Nin 忍

Nin 忍　Calligraphy by Kiyama Hiroshi, Copyright 2019

 

Nin (忍) is a Japanese term that is not often heard standing alone. Outside Japan it is most commonly encountered in the term ninja (忍者).  Nin has nothing that directly ties it to spies and assassins though. Nin is a character trait that may be the most important generic lesson in classical budo. Every ryuha has its own essential character that makes it truly unique: they all teach nin.  

In dictionaries nin is usually translated as “patience”. Patience nails a piece of the character nin (忍). As with so many things though, to simply say “nin (忍) equals patience” is to miss a great deal. Nin is not regular patience, but the patience that quietly endures suffering and trials.

There are the obvious trials in budo, like how much your knees and feet ache from doing the first iai kata for an hour, continuing even after you’ve worn the skin off your knees.  Or the never-ending torture that is the posture known as tatehiza. Learning to endure physical discomfort with quiet stoicism is the beginning of nin (忍). Anyone who sticks with budo for any length of time learns to do this. It’s just part of the physical territory. Everyone in the dojo hurts and no one is interested in hearing you whine about it. Everyone went through the pain of learning to take good ukemi, even if taking ukemi for Sensei can knock the wind out of you.  That’s the physical side.

The other side begins when Sensei says “Shut up and train.”  In that moment it becomes time to patiently endure not just the discomfort and stress of training, but also your own curiosity and desire for answers. This is the time when your questions will only be answered by your endurance of training with doubt and misunderstanding and ignorance that gnaws at your heart. I come from a background where I was taught to always ask a question if I didn’t understand something. Ask a question and get an answer. In budo though, most often the best answer to a question is not an explanation, but more training.

It took me years to understand that my teachers were trying to tell me that the answers to most of my budo questions were to be found in training, study and contemplation. I asked Hikoso Sensei about foot sweeps in judo one evening, and I can’t imagine a more rudimentary answer. I was looking for a deep explanation of the timing and how to understand it. He showed me the proper way to move my foot when sweeping.  That’s it. The answer was that I needed to train more to understand the timing.  No amount of explanation would ever give me that. I had to put up with not understanding the timing until I did understand it, and I had to to do it knowing there was no guarantee that I would ever get it. 

Nin is about patience where you hold your tongue even though the most satisfying thing in the world would be to respond to someone’s unkind, callous or outright mean comment with a righteous comeback. Wisdom, discretion or simple maturity demand that you let it go. Without escalation, there will be no conflict.  Without nin no one would have been able to abide by the rules laid out in so many keppan (training oaths) not to engage in fights and duels until you mastered the art. If you wanted to keep training with Sensei, you had to master your emotions and learn to forebear not just the little slights, but the big insults as well. Once you joined a ryuha, everything you did reflected on the ryuha. If you got into trouble because you couldn’t hold your tongue or control your anger, it could bring the wrath of the government down on everyone in the dojo.

Nin continues to be an important component of what makes a good person in Japan. From the salarimen trudging through their endless days or the school kids spending their days in regular school and their evenings in cram schools dedicated to getting them into even more rigorous high schools and colleges. Nin can be seen in today’s dojo in Japan in the near complete absence of talking during keiko. Everyone is focused on the training. Talking is something for elsewhere. In kendo dojo it may seem like there is too much yelling going on for conversation, and in an iai dojo the quiet can be complete except for the swish of
a sword through the air.

Nin is sitting in seiza with a smile while sensei forgets that everyone is in seiza and launches into a long story. Nin is sitting in tatehiza with the appearance of relaxed comfort. Nin is mastering present desires for long term ends without letting anyone know about the desires or the ends. Nin is the quiet patience and endurance of the mature martial artist.

Special thanks to Deborah Klens-Bigman, Ph.D. for editorial support.

 If you enjoy the blog, get the book!

 

Practice Makes Permanent

 

 

Wayne Boylan,  1938-2019

Dedicated to my Father, Wayne Boylan 1938-2019

I was talking about doing some suburi (repetitive sword cut practice) with a friend and he mentioned that one of his teachers says you shouldn’t do 100 suburi.  You should do one good cut.I have to agree. Mindless repetition doesn’t make for good practice. If you’re just cranking out repetitions to hit a number, you’re not paying attention to the quality of what you are doing. You’ll be sloppy and rushed.

“Practice doesn’t make perfect.  Practice makes permanent.” My Dad was a teacher - music - not budo, but he knew more about how to teach and learn skills than I ever will.  And it’s true. You’re only as good as your practice.  Doing thousands of suburi will only ingrain your mistakes if you’re not consciously trying to make each one better than the last. Real practice is as mentally hard as it is physically tough. When you’re practicing effectively you engage your mind as much as your muscles. You’re aware of what you're doing and always looking for flaws.

I’ve had the same satisfaction with my budo for the last 30+ years. I’m consistently satisfied with less than 10% of everything I do. Whether I do 100 kirioroshi (sword cuts) or 100 hikiotoshi uchi (jo strikes) or 100 harai goshi (a judo throw), if I’m happy with 10 of them it’s an unusually good day.  I use too much right hand or not enough left. I tense my shoulders (that one really ticks me off about myself). I don’t engage my koshi enough. My stance is too narrow. Weak te no uchi. I muscle the cut, My angle is off, my tip bounces. I’m off target. I do a chicken neck. My movement is small. There are days I could write an entire essay just chronicling the different mistakes I make.

One of my goals is to never make the same mistake twice in a row. If I do that I’m not being aware and correcting myself. In practice I have to be aware of what I’m doing so I can consistently correct mistakes. Practice is about fixing, correcting and improving.　It’s not about repeating what you’ve already learned. Suck, yes, but as my friend Janet says, “Suck at a higher level.”  Be aware of what you’re doing and make it a little better every time. I know flaws won’t go away with one correction, but at least make sure that you’re not repeating them.  

The hardest thing to fix is a flaw that you’ve practiced. My iai has a flaw where my stance is too shallow. At some point I decided that what I was doing was good enough, and then I did thousands of repetitions with that shallow stance. Now that is my body’s default stance. Any time I’m not consciously extending my stance, it shortens up.  Practice makes permanent. Whatever you practice is what you’ll do. I practiced with a shallow stance and now it will take even longer to correct because the mistake has been drilled into my body.

Enjoy the blog?  Get the book!

I have to build a whole new set of neural pathways and polish this deeper stance until I’ve overwritten the old training. That’s going to take time. I’m going to have to be sharp and watch my stance whenever I’m training. I will have to do more repetitions with a correct, deep stance than I’ve done with the flawed, shallow stance. That’s no fun, but it’s what I get for practicing a flaw. 

The good news is that good practice isn’t difficult to do, and it’s more interesting than bad practice. With good practice you’re constantly aware and tuned in to what you're doing so you can fix any flaws you spot. This is much more interesting than doing a hundred or two hundred mindless reps just to get in some reps. As in so much else, it’s the quality, not the quantity. 

Just as in music, it doesn’t do any good to rush through things just to say you’ve done it. Maybe do the whole kata once. Pay attention to what’s weak, then go back and just work on the parts that are weak.

Good practice makes for good budo. Poor quality practice makes for poor quality budo. Pay attention to what you're doing, and to what you’re not doing. Practice the stuff you’re good at, and practice the things you're bad at even more. If you don’t practice, things won’t improve; but if you practice badly then things will stay bad.

 

 Thanks Dad.

 

Special thanks to Deborah Klens-Bigman, Ph.D for her editorial support.

Yes, Virginia, There Is Sexism In Budo

Deborah Klens-Bigman, Ph.D. doing Shinto Hatakage Ryu. (Photo copyright 2018 Deborah Klens-Bigman)

 
This is a guest post by Deborah Klens-Bigman, PhD. and Jun Shihan in Shinto Hatakage Ryu. A martial arts practitioner and teacher for more than thirty years, she has seen a great deal of the budo world, and experienced its good and bad. We as budoka are not perfect, and this seems like a good time to consider one area where the budo world could improve. Budo has never been a male-only practice, as can be seen most clearly in the number of women who've led, and lead, martial ryuha in Japan. Klens-Bigman Sensei is addressing an issue that should be of concern to everyone in budo.

First, I would like to point out that most of my teachers in my 30-plus years of training have been men - good, talented men.  And the vast, vast majority of my colleagues in budo are also men - honorable people I am pleased to associate with. But sexism in budo needs to be addressed; and I feel the need to address it very specifically, and right now.

The public discourse of the past two years has allowed for what pundits refer to as "tribalism" to come out into the light.  I think it is too early to know yet whether this is a good thing (what comes into the light can be confronted, and refuted), or a bad thing (normalizing behavior that many of us had hoped no longer existed).  All the while there have been some voices all-too-quietly pointing out that misogyny is ever present for all to see, regardless of “tribe.” Perhaps it is its perpetual "there-ness" that allows misogyny to be continuously overlooked, or disregarded.  Or, just perhaps, no one is very comfortable discussing it, so no one does.

Since I was a little kid sneaking out of the children's library into the grownup sections for further adventure, I was interested in hand weapons.  Not guns, but swords, knives, glaives, spears, battle axes, bows, maces - if you could hold it in your hand and wield it at someone, I was ON IT - at least in the bookly sense.  I lugged home books on arms & armor that were almost as big as I was. When I was traveling with my parents, nothing thrilled me more than climbing around castle ruins or forts, or (the best) going to a real medieval armory.  

My parents thought I might become a historian.  

Through all of this fascination, it never occurred to me for a single moment that my interest was weird or should be circumscribed in any way.  That is, until I decided to actually do something about it.

I tried fencing, which I enjoyed, but I was not happy with the competitive aspect of it (there was no historical fencing available like you can find now).  Likewise, I was not happy with the theatrical fencing I encountered in college; not just because it was fake, but because there really was no opportunity to take part in fight scenes featuring women.  I decided fight choreography was a waste of time.

When I first encountered iaido, I was very fortunate that my teacher, an Osaka native, had three daughters.  He had no problem whatsoever with training me. There have been few times in my life when I felt that I really found something important.  This was one of them.

Deborah Klens-Bigman, Jun Shihan, Shinto Hatakage Ryu (photo copyright 2018 Deborah Klens-Bigman)

Unfortunately, my sempai did not agree.  My first few months of practice, one of them told me that it was "not proper" for women to study Japanese swordsmanship.  I decided that was silly. My Japanese teacher was perfectly happy with me being in the dojo. However, this sempai arranged for me to miss a demo that my teacher wanted me to take part in.  Everyone else was there. The experience was mortifying. It was designed to make me quit. That was the first time I realized that not everyone had the same attitude when it came to women training in budo.

I should point out that most of the resistance to my practicing swordsmanship came from a number of my American sempai.  During my many training trips to Japan, I rarely encountered the feeling of being excluded. But more about that later.

I didn't quit.  I was stubborn. I kept going to okeiko.  I volunteered to organize demos (a job no one wanted) partly so I could not be left out again.  I trained hard. I watched. I listened. I learned. And I put up with a lot.

Budo training for women involves more than just wanting to improve your skills and develop your personality.  It involves enduring.  Enduring sempai who, instead of being willing to help you, try to hinder you, because something about being an onnakenshi just doesn't feel right to them.  It's walking into a seminar where you are the only woman (hint: You have to walk in like you own the place).  If no one knows you, it's getting the puzzled look as the guys try to figure out whose wife/girlfriend or (after awhile) mom you are.  It's also enduring looks at the inevitable banquet when wives and girlfriends eye you with suspicion because you are there by yourself.  It's being told you are "gender non-conforming," and that's supposed to be a compliment. 

 I'd like to say the situation improves for women who teach, but it does not.  I've had men walk into my okeiko and immediately look to one of my male students as the teacher, because it's not possible that could be me.  I've taught seminars and offered correction to a male student who ignored me while taking the same correction from another man. I've encountered fellow budo teachers who implied I should be teaching women, or children, but not men.  Sadly, I gave a demo once and had a woman in the audience ask if there are "any restrictions for women" in learning budo.  Because she assumed that there are.

Klens-Bigman Sensei leading class (photo copyright 2018 Deborah Klens-Bigman)

 And it's rare, but it happens - someone being just a little too rough as a training partner, landing a tsuki in jodo with the intention of knocking you down, or knocking the wind out of you, at least.  Or, as a senior student, having a sempai publicly humiliate you in front of the whole dojo, because you "just don't know your place" (and having the kohai silently agree with him). The fact that I was correct in that situation was meaningless.  

One wonders why we bother.  Indeed, I have wondered, from time to time, why I bother.

There are a lot of reasons for persisting.  For one thing, not all budoka behave in the ways I have mentioned (though more of them do than I'd like).  Just like the guys, there is the fun of learning new things and gaining new skill and confidence. And I have been to seminars in Japan where I am not the only woman; indeed, where several of the women have menkyo and everyone treats me as though I have the same potential.  As I said, while I can't say that I never encountered male hostility in Japan, I can say that, generally speaking, when it comes to okeiko, people have treated me like any other student.  And most of the groups I have trained with are at least 1/3 female.

And that is all women want.  We want to be just like everyone else.  We want to be taught. We want to learn.  We don't want to be hit on. We aren't looking for dates.  We want to be taken seriously. And we want our expertise to be recognized.

Now and then, a young woman comes to the dojo, with a look in her eyes like I had so long ago.  It's my job (and my pleasure) to make her feel welcome. To help her understand that yes, you can do this.  I will help you.

And there are good memories, like the time my teacher gave me a bear hug after a class (in front of the sempai!) and said, "You're doing VERY WELL."  

I do this to keep my teacher's faith in me.  I do it for myself. And yeah, I do it for women.

Deborah Klens-Bigman doing Shinto Muso Ryu. (photo copyright 2018 Deborah Klens-Bigman)

 

Dojo

 

Old Butokuden in Kyoto. Photo copyright Peter Boylan 2015

I started training in the university judo dojo in Western Michigan University’s Oakland Gymnasium.  But I was really looking for tai chi. Now don’t laugh too hard, but from what I could find in Kalamazoo Michigan at that time, I thought judo was the most similar to tai chi. Back then there was no internet and no YouTube, so most of the information I was relying on was bad martial arts movies and descriptions from books. I didn’t have the first glimmer of understanding what I was getting into.

Judo was offered as a physical education course at the university. I showed up for the first class not really knowing what to expect. The classes were taught by Earl Bland and Robert Noble. It was a university physical education class, so it was filled with young, healthy students, most of whom didn’t know any more about what they were getting into than I did. I don’t remember much of that first day except that I bought a judogi and after class talked my friend Frank into coming to class because the teacher said everyone was welcome, whether they were paying for the class or not (I’m pretty sure the university administration would have had a stroke if they’d found out the teacher was inviting people to attend without paying for the class!).

I was more comfortable in the dojo than anywhere else on campus. It had been a dance room decades before and had mirrors along one wall. The mats were ethafoam sheets with a green canvas cover stretched over the top, with two competition areas marked out on it. You could always spot our people at tournaments because our dogi had a green tint from doing groundwork on the green mat cover. I took my first steps on the budo path there and I am still friends with many of the people I trained with at that time.

The atmosphere was relaxed and light. We learned how to fall down safely, and learned to call the act ukemi. We learned how to throw each other, how to do the arm locks, strangles and pins of judo. We had a great time, and we kept showing up for the classes for years after that first semester. That dojo was my favorite place on campus and I spent more time there than anywhere else except perhaps the cafeteria. Every semester a new crop of beginners would show up for the first class, and Frank, Sam, and other friends that I made stuck around.  We became the seniors in the university club. I hadn’t taken up judo looking for a competitive sport, but for the first time in my life I found one I enjoyed immensely, even if I was no better than average.

Enjoy the blog?  Get the book!

When I moved Japan a few years later, I discovered a lot more of the variety that dojo can come in. I trained with the local high school judo club in the high school dojo, and I joined a nearby adult dojo that trained in an old gymnasium. The high school dojo is pretty typical for Japan. When I was introduced, the entryway had a bunch of faucets and under each one was pot of barley tea, chilling for after keiko. The dojo was a lot larger than the one in college was, but only half of it was covered in tatami, the traditional style mats for judo. The other half of the room was a smooth, wooden floor filled with people in kendo armor swinging bamboo swords and screaming. There were at least four kendoka on the floor for every judoka on the mats. The judo club was small, about eight kids, but they trained five or six times a week, and most had been doing judo longer than my four years. I learned a lot from them.

The old gymnasium, where the adult group met, was all that remained of an old elementary school. The school was long gone, but the gymnasium was serving as a community gym. People used it for kendo and volleyball and other things.  On Sunday evenings a group used it for judo. This was a few train stops from my apartment and the closest group of adults doing judo. That the gym was an old elementary school gym meant that it wasn’t heated in the winter or air conditioned in the brutally hot, humid Japanese summers. The mats were old-style tatami with canvas over it. Over time, the tatami had become compressed and compacted until it had only slightly more give than the wooden gym floor we put it out on each week. It was remarkable how fast my ukemi improved when I started getting thrown on this. At the end of practice, we didn’t do a cool down.  Instead, we picked up all the mats and stacked them behind the stage at one end of the gym.

It was the antithesis of a modern dojo, and was totally lacking in comforts and conveniences. No showers, no locker rooms, no changing spaces. Even the toilets were in a separate building. It was a great place to train though. Everyone was there for the judo. When I first moved to Japan it was the only place I felt truly, 100% comfortable. I spoke very little Japanese, but my judo was pretty fluent, and I knew most of the cultural cues around the dojo. I was certainly lowest-ranked student in the room, but I was welcome and comfortable and they worked me over hard every week.

Sunday night practice started with a class for the kids, and was followed by an adult practice for all of us who had made it to adulthood and still wanted to get thrown around. After bowing in and warming up, all the adults would line up on one side of the dojo, and the senior high students who stuck around to train with the adults would line up facing us.  We lined up by rank, so I started out on the far end of the mat. Every week we would start with uchikomi practice (throwing practice without actually throwing) and the junior side would rotate around the mat so they trained with many different partners. After a break we lined up again for randori. This time both lines rotated so we ended up training with both junior and senior people. After that, it was open randori time.  Anyone could ask anyone else to do some light fighting. Of course, the younger guys idea of “light” was different enough from what the seniors in the dojo thought of as light to make some of the practice interesting indeed.

Eventually that old gym lost its roof in a typhoon and had to be torn down.  We moved to training in an old dojo attached to a Hachiman shrine for a few months before we settled in the very new, very lovely community center. I still practice there when I go to Japan.  It's a beautiful new building, and a pleasure to practice in, but it just doesn't have the atmosphere of the old school gymnasium. The people are the same though, so the feeling on the mat during practice is much the same, with the added bonus that my feet don’t go numb in the winter during keiko.

Dojo can be anywhere, literally. I’ve trained in parking lots and backyards and on the grounds of shrines and temples and churches. Maybe the most interesting location for dojo is Hotani Sensei’s jodo dojo in Osaka. It’s on top of an office building. Not the top floor, but a separate building that sits on the roof of the office building and is strapped down to prevent it blowing away in a typhoon.

There are a few dojo that stand out as iconic. There is a wonderful dojo attached to Kashima Shrine that I have had the honor and pleasure to visit on a number of occasions.

Then there is the grandfather of dojo, the Butokuden in Kyoto. It was built in 1895, and the builders seem to have wanted to create the most impressive dojo possible.  They succeeded. The columns supporting the roof are massive, and the whole building has been polished and worn with use to a lovely patina that feels neither old nor tired, but alive with the energy of the people who have trained there.

That is the essence of a dojo. It’s not the place. It’s the people training and studying there. For me, dojo space is sacred. A dojo is a place for putting aside my ego and everything I think I know so that I can learn and grow and polish what I am. It’s often said that “you should leave your ego with your shoes” when you enter a dojo, and in good dojo, everyone does. A dojo is a place to study the Way. Whether the Way is Buddhist, Neo-Confucian, Taoist, a mixture of all of these, or something else is up to the students who study there. The important thing is that we are all there to learn and grow.

I have fond memories of many dojo. There was the one above a fish monger’s warehouse. Another in an old side building. Hotani Sensei’s on that roof in Osaka, and Iseki Sensei’s on the ground floor of his home. I can’t count the number of school dojos I’ve trained in, nor the number of gymnasiums I’ve been in for tournaments. The Kodokan in Tokyo has a gorgeous and thoroughly modern dojo on the 7th story of its massive building. Then there was the parking lot in back of Hashimoto Sensei’s house where we would practice and try to avoid sliding too much on the loose gravel scattered across the asphalt.

What I remember most about all of these dojo is training with the other students. At every dojo I’ve been to I’ve been welcomed warmly. It is the people who make each dojo special. Each has honored me by letting me join them and train with them. We’re all there to learn and grow, and we’re all there because we want to be. This makes any dojo a wonderful place to be. The physical location is a distant second to the gathering of people who are there to train and grow. That always makes space sacred. Even old gymnasiums and parking lots.