Aikido in the Park

The Young Grasshopper (in the hat and the blue shirt)
works out with a jo in the park.

Last September, a group of aikidoists from all over the Milwaukee area got together in the park for an afternoon of informal weapons training. It was great fun, and we all lamented that no one had come up with it earlier in the year, before the Wisconsin weather began to drop hints of the coming winter. As it was, we had to be satisfied with one such event last year.

This year, I took it upon myself to make sure there were more of these. I had a brand new list of aikido Facebook friends I'd met at recent seminars, and I started talking to all of them last month about setting up three or four of these events for the coming summer. We had the first of them the first weekend in June. What follows is a list of observations from the event; I don't have a story here that comes to a single point.

Training outdoors requires greater attention to footwork. Every step out in the grass must be a real, deliberate step. Even kata I knew very well were fumbling messes when I wasn't paying attention to my feet. Every little foot movement, even the move colloquially known as a "slide", demanded that my foot be deliberately and entirely lifted off the ground. It was quite different from the dojo, where an aikidoist can get away with "skating"on the mat (some clubs even prefer it).

Weapons training levels the playing field. Get a group of people from a bunch of different aikido clubs together and the hardest thing to get them to do as a group will be weapons work. The Saito, Tohei, and Saotome lineages (for example) all teach essentially the same kotegaeshi but have vastly different weapons curricula. What this means at a gathering like the one in the park is that everything, no matter how basic, must be taught to the group as if to brand-new beginners, even if the group includes some black belts who have been training for decades.

I'm getting better, but I'm still not good enough. Aikido's movements are largely based on kenjutsu, which means, in theory, that weapons training ought to be using mostly the same muscles as taijutsu (unarmed training). This in turn means that if I'm doing it right, my arms, shoulders, and back shouldn't be hurting too much afterward. At the end of two hours with the jo and then the bokken, my abs were sore rather than my arms or my back. I took this for a good sign: finally, I supposed, I had managed to use weapons from my center rather than my arms and back. When I woke up the next morning, though, my previously injured wrist and shoulder were very angry with me.

Outdoor training means being stared at. We have managed to find a pretty secluded place for our gatherings, but a public park is still a public park. More than once, a motorist who was just coming by to park or turn around slowed way down to watch the spectacle of more than a dozen grown men and women apparently playing with sticks and wooden swords. One of them had her window rolled down and went by so slowly that my training partner and I could read her lips as she wondered aloud, "What the fuck?"

All in all, aikido in the park is an interesting and educational experience, and there are much worse reasons to get a bunch of friends together. There's another one coming up late in July. Come join us if you're in the Milwaukee area.

Observations From a Seminar

The YGH prepares for a tachi-dori (sword defense) technique at the seminar.

I went to my first real aikido seminar this past weekend, a weapons intensive seminar led by Mark Uttech (4th dan, head instructor at Aikido of Marshall). It was in equal measures fun, educational, taxing, and terrifying.

The seminar lasted two days. Each day consisted of a three-hour training session, a two-hour lunch break, and then what was supposed to be another two-hour training session (it was closer to two-and-a-half hours both days). Most of Uttech Sensei's teaching was aimed specifically at weapons techniques, though he did mix in some tachi-, jo-, and tanto-dori (unarmed defense against weapons) and finished the seminar with some pure taijutsu (unarmed) techniques.

I don't think I could encapsulate the whole experience in a blog entry that comes to a single point (as my entries usually do). Instead, what follows is a list of things I learned and observed during the seminar.

Talk is Cheap

Uttech Sensei's teaching is rarely more verbal than it has to be. Many of the times he showed exercises or kata, the only words we got from him at all were, "You try it."

I was brought up in a very verbal aikido club, a place where everything was extensively explained. This suited me nicely because I am a very verbal person myself; I love words. When I am alone I talk to myself out loud because I start to miss words. This blog itself is little more than a way for me to get my words fix.

But not only did I do just fine without all the extra words, I see too in hindsight that I didn't even notice they were missing. Uttech Sensei's aikido (and mine, for that matter, as long as I was under his tutelage) didn't need the extra words. Nothing seemed to have been left unsaid.

When next I train, I'm going to see what happens if I try to talk less.

I'm Out of Shape

My exercise regimen has been spotty at the best of times since my daughter was born, and I felt it at the seminar. By the end of the first day, every part of my body ached. I spent the last hour-and-a-half of the second day silently pleading for the whole thing to be over because my body had just given up.

To be sure, ten hours of aikido in two days is rough on anyone, but by the end of the seminar my ukemi was so sloppy it was getting dangerous. At the very least, I need to get into a regular routine of cardio and stretching. Aikido may be a relatively low-impact, non-competitive martial art, but it can still beat the hell out of you if you're not in shape for it.

Weapons Make for Good Zanshin

I have written about zanshin before; it's something I usually have difficulty with. Cultivating the attitude of martial awareness that is essential to good aikido isn't always easy in the course of what is essentially a recreational activity.

But weapons seem to change that. Much as my mind would like to stray to my wife, my daughter, music, the book I'm reading, the video game I'm currently working my way through, or a thousand other things, there is no ignoring a sword in my face. It helped keep me focused and ready.

This, I think, is one of a few very good reasons to keep weapons training in aikido.

My Bokken Might Be Too Heavy

In general, I like a bokken to have some weight to it. If it's too light, I have a tendency to whip it around with my right arm and my technique just goes to hell. But on the other hand, spend a weekend training with a very heavy bokken and your muscles will let you know about it.

What I'm using right now is E-Bogu's Top Quality White Oak Aikido Bokken, a thick, heavy Iwama-style sword. At the time I got it, it was the only bokken E-Bogu packaged in an aikido set (bokken, jo, and weapons bag); that appears to have changed since then. It's a fine weapon, especially for the price, and I'd still recommend it to anyone who doesn't want to splurge on high-end hickory stuff, but it did get heavy after a while.

I got the opportunity to use a few other students' swords, and found that there are some that have enough weight to give me the feedback I want but aren't quite so thick and heavy. Of, course, they were all extremely expensive-looking weapons, and I probably won't be in the market for a new bokken for years. But someday I will go looking, and now I have a better idea of what I'll be looking for.

There are No Strangers at a Seminar

There were a few people I knew at the seminar: one training partner from my current club and a couple current and former members of my old club. The rest were strangers, but I quickly discovered that the seminar atmosphere breeds familiarity at a very accelerated rate. This is true on multiple levels.

By the middle of the second day, I had a good feel for everyone's style and level of experience. I knew whom to seek out as a training partner if I needed someone who really knew how to do a good tsuki with a jo. I knew who would take it easy on me and I knew who would give me everything they had. I knew who would help me through something complicated and I knew who would need my help (at this stage of my aikido development, there are far more of the former than the latter). In two short days, I had a feel for everyone's aikido, as if I'd been training with them for months.

Similarly, at lunch and in the locker room, I talked to many of these total strangers as if they were old friends, and it didn't feel weird at all. Much of the conversation was about aikido, to be sure, but we also talked about food, about our kids, about movies, about anything and everything. One guy let me use his phone and another his charger when my phone went dead.

"Nice to meet you," is something we all say out of courtesy, but never before have I said it to so many people and really meant it. It doesn't seem strange at all to call these people I've just met my friends. I guess seminars just do that to people. This one did, at least.

One Final Note

This is in reference to my last post, in which I told the story of an instructor from my old club insisting on a strictly enforced attitude of seriousness and solemnity when training with weapons. I'm happy to say Uttech Sensei had no such ideas. He is a man who is always smiling, occasionally vulgar, and capable of laughing uproariously without warning. His love of his art and respect for his teachers run deep, but that doesn't stop him from bringing a feeling of childlike joy to everything he does in the dojo.

It's a good thing, too: holding a perpetual, silent frown in reverence to weapon-shaped pieces of wood for two days would have been insufferable.

The Harmlessness of Humor

Nor think a joke, Crape, a disgrace,
Or to my person, or my place;
The wisest of the sons of men
Have deign'd to use them now and then.
- Charles Churchill, The Ghost

I visited my old aikido club a couple weeks ago for their annual Kagami Biraki new year celebration. It has become a tradition of sorts that I and my guitar serve as entertainment during the dinner portion of the festivities. The preceding aikido class was led by two guest instructors followed by the club's own most senior instructor, a seventy-something man who fits nicely into the C.S. Lewis "lovable old ass" category.

Understand, before I go on, that I speak of the man who first introduced me to aikido; though I am about to disagree with him, I hold him in the highest regard.

In the final segment of the class, he showed us some tanto-dori (knife defense) techniques. Before setting us loose to practice, he made a point of saying, "I don't want to see anyone smiling or laughing--this is serious. When there's a weapon involved, you don't get second chances." He told us too that the worst thing he ever heard in the dojo was his own instructor (the man who founded the club and first brought aikido to Wisconsin) saying, "You got cut!"

I kept silent, of course, but I take issue with this kind of posturing in the dojo.

The martial arts instructor's desperate exhortation, "Don't laugh; this is a matter of life and death," is wrong on two counts. First, it probably isn't a matter of life and death, and second, even if it were there would be no shame in laughing about it.

If I've said it once, I've said it a million times: aikido is not realistic combat training. What I do in the dojo is practice antiquated and sometimes unnecessarily complicated techniques in stylized ways. In doing so, I become a fitter, happier, more centered, and perhaps a little tougher person. Now, that's nothing to sneeze at, but it's nothing to treat like brain surgery, either. No one is going to live or die because I have the proper palm-up hand position going into an udekiminage, and that proper positioning will be achieved or not independently of whether or not I am smiling at the time.

What's more, I'm not sure I buy into the idea that anything is too important to be undertaken in good humor. I suspect even the doctors performing the aforementioned brain surgery occasionally tell jokes.

I recently discovered on YouTube a wonderfully entertaining and enlightening lecture given by John Cleese (of Monty Python fame) on the subject of creativity, in which he underscores the futility of talking at length about creativity by repeatedly lapsing into sequences of "light bulb" jokes (How many _____ does it take to change a light bulb?).

One of the things Cleese finds most stifling to creativity is forced solemnity. He draws a clear distinction between seriousness and solemnity, asserts that seriousness does not demand solemnity, and then goes so far as to question the usefulness of solemnity at all (mind you, this is a man who used the words, "Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard," while giving the eulogy for his best friend).

I'm not sure I'd go quite so far as Cleese, but I'll go on the record saying that very, very few things are too serious to be laughed at. The Holocaust, maybe. Aikido, though--even aikido done with knife-shaped pieces of wood--isn't on the list.

Now, I'm not advocating goofing around when we should be training. Our time in the dojo is limited, and we ought to make the most of it. But anyone who's worked in a high-stress job with deadlines to meet knows that a little humor doesn't slow one down: in fact, sometimes it's the only thing that keeps one steady enough to meet those deadlines. Even if our tanto-dori were real preparation for a knife fight (which it probably isn't), there would be no reason to think smiles and even the occasional laugh would make us any worse at it.

As a case in point, ask any military veteran about the jokes he and his buddies used to play on each other. You'll discover that the men and women who really are training to put themselves in harm's way are often the biggest jokers of all.

We've established, then, that strict solemnity makes us neither safer nor more skillful, at least so long as we aren't frivolously wasting time. Why, then, do so many martial arts instructors expect their students to act like Trappist monks at Mass?

I think Cleese comes close to an answer for this question in the above lecture when he says, "The self-important always know at some level of their consciousness that their egotism is going to be punctured by humor."

Now, there are a few people in the martial arts who really are self-important. These are people I've complained about before (here, for example): people who need the ego-stroking that comes with being looked up to, being given ranks and awards, and being addressed with exotic-sounding titles, or people whose income depends on projecting a fiction-inspired image of themselves as warrior priests. These people need the martial arts to be serious business so that they can go on being important.

But my old sensei, cantankerous though he can be, is not so pompous or selfish as to demand solemnity for his own sake. What he fears will be "punctured by humor" in this case, I think, is not his own ego, but the importance of the legacy left to him by the cherished instructor who was also his best friend. His reasons, to be sure, are much more noble than those of the self-important show ponies I discuss above, but I still think he's wrong.

Aikido, in and of itself, just isn't that important. My family is important. My home is important. My faith (confused as it is) is important. These things are all considerably more important to my life than aikido, and even they aren't too important to laugh about.

With all that in mind, I, humble fifth-kyu that I am, say laugh on.

How many aikidoka does it take to change a light bulb? Two, unless light bulbs learn how to grab our wrists.

Waist Deep and Pushing On

The Sergeant said, "Sir, are you sure
This is the best way back to the base?"
"Sergeant, go on! I forded this river
'Bout a mile above this place.
It'll be a little soggy but just keep slogging.
We'll soon be on dry ground."
We were waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.
- Pete Seeger, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy"

I may not know much about the martial arts, but I do know a little something about teaching.

In order to teach material, a teacher must first know the material. He must be able to lead students through it, answer questions about it, and find a way to make it relevant to different students with different points of view. A teacher who doesn't know his material simply can't teach.

There is something worse, though, than a teacher who doesn't know his material: a teacher who doesn't know his material and yet insists on moving forward as if he does. These are the teachers students alternatively laugh and grumble about, and peers whisper about behind their backs. These teachers don't just make fools of themselves, they drag their students down with them.

We've all had these teachers at one time or another, and I've always wondered at their motivations. Can the prospect of owning our ignorance really be so daunting that we're willing to humiliate ourselves and inconvenience others instead? In my own experience as an educator, I've found it's much easier and much less painful for everyone (including myself) if I just say, "I guess I need to do a little more work on this before we can move on. Let's do something else for now."

Yesterday at the dojo, the club's most junior instructor tried to lead us in some exercises with the bokken (wooden sword). This began with partners matching each other in an alternating sequence of blocks and strikes. For the next step, our instructor brought up the other yudansha (black belt) present to be his partner in demonstration.

The first exercise, said our instructor, was preparation for the second, in which the sequence was offset so that one partner was striking while the other was blocking. In verbal form, this idea made plenty of sense, but it became clear as he attempted to demonstrate that it simply didn't work. Try as he might, our instructor just couldn't make this particular block work for this particular strike, at least not in a way that allowed the sequence to continue.

His demonstration partner, an aikidoka of the same rank but with longer and broader experience in the art, did his best to help out, trying out little tweaks to see if he could make the sequence work. He couldn't. Our instructor was missing something, something important enough that the entire sequence ground to a halt without it. It quickly became obvious to all of us--except, apparently, our instructor--that this wasn't going anywhere.

For several minutes we sat, watching our instructor try to figure out this exercise so that he could teach it to us. Most of us got tired of holding the seiza position after the first minute or two and shifted to sitting cross-legged as we waited, bored and increasingly frustrated. We began to cast sidelong glances at each other, wondering when he would give up and move on to something else so that we could get back to training. He pressed on, though, trying to work it out with his polite but increasingly exasperated partner.

After every conceivable option had been exhausted, our instructor finally stopped. There was a collective sigh of relief as we all anticipated moving on to something more pertinent, perhaps the kumitachi (paired sword kata) that would be in our upcoming tests. Instead, the instructor turned to us, smiling, and said, "Let's try it. See if you can figure it out together."

I was dumbfounded. There were no words for it.

My training partner and I would find the words a few moments into the most confused and clueless training session in either of our martial arts lives. They were quiet words, grumbled to each other under our breaths. I won't repeat them here.

I don't say this very often about training, because I think almost everything we do in the dojo serves a purpose, but it was  a complete waste of our time. We wasted time watching our instructor try to figure something out for himself rather than teaching, and then we wasted more time trying to practice something we hadn't been taught.

This is the first time in this blog I have made so bold as to openly criticize an instructor. I want to make clear, though, that it is not his forgetfulness I am criticizing. There is little shame in ignorance in and of itself. The shame comes when we, in our pride, cling to our ignorance and try (always futilely) to row upriver against the current of reality.

That's why we train. Hard, honest training is the best cure I know of for ego and ignorance. If you can't admit you're out of shape, if you think you're better than you are, if you're in denial of an injury, hard training is a surefire cure. Every martial artist knows what I'm talking about; they all can remember a moment when their pride and delusions were dashed (perhaps painfully) by training.

For me, it was when a common nikkyo lock sprained my wrist. Until then, I'd thought I was ready to play with the black belts. Delusion cured.

What I did take away from yesterday's class is that, years from now, when my time comes to teach, I don't want to be the one clinging to my ignorance, the big fool pushing on as the water rises. And that means more training. The more pride and delusion I can get beaten out of me before students are depending on me, the better.

See you on the mat.

Boys With Toys

Though a beginner, I do consider myself a serious martial artist. I strive at all times to approach the martial arts as a serious pursuit, and have a tendency to look down on those who treat them like childhood playacting. Aikido, with its (relatively) safe kata-style training, its ritualistic kneeling and bowing, and its traditional weapons and garb, is particularly susceptible to the playground mindset, and attracts no small number of fantasy enthusiasts looking to get their geek on.

I like to think that I'm above all that, but the truth is that I'm a fantasy enthusiast myself. I spent my youth absorbed in novels, role-playing games, and video games full of romanticized medievalism. Every time I step onto the mat, there is a great temptation to wrap myself in childish fancy. Usually, it's a temptation I can resist, but there is one thing that still always brings out the nerd in me: the bokken (wooden sword).

Throughout my formative years, I rolled dice and pressed buttons to pretend I was swinging a sword. So the first time I took a bokken off the rack, bowed, and took up a kamae (stance), I was in nerd heaven. Repetitive suburi exercises became samurai training out of  a bad Eighties movie. Kumitachi (paired sword kata) was particularly geektastic, creating the feeling of being in a samurai duel.

I'm slowly getting the nerd moments under control, but the thrill of actually doing something I'd previously given up to the realm of fantasy never really goes away. And I can't help thinking that it should.

A serious martial artist, it seems to me, ought to be able to puruse the martial arts for what they are, not what he can pretend they are. If all I'm doing in the dojo is getting my fantasy fix, then I'm not a martial artist at all.

Black Belt columnist Keith Vargo expresses similar sentiments in a 2002 article called "Star Wars Geeks" (you can read it in its original context here, but I found it in Vargo's 2009 book Philosophy of Fighting: Motivations and Morals of the Modern Warrior). He warns that if we forget the practical elements of our arts in favor of fanciful play, we are danger of becoming "costumed buffoons like those rabid Star Wars fans, aping an epic story instead of creating one for real with our lives".

I'm not sure I want my life to be an epic story, but I am sure that I want more from my martial arts training than regular opportunities to be a "costumed buffoon". Still, I do put on the costume, I do swing the sword, and I do get a thrill from it that has nothing to do with real martial art.

Can I do both? Can I be an honest martial artist and a giddy fantasy nerd at the same time? I hope so, because the giddy fantasy nerd dies hard.