Japanton – Chronicles of Anton in Japan!

Running a martial arts class can be difficult.  It becomes very much more difficult when I don’t see effort put into training.

The skills that we are trying to teach can be frustrating from time to time.  I have had my share of failures in training.  We however are training an art of perseverance and this includes our training itself.  You must be able to put aside your doubts and train.

When you doubt your skills train.  When you lack confidence train.  When you feel uneasy train.  The skills that you can attain through training, no one can take away from you.

When I see you take control of your training it encourages me to help you progress that much more.

Your life is on the line, practise well.

I am often asked what to study at home.  When this question is posed, I often stick to the safe stand-by’s san shin, the koshi sanpo and ukemi.  These are good things to practise, but I have some advice which has helped my practise over the past year.

As I have discussed before in writing and conversations, the kata of the Bujinkan are difficult to train on your own.  The majority of the kata rely on facing an opponent.  You receive an attack respond to the attack and end up folding your opponent into a pretzel to finish them.  How can you possibly practise that by yourself?  The answer is visualization.

Using your visualization, you can create an opponent based on your experience.  With this opponent in mind it becomes possible to train your technique effectively even at home.  I challenge you to give it a try, you will be pleased with the results.

Your life is on the line, practise well.

I was having a discussion with a good friend of mine on the various wings of the Bujinkan.  Things that were mentioned were; the spiritual wing, the publicity wing, the translation wing and the badly undermanned fighting wing.

That’s why I decided that I want my students and myself to help bolster up the fighting arm of the Bujinkan.

There are a lot of different things people try to attain through the martial arts.  I have decided that though I can not speak for others, more than anything I wanted to become strong.  My goal was and is to become a stronger fighter than anyone.

I do not profess to be anywhere close to this goal, but I have a lifetime to chase my objective.  I hope that those whom are chasing different goals still have something they can gain from training with me.  I will just want to be clear about why I train.

This same friend gave me a challenge of his own.  It has created a second goal for me to pursue.  I am trying to create a life worth protecting.  I will discuss this in a later post.

Your life is on the line, practise well.

In the martial arts there are few things as underrated as visualization.  I am not referring to crossing your legs into a full lotus whine saying ohm, though that in itself can be a good way to practise the concept.

This is a tool which athletes use, they set a clear goal, get a clear picture in their mind of accomplishing that goal then proceed with the physical action.

Recently we have been working on our tsuki (thrust, often refereed to as a punch), following the concept of visualization, you would go through some steps.  Let us assume you are practising with a heavy bag.

1.  I articulate a goal.  “I will move through kamae and send the heavy bag swinging while keeping my body relaxed so that I can throw a second attack if necessary.”

2.  Create a mental image of yourself accomplishing the goal.  “Take a moment ot see the tsuki being done and the desired result being accomplished.”

3.  Do the bloody technique.  “nuff said”

This is something which you should be doing with every technique while training.  It will make your home study easier, in some cases it is near impossible to effectively train Bujinkan technique without visualization.  I will get more into this when I write about self training.

I have been asked recently to explain the kata of the Bujinkan.  Not to explain how to do each kata, but rather how they are to be studied.  I will try to give a brief contrast between Bujinkan Kata and Karate Kata/Chinese Kung Fu forms.

In the Bujinkan arts the form generally consists of few moves.  The most involved kata that I have seen to date are around 12 moves at most.  In san shin you have as many as 4 distinct moves and as few as 2.

When I compare this to my experience in Karate and Kung Fu, the forms are generally much longer with many parts.  When I was learning the forms, I was taught that each sequence, the series of moves before a direction change is another opponent.  If this is true; which I have no reason to doubt, one of those sequences is the equivalent of a Bujinkan Kata.

Kata in the Bujinkan are treated like bujkai in karate.  Bunkai is when you take a portion of a kata and work it against a live opponent.  This allows you to get a feel for the technique and its variations.

The very nature of Bujinkan kata create an issue when it comes to self study.  It is difficult to practise a kata which relies on feedback of an opponent by yourself.  There is a method to accomplish this.  I will discuss visualization in the near future.

I hope this clarifies the subject of kata in the Bujinkan if even a little.  Your life is on the line, practise well.

As those who train with me know, I have over the course of my short time in the martial arts tried many different styles.  Karate, Judo, Aikido, Jujitsu and Chen style tai chi to name a few.  There are even more that I have seen and not had a chance to try.  Unfortunately I have abandoned the other arts.

The Bujinkan consist of 9 schools and hundreds of of kata with ten’s of thousands of variations.  There is enough information to spend 9 lifetimes studying.  There is a depth of feeling and skill which I have yet to see reproduced in any other martial art, by any other martial artist besides Hatsumi Sensei.  There is a breadth of knowledge which has literally saved the life of students and myself.

When my life was on the line, it was saved by this Budo, as long as I have permission I will dedicate my martial arts training to the art of Hatsumi Sensei and his standard bearers.

Your life is on the line, practise well.

We have restarted our curriculum cycle.  As I have mentioned before we are going from 4th kyu to shodan.  This will be new to a lot of the students as it will be new to me teaching the material.  For the longest time I have been going over the lower level kyus (higher number kyus) to get the basic movements ingrained in (y)our bodies.  Now it is time to get the higher level concepts integrated in your movement.

Many of the techniques which you will study over the next few months are going to be techniques you have seen before, I will just spend a lot more time on the details of how these techniques work so that you can become creative with their application.

I will warn you in advance, in the Bujinkan Shodan is not a big deal.  In Japan as a whole shodan is not a big deal.  It literally means lower rank.  It is more of an indication of dedication rather than proficiency.  As soon as you forget that conversations like “That person does not deserve that rank” or “We have a more stringent grading than everyone else” come up.  This is not the correct approach.  As soon as you get the idea that because you are associated with a certain way of doing things gives you a sense of pride, you have lost the point.  The rank doesn’t matter as long as you can survive.

If you are in a fight and have a shodan under a stringent curriculum but still lose it means nothing.  What is important is that you learn the feeling that Hatsumi sensei is trying to convey.  Once you have that feeling everything else will fall into place.

Your life is on the line, train well.

I received a question a while back on three timings as it pertains to kicks.  Well in short it doesn’t easily.

I could very well get into a long winded explanation on the nature of closing the distance with kicks.  But I believe explaing kicking in a different way would be of more benefit.  We should instead look at your kicking range based on which leg you are using.

If you could please imagine yourself in a ichimonji of the gyokko ryu variety (quick pop quiz for my students) and think about throwing a kick.  I am guessing 99.9 % of you imagined the kick of the rear leg.  Well there you have it, you have established one distance.  Keep in mind though you can also throw a kick with the lead leg.

The lead leg is a bit more tricky because if you don’t close the distance you are limited to hitting something/someone whom is already in your range.  The other option is you are hitting a target which is moving into your space.

Kicks are something that I feel we (as a club) are not very skilled at.  There fortunately is an easy remedy for that.  Training our kicks.  Although the theme for the next couple months is back to curriculum (4th kyu through shodan) I will make sure to practise kicks every class.  Please help me remember because this is something which is very useful when dealing with an opponent whom overpowers you by a fair amount (ask me in class).

Your life is on the line, train well.

As Budo-ka we have a responsibility to those around us.  We hold ourselves (or should) and are held to a higher standard because of our training.  In our art this goes beyond punches and kicks.  In budo we study the relationship between ourselves and others.  At the start that is our opponent, and we move out from there.  I would like to take a bit of time to recognize Jon and the work he did in raising money for a Cancer walk/run that was held yesterday.  It is actions like these which make an impact on those around us.  Acts of selflessness benefit our global community and that is the kind of attitude that I feel Hatsumi Sensei is trying to generate between all of us who train in his art.

Your life is on the line, train well.

In our budo, there is more than just the physical aspect of technique.  I am going to spend a little time talking about the mental aspect of our techniques.

Budo is a very unique activity which I feel must be associated with a intellectual realization.  Like music, art or mathematics; you can have the same groundwork with different results.  Through an exploration you will come to a moment where something will make sense and the task will become so easy you will wonder how you were having trouble with it before.

Two budo-ka of equal physical ability will not necessarily be even in skill.  This becomes apparent when you are dealing with multiple opponents.

With multiple opponents, you can not become attached to the techniques and skills which you have learnt in the past.  Sometimes you need to abandon your techniques half way.  Sometimes you have to take the initiative.  When you are at a disadvantage is when your skills are really shown.  You must be an artist, creative with your tools.  You need to know what to put in and even more importantly what to leave out.

This is a bit of a scatter brained Hatsumi-esque post but if you want more information on what I am getting at ask me.

Your life is on the line, train well.