Inflexibility

My colleague, the Budo Bum, once said that it is easy (and, I would say, maybe even expected) to adapt a modern martial art (judo, karate, kendo) to yourself as you are, but that when dealing with old-style (koryu) arts, the opposite was true - the practitioner had to adapt him/herself to the art instead. From this, it would seem the issue of inflexibility would apply to the koryu arts, but that is actually not the case. In fact, the opposite is true.

Several weeks ago, I hosted a joint practice that included an old sempai of mine and some of his students. The idea was for me to show some of what we practiced by leading "miniworkshops" of about an hour or so, culminating in about an hour of tameshigiri practice (after which, it was party time). The main practice of this other group is karate, one of the modern martial arts that my colleague was generally referring to in the above paragraph. For the first two hours, everyone, to their credit and good manners, did their best to make their way through the jodo form I offered, as well as several sword forms that followed (they did better at the iai portion than the jodo, a point that did not at all surprise me. I have written here and elsewhere how frustrating it can be to control a plain, wooden stick). My sempai, at 71 years old, is still strong and well-coordinated. With allowances for the difficulty of maneuvering a featureless stick, he did just fine with the workshops.

The very interesting part of the day was the tameshigiri (practice cutting), because this was where the proverbial sheep were separated. None of them, with the exception of their teacher, had ever tried cutting before. This surprised me a little bit, but the plain fact is that, as karateka, even though they owned a variety of gunto (Japanese swords made for use by the military in WWII) and Chinese-made "sharpies", their main practice is not in sword arts. As I worked with them, one-by-one, leading them through the basics of how to cut a target, I found there were two kinds of people in the group - those who listened and followed directions, and those who pretended to listen and then did whatever the hell they wanted. Following good practice, I made everyone stand well out of the way of the target-cutting, and was doubly glad I did so, given that about half of the guest students variously wailed on the targets, ignoring advice on safe footwork and proper cutting techniques as they did so. I tried to correct them, but it was useless. Since they were using their own equipment, I decided not to interfere, and let them do whatever they wanted (since I was powerless to do anything about it anyway).

But it did leave me thinking afterward (and I am still thinking, so this may not be my last word on this subject). All of them (with the exception of some sort of "assistant instructor," who thought he was much better than he actually was, in all aspects of all things that we did) were fairly nice guys, and on good behavior, but for the half that were "wailers," they reverted back to what they knew best - apply power to the punch - even if the "punch" was being delivered by means of a sword.

I know many, many budoka who do more than one art form, both traditional forms and other modern ones. One does Daito (traditional) and iai; one does judo (modern), jodo and iai; one does kendo (modern) and iai; one does aikido (modern) jodo and iai, etc. etc. My colleagues in Japan also study multiple art forms, modern and traditional. The difference between them and the wailing guest students was that they were adapting themselves to their traditional art forms, not trying to bend those art forms to themselves.

As I said, I am still thinking over the implications of this experience. It's not that people who do modern art forms can't do koryu - I see that all the time. It's not even that karateka are particularly stubborn. I simply find it worth thinking about that the presumably "rigid," traditional forms of budo seem to inspire the most flexibility in their practitioners.

More to come, no doubt...