Miquel, in memoriam

This past week was the first anniversary of the death of a unique practitioner. A practitioner with lots of gray areas, that kept getting darker. Checking old photos, you can see how he would fill up a basquetball court in the 90s and barely have half a dozen people fifteen years later. There were reasons for that. His last days were... disheartening. I'm still cleaning bad habits from his teachings... more than ten years after my last class with him. He used to be exceptional at teaching beginners. Sadly, he took "the eternal beginner" to a whole different meaning.

And, yet, he was the man who once introduced me to Iai, and to Tatsumi-ryû. I wouldn't be in the school if it wasn't for him. He is the foundational stone of a lot of my understanding of martial arts, and Japan. A key stone in many other areas. I can't, and I shouldn't, forget his paper in that, fail to acknowledge his contribution.

I recoil from what he became, I mourn what he could have been, what he had been to his few friends. I remember my good moments with him; I'm afraid he always saw me like the babyfaced teen he met in the early nineties.

So it might be a weird memento, but I did 108 repetitions of a kata in Tatsumi I'll always associate with him: nuki uchi, ni no uden, ni no tachi, kesa. He liked it, because if was off the main track of the school, on its own. It almost says it all, right there.

Godspeed, Miquel, rest in peace

What's a samurai like?

This is going to be a tad unmartial, but it relates. It's just that I'm going to send to different people from different subsets of mailing lists and I don't want to neither repeat myself too much nor presume I can share their mails with each other.

What's your first image of a samurai? The sober man standing guard near his lords's castle? That lord paying a "courtesy" compulsory visit to the shogun? That same lord at his state? Their attire, their swords, are not going to be the same.

And yet, they are but a small, specific subset, of samurai history. Edo's shogunate. A government system set up by an upstart minor samurai of humble origins that destroyed the martial prowess of the samurai. Yes, I'm serious. The next time the samurai are at war they loose to peasant conscripts, hugely. And he does it willingly, to subdue a threat.

And that's the samurai we know. Martial artists put on a hakama, because it's "traditional", not really knowing when that tradition starts, or what was worn before. The katana becomes "THE" sword of the samurai... never mind that katana had different standards in time, different mountings, different... But the 2+ shaku katana of the Edo period, in compulsory (that word, again) black becomes the one and only. Maybe, if you're lucky, the daimyo's heritage mounting when he wants to impress a visitor.


O... kay. Let's check the Edo period. The urbanization of Japan, the pax Tokugawa, leads to an increased emphasis on what we would call police work. And one of the tools, that dubs as a badge of office, is the jutte. The following pics are from Don Cunningham's Samurai Weapons (Tools of the Warrior), at Tuttle. There are more pics, but I don't want to spoil the book.

See how the complexity of the manufacture increases? Simple iron sticks with wrapped rough fibers become samegawa wrapped hilts with some bronzework and tsuba to end up as gilded precious metal status symbols. There are several engraved ones in that book. I'd prefer, in the heat of the moment, a bare iron jutte to an engraved shakudo one, but that's just me being attached to my arm... and wanting to keep it that way.


However, when we study martial arts or Japanese culture in a more general form, we often kind of see one of the last two sets of examples, maybe two, and we forget the rest as if it was never there. And we're not even aware that Musashi's father was already a renowed expert in this very same weapon several decades before the Edo period even started.

My original point with this, and I've veered way of what I intended, is that Japanese MA practitioners talk about their katana, comission their practice blades. And most of those blades are, basically, the equivalent to the second set of pictures. Sometimes, they veer into the third one. But they never leave Edo. Their saya are predictable. Their sageo, almost always single colored. If not, there are basically two variants, always muted. From what I've seen, I suspect that kendoka have something similar going on. And when you talk about real armors, people visualize the great bif colorful ones, in lacquers and embroidery and nifty braids.

I've tried my hands at Japanese braid making. It's a slow process, and it needs many meters of yarn, and "looms". The basic samurai had neither, and yet you can bet his cords broke. Because of a sowrd thrust or a nasty fall, because it rotted, because it w¡had been used to carry a bundle of wood for the campfire... You name it.

This is a rope for tying up criminals, quickly (yes, I've tried similar designs) braided by hand. Wanna bet most swords used something similar? And armors, and pouches, and... A contraption that requires a whole mat to set up and work in it, plus hundreds of meters of silk for a single sageo, or this, done by the campfire?

Take care.

Sankaku

Soemtimes you have one of those glimpses that makes you see things much more clearly... and realize you've been a fool until then.

I've said for a while (though I admit that I took most of those posts offline a couple of months ago) that I'm surprised about the relationships between Tatsumi-ryu (early XVIth century ryuha, Japan) and Kajukenbo (sort of Chinese ancestry, 1950s, Hawai'i). Both are very forward, frontal, arts... until they're not. Both require a weird fluidity, a transition between strength and bounce, a pressure...

And both share the same basic deflection.

I'd seen it, sort of, before. The idea was the same, but instead of using the arm, you were using a 3-feet blade.

Except it's more than that. Kajukenbo deflects with the weak arm while the strong one comes from below and shields. In an emergency, you can simply put your strong hand over its ear and your other hand reinforces the arm. It's a rather strong shield that can move around more than you'd expect (and has a pointy end).

Tatsumi ryu has mukou. The strong hand grips the sword while the weak one... grips both sword and arm and reinforces it. Not only the "energy" is the same (both physical and "psychological" [*])... the actual physical structure of your own body is almost a copy.

I'm an idiot. A practised idiot.

Take care.

[*] Willpower, intent... call it as you wish.

Sharply forward

There are two kanji (and a zen proverb) I'm falling in love in MA. The proverb is that in my "avatar", 'gen mata gen'. Mystery beyond (the) mystery. There's a longer version, and it comes originally from China, at least. It reflects the idea that every time you think you've solved something in life, there's another mystery behind it.

The other two are more "mechanic". Mukō (first kanji on the right) is a kanji I met through Tatsumi-ryū. In the school, it means forwardness, and it's applied a to a go no sen technique, a technique where you're reacting and where you must push forward, avoid getting into defensive mode. It's a mindset that applies beautifully to Kajukenbo, even its associated mechanics.

And the last one... the last one goes the other way. If Mukō is something I first understood in Tatsumi and brought to Kajukenbo, Hazumu is something I've learned in Kajukenbo and I'm learning to apply to Tatsumi. Meaning? Bouncy, bullet, snap, flip, lively... Do not stop your technique at every hit. Bounce back. Use his energy and snap back into him.

I'm liking it, but I realize you need a certain kind of head.

Take care.

Kajukenbo revolution

The Spanish branch of KSDI used to have a couple of... mantra. One was around bullfights and such. The other was something called "evolution", to try to explain why and how our training method differed from the classic one. As I see it, it's more a difference of training focus than a difference in mechanics, but... well, MA and its societies and breaking up and...

What just pinged me is that some points regarding "pure" KJKB are evidently false. Misguided, at best.

I practice Japanese martial arts. Not "I trained a couple of months in Japan and I came back with a new system", but 500-yo martial arts (as in, there's documents about it). And a thing old Japanese systems have is that... they've changed. They get that kata in for such reason, they leave that kata only for high level instructors and people who really show a specific interest because no one needs it any longer... Even the teaching emphasis changes, and it has in the last 20 years. The principles are the same, the techniques... sort of, sort of not. And the execution and teaching changes from instructor to instructor.

Karate had that, and it's recovering it after the disaster that was the military build-up and the war.

Kajukenbo? Often, I can't see it. All I see is "pit" stress training, macho reps, shitty mechanics done faster. Sometimes even here. Why? Tradition? Gimme a break! It doesn't work like that. If you want to respect tradition, respect the substance, not the barest of forms. Substance can give you any form in your style. Bad form will never get you substance.

Sigh. Take care.