just that the head teacher is leading and sponsoring the seminar, it’s also that
his senior students, who are now leaders in the art, are teaching us. Secondly, it is the chance for me to spend
several days doing nothing else, not distracted by the concerns of life
(assuming work doesn’t get excited and call the international cell phone they
gave me) and to stay focused on these ancient arts. Some of the curriculum has roots that may go
back 600 years. This is a chance to
immerse myself in not just the technique, but the mindset and living philosophy
of the arts.
Twenty-five
years ago, these arts were difficult to find, even for Japanese living in
Japan. I first stumbled into their world
by complete accident. I was riding
home after a haircut when I saw a guy grinding something on a huge
grindstone. I stopped to look at the
grindstone, and realized he seemed to be grinding a sword! About then the gentlemen looked up and
invited me into his house for tea. His
name was Nakagawa, and he was a sword smith.
From there I stumbled into the world of Japanese sword arts and other
classical martial arts.
Now
anyone can do a Google search and find a list of teachers and their dojo in
Japan. It still takes something extra
though to get up and go to Japan, whether for a week or years. One of the biggest reasons I go is that
there are great treasures to be discovered.
These treasures are precious beyond price, and some of them disappear
every year. They are the great old
teachers who have spent a lifetime studying their arts and who work hard to
give what they have learned to their students.
I know plenty of people who have
20, 30 40 years or more of training, but it pales next to teachers who have
more than 8o years of active training, all of it with people who were great
teachers in their time.
On
this trip I will get to spend time with a couple of these great teachers, both
gentlemen of the first rank. I visit and
spend time with them whenever an opportunity presents itself. This time I get to spend several days at a
gasshuku with a great Shinto Muso Ryu teacher and his senior students, and then
I will get to spend a day or two with my iaido teacher, Kiyama Sensei. He’s 89 and has been doing budo since he was
5, when his grandfather started teaching him a branch of Yoshin Ryu
jujutsu. He’s been studying budo ever
since.
These teachers aren’t teaching me
just technique, though they do a lot of that.
They are teaching the deep connections among the techniques, the
principles of the arts that generate the techniques, and the ideals of what the
arts mean in life. They’ve been living
the budo path since long before I was born, and they are wonders at pointing
out not just the path, but pitfalls along the way. They’ve had lots of chances to make mistakes
and learn from them. If I’m lucky and
wise and work hard at their lessons, I won’t have to make all the same
mistakes. I never get chewed out so
badly as when they catch me making a mistake they are too intimate with because
of personal experience. I will stand and
listen to them and hear the pain in their voices because they know the
consequences of what I’m doing.
After
a while at this training and studying and continually polishing what I am
doing, disappointing my teachers becomes the toughest thing to endure. These great gentlemen go to incredible effort
to pass on their knowledge, skills and understanding to their students. Once I understood how hard they worked to
train me, I realized the most painful thing I could do was letting them down.
Kiyama Sensei and the other great teachers I know aren’t getting rich by
teaching students. The best we as
students can do to show our appreciation and take care of our teachers is to be
there and help them when they will let us.
They teach out of love of their art and love of their students. This is part of what makes them such great
treasures.
So
when I can, I get on an airplane and go visit them. Life has moved me away from Japan but not
away from them. So I sit in airports and
through delays. This time I got as far as L.A. and my flight was canceled, with
no other flight available until the next morning. I will miss a chunk of the gasshuku. I’ve been grinding my teeth over that for 18
hours. The training that remains will
still be great, and I’ll get at least a few evenings with my teachers to talk
and absorb as much as I can. These
treasures will disappear someday and I will be left with whatever I have been
able to learn and absorb from them.
