Like any number of budoka, my teacher had a profound effect on me. He was a Japanese immigrant who came to the US after the Pacific War wiped out his family business, leaving him with few prospects in his home country. After helping his family members become economically stable, he came to New York in the mid-1950's to start a new life. And he built one here, raising a family and teaching budo until his death in 2004.
I was fortunate to have known him for 18 years. Sensei was a samurai class descendant, though his family was not a very high-ranking one. Still, he was very proud of his heritage. He liked to say that swordsmanship was philosophy, and that, looked at properly, the practice of iaido could guide one's life. Through talking with him as well as the many stories that circulated about him, it was obvious that he was a man of his word, even if that word was sometimes pretty hardassed. Technical instruction for him was just the very beginning of iai practice; after that, we were supposed to find a way to apply the tough lessons inherent in the practice to our everyday lives. The sheer difficulty of practice would hopefully instill some level of stubbornness (in the good sense; i.e. persistence), and that trying to come up to some imagined, or even observed, level of skill would develop both patience and humility. We were supposed to show compassion, even if the result was not particularly satisfying; we were supposed to perform right actions for their own sake.
I came from an intact family, and, though I did not always agree with them, had enormous respect for both of my parents. My dad, in particular, also had a stubborn, honest streak. My mother was a very gracious woman who treated everyone equally, regardless of wealth or lack thereof. So the effect of my teacher was not a result of being deprived of adult role models like it sometimes is for others. Sensei was not a father figure to me; I already had one of those. So, he was neither a parent, nor a friend - he really was my teacher. Someone who could look at what I was doing in the dojo more dispassionately than a biased family member or a friend. He was the type of person who, when he called me on the phone, caused me to sit up straight, a quality I never felt compelled to exhibit with either of my parents. Not a day goes by that I don't think about something he said; or any situation that has arisen in my life as a budoka since his death that I could not think, "What would sensei think of this?" and hopefully gain some insight into a solution.
I have trained with some of his former students (all sempai of mine), and on more than one occasion, one or another has remarked, "I can see sensei in you." I am enormously flattered, but I have to remember: I am not him. I could never be him. Why does this matter? Because it is easy to accept the occasional comparison and think I am somehow becoming more (or different) than what I am. Because sensei himself would never care for the idea that the goal of my practice was to somehow be him.
I can't be him for a score of obvious reasons, of course, but the more subtle ones are also important - my time is different. I live in a different world. Not many people nowadays have the time or even the inclination to come to a dojo for a regular practice. In the first place, many people, even if they leave the office, never "leave the office." They bring it with them. Often that means the best thing is to go home, in case that important email comes up. Distractions like YouTube, with its endless clips of all kinds of budo, from the incredibly stupid (or just fake) to the incredibly brilliant are at everyone's fingertips, and, for some people at least, watching stuff is almost as good as actually practicing it. And for certain, a flesh-and-blood budo teacher can never be a match for a 50-year-old clip of Nakayama Hakudo, can she? When my teacher was training, that film clip was a rarity. Now, you can just dial it up.
There are some teachers who, even when the torch has passed to them, can never emerge from the shadow of their teacher. They try to imagine what their teacher might have done in every teaching situation. They object to things they think their teacher would have objected to, even though their situations are totally different. They refuse to change anything their teacher did. even rejecting innovations that might be useful to current students because "that's not how sensei would have done it." They may be pretty effective anyway, but I wonder when they will bring their own gifts to the practice floor? My teacher encouraged me to explore and investigate, and expected me to bring my discoveries to the classes I was teaching. He may not have liked everything (and sometimes he was very explicit in his opinion of what I was doing), but he knew enough to see the world changing around him. All the same, I find teaching budo very difficult, given all the distractions we now have. But, as a student of my teacher, I intend to keep trying.
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Monday, July 22, 2013
Female actors, then and now (revised)
[I revised this post because I decided my analysis wasn't clear enough. It may still not be clear enough, but at least I gave it another shot!]
As usual, in one of my curious junctures, in reading a book on a particular topic, I begin to see parallels all around me. In this case, the book is Elizabeth Howe's The First English Actresses (1992, Cambridge University Press). Note the date, please. 1992 suggests that the scholarship behind the book probably took place during what I like to consider the Last Great Age of Feminist Scholarship; i.e., the 1980's.
Howe explores English Restoration drama with the advent of actual, live women on the public stages, beginning in 1660. She profiles prominent actresses from that time to approximately 1700. In addition to well-known stars, such as Bracegirdle and Barry, she uncovers others that I have heard less of. Most importantly, she outlines the types of roles created for these actresses, and the connection between their public personae and their roles onstage.
Reading Howe's book takes me back to my fairly poor theatre history courses. Some of what she notes, for example that playwrights wrote for particular companies, applies, but in my history classes, the profs emphasized the customization of men's roles for the great male actors of the age, leaving out women's roles altogether (except to note that there were, in fact, women performing for the first time). Howe shows that certain genres, such as tragedies, became very female-dominated at one point, apparently in light of the abilities of some great female actors to perform these types of roles. At one point, the "heroic tragedy", which was male-centered, was eclipsed by "she-tragedies" in popularity. Howe is not able to really place any reason for the shift, except that certain female actors were so good at tragic roles, playwrights had to accommodate their skills in order to get audiences to keep coming to the theatre.
So, that's the history lesson. At the same time, I took a couple of long plane flights. Thanks to modern entertainment technology, long flights are the only time I watch movies. I watch old ones on TV, but I don't go to movies (between the cost and the time they take up), so a long flight is a perfect time for me to catch up on a few releases that I thought about seeing when they came out, but of course did not go to. Over two long flights, I saw four films - Django Unchained and Lincoln (on one flight - talk about disjuncture), and Cloud Atlas and Skyfall on the return. There's a good deal of comment that could be made about each of these films (and there were reams of code written about each of them upon their releases) but in particular I was struck by the types of roles played by women compared with Howe's historical investigations.
Restoration actresses played, in broad categories, strumpet-type roles, and virtuous roles. The strumpet roles included actual whores (Howe's word, based on historical descriptions) and breeches roles, in which "loose" characters wore trousers, more to show off actresses' legs than for any more substantial reason. These were comic roles. Whores, of course, could be married or not, as could the breeches-wearing roles. The other type of role are the tragic types, in which women are either punished for their sins with death (natch) or are victims of rape or other kinds of personal violence, depicted in order to show them in some form of dishabile. Aside from the penitent women, the tragic roles included virtuous women wronged in some way or other, for whom the only way to find justice is to seek the divine type (i.e., they kill themselves). Strumpets, of course, could be good or evil, depending on whether we are talking about comedy or tragedy. And then, among the virtuous roles, there are the innocent women, usually young girls. Generally, these were non-comic parts, except when they were played by actresses whose public personae suggested they were anything but.
So, let's look at the films. In Django, the women's roles include Django's wife, who needs to be rescued, or the small role of Leo DiCaprio's sister, who is a very cold fish indeed, and is an evil type. In Lincoln, the only real female role is Mary Todd Lincoln (awesomely acted, by the way), who could be very much seen as a virtuous tragic victim type. In the background of both films are women slaves who have virtually no personalities whatever. In Cloud Atlas, the female roles are innocent victims (one of Tom Hanks' many characters' wife and children), with one evil role, that of the psych hospital nurse. What of Hallie Berry? She plays a fairly resourceful character, but she needs a man's help to do what she needs to do in the film. As a reporter, she needs the help of a friend of her father to stay alive. As a powerful off-worlder, she needs Hanks' help to reach the temple on top of the mountain. She can cure deadly illness and is a great shot, and seems to possess a great deal of wisdom, and yet she needs his help for a mountain climb? (If he had not helped her, there would have been no redemption for him in the end, which introduces yet another trope, though one not covered by Howe - the female as helpmate) The Asian woman's role as a kind of seer is an innocent victim in need of rescue who suddenly becomes a pronouncer of platitudes on people's mutual dependence as her male rescuers are slaughtered below her. She goes to her martyrdom with a faint smile on her face.
And finally, Skyfall. I liked this film more than I thought I would. I am, paradoxically, a Bond film fan, in spite of the overt sexism in every Bond film ever made, because I love good stunt work. In Skyfall, the real "Bond girl" is Judy Dench, who shows that resourcefulness and courage (not to mention skill at producing IEDs out of any available material) bust through all the role types mentioned above.
So, we had virtuous victims, innocents, and a villain or two, plus one role that defied stereotype. Times being what they are, there were no whores, though on the other hand, none of these films were comedies. (Actually, the whore role is rife in so-called reality TV, a point so obvious it almost does not really bear mentioning.)
Berry has a happy ending. Having been rescued by Tom Hanks, she rescues him in return. Django gets his wife back. Mary Todd loses her husband.
M, in spite of all of her resourcefulness, dies. Considering her age in the film, one can imagine M climbing through the ranks of male agents, busting rhrough the glass ceiling. In the process, her temerity creates a villain who takes her transgression into male privilege too personally, resulting in her downfall professionally, and, ultimately, her death. In some ways, she does fit one of Howe's role types - as the woman who gets her comeuppance for stepping out of her place (though in Restoration times, she would have been an adultress, not a bureaucrat). She's replaced by a man of action. The other female agent in the field decides she would rather be an administrative assistant, and balance is restored to the universe. It's a balance that Mary Betterton, Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle would recognize.
As usual, in one of my curious junctures, in reading a book on a particular topic, I begin to see parallels all around me. In this case, the book is Elizabeth Howe's The First English Actresses (1992, Cambridge University Press). Note the date, please. 1992 suggests that the scholarship behind the book probably took place during what I like to consider the Last Great Age of Feminist Scholarship; i.e., the 1980's.
Howe explores English Restoration drama with the advent of actual, live women on the public stages, beginning in 1660. She profiles prominent actresses from that time to approximately 1700. In addition to well-known stars, such as Bracegirdle and Barry, she uncovers others that I have heard less of. Most importantly, she outlines the types of roles created for these actresses, and the connection between their public personae and their roles onstage.
Reading Howe's book takes me back to my fairly poor theatre history courses. Some of what she notes, for example that playwrights wrote for particular companies, applies, but in my history classes, the profs emphasized the customization of men's roles for the great male actors of the age, leaving out women's roles altogether (except to note that there were, in fact, women performing for the first time). Howe shows that certain genres, such as tragedies, became very female-dominated at one point, apparently in light of the abilities of some great female actors to perform these types of roles. At one point, the "heroic tragedy", which was male-centered, was eclipsed by "she-tragedies" in popularity. Howe is not able to really place any reason for the shift, except that certain female actors were so good at tragic roles, playwrights had to accommodate their skills in order to get audiences to keep coming to the theatre.
So, that's the history lesson. At the same time, I took a couple of long plane flights. Thanks to modern entertainment technology, long flights are the only time I watch movies. I watch old ones on TV, but I don't go to movies (between the cost and the time they take up), so a long flight is a perfect time for me to catch up on a few releases that I thought about seeing when they came out, but of course did not go to. Over two long flights, I saw four films - Django Unchained and Lincoln (on one flight - talk about disjuncture), and Cloud Atlas and Skyfall on the return. There's a good deal of comment that could be made about each of these films (and there were reams of code written about each of them upon their releases) but in particular I was struck by the types of roles played by women compared with Howe's historical investigations.
Restoration actresses played, in broad categories, strumpet-type roles, and virtuous roles. The strumpet roles included actual whores (Howe's word, based on historical descriptions) and breeches roles, in which "loose" characters wore trousers, more to show off actresses' legs than for any more substantial reason. These were comic roles. Whores, of course, could be married or not, as could the breeches-wearing roles. The other type of role are the tragic types, in which women are either punished for their sins with death (natch) or are victims of rape or other kinds of personal violence, depicted in order to show them in some form of dishabile. Aside from the penitent women, the tragic roles included virtuous women wronged in some way or other, for whom the only way to find justice is to seek the divine type (i.e., they kill themselves). Strumpets, of course, could be good or evil, depending on whether we are talking about comedy or tragedy. And then, among the virtuous roles, there are the innocent women, usually young girls. Generally, these were non-comic parts, except when they were played by actresses whose public personae suggested they were anything but.
So, let's look at the films. In Django, the women's roles include Django's wife, who needs to be rescued, or the small role of Leo DiCaprio's sister, who is a very cold fish indeed, and is an evil type. In Lincoln, the only real female role is Mary Todd Lincoln (awesomely acted, by the way), who could be very much seen as a virtuous tragic victim type. In the background of both films are women slaves who have virtually no personalities whatever. In Cloud Atlas, the female roles are innocent victims (one of Tom Hanks' many characters' wife and children), with one evil role, that of the psych hospital nurse. What of Hallie Berry? She plays a fairly resourceful character, but she needs a man's help to do what she needs to do in the film. As a reporter, she needs the help of a friend of her father to stay alive. As a powerful off-worlder, she needs Hanks' help to reach the temple on top of the mountain. She can cure deadly illness and is a great shot, and seems to possess a great deal of wisdom, and yet she needs his help for a mountain climb? (If he had not helped her, there would have been no redemption for him in the end, which introduces yet another trope, though one not covered by Howe - the female as helpmate) The Asian woman's role as a kind of seer is an innocent victim in need of rescue who suddenly becomes a pronouncer of platitudes on people's mutual dependence as her male rescuers are slaughtered below her. She goes to her martyrdom with a faint smile on her face.
And finally, Skyfall. I liked this film more than I thought I would. I am, paradoxically, a Bond film fan, in spite of the overt sexism in every Bond film ever made, because I love good stunt work. In Skyfall, the real "Bond girl" is Judy Dench, who shows that resourcefulness and courage (not to mention skill at producing IEDs out of any available material) bust through all the role types mentioned above.
So, we had virtuous victims, innocents, and a villain or two, plus one role that defied stereotype. Times being what they are, there were no whores, though on the other hand, none of these films were comedies. (Actually, the whore role is rife in so-called reality TV, a point so obvious it almost does not really bear mentioning.)
Berry has a happy ending. Having been rescued by Tom Hanks, she rescues him in return. Django gets his wife back. Mary Todd loses her husband.
M, in spite of all of her resourcefulness, dies. Considering her age in the film, one can imagine M climbing through the ranks of male agents, busting rhrough the glass ceiling. In the process, her temerity creates a villain who takes her transgression into male privilege too personally, resulting in her downfall professionally, and, ultimately, her death. In some ways, she does fit one of Howe's role types - as the woman who gets her comeuppance for stepping out of her place (though in Restoration times, she would have been an adultress, not a bureaucrat). She's replaced by a man of action. The other female agent in the field decides she would rather be an administrative assistant, and balance is restored to the universe. It's a balance that Mary Betterton, Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle would recognize.
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Tradition and rigidity
A couple of weeks ago, I had the all-too-rare pleasure of practicing jodo with some friends and colleagues at a dojo some distance away. Everyone was in street clothes except for myself and one other person. The space was a training room at a gym on an army base rather than a traditional dojo. Earlier, I had been told I did not need to "dress out" for the practice.
"Yes I do," I replied. I did not want to embarrass my hosts, however, so I added that I had a four-hour drive home afterward, and preferred not to wear clothes I had been sweating heavily in all the way back. But that was only part of the reason. I "dressed out" because for me, it is not right to practice in street clothes.
Why not? Well, good question. As an iaidoka, the keikogi-hakama-obi combination is actually important for wearing a sword. Just for yucks, try wearing one with contemporary clothing sometime. The sword simply does not want to cooperate very well when stuffed into a leather trouser belt. And if you're me, you're not even wearing a belt, which makes it simply impossible. But for jodo, it's true; one never needs to thrust a sword into a belt, only a bokuto; and when you do, it's controlled enough in the kata that it does not need to find that comfortable place above your hip that a well-placed obi will provide. Moreover, bokuto are lighter than real or practice swords, so the extra support of the hakama himo are not necessary either. Still, I got dressed. Beyond automotive hygiene, the reason I got dressed was simply tradition.
I have had people not familiar with our keikogi-hakama-obi combination ask me about my outfit. One person, a TKD teacher, even went so far as to reason out that my opponents could not see my leg movements when my lower limbs were clad in the wide, pleated trousers, thereby conferring some sort of tactical advantage. No, I replied. We wear this outfit because that is what Edo period samurai actually wore. It is the most practical outfit to wear for putting a sword (or swords) in your belt. No other reason.
But, practicality aside, it is a tradition, as in practicing a traditional martial art. I "dress out" because it shows respect for my teachers and the history of my art form.
At the same time, and to a certain extent, in deference to my colleagues for whom dressing out is optional, I have to take note that there are times when tradition can become a simple, rote repetition, or a rigid, invariable habit. People who study traditional martial arts get hit with this criticism all the time: our practice is rigid, outdated, impractical; there is too much attention to minute, meaningless detail, and not enough to the substance of technique. There are certainly examples all the time when attention to detail overwhelms substance. One large, degree-granting organization will fail people who test simply for making mistakes in the required bowing and etiquette attached to their style. I think the reasons are that (1) the judges are looking for attention to detail generally, and not observing the minutiae of etiquette suggests a sloppy training regimen; (2) they want to judge everyone by the same criteria, so one must do one's best to follow every prescribed detail; and (3) (maybe most important to them) minutely observing the same protocols adds to group cohesion and upholds the importance of the group identity in general.
I am not being critical, just observational. Is it possible to be polite to people without minutely adhering to a prescribed ritual? Absolutely. Just not there. And to be honest, I have never belonged to that organization for the simple reason (and I am echoing my teacher in this regard) that I regard the substance of practice as being more important. For my teacher there were other, political considerations as well, but that is my take. That at some point I have to draw the line between minute attention to detail and the substance of training, because one can get lost in the minutiae and lose sight of the important stuff. On the other hand, I am traditional in the sense of wanting to pay homage to my forebears in the art, and certainly I would never get rid of etiquette or bowing in the dojo, ever. Especially in a weapons dojo, mutual respect is paramount, or practice quickly becomes impossible.
But that rigidity thing. Traditional kata is very exacting. Put your foot here, draw now, cut like that. Block this cut, come in for a tsuki with the jo, push the opponent away, swing the jo towards his eyes. The potential for the prescribed movements being the end point of kata training is ever-present, and I know some very good practitioners who do excellent kata, but have a great deal of difficulty thinking outside the box.
That goes for other art forms as well. My husband is a modern artist, and we occasionally engage in rather lively discussions regarding classical versus modern art. To him, classical art is rigid and confining, whereas modern art is more expressive. Leaving aside the obvious flaws in modern art (overcommercialization comes immediately to mind), I point out that it is possible to learn a classical art and yet be able to express oneself through it. Eventually in these discussions, we invariably find out we are really talking about the same thing, just in different ways.
Somewhere amid my stacks of DVDs I have an old video (transferred from film) of Nakayama Hakudo, the last soke of MSR. My teacher first showed this film to me when I visited his home one time. "Look at this, I'll bet you've never seen anything like this before," he said, a little mischievously. In it, Hakudo sensei, who was obviously a very old man at this point, performs MSR kata. First, he does the kata in a way that is more-or-less as a practitioner would recognize it. Then, following, he performs a variation on the kata that can only be described as playful. I could see, looking at these variations, that Hakudo Sensei was truly a 20th century master of a living art form. He took the kata, played with it, expanded it, then went on to something else. His kata was neither rigid nor dull.
It's difficult to describe my reaction - I came to understand many things about my teacher, and our practice, by watching this film. It was like someone hit me over the head. I began to understand answers to some of the questions I had about specific kata and their meaning, but, more importantly, it impressed upon me that kata is not an end in itself, but a taking-off point for applying techniques in whatever situation was at hand (even if it was a community hall stage).
But my final thought after seeing the film for the first time was that Hakudo Sensei would probably fail a grading test with all the fun he was having.
In an earlier post, I described the playing of traditional noh flute and how learning to improvise was actually a part of the tradition. It is certainly possibly to limit training in the flute to set pieces; but the practice will not be nearly as rich as embracing the entire tradition. But the safe pit of rigidity is always there. It's safe, because as long as you do exactly as your teacher did, you literally can't put a foot wrong. No one can criticize what you are doing because you are doing exactly what you were taught. In the old days, people who trained in weapons arts quickly got over the rigidity thing, because they were actually engaging in life-or-death training and anyone who favored rigidity was not going to last long in an encounter. Even in traditional arts, like ink painting, if a student wanted to get out from under the shadow of his master, he had to develop his own way of interpreting the world.
This is not easy stuff. It's great to insist on the perfect dojo space, the proper stage, the exact same setup that your teacher had. Do the kata or the dance exactly as you were taught. Make the line on the paper exactly the same as before. Adapting or changing what you've spent so many years learning is a lot like stepping off a cliff; and, in fact, some people actually fall off, and turn what they have learned into something unrecognizable. Sometimes it's brilliant; but sometimes it's simply a mess. The very tricky part is, staying in a tradition, learning its rules, techniques and conventions, and then being able to push past the rules to where the real substance of the practice is for you. Scary. Exhilarating. Brilliant.
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Performing budo
I am just finishing Chi-Ming Yang's Performing China (2011), in which she examines several ways in which the West (specifically, 17-18th century England) interpreted Chinese culture for a popular audience. While her interest is mostly in the performance of Restoration plays based on sometimes very odd interpretations of Chinese history, story, folktale or some mashup of all three things, she also discusses the English craze for imported material goods, such as porcelain (i.e., "china"), lacquerware and other commodities. The epilogue is one of the best parts of the book, wherein Yang discusses a production of Puccini's Turandot that was performed at the Forbidden City in Beijing in the late '90's.
One of the cool things about current scholarship on Asian-European (or -American) interactions is that nowadays it's not just white people writing about them. Yang is (at least at the time of publication) an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, but as a native Chinese, she is able to give some first-hand impressions from a Chinese perspective of what Edward Said referred to as "orientalism" - a broad category that covers, in effect, how the West has dealt (and continues to deal) with the East.
My one criticism of the book is that not much more than snippets of actual Chinese history or culture are mentioned which planted the seeds of such productions as The Orphan of China (1759), or, of great interest to me, the character of the Chinese female warrior-hero in Settles' The Conquest of China, by the Tartars (1676), played by famous actresses of the day, who were then new to the Restoration stage. A careful look at the notes to each chapter introduces some tantalizing bits of historical veracity to some very convoluted plotlines. Picking up on that info is what is known in academia as "areas for further reading and research," and I am embarking on some, to slake my curiosity.
However, this is not a review. Many of us who have watched films like The Last Samurai know that the best fiction mixes in elements of non-fiction. If it's a subject we know something about, we can take a distanced view at the cleverness of the director and producer at how they make use of that information, whether in costumes, decor, or even dialect and the retelling of historical incidents. If a viewer is not familiar with the historical background material of a fictional work, she can nonetheless be drawn in by that sense of verisimilitude - everything seems so plausible. Take for example, the film Bridges of Madison County. Some fans swore they owned, or at least read, the fictional National Geographic article the photographer (Clint Eastwood) was working on in the film. The filmakers had to clarify several times that such an article was never written. But it seemed so real.
Yang's book (and obviously other things, but that's how my mind works) led me to think further on some of my encounters with American budoka. Some of the ways in which American students (and some European ones, for that matter) reintrepret Japanese culture (and I realize I am switching cultures here, thanks) are far off the mark and sort of amusing. I have encountered non-Japanese who have grown their hair into topknots. I have met others who have festooned their dojo space with souvenirs until there is almost no room for practice. I once almost accidentally stabbed a beautiful wedding uchikake (a large, embroidered and padded kimono) because it was hanging on the wall of an American teacher's training space. But these are obvious, fantasy-driven, or ego-driven interpretations. Topknots went "out" (by decree) in the 19th century (except for sumo wrestlers). Dojo walls in Japan are generally plain and unadorned, for both aesthetic and practical reasons. We smirk a little when we see earnest students of some oddly named "ryuha" walking about in hakama with sneakers on, practice-cutting rolled up paper painted to look like bamboo, or, my personal favorite, American students who are left-handed, so they draw a sword that way. As one awful video put it (approximately), "Doesn't everyone's martial arts practice involve a little bit of fantasy?" No.
These are obvious, and sometimes honest, misinterpretations. American education, until one gets beyond secondary school, is fairly ignorant on the subject of Asian culture and history, unless one's family is actually from Asia. Unless students are motivated to pick up and read some non-required (generally non-internet) texts, they may never understand that there are still cultures out there that are different from our own. And that the historical past is - actually - past.
But I don't regard the above as a real problem. In at least some cases, the misunderstanding is so blatant it's funny, and blatant misunderstandings, if the person is sincere, can be corrected, or at least ignored. I think the bigger problem is more subtle. It lies in using real stuff as a basis for whatever a teacher wants to accomplish. For example, I know of several high-ranking practitioners (and heard of others second-hand) who insist on a high degree of loyalty and engagement from their students. People have to commit to a certain amount of time per week or month in order to train with the teacher. In at least one case, I have seen some of these students demonstrate, and they are awesome - a result of that large time commitment. It is true that before the late 19th century, samurai pledged loyalty to their overlords, and may have signed blood oaths to that effect. It was their job. But that was then. However, that did not stop one American martial arts teacher/writer. After learning of this custom, he created his own loyalty oath, written in his own blood, which he then presented to his traditional Japanese teacher. If I am recalling his piece correctly, he wrote that his teacher was somewhat surprised (I'll bet). The teacher then gently pointed out that no one did that stuff anymore. However, the writer notes that he felt the need to express the depth of his commitment to his training in this way, so he revived a tradition from almost 200 years ago in order to accomplish it.
I could never study with either of the above, no doubt excellent American teachers because I have a job and a family - I am not able to make the time (or blood) commitment that their small groups of students have. I envy their students in a way, but I also wonder about them: what happens if their life circumstances change? Do they have to leave the practice?
I have written elsewhere that in traditional koryu dojo in Japan, budoka consider their practice to be a part of their identity, but it is not all of their identity. Japanese people are at least as busy as Americans - they have jobs and family obligations like the rest of us. They come to practice when they can. I remember one dojo where I trained where students sometimes left their sarariman jobs to come to okeiko for a couple hours, and then went back to the office. So they were dedicated, but they also had priorities. And lives. Another story told to me by a budo colleague was of a gentleman who really wanted to take up a koryu budo practice, but had a hideously demanding job. The week after he retired (at 65) he came to the dojo, became a regular student, and even earned a menkyo from the teacher of the ryuha after much hard work. But his first priority was to support his family.
So is there some danger to all this? Probably not, unless you get swept up in it yourself. And certainly, there are teachers in Japan who are happy to indulge American students' fantasies and misinterpretations if it works for their bottom lines. To draw another parallel with Performing China, Yang writes about the production of Turandot in Beijing. The plot actually does have a little, tiny bit of basis in some Chinese legend/history, but of course the opera is all Puccini. The production at the Forbidden City cost upwards of $15 million, and drew rich and influential people from all over the planet. Yang notes, and I concur, that China managed to appropriate a piece of Italian opera and turn it to its own profit, turning Westerners' orientalism on its head, as it were. I have met Japanese budo teachers, for example, who have decided it is more beneficial for them if their students believe their style dates to hoary antiquity rather than the mid- to late-20th century. They may even have the scrolls to prove it. Of course, said scrolls might have been picked up at the Toji flea market in Kyoto, but since no one can read Japanese, how will they know?
I cringe, though, when I meet American martial artists who think that this mishmash of reality, history and fantasy are somehow more authentic than just showing up to the dojo for practice of good technique with a competent teacher. And I cringe even more when I am at a public demonstration and see their fantasies on display, as I did recently, when a kung fu group presented a history of Chinese martial arts complete with a soundtrack from Schwartzenegger's Conan, among other popular films. I mean, Conan is one of my favorite movies, but it's also incredibly silly. It's one thing when the practitioners practice goofy things. It's another when they ask an audience to believe it.
The book:
Yang, Chi-Ming
Performing China, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.
One of the cool things about current scholarship on Asian-European (or -American) interactions is that nowadays it's not just white people writing about them. Yang is (at least at the time of publication) an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, but as a native Chinese, she is able to give some first-hand impressions from a Chinese perspective of what Edward Said referred to as "orientalism" - a broad category that covers, in effect, how the West has dealt (and continues to deal) with the East.
My one criticism of the book is that not much more than snippets of actual Chinese history or culture are mentioned which planted the seeds of such productions as The Orphan of China (1759), or, of great interest to me, the character of the Chinese female warrior-hero in Settles' The Conquest of China, by the Tartars (1676), played by famous actresses of the day, who were then new to the Restoration stage. A careful look at the notes to each chapter introduces some tantalizing bits of historical veracity to some very convoluted plotlines. Picking up on that info is what is known in academia as "areas for further reading and research," and I am embarking on some, to slake my curiosity.
However, this is not a review. Many of us who have watched films like The Last Samurai know that the best fiction mixes in elements of non-fiction. If it's a subject we know something about, we can take a distanced view at the cleverness of the director and producer at how they make use of that information, whether in costumes, decor, or even dialect and the retelling of historical incidents. If a viewer is not familiar with the historical background material of a fictional work, she can nonetheless be drawn in by that sense of verisimilitude - everything seems so plausible. Take for example, the film Bridges of Madison County. Some fans swore they owned, or at least read, the fictional National Geographic article the photographer (Clint Eastwood) was working on in the film. The filmakers had to clarify several times that such an article was never written. But it seemed so real.
Yang's book (and obviously other things, but that's how my mind works) led me to think further on some of my encounters with American budoka. Some of the ways in which American students (and some European ones, for that matter) reintrepret Japanese culture (and I realize I am switching cultures here, thanks) are far off the mark and sort of amusing. I have encountered non-Japanese who have grown their hair into topknots. I have met others who have festooned their dojo space with souvenirs until there is almost no room for practice. I once almost accidentally stabbed a beautiful wedding uchikake (a large, embroidered and padded kimono) because it was hanging on the wall of an American teacher's training space. But these are obvious, fantasy-driven, or ego-driven interpretations. Topknots went "out" (by decree) in the 19th century (except for sumo wrestlers). Dojo walls in Japan are generally plain and unadorned, for both aesthetic and practical reasons. We smirk a little when we see earnest students of some oddly named "ryuha" walking about in hakama with sneakers on, practice-cutting rolled up paper painted to look like bamboo, or, my personal favorite, American students who are left-handed, so they draw a sword that way. As one awful video put it (approximately), "Doesn't everyone's martial arts practice involve a little bit of fantasy?" No.
These are obvious, and sometimes honest, misinterpretations. American education, until one gets beyond secondary school, is fairly ignorant on the subject of Asian culture and history, unless one's family is actually from Asia. Unless students are motivated to pick up and read some non-required (generally non-internet) texts, they may never understand that there are still cultures out there that are different from our own. And that the historical past is - actually - past.
But I don't regard the above as a real problem. In at least some cases, the misunderstanding is so blatant it's funny, and blatant misunderstandings, if the person is sincere, can be corrected, or at least ignored. I think the bigger problem is more subtle. It lies in using real stuff as a basis for whatever a teacher wants to accomplish. For example, I know of several high-ranking practitioners (and heard of others second-hand) who insist on a high degree of loyalty and engagement from their students. People have to commit to a certain amount of time per week or month in order to train with the teacher. In at least one case, I have seen some of these students demonstrate, and they are awesome - a result of that large time commitment. It is true that before the late 19th century, samurai pledged loyalty to their overlords, and may have signed blood oaths to that effect. It was their job. But that was then. However, that did not stop one American martial arts teacher/writer. After learning of this custom, he created his own loyalty oath, written in his own blood, which he then presented to his traditional Japanese teacher. If I am recalling his piece correctly, he wrote that his teacher was somewhat surprised (I'll bet). The teacher then gently pointed out that no one did that stuff anymore. However, the writer notes that he felt the need to express the depth of his commitment to his training in this way, so he revived a tradition from almost 200 years ago in order to accomplish it.
I could never study with either of the above, no doubt excellent American teachers because I have a job and a family - I am not able to make the time (or blood) commitment that their small groups of students have. I envy their students in a way, but I also wonder about them: what happens if their life circumstances change? Do they have to leave the practice?
I have written elsewhere that in traditional koryu dojo in Japan, budoka consider their practice to be a part of their identity, but it is not all of their identity. Japanese people are at least as busy as Americans - they have jobs and family obligations like the rest of us. They come to practice when they can. I remember one dojo where I trained where students sometimes left their sarariman jobs to come to okeiko for a couple hours, and then went back to the office. So they were dedicated, but they also had priorities. And lives. Another story told to me by a budo colleague was of a gentleman who really wanted to take up a koryu budo practice, but had a hideously demanding job. The week after he retired (at 65) he came to the dojo, became a regular student, and even earned a menkyo from the teacher of the ryuha after much hard work. But his first priority was to support his family.
So is there some danger to all this? Probably not, unless you get swept up in it yourself. And certainly, there are teachers in Japan who are happy to indulge American students' fantasies and misinterpretations if it works for their bottom lines. To draw another parallel with Performing China, Yang writes about the production of Turandot in Beijing. The plot actually does have a little, tiny bit of basis in some Chinese legend/history, but of course the opera is all Puccini. The production at the Forbidden City cost upwards of $15 million, and drew rich and influential people from all over the planet. Yang notes, and I concur, that China managed to appropriate a piece of Italian opera and turn it to its own profit, turning Westerners' orientalism on its head, as it were. I have met Japanese budo teachers, for example, who have decided it is more beneficial for them if their students believe their style dates to hoary antiquity rather than the mid- to late-20th century. They may even have the scrolls to prove it. Of course, said scrolls might have been picked up at the Toji flea market in Kyoto, but since no one can read Japanese, how will they know?
I cringe, though, when I meet American martial artists who think that this mishmash of reality, history and fantasy are somehow more authentic than just showing up to the dojo for practice of good technique with a competent teacher. And I cringe even more when I am at a public demonstration and see their fantasies on display, as I did recently, when a kung fu group presented a history of Chinese martial arts complete with a soundtrack from Schwartzenegger's Conan, among other popular films. I mean, Conan is one of my favorite movies, but it's also incredibly silly. It's one thing when the practitioners practice goofy things. It's another when they ask an audience to believe it.
The book:
Yang, Chi-Ming
Performing China, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)