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by 田所道子, copyright 2017
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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!
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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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