Budo Training Is Exhilarating!

Budo practice is exhilarating.  I’ve been searching for the right word to describe how I feel about practice and how it makes me feel for years.  Obviously I’m kind of slow if I’m just now figuring this out, but hey, after more than 25 years of exhilarating budo practice being thrown around, choked unconscious and beaten with sticks, maybe there’s a reason it’s taken me so long to figure it out.

People always ask if budo is fun, as if it is a game or a sport.  Some bits of it are fun, but they are an awfully small portion of my budo practice.  It’s difficult to call long practice sessions trying to master the proper swing of a sword, or the best way to unbalance someone, or the proper technique for sweeping someone’s weapon out of the way “fun.”  They are challenging and intriguing and full of learning, but fun is not the word to describe them.  That feeling when the sword flashes through the air and feels like it is doing the cutting itself and you’re just along for the ride?  Exhilarating.  The moment when you touch someone so their balance vanishes and they don’t even know you’ve done it and the throw happens as if they had jumped for you?  Exhilarating.  When you get the sweep just right and your partner’s weapon effortlessly whips around and behind them and maybe right out of their fingers?  Definitely exhilarating.

Even when I don’t make those great leaps in understanding or technical ability though, budo is exhilarating.  The focus it requires and teaches is wonderful.  Getting every part of my body and mind to act as one, coordinated whole just feels fantastically exhilarating.  Iai is certainly one of the least exciting forms of budo to watch.  When done properly it is every bit as intense as any of the paired practice forms such as kenjutsu or jujutsu.  Everything comes together and drives forward with an intensity and force that blocks out the rest of the world and leaves me panting with exhaustion in minutes.   The ability to focus like that on something, even for a short while, is an amazing feeling.    It’s certainly not fun, and it’s definitely not relaxing, although it does seem to drive the tension and stress out of my body and mind.  It’s exhilarating.

Then there is paired practice like kenjutsu or jodo or any of the other delightful weapons we train with.  You and a partner are actively trying to bash each other with big sticks, and getting hit is a real possibility if either of you makes a mistake.  There’s just no way to call this “fun.”  What it is, is fabulously focusing and energizing.  The rest of the world vanishes as you focus on your partner’s intent and your own.  There is no room for your mind to hold onto anything else.  If you try to, you’re going home with big, beautiful bruises.  All you have room for is the awareness or your partner, her weapon, the range at which that weapon is dangerous and where yours is, and how she is moving.  She attacks filled with the intent of smashing you into the ground and yet your movement is just enough to avoid being struck while your counterattack steals her space and leaves her dangerously off-balance and unable to move, all in a single heartbeat of action.  Absolutely exhilarating.

The free practices, known as randori in judo and aikido (though they are quite different) and ji-geiko in kendo, are deeply intense, energetic, powerful practices with you and your partner both giving everything to the training, whether you are focusing on developing and refining specific techniques in an unstructured situation, or going at it full-on to dominate and master your partner.  It’s not “fun” in any sense of the word that I’m familiar with, but it is wonderful.  Often it’s quite uncomfortable, especially when then bruises are tender.  Still, the feeling, from the moment someone says “Hajime!” until well after the randori has ended, is one of exhilaration.  I’m out there working with my whole body, and trust me, when those small muscles all over your body ache they next day you know you were using the whole thing.  You’re also using your whole mind trying to figure out the puzzle your partner is offering you.  Some days you figure out the puzzle in front of you, and some days you are the puzzle that is being figured out.  Either way though, it’s exhilarating.  When I take a really big fall, thrown by that 275 lb (125 kg) guy who sends me flying half way across the dojo and then lands on me, and I get up without any pain or problem because the ukemi was good, it is exhilarating knowing I can survive something like that.  It’s even more exhilarating than when I throw him, although that is a different kind of exhilaration, the exhilaration of achieving something I really wasn’t sure I could do.  When it’s all over and someone yells “Yame!” and we all bow and thank each other, the feeling of exhilaration continues.  It lasts out the door, all the way home and often well into the next day.  That feeling of doing things that are truly difficult, both throwing and being thrown, succeeding and failing, is exhilarating.  

               Budo is not fun.  Fun is too small a word for what I feel when I train.  Fun is a game of euchre at lunch, watching a baseball game with friends.  Fun is pick-up basketball or a tea party with your kids.  These are worth doing.  They are fun.  But they aren’t exhilarating.  They don’t leave your body and mind flushed with the intensity of focusing completely on one thing and directing all your energy to one target.  They don’t leave you exhausted, wrung out and relaxed from the work of gathering all your energy into one focused mass and throwing it at your target through the budo.

That’s the feeling I get from budo practice, exhilaration.  At the end of practice I’m wrung out and exhausted, with my brain dribbling out my ears from the effort to do everything well, to analyze what I’m doing to and try to improve it a smidge every time I do it.  How else can you describe the feeling of someone genuinely trying to beat you with a stick while you block and dodge and control his attacks without getting hit?  The feeling of getting that 275 lbs guy up in the air and flying, or the joy when someone makes you fly and go slamming into the ground and it doesn’t hurt is just amazing.  It’s exhilarating.  Now I know what to say to all those people who ask if budo is fun.  I tell them “No, it’s exhilarating.”

Why I Go To The Effort To Go To Japan

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 21^st 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.

Judo and the Olympics

I posted a slightly different version of this on a discussion board where the subject of Judo being in the Olympics came up.  Part of the objection was that studying classical Judo would somehow transform the sport into a bloodsport done in an octagon.  The other implication was that being in the Olympics helps make Judo popular.  My response:

An essential part of Kodokan Judo is that we protect each other when we train, so I don't see where any of the desire to study the full system that Kano Shihan developed should require a blood sport octagon. Classical Kodokan Judo includes a lot of effective combative techniques, many of which we have never used in shiai. Jita Kyoei still applies when we are doing shiai. In the last 10 years though, I've seen endless changes made to competitive judo to make it more attractive to spectators and, more importantly, television advertisers. That is the only solid reason I have seen given for the vast majority of changes made to competitive judo. I have no problem with changes to improve safety. I want to be still be studying Kodokan Judo and doing randori when I'm in my 70s, like some of my teachers today. Changes just to get more television viewers though bothers me. 

I see the focus on Olympic judo as a weakness. I look around and the art that is growing by leaps and bounds, without any Olympics and without any blood sport octagon, is BJJ. In my area there are easily 20 BJJ studios for every 1 Judo dojo. Participating in the Olympics has nothing to do with Judo being a healthy, growing art and sport.   All the changes being made to competitive judo to stay in the Olympics make it weaker and weaker. It looks like we are too weak to compete with wrestlers and the BJJ crowd so we change the rules to keep them out instead of learning how to stop them with Judo.  No touching the legs in standing work.  Shorter and shorter time limits on ground work.  These just look like a way to keep out strong wrestlers and BJJ grapplers.

Judo is not a spectator sport, and I don't believe that we can change it enough to ever make it a spectator sport. Nothing we can do will satisfy the Olympic committee for very long. Their search is for the highest television ratings possible. We could ruin judo for everyone, classical stylist and modern competitor, and it still won't keep us in the Olympics for much longer. The Olympics is constantly seeking out newer, hipper, cooler, edgier sports because they get better television ratings.   Eventually they will drop us for something newer, cooler and hipper that gets vastly better ratings.  That's why this winter there will be a number of new sports stolen directly from the X Games. 

We can't compete with these sports for ratings, and we shouldn't bother trying. I think if we change the rules back to something that allows the wrestlers and BJJ grapplers to play on our terms, if we up our game so we can handle them, we will have a strong, robust art and sport that will see a lot of growth. If we continue to chase television ratings we will destroy our art and still not stay in the Olympics

Budo Training and Budo Philosophy

There is a lot of philosophizing that goes on in budo circles.  I know that I am in the first rank of those guilty of it.  There is far too much of philosophizing about budo by a lot of people who don’t have the depth to do a good job of it.  This might be a symptom of the internet age though.  Everyone who trains should be thinking about the ethics and values of Budo, but not everyone’s thoughts are ready for prime time.  With the advent of the internet bulletin board and personal blogs (like this one) any fool (like me) can expound to the world.  That’s probably not a great thing.  However, budo without a philosophy of well considered ethics and honor is just another way of hurting people, so I’m glad to see there is so much time and effort being put into thinking about it.

Having said that, I think you need a ratio of at least 100 to 1 ratio of practice to philosophy, although it might need a lot more practice than that.   Consider that the Tao Te Ching can be read in an hour, and then you can spend years discovering new stuff from it.   All the good budo that I have encountered has been deeply thoughtful and filled with philosophical content, but the bulk of that content is written in the kata and application, not in words.  The kata and application are structured so they teach nearly everything about an art, whether it is a koryu bugei such as one of the branches of Yoshin Ryu jujutsu, or a modern art like Kodokan Judo or Aikido.

The kata and applications practiced don’t just teach how to do a technique.  They teach what the art values and thinks as well.  If you haven’t studied the kata and application of the art deeply, any written or spoken lessons about the art will be meaningless.  In Kodokan Judo there are 9 sets of kata, and they teach a full range of techniques for throwing, pinning, joint locking, choking and disarming.  But the techniques taught are just the beginning.  The kata teach how to apply them from a variety of ranges and attacks, so you can also learn something about when to apply the technique.  

When studied properly the kata teach a student to see how close someone has to be before they are dangerous.  The kata also teach an arts philosophy on how strongly to respond and what level of damage to inflict on an assailant.  Some arts believe in preemptive strikes (Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu and Muso Shinden Ryu share the same assassination kata Tana No Shita. One of the first kata in Araki Ryu is an assassination kata).  Other arts don’t include surprise attacks but are willing to strike first once they have been threatened (Shinto Muso Ryu’s Tachi Otoshi).  Still others refrain from action until actually attacked (Kodokan Judo).  This is philosophy at a fundamental level that is embedded in the kata of the particular systems.  These kata all make an ethical statement about what is acceptable behavior in the eyes of the people who crafted the system.  

Studying an art’s kata teach you what the system approves of and disapproves of.  It also teaches about things such as how strongly to respond to a given situation or provocation.  Some systems always respond with lethal force (see pretty much any koryu bugei from before 1604 c.e.).  Others have a variety of responses that range from killing or crippling an attacker down to simple restraint.  Shinto Muso Ryu has a variety of responses in the kill, cripple or seriously injure range, while arts like Kodokan Judo and Aikido tend to focus on the range from causing injury down to simple restraint.  These are all philosophical statements, but without deep practice of the art, the philosophy of the arts cannot truly be understood.

Most arts also have written or verbal teachings that supplement the physical training, but the physical training is the core of the system and really teaches what they system believes.  The associated writings help one to better understand the art, and provide some guidance in the form of things to think about while practicing. However, without intensive training in the systems kata and application, the writings and verbal teachings are nearly meaningless because they lack the proper context for understanding their intent.

Kano Jigoro Shihan, the founder of Kodokan Judo famously crafted two guiding principles for his art:

自他共栄   Jita Kyoei　often translated as Mutual Benefit And Welfare

精力善用　Seiryoku Zenyo　often translated as Maximum Efficiency Minimum Effort

These are simple statements, but the true depth of their meaning and intent can only really be understood through intensive practice of the system that embodies their meaning.   Mutual Benefit And Welfare sounds very nice, but actually practicing it in the dojo while you train is much more difficult that the simple phrase suggests.  The dedicated student has to learn how to do this even when they don’t like their training partner, even when they are tired, angry or annoyed, and even when a partner may have actually harmed them in some way.  The principle is not easy to implement, and it isn’t meant to be applied just during keiko.  

Seiryoku Zenyo is even more difficult to understand, though perhaps it less emotionally difficult to implement.  It starts out in technique, but grows quickly after that.   All Kodokan Judo students soon realize how important the principle is for doing the techniques of the system properly and effectively.  That is quickly obvious when you see a 60 year old judoka doing randori with a 20 year old, and you notice that the 60 year old is relaxed and breathing easily while the 20 year old is stressed, stiff and gasping for air.  Same techniques, same art, but the 60 year old is doing a much better job of applying Sieryoku Zenyo.  While the 20 year old tries to use strength and youthful energy, the 60 year old is doing only as much as is really necessary, resulting in the 60 year old being fresh and relaxed after a few minutes of randori while the 20 year stands next to him exhausted and panting for breath.  The difficult secret is that you are supposed to be able to scale the application of Seiryoku Zenyo to everything else you do in your life. It’s not meant just to be hidden in the dojo.  Without dedicated practice in the dojo though, the real depth of the concept will never be revealed though.  There are lots of things that seem efficient at first but that the trial and error of practice reveal to be mistakes.

As a student advances deeper and deeper into a budo school, they slowly discover more and more depth to the teachings, both the practical, physical teachings of the system and the written teachings.  The core of any budo system is the physical teachings of the art, the kata.  The writings associated with the art help a student to understand what is embodied in the kata, but without extensive practice of the kata and deep appreciation for their contents, the writings will just be so many scratches on paper.  This is true whether they are Kano Jigoro’s writings about mutual benefit and maximum efficiency, Ueshiba Morihei’s writings about the circle, square and triangle, Shinto Muso Ryu’s shiteki bunsho about the nature of the jo, or some of the esoteric teachings of other styles like Yagyu Shinkage Ryu or Araki Ryu or Miyamoto Musashi’s writings for Niten Ichi Ryu.  If you haven’t studied the physical portion of the curriculum deeply, the philosophy will be meaningless.

Now get out there in the dojo and study your art’s philosophy.

Why do we start teaching?

I wrote about the responsibility of rank in my last post, and then I discovered this fabulous post by Wayne Muromoto about teaching in budo, why we do it, why it's important.  He does a lovely job of talking about how the responsibility starts, and how we should accept it and shoulder it.

http://classicbudoka.wordpress.com/2014/01/13/106-becoming-sensei/

What Is Martial Arts Rank?

I got involved in the another discussion about the real importance and value of rank again.  This conversation has been around since at least Kano Shihan establishing the now popular system using black belts and ten steps of rank (known as dan 段 in Japanese).  You’d think I’d be over this discussion, but I can’t seem to let it go by without taking another whack at it.  I’m sure there were huge discussions within the Kodokan, because the rank system there evolved over several decades before it was finally settled in the form we are all familiar with.   

The question of what does a particular rank mean can be an interesting one.  People are constantly asking “ What is a black belt?" and “What does rank really mean?”  These questions need to be looked at in connection with a couple of other questions.  Those are “What is a sensei?” and “What is a student?”  

In the world of classical Japanese martial arts, the koryu bugei, these questions don’t seem to exist.  It might be because people are not evaluated in comparison to each other’s level of attainment.  They only give scrolls that correspond with the portion of the system you have learned, and teaching licenses that lay out what you are qualified to teach.  This only leaves one question to ask if you are talking to a possible teacher, and one to ask anyone you are training with.  The question for possible teachers is “Are you licensed to teach?” and the question for training partners is “Can you do this technique or kata?”   

For me, part of the issue is that I’ve been in the iaido and koryu worlds for a long time.  I started in judo, and I still train, but I spend a lot of time in other arts.. The Kendo Federation (where I got my iai and jo dan ranks) has ranks, but there are no symbols of rank. Everyone in the room dresses alike, from the guy who just started, to the 8th dan who's been at it for 80+ years. The koryu dojo I'm in are even less about the ranks and such. Yeah, you get some paper sometimes, maybe a license, but that's pretty much it. There are even fewer signs of rank there than in the Kendo Federation. The fascination with belt colors is only in judo and karate systems, and something that is big outside Japan. In Japan, you get a black belt comparatively quickly, and all it tells people is that you are a real member of the club who can take the ukemi.

This leads back to the initial questions: “What is a sensei?” and “What is a student?”  These seem obvious.  A sensei is someone who teaches, and a student is someone who learns.  Those answers work fine in a standard school classroom setting where most questions have right and wrong answers, the kids sit in the desks and the teacher stands in front of the white board.  They don’t work so well in dojo where everyone mixes, the teacher might be in his 30s or 40s and the students are anywhere from 9 years old to 91, and even the teacher is working to improve her understanding of the art.

The student’s role seems straightforward.  The student is there to learn the art.  To do that, that the student is responsible for showing up healthy and ready to learn, with a good attitude.  The student is responsible for herself.  That was quick and easy to write, but it’s not very satisfying.  Showing up healthy is pretty simple.  Budo is practiced in close contact with other folks, so please take responsibility for yourself and don’t expose your training friends to every illness you get.  Stay on the sidelines when you’re sick.  This might not be a complete answer, but what is a sensei needs to be considered before we can go any further.

So what is a sensei, and what is she responsible for?  I’ll start by disappointing everyone who wants to break down the Japanese word 先生 and define it by it’s parts.  We don’t understand the modern meanings of English words because their original German, Greek or Latin roots meant something a thousand or two thousand years ago.  We define them based on how they are used today, and the same goes for Japanese.  In Japanese today,　”sensei” is used to address a teacher, doctor, lawyer, politician or other important person.  Most commonly, it just means teacher.  Nothing more.  It has no fancy, special, abstract or mystical meanings.  It just means teacher.  The word doesn’t help us.

In a budo dojo though, the sensei doesn’t do a lot of classical talk and chalk teaching.  Keiko in a budo dojo is a different situation from teaching an academic subject in a classroom, with different concerns, conditions and goals.  The teacher has responsibilities to the students and to the art she is teaching.  I’m partial to the modern version of koryu budo instruction rather than the military style instruction that became popular in Japanese and Okinawan during the 1930s and 1940s in militarist Japan, and which continued and was spread worldwide afterwards in gendai budo like karate.  Koryu is generally done in smaller groups, with more personal instruction and less regimentation.  This reflects what sensei is responsible for.

Sensei is responsible for students’ having a safe training environment, that should go without saying, but it doesn’t, so I say it often.  This is koryu bugei, and one significant difference I’ve found between koryu bugei thought and practice and nearly every other teaching situation I’ve seen is that in koryu bugei the sensei has no responsibility for making sure students learn anything.  Sensei is responsible for making sure students can learn if they make the effort.  If someone doesn't make any effort and doesn’t learn anything, that’s the student’s issue.

In both koryu bugei and gendai bugei, the sensei is not only responsible for teaching the student.  The budo sensei is responsible for the art as well.  They are responsible for passing on the entirety of their art to the next generation.  They are not responsible for popularizing the art and teaching to as many people as possible.  In fact, many senior members of koryu bugei systems  view trying to spread an art as being an abdication of their responsibility to the art.  Trying to spread an art quickly risks having poorly or incompletely trained people teaching and not doing a good job of teaching, and worse, corrupting the art because they don’t understand it well enough.

The lessons of any good budo system, koryu or gendai, are far more complex, and deeper than just the movements.  In addition to the physical movements there are strategies and tactics for controlling the spacing between you and your opponent.  There are techniques and concepts for controlling yourself and your mind.  Most of a budo system is beyond the physical movements, and these are the real heart of a system.  WIthout a proper understanding of these aspects, an art cannot truly be taught or learned.  The sensei’s responsibility to the ryuha includes making sure that only students with an adequate understanding of all parts of the system are teaching.  It is better to remain small and obscure and pass along the entire system than to grow into a huge, globe straddling organization that is teaching only the merest shadow of the original art.  The teacher’s responsibility to the art is greater than to any individual student.

Interestingly, it’s strange how quickly most students begin to see and understand this.　The art, the system dates back generations, particularly for koryu bugei ryuha which can be more than 500 years old, but even Kodokan Judo, the exemplar of gendai budo, is over 130 years old.  The ryuha (system, school, art) has it’s own priorities and requirements and benefits. These outweigh the needs of individual students.  As students develop an understanding of the deeper nature of the ryuha’s teachings, they also understand that the ryuha will continue long after them, and that their responsibility is to learn the system to the fullest of their ability so that those who train with them and follow them will get the full system and none of it will be lost or corrupted.  

Students who begin to understand this, also begin to see and take on responsibility for maintaining the system.  Mastering the art is no longer just about gaining personal skill.  It becomes about being part of a larger structure that stretches back into history, and pushes on into the future.  As students move from beginners to experienced students to teachers licensed to teach a portion of the system and occasionally become licensed to teach the entire system, their rank isn’t about status.  It’s about responsibility.  The higher your rank, the more responsibility you have to the system.  Students who are only interested in learning the system for themselves and who don’t take responsibility for the system should be, and usually are, slowly frozen out of the school, and sometimes even simply expelled.

This is the way it should be.  As I’ve been reading more about the early days of the Kodokan and the new rank system that Jigoro Kano Shihan implemented, and it’s evolution, it becomes clear that in the early Kodokan, rank, at least at the early to middle levels, was strictly about how well you could fight.  Students were promoted when they defeated 4 people of the same rank, instead of based on how well they knew the whole of Kodokan Judo.  I suspect that this caused a not so subtle twisting of priorities amongst the growing membership of the Kodokan.  We can see the effects today in the way the International Judo Federation values competition above all else, and downplays or ignores the other 90 percent of the Kodokan syllabus.  What has happened is that in many modern budo, rank has simply become a symbol of competitive accomplishment and not a reflection of system mastery or responsibility.

This leaves me with the sad reflection that we have two different answers to the question of rank.  The first is what should rank mean?  It should be a reflection of student’s mastery of the system and their responsibility to it.  The second question is what does rank actually mean?  In koryu bugei, rank is still a reflection of a student’s mastery of the system and their responsibility to it.  In gendai budo sometimes rank is a reflection of a student’s mastery of the system and their responsibility to it, and sometimes it is a recognition of the student’s competitive accomplishments.  Figuring out which is which usually isn’t too difficult.

A Rant About Budo And Sports

I’m blowing a gasket about budo just now. Dr. Ann Maria DeMars, the first US women's world judo champion reduces the benefits of judo to those of tennis or golf. Steam coming out my ears that the art I love so much has fallen so far even in the eyes of its champions. She wrote on her blog

...I'm not convinced that, in the U.S., competing at the highest level is that positive. It costs a lot of money that most of the students I coach don't have. If we are going to do fundraising, I want it to be for something that is a positive experience for them - not an ego trip for coaches and referees. The benefit of judo should be to meet people from different walks of life, see the country, get exercise, test your skills. Too many tournaments are not focused on that - they're on making sure your belt is tied right, you bow properly and you never violate any of a set of rules that seems to be changed every Thursday.

There are lots of benefits to training martial arts.  Budo, including Kodokan Judo, teaches a lot of things while learning and practicing the principles of conflict, whether armed or unarmed.  In addition to the fundamental principles of conflict, including combative spacing, timing, rhythm, tactics and strategy for dealing with all sorts of conflict, effective self-defense skills, the conscious ability to read peoples posture and movement.  It should also teach discretion about how and when to use those skills, respect, honor and dignity.  

Sadly, when the focus of a martial art becomes competition, those benefits are soon lost.  Dr. DeMars reduces a great budo to little more than a social gathering with health benefits.  Her concern about judo seems to be keeping it a positive experience for the students and not letting coaches’ and referees’ go on ego trips.  Nothing about actual application of the skills learned, nothing about respect, honor and dignity.

On top of the things she has lost, there is the problem of over-specialization. To do well in any competitive field, you have to specialize.  In judo competition you have to specialize in what the rules will allow.  Competitors never waste time on anything that doesn’t apply to competition.  The result is that people only learn judo at very close distances.  They never study anything that can’t be used in competition, and as Dr. DeMars does note, the rules change frequently, often based on what the International Judo Federation thinks will make the Olympic Committee happy, rather than based on what makes good judo.  One result is that most people who’ve started judo since a bunch of rules changes in 2010 are completely unaware of the existence of Kata Garuma, one of the signature techniques of Kodokan Judo’s founder Jigoro Kano.  People who do competitive judo know only what is included in competition, and even there, they often practice a limited set of techniques that they specialize in using in competition.

Even if we only talk technique, Kodokan Judo includes so much more than sport judo that I feel like competitive judoka are voluntarily blinding themselves.  They don’t know anything about controlling spacing and timing for any attack other than a grab.  They never learn about strikes or weapons attacks.  They are completely ignorant of whole classes of techniques, from strikes to joint locks to weapons defences.  They never learn about handling attacks from any angle that isn’t allowed in competition.

Over and above that, the values they learn are only those of the sporting field.  Sports are nice and popular, but the etiquette and behavior are a bit thin.  Good sportsmanship isn’t the same as honor and respect.  Kano Shihan established two fundamental principles of what makes something his Judo; Maximum Efficiency Minimum Effort and Mutual Benefit And Welfare.

The first, Maximum Efficiency Minimum Effort does get mentioned a lot..  The sports guys seem to like this one because it’s an effective strategy for winning. The problem is that it’s supposed to be a strategy for living, not just a method for judging the effectiveness of techniques.  The techniques of Judo are supposed to be a physical method for learning and experiencing this principle as something that can be applied everywhere, all the time.  Instead it’s reduced to a trick for figuring out how to win trophies.

Then there’s the other foundational principle of Kodokan Judo; Mutual Welfare And Benefit.  The idea is that everyone benefits from training and practice.  Judo practice is a group activity.  To really practice Judo you have to have a partner.  You can do the movements alone, but without a partner you’re not really doing Judo.  When you have a partner, both of you are supposed to progress in your understanding and application of Judo’s principles.  

This is a great lesson.  You get so much more of value out of things when everyone involved benefits.  This is a strategy that can be applied throughout life.  I even manage to apply it regularly in the competitive world of business.  There is a fundamental difference between life, including a competitive are like business, and sport.  Sports like competitive judo are zero sum games.  No matter how many people are involved, there can be only one winner.  By definition, everyone else has to lose.

Life, even in it’s competitive aspects, is not a zero sum game.  I know in America, what I’m about to write is close to heresy, but in life, there don’t have to be losers and winners.  The most effective solutions are the ones where everyone gains something.  When I negotiate something in business, the best strategy, and the one that wins the most agreements, is to make sure my partners in the negotiations benefit as well.  If they aren’t benefitting, why should they agree to what I’m asking for?  Mutual Benefit And Welfare.  Make sure everyone benefits from what you are doing.  Don’t just divide the pie.  See what you can do to make pie bigger, so everyone gets more, regardless of the percentage.

Competitive sports though, are zero sum games, and this drives what I find to be a selfish and thoughtless attitude as the level of competition climbs.  I’ve witnessed too much bad behavior at the highest levels of judo competition, behavior that runs completely counter to the principle of Mutual Benefit And Welfare. I see people who will use questionable techniques that can endanger themselves and their opponents, people who cheer their victory when an opponent loses on a technicality, people who by their behavior show that they have no respect for the human being they are facing and see them as only something to be broken if it gets in their way.  This not to say that I don’t also see good sportsmanship in competitive judo, because I do see it. Good sportsmanship though is a faint shadow of the values I expect from someone who calls himself a judoka.

In Judo there principles and techniques.  The techniques are just expressions of those principles.  They are a means for elucidating high level ideas and making them concrete.  We are always trying to refine and improve our understanding and application of the principles.  The goal is for everyone to benefit and grow.  In budo, including Judo, there is no such thing as perfect. There is only progress.

Dr. DeMars though seems to think that continued progress is not really possible.  If the only measure used is that of competition, she may be right.  In the same blog she writes that “I think far too many people continue teaching judo for too long…..I'm not nearly as fast or strong as I was 30 years ago. What I can do and demonstrate is limited.”    Our bodies don’t perform as well as we age.  If the goal is continuous improvement of our understanding and application of the principles however, there is never a reason to stop.  We’re not trying to win anything.  We’re trying to progress as judoka.  We want to continue learning to be more efficient, more effective, and more beneficial for our partners to work with.  Really, if a technique or application works well for someone who is 50, 60 or 70, than it ought to be amazing when a  20 year old learns to apply it in the same way.  As we age, we have motivation to refine and explore techniques and ideas that we would never bother with when we are young and hale.

Dr. DeMars completely neglects Judo’s ability to empower its students.  I often hear the word “empower” tossed around, but Judo, like all budo, really does give students power.  It gives them the power of conflict and violence.  It’s a power I dearly hope they will never need, but it is a power that means they no longer have to be intimidated by anyone physically.  I have seen how it changes peoples’ relationship with the world, especially women.  They get ownership of the power of violence, and they no longer stand as potential victims of it, but they stand as owners of that power.

Everything I’ve talked about gets lost if Judo is reduced to a mere sport for meeting people from different walks of life, seeing the country, getting exercise, and testing your skills, one where the rules are constantly tweaked to make it more interesting for spectators or to be more photogenic for television.  I’m saddened and furious to see what a small, relatively worthless and easily replaced thing someone like Dr. DeMars views her judo as.  I understand that competition is fun, but just doing competition seems to be to be like eating nothing but fries and ice cream.  There’s not much nutrition for the mind and spirit there, and it can be awful for the body.

I’ve started teaching judo again, but I can’t honestly recommend that my students go anywhere near any place that focuses on competitive judo.