The (Un)Realities of the Aikido “Sword”

Some students of O Sensei had a very in-depth and involved relationship with the Japanese sword.  Their experience has been passed down in specific associations, but not in the larger Art.  Tachi-dori is still a required test element for black belts, but one that has been allowed to lapse generally and might not even get asked for.

The definition of Tachi-Dori is tied to the definition of the Bokken:

1.       A single edge

2.       A single point that extends from the cutting edge

3.       No tsuba or hand guard

4.       No weaponized handle (ie skull crusher pommel or additional spikes)

5.       Roughly uniform length

6.       Curved

7.       Deployed with the right hand forward and the left hand towards the pommel

8.       No flexible or distracting elements

9.       No hidden weapons

10.   No scabbard

11.   No paired weapons

12.   No surprise attacks

13.   Handle less than a foot long

14.   Only three basic cutting movements allowed

15.   Both hands are on the handle at all times

Exceptions exist to EVERYTHING on this list.  We still train the way we train.

As we train mostly with wooden weapons now, the major difference is in the weight.  A metal sword blade is much heavier than the handle.  It falls into your hands as you swing it.  When you make a Bokken out of a single piece of wood, the handle is wider and fatter and therefore has more mass at the handle than the tip.  The balance feels very different. 

The same weight discrepancy is true of a Shinai.  The Shinai can be a fun training tool, because you can get hit with one and not get much of an injury.  I prefer a Bokken because at least with a Bokken we can tell where the edge supposedly is.  The Shinai is also a little to flexible to represent a sword.

I came across a paperback book from years ago that said the Bokken could be “more deadly than the Katana.”  Dead is dead.  You cannot be “more dead.”  A sharpened katana can kill more efficiently with less effort.  Yes, you can break bones and skulls with a Bokken – the same way you can with a baseball bat.

The length of the handle is almost inconsequential – I myself prefer to use a Bokken with more distance between my hands than a standard handle allows.  With no blade and no hand guard, it really doesn’t matter how or where I hold the Bokken.  The distinction between the real sword blade and the handle is - sharp.  (groan)

The single edge is a good, standard design.  Even in Japan it isn’t the only design.  The Ninja-To is straight, with both sides sharpened.  The hand guard is often depicted as square, with edges to the guard that could presumably be used to catch or cause trauma. 

The Japanese Shikomizue (think Zatoichi) is straight, but often (not always) only sharpened on one edge, no tsuba and often held in the reverse grip and employed with one hand with the scabbard being used to block or strike. 

Many other different names for swords become a statement on the length – only the samurai class was allowed to have the long sword, but merchants could be allowed to carry wakizachi which were of intermediate length.  Law Enforcement officers were allowed jutte (deployed often in the left hand, and wielded single handedly) and in Okinawa the law enforcement officials carried Sai (wielded in pairs).  With no hand guard, grabbing movements that could control the handle or weapons that could catch on the hand guard now run the risk of just slipping down the blade.

The sword is one of the world’s oldest weapons.  Nearly every culture developed some variation on a long blade.  The definition of the sword has a wide range of expressions tolerated within Japan, and many variations exist from other cultures. 

We take the idea of a sword being “razor sharp” as a given.  Apparently, this is not true all around the world.  A friend of mine who studies the German long sword notes a number of techniques using the left hand to grab about a foot away from the tip to make a strong brace or to improve accuracy and power with a stabbing motion on an armoured opponent.

We expect the sword to be a venerated object.  We further try to venerate our ethical response to our attacker and therefore try to elevate our technique.  This can interfere with the idea of a graduated response to an armed attacker.  We do suspect movements that might endanger us in an effort to show proper respect to the 2x2 piece of lumber.  We forgo antisocial movements that might give us a higher chance of success.  We do not appear to be doing this to learn strategies to take out an armed attacker, but rather as a tie to our historical roots.

No one carries a sword anymore.  Immediately post WWII, I think any sword training was discouraged and that has resonated through the decades since - even seniors instructors will claim to know little of the sword.

Why do Tachidori?  What advantages do Aikido people get from this practice?

Bokken Returning Etiquette

http://youtu.be/zAMlWKiXNGU

Check out the return of the weapon at 48 seconds.

While I was taught to treat the bokken as a sword; it isn't one.  I have had many loud lectures given to me by many people over the years about what was the correct way to hand a bokken back.  I have had outraged low ranked people stop the entire class so that they could lecture on what they had seen on TV, in a movie, in a Kendo or Judo or Karate or Kenjitsu or Iaido class.

This is Hitohiro Saito, the son of Mirohiro Saito.  Saito senior was the longest serving direct uchi-deshi of O Sensei, and he became the world's most recognizable Aikido sword expert as the author of Aiki Ken.

This is not how I was trained, and I teach in a way that respects my teacher and I try to not offend anyone.  But, for anyone who wants to get hyper and pick a fight over sword returning etiquette - this is the clip I think of when I tell them to settle down.

How to (not) roast garlic in a toaster oven

Dear Diary.

Today I was making some pasta fagioli and I decided to roast the garlic.  I remember before squeezing the garlic out of the peel as it became luscious and soft.  The part I forgot is that when my sister showed me this, she cut the top off the cloves...

I went outside for a few minutes with the cloves toasting for five minutes.  At five minutes, I returned and the kitchen smelled wonderful!  

Then I heard a pop.  My long-suffering wife commented, "What was that?  I've heard a few pops already!?"  

No, there was no drive-by shooting.  Nothing that easy.

The garlic cloves exploded in the toaster oven.  Burnt garlic coating the oven.  And my hungry wife glaring at me.

So, please feel free to roast garlic in a toaster oven with a piece of tin foil underneath, and SCORE the cloves, or wrap them fully in the tin foil.  It could save your life.

Honey, I love you and I am so sorry that your bagel smells like garlic.

Turtle Kung Fu - lost in the Martial Metaphor

Turtle Style Kung Fu.  One of the 12 animals of Xingyiquan, the oldest of the three major internal martial arts of China.

I heard of it years before I saw a demo.  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was prominent on TV, and so the toys were everywhere.  Little kids yelling, "Cowabunga!" on the school yard, trying to be super acrobatic gnarly ninjas?

Or maybe, the reference was to a turtle shell.  A form of Iron Shirt Qi gong that would make a student impervious to any attack?  One of these "Hit-my-testicles-with-a-2-by-4-and-watch-the-board-break kinda fighting styles?

Maybe snapping turtles?  Tiger Claw type ripping and tearing?

I definitely had an image of slow, of the race between the tortoise and the hare teaching perseverance, of a defensive approach.  Heavy, solid.

So, when I was told it looked like Cloud Hands, I didn't get it.  Light, fast circular movements.  Turtle?!?

http://youtu.be/vKIOFsFQoD8

Eventually I learned the inspiration was the SEA TURTLE.  Swimming movements.  Smooth circular deflections, open hand strikes and wrapping motions.  Some zig zag motions.

Not turtle soup, no eggs laid in the sand, no herringbone walking pattern, no invulnerability, no pizza.  Suddenly the metaphor and inspiration made sense.  It also made sense that this animal style has a few names other names like Lizard.  People who lived inland before YouTube probably didn't immediately picture a swimming turtle.

I guess the whole point for me is that there are so many Japanese words or translated Chinese names that I don't put this much effort into understanding.  All the stuff I never even tried to think about, research or understand - because I already figured I understood it - maybe there is more to understand. 

Grasping at Clouds

I had been told that the Taiji movement Cloud Hands meant leaving the hands light and cottony soft.  If a person attacked you, they would magically fly across the room while never feeling any more resistance than a cloud.  The movement is rather vague, but gets repeated more than any other in the Yang Long Form.  I was told the repetition is because this movement is more important and has more possible applications.  However vague and unclear the applications were...

I saw a Jujitsu technique called, “Ashes In The Eyes” which looked like a possible application – but I was still pretty sure Cloud Hands wasn’t about “poor visibility.”  I was also pretty sure it could be used for variations on Sokumen Iriminage or even an O-Goshi, or a Kaitenage.  I did this once with a karate friend and I ended up in a perfect Kosa Dori Ikkyo.  Punches, elbow strikes, palm strikes to a variety of heights, several throws, a wide variety of locks seem possible with a huge amount of "artistic license."

The Wu/Hao system does the movement front weighted or back weighted.  The Chen Style I learned did several variations on footwork with multiple segments of repetition – shifting each foot moving forward, expressing Fa Jin each time but staying in place, step in front, step behind, step backwards.  The Yang system just seems to shuffle from sideways, but movements like the Yang “Part Horses’ Mane” are the same arm movement, just walking forward.

I was shown a Shotokan Kata called Unsu, or “Cloud Hands” in Japanese.  Piecing together a few translations and embellishing on them:

-  Clouds undergo “Incessant Changes.”

-

-  Clouds can adopt any shape.  In the eye of the beholder, clouds can become dragons, monsters,religious images or long dead loved ones.  Awe, fear, love can be inspired, or indifference.

-  Clouds can produce lightning, thunder, snow, sleet, rain, hoar frost, mist, steam, fog, hail, dew and many other things in nature.  Smoke always finds a path upward, or when confined smoke causes spontaneous combustion.  Fog settles and leaves the dew.

-  Clouds can leave you sweating, or freezing, or instantly dead.

-

   Clouds can be virtually unnoticable, or they can black out the sun.

-  Clouds can be enveloping and close, or miles away. You can look down on the clouds, or they can hug the ground, or be in the highest reaches of the atmosphere.

-  Clouds can be seen moving and changing rapidly, or so slowly as to appear completely still.

There are some pretty amazing performances out there, but this is from a direct student of Gichin Funakoshi, Nakayama Sensei, who was the leader of the Japanese Karate Association for years and a 9thDan.http://youtu.be/9gNTc283kAg

  

So, these martial art metaphors from centuries past, and thousands of miles away, from a culture I don’t share, developed by people who faced threats that I never have; and who lived in an environment that my inland northern prairie home did not resemble – these metaphors do not always speak to me.

I have come to see the Cloud Hands movement as more of a state of mind than a posture.  That's why there are so many variations and applications, while the movement remains so vague.  There is no one "right" definition, because that is the whole point.  Clouds are abundant possibility and endless variation.

If I had never looked at other martial arts, if I had never allowed someone else's perspective to inform my practice, I would still be lost.  

Ender's Game - still a great book.

Ender's Game was published in the 80s.  While I didn't see it at the time, when I went back to the book later I noticed what I see as a comment on technology and warfare.

Security meant:  Supermax fortresses with massive amounts of barb wire, fences, guns, ditches, drawbridges, high ground, burning moats and projectile weapons.

Strategy to take a fortified position was to overwhelm it.  Throw lots of bodies at the defences until they crumble.  So, thicker and higher walls, with more and bigger guys, armed with more and bigger weapons, travelling around in more and bigger vehicles.  After the Second World War, we competed and fought over bigger armies, bigger bombs, bigger planes, bigger ships, bigger submarines, bigger fortifications in better locations.  This was true pretty much until the 1980s, the pinnacle of the Arms Race. 

What happened around the 1980s was that home computers were getting common.  We were forced into a new paradigm of war.  While the discovery of atomic energy was as much a game changer as the discovery of gun powder, this was getting overshadowed by a new threat the current militaries weren't ready for.

Security now is less about how many pushups someone can do in a minute, or how accurate a shot they are: A huge portion of security these days is how many words you can type in a minute, and how accurate you are with a mouse.  Like Q says to James Bond in Skyfall:  "I can do more damage to the entire world from my laptop in bed than you ever could with your pistol and martial arts."  (Don't have the script in front of me, I am sure the quote is wrong but not the intention.)  Suffice it to say, we as a planet have more to fear from the tech savy than we do from Conan the Barbarian. The person who steals your identity remotely can do you and the world more harm than the person who pulls a gun and demands your wallet.

This is really what I was looking for in Ender's Game, and what I was thinking when I was reading.  Suddenly, thrust into a war where "Up" does not exist.  Every type of formation on the ground or at sea - counted on there being ground, and sea.  Air combat focused on relationship to the ground.  Take away gravity and ground?  Air has also usually played a support role, however devastating.  What to do when we only fly in combat?  How do you force aircraft down - when there is no "Down?"  Nothing can actually "Fall."  The adults want a new general for this new type of war, and they select Ender.  Ender learns to think in zero gravity the way a generation learned to think in computer. 

Most of the actual battles are never described in the book.  How to describe a battle we can't understand and make us understand it?  The genius of Ender is his ability to grasp what we can't, but we want a movie we can grasp.  We have an orgy of CGI.  The airless and soundless space is full of loud fiery explosions, and the endless black is full of colour and sound. 

Ender is raised to be a tool, while the adults decide to do all the thinking.  The adults in Ender's Game say:  Achieve the objective we tell you to achieve.  We don't know how to do this, so you figure that out for yourself.  We'll be doing all the contemplating for you.  All the moral anguish?  Leave that to us.  You're going to be smarter than us and better adapted to this new world and new style of war.  Just remember we have the finger on your trigger, you don't pull it yourself.  Never ask why.  Never question.  Never develop a moral compass or conscience as that would be inconvenient for us.  We'll use you when we want to, and then villify you and discard you when we chose.  The rules are what we tell you the rules are, right is what we tell you it is.  Trust us implicitly, and never ask if we are worthy of that trust.  Be morally and mentally flexible, but we expect you to be rigidly and unquestioningly loyal.

The adults lie to Ender, and manipulate him and trick him into being the Xenocide - the killer of an entire species.  He destroys the enemy homeworld in a game, knowing that when the game is over he is done with this game and these people.  He wants to go home to his sister, and he's I think really striking out at the adults in the room by wrecking their little game.  Only, it was never a game.  He was betrayed.  At eleven years old, he is the killer of billions of sentient life forms.  He had trusted the adults too much.  He is discarded, and portrayed as a murderous sociopath with no place in the world he saved.  And then, the weapon the adults forged to do what they can't, in the war of means that they don't understand, against a threat they can't comprehend - answers to his heart.  Ender undoes the efforts of the generation he answered to.

Change the technology and the battlefield, change the threat and the means to neutralize it.  When the leaders don't understand the objectives, nor how they are attained, then eventually the leaders are no longer in control.  They can't even see where and when they lost control.  As martial artists, what happens when the world and warfare change too quickly for us to understand, when we're not even aware of the threat or how to respond to it?  Maybe one of the most interesting things for me, is how I think really the book predicts Edward Snowden - a new breed of soldier in a type of war few understand where everything we thought we knew about being dangerous is useless and meaningless.  And, we're really not in control.