by 田所道子, copyright 2017
A friend asked me to contrast seitei systems and koryu systems in Japanese budo, and their relative benefits and drawbacks. “Seitei” are standardized systems, generally practiced by large organizations that intend to create a common standard for rank testing and competitions. “Koryu” are classical systems, generally defined as having been founded prior to the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1868. Seitei are used by organizations that can be global in reach, such as the International Judo Federation, the International Kendo Federation and the International Naginata Federation. Koryu are generally small groups ranging from fewer than 10 people, to a few hundred or a thousand.
The advantages of standardized training systems are straightforward. Everyone knows what is expected. The syllabus and the path to promotion are clearly defined. Since it is standardized, you know that anywhere you go in the organization, people will be doing the same thing in the same way, and that your experience and rank will be respected. Because the decisions about rank are made by the organization, you should be able to clearly see and define differences between ranks. If you run into a personality issue in one dojo, it is not difficult to move to another dojo training the same curriculum. The biggest benefit is that there are many people pushing against each other to improve, so there is a great deal of experimentation in how to teach things, and successful techniques are shared widely, making the teaching ever more effective. A similar benefit for the art is that people are naturally competitive, comparing themselves to others in the organization and finding more ways that they can improve. Actual competition deserves its own essay.
Koryu is the antithesis of a standardized practice. There have been thousands of koryu throughout history, and there may be a couple of hundred that remain today. They each have their own prescribed kata, and the variety is amazing. Not just unarmed combat, sword arts and naginata (similar to a glaive), but somewhere in the syllabus of one of these koryu you’re likely to find methods for fighting with nearly anything that was recorded as being a weapon in Japanese history. Koryu are personal rather than organizational. Koryu’s strength is actually this lack of standardization. The kata are there, but they are not carved in stone, or even really printed on paper. Koryu grow and evolve as their practitioners explore new ideas and pathways. Different groups doing koryu of the same origin are free to go in different directions. This flexibility and adaptability mean that healthy koryu never stop evolving. It is much easier for a koryu to modify or add to its syllabus than it is for a large organization where everything is codified and overseen by committees that have to come to agreement about how things will be done. Koryu can adapt quickly to changes in the world around them.
Large, standardized, organizations are large, standardized, organizations. This means that they come with all the baggage of any large bureaucracy. There are internal politics and petty fights to satisfy petty egos. They tend to be rigid and have difficulty with change, even when the path they’re on is clearly heading off a cliff. All that standardization that makes it possible for people to freely train with each other also tends to drive things down narrower and narrower roads. The effort to match the ideal of the standardized kata often means that anything that strays from that limited model is deemed “wrong”. This makes cross-training difficult because you will be criticized for anything that bleeds through from other systems, styles, or schools into the standardized set. I find this a particular issue because I sincerely believe that martial arts whose practitioners don’t cross-train are doomed to fade and die in weakness and irrelevancy. Cross training in martial arts isn’t optional. It’s necessary.
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| Where I mouth off about a lot of things! |
The rigidity of the bureaucracies includes another problem: ego building. The one thing that is truly required for someone to become the head of a group, section, division, or even an entire international organization is that they want the job. Competency is not a requirement. Look at all the big companies that have been run into the ground by incompetent CEOs. Then combine this with an unhealthy dose of ego and you get all sorts of problems. People argue and fight over who’s going to be in charge. They fight because their self-esteem is so small that they feel threatened by anyone who is competent. I find organizational politics to be so petty and contrary to every reason that I do martial arts that my reaction is to go somewhere else. I have great respect for competent people who are willing to put up with organizational politics in order to preserve and grow what is worthwhile in the organization.
Another weakness of organization budo is the tendency to mistake technical skill for individual maturity and organizational ability. Too often, the people who are the most technically skilled, the ones who can win in competition, are the people who end up at the top of the organization. The traits required to develop great personal skill are very different from the traits required to effectively manage an organization. Just because someone has a great o soto gari doesn’t mean they should be put in charge of anything. Look at the people who become great coaches and managers in team sports. Very rarely were they great players. Many baseball general managers come up out of the minor leagues without ever playing in the major leagues. Playing and managing are unrelated skills. Respect those who develop great personal skill, but don’t put them in charge. In budo organizations though, it is far too common for people with high rank but little organizational and managerial skill to be given positions of responsibility. Then things get messy.
Koryu don’t generally suffer from the problem of the best technicians rising to the top. They do suffer from the problem of not having clear standards for when someone is ready for the next step in learning or responsibility. It all depends on the soke’s or shihan’s ability as a teacher, leader, and organizer. If the current leader is good at these things, then likely this generation of the ryuha will do well and flourish. If they’re not, the leader’s incompetence could kill a ryuha that has survived for hundreds of years. If the leader isn’t a skilled teacher, critical elements of a ryuha’s curriculum and pedagogy can be lost. If the leader can’t manage people, they can end up creating jealousy, anger, and frustration among the ryuha’s members. A teacher who plays favorites, or plays students against each other can seriously weaken and even destroy a koryu.
Koryu lack the quality control of a large organization’s clear, easily evaluated, standards. The standards all exist in the leader’s mind. They aren’t clearly written out, argued over by committees of experts, and easily evaluated. If the leader is great technically, but not good at teaching and evaluating students, the quality of the skills the ryuha teaches can deteriorate and the teacher can end up hurting it even more by elevating unqualified students. The end result is that unqualified people end up leading, and the ryuha slides towards death.
Another weakness that destroys koryu is their relative isolation. Koryu practitioners don’t have to get out and deal with people from other groups. They can stay in their dojos and only deal with people who do the same koryu. They don’t even have to deal with people from slightly different branches of the same ryuha who are trying different interpretations. The result can be ryuha that gradually become duller and duller, losing the sharp skill levels that competition and contact with a variety of different practitioners brings. Koryu where the practitioners don’t get out and train with outsiders will get insular and weak. Practitioners who don’t train with outsiders from time-to-time don’t have their assumptions and skills challenged. Cross-training challenges us and polishes us just as abrasives sharpen a sword. Without active competitions and large training seminars, koryu risk becoming dull and weak.
There are small groups that work to keep people in slowly diverging lineages in touch with each other and training together. They work to prevent practitioners from getting isolated and stagnating. They don’t impose a single, standard way, but provide people with the opportunity to test and explore their ideas with people who will challenge them to find the optimal way of doing things. There’s never agreement on what’s optimal, and that’s a good thing. That means that the testing and exploring won’t end. Isolation and elitism are the path to extinction for koryu budo.
When people are involved, nothing will ever be perfect. Koryu and seitei budo organizations all have faults. The biggest ones are that they are run by fallible, egotistical, humans. In koryu and seitei groups, human weaknesses and faults find different ways to express themselves. It’s up to those of us who love and value budo to resist these human traits that can tear down everything that decades and centuries of effort have created. More than 99% of the ryuha in the Bugei Ryuha Daijiten are extinct. Part of our training is our effort to maintain healthy organizations and push back against our inherent human faults so future generations can experience the growth that training in good budo provides.
Special thanks to Deborah Klens-Bigman Ph.D. for editorial support and bad idea busting.
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