Karateville

I'm going to begin here by directing my few readers to a better and more widely-read internet writer than myself. This particular writer happens to have the same parents I have.

My brother recently wrote a wonderful piece on The Inclusive about video games. Specifically, he aired his beef (shared by many of us who grew up on the NES, Sega Genesis, and SNES) with the kind of social games on Facebook and the iPhone that he calls "Villes" (think Farmville, Cityville, etc.). The purpose of these games, says my brother, is not be fun or interesting, but to hook players on a progression of increasingly difficult and expensive rewards. The goal in developing these games, he says, is to get a few gullible people so addicted that they're willing to pay real money for benefits that exist only in the imaginary world of the game.

My brother compares these games to B.F. Skinner's operant conditioning chambers:

This is why these games are free, brightly colored, and cute: if they get enough people in the box, some of people will keep hitting the button. If there are time delays constricting how often the button can be pushed, some people will pay for the privilege of hitting the button sooner. Although this sounds like a Dire Metaphor, it is almost literally accurate: pay fifteen in-game-currency units (sold at ten for a real-life dollar) to get the Pig Pen now, rather than waiting to accrue that many units over time.

My brother, mind you, has a much bigger and much more important point to make than his distaste for a particular kind of game; I encourage you to read the piece for yourself. But his grievance against the "Villes" got me thinking (as many things seem to these days) about the way we, as students, practice the martial arts.

I train because I like to. Sure, in the back of my mind, I'm on a years-long hunt for an elusive treasure known as the Black Belt, but that destination wouldn't be worth anything to me if I wasn't enjoying the journey. The martial arts fascinate me; when I'm working my way through a new technique, the next rank is the last thing on my mind.

But if you've ever been to an independent regional taekwondo or karate tournament, you've likely seen a very different attitude from mine about rank. You've seen cadres of "masters" who seem intensely proud of all the ranks and awards prominently displayed on their doboks and gis. You've seen children as young as nine who have already blazed through dozens of ranks to earn their black belts and are eagerly working on the next degree.

My mind is boggled by this kind of thing. In my own discipline of aikido, many instructors are middle-aged men who have yet to move beyond their first dan. Most organizations have only six ranks between zero and black belt, and usually most of those ranks do not have corresponding belt colors. Testing at my club is done only once a year. Rank, in my experience of aikido, is a personal milestone and a tool for designating instructors, nothing more. The art is its own reward--ars gratia artis.

Now, I'm not suggesting that anyone who's not doing rank the aikido way is doing it wrong. If I thought that, I never would have attempted my foray into taekwondo. What bothers me is a tendency I see among some martial arts schools to sell the next rank (for which there will of course be extra fees), rather than an experience, as their primary product, and worse, a tendency among students to buy it.

The last time I went to a taekwondo tournament, I watched black belts compete who could not punch straight or kick above their waists. I watched a red belt compete in a wheelchair--a man who cannot kick is nearing his black belt in an art that is roughly 75% kicking. These peoples' ranks are not indicators of skill; they are rewards for investments of time and money.

There are those who say that awarding ranks so freely makes a mockery of the martial arts. Personally, I couldn't care less about mockery. I put on long, white underwear and play with wooden swords with other grown men three times a week; the truth is already as funny as any mockery that might be made of it. What I do care about is the perception, fueled by people like the aforementioned tournament-goers, that the martial artist's purpose is to accumulate ranks rather than to practice an art.

A martial arts experience shaped by this perception stops being about learning and enjoyment and becomes Karateville, an endless cycle of chasing the next little reward. This is, of course, good news for people trying to cash in on testing fees. It's bad news, though, for all of us who just like the martial arts because they're interesting and fun: we don't want to confine our training to the handful of things on the next test, and we don't want to train with people more concerned about colored pieces of cloth than well-executed technique or a good workout.

Twice before (here and here) I have brought up Rob Redmond, writer of the excellent karate blog 24 Fighting Chickens. Redmond's take on rank is both cynical and iconoclastic. He goes so far in one piece as to suggest that the Karateville game is the only reason to have more than a few broad ranks:

There are not twenty discernible levels of skill in karate. I submit to you that there are probably only four or five. You are giving out ranks to reward attendance, memorization, and good conduct. You are encouraging the payment of fees for tests, belts, and for continuing lessons, but your ranks you give out do not have any real meaning. No one could look at your yellow belts and purple belts and see with their eyes which was the higher rank without you telling them first.

So what's a martial artist to do? Abandon rank altogether? I'm not going to advocate that here, though I do think the question of whether or not we really need rank in the martial arts is an interesting one. For now, I think we can ask some simpler questions of ourselves.

Is my pursuit of rank helping me focus on my training or distracting me from it? How different am I really from a student one rank higher or lower than me? How much recognition do I really need for learning this new technique or form? Is there an obvious purpose behind all the ranks at my school?

Socrates tells us that the unexamined life is not worth living. It naturally follows, I think, that the unexamined art is not worth practicing. If we only notice what we are awarded without ever asking questions about what we're really learning, we may be stumbling over the city limits into Karateville.

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.

Coffee Machine Aikido

Do you remember the old vending machines that sold coffee, hot chocolate, and sometimes tea or soup, dispensing them out of a nozzle into a little paper cup for a few quarters? I do; there was one in the lobby in the science building in college (the machine has since been replaced by an entire Starbuck's--kids these days don't know how good they have it).

Dave Barry remembers them, too. In one of his columns, he recalls:

I myself developed the coffee habit in my early 20s, when, as a "cub" reporter for the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pa., I had to stay awake while writing phenomenally boring stories about municipal government. I got my coffee from a vending machine that also sold hot chocolate and chicken-noodle soup; all three liquids squirted out of a single tube, and they tasted pretty much the same.

I took a class this week from an aikido instructor who reminded me very much of one of those old machines.

I have been investigating the possibility of moving to another club for some time now, both for reasons I have discussed in print and for unrelated reasons I'm not going to put on the internet just yet. Only recently, I've started actually visiting other clubs.

The club I visited this week is home to several former members of my current club. One of them, a friend of mine, sent me an e-mail shortly after he left, inviting me to come take a look at his new club. I'm not sure how I feel about this kind of recruiting, but hey, I'm looking. So I showed up, worked out with an old friend, and got to see a different kind of aikido.

As it turned out, I think it was a little too different for me.

The instructor was a very nice, very friendly, very capable man with a background in many different martial arts. His expertise extended far beyond aikido into kung fu, boxing, muay Thai, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, among other things. He didn't wear a hakama.

His class felt strange to me. We trained with bo (six-foot-long staves not commonly used in aikido). We finished techniques with jujutsu-style armbars rather than what I know as aikido pins. We practiced gun disarms, some based on recognizable aikido techniques and some not. It was lots of fun, to be sure, but I had to look very hard for things I definitively recognized as aikido.

I asked the instructor afterward how accurately the class I'd just taken represented a typical night at his dojo. He admitted the gun disarms were a rarity, but said that otherwise what I'd just experienced was pretty typical of the classes he liked to teach. He told me that he liked to bring the perspective of other martial arts to aikido, to show that aikido can be a deadly (his word, not mine) martial art.

I'm going to abstain here from any argument about whether or not deadly is a word that ought to be used in reference to aikido. It's not really the subject at hand and I'd like to give the benefit of a doubt to a man whose experience and skill so obviously exceed my own.

What did concern me was the nagging feeling that I was getting aikido from one of the old coffee machines: so many flavors had become mixed together that I was having a hard time telling one taste from another. I couldn't help thinking that this instructor was trying so hard to bring all his martial arts experience into play that his aikido class had become an eclectic self-defense class instead.

There are probably those who don't see this as a bad thing, but I don't think I'm entirely comfortable with it. To be sure, aikido is a malleable martial art that can be fit into many molds. I don't dispute that, and I certainly don't dispute the value of crosstraining. But I decided when I began two years ago that aikido is an art form with its own value that transcends its material usefulness to me (ars gratia artis and all that); if I change aikido to suit my needs, then I'm afraid that decision was a lie.

I will almost certainly visit this club again. Even if I don't join, I'm sure I'll drop in from time to time just for the chance to work out with my old training buddies. In either case, it's unlikely I'll become a regular attendee of this particular instructor's classes.

Give me that old-time aikido; it's good enough for me.

Bullshit

From time to time, I enjoy catching an episode of Penn and Teller's cable television show Bullshit!. For those of you who don't know, Bullshit! involves the popular illusionist duo picking something they find dishonest, underhanded, or just plain wrong, and tearing it apart with all the wit and humor they can muster--which is a considerable amount. I don't always agree with the things they have to say (Penn and Teller are staunch atheists and libertarians), but I always enjoy hearing them say it.

Over the past few years, Bullshit! has taken on conspiracy theories, religious movements, pieces of legislation, political organizations, and New Age fads, just to name a few. Their commentary is caustic, irreverent, and usually heavily laced with profanity (as the name of the show might suggest).

It was with some trepidation that I recently sought out a particular episode that I'd read about on a martial arts message board. It turns out Penn and Teller had done a Bullshit! on the martial arts. I had to find it, of course, but the idea of Penn and Teller tearing into one of my favorite activities certainly made me nervous.

Would Penn and Teller tell me that my training is, well, bullshit? Would their show be ruined for me forever? Worse, would they challenge my belief in the validity and usefulness of my martial arts training? I almost couldn't bear to watch. But, of course, I did.

In their 30-minute attempt to burst the bubble of the martial arts mystique, Penn and Teller made the following allegations:

1. No matter how much martial arts training one has, running away from or surrendering to an attacker is much more likely to prevent harm to a victim than any martial art.
2. Most martial arts instructors have never been in a real fight.
3. There is a telling lack of stories in the news about robbers and attackers being thwarted with martial arts skills.
4. Martial artists' claims about healing and other powers of "chi" or "energy" are mostly nonsense.
5. The colored belt system that many martial arts programs hold so dear is a modern invention with very little connection to martial arts history.
6. Many things that are being taught in martial arts studios as "self-defense" would be considered criminal acts of aggression by a court of law.
7. Most martial arts training is more fear management than danger management, meaning that many martial arts students are being misled into a dangerous, false sense of security.
8. Injuries are far more likely to result from martial arts training itself than from living without self-defense skills.
9. Breaking boards is a parlor trick that has very little to do with self-defense.

There are definitely some in the martial arts community who would be deeply offended by some of these allegations. I myself have had an aikido instructor who likes to talk about throwing with "spiritual energy", and a taekwondo instructor who treats the colored belt like an ancient religious relic. For all that they might protest, though, I look back at this list and find nothing particularly offensive, or even surprising.

Why? Because, as I said a few weeks ago, I have no problem thinking of myself as an athlete and the martial arts as a sport. I don't expect the martial arts to make me an invincible warrior and I don't pretend I'm following any ancient spiritual tradition, so there is no bubble to burst. The truth, as I said back in February, is only a weapon that can be used against me so long as I cling to a lie.

But why cling to a lie when the truth has so much to offer? In two years of martial arts training, I've improved my body, my confidence, and my attitude, all without buying into any of the "bullshit" exposed by the list above. Unless Penn and Teller can tell me that the martial arts aren't making me a happier, healthier person, they can't touch me. And thankfully, I can go on laughing at them.

Name Change

A brief note about the name of the my blog: I have changed it in an effort to be a little less esoteric.

"Newbie Deshi" was a pun on the Japanese term uchi deshi. I thought myself rather clever when I first came up with it, but it has been nagging me for some time that the title of my blog was going to confuse more than amuse. Only those of us with a background in the Japanese martial arts know what an uchi deshi is.

The new title, a reference to the television series Kung Fu, I hope is a little more suitable for mass consumption.

Nothing else has changed, not even the layout of the page, so those few of you who have been reading regularly, carry on as usual.

'Sport' is a Four-Letter Word

There are many martial artists (and I used to be one of them) who take real offense at their arts being called sports. They believe they are practicing something more noble, more real, and more valuable than sport.

I don't know whether or not George Ledyard Sensei takes such offense, but he exemplified the kind of high-minded sentiment I'm talking about in a recent post to his blog George Ledyard's All Things Aikido. Here's an excerpt:

Aikido is a form of Budo. Budo is basically the use of the martial arts for personal transformation. Aikido as Budo is a "Michi" or Martial "WAY" (the "do" in Aiki-do). O-Sensei, the Founder, actually believed that through Aikido, the whole world could be brought into a state of harmony; he called our art "The Way of Peace". For him, Budo was a life and death matter. Given the right level of commitment one could truly become a better person, less fearful, stronger, braver, more compassionate. One could, in his or her own Mind and Body understand that everything in the universe is essentially connected. His creation of Aikido represents a radical transformation of how Budo was viewed historically. It is a unique art. It is not a "hobby", it is not a "sport", it is not a "workout", it is a Michi, a Way.

Before I go on, I would like to make aboundantly clear that I greatly respect and admire Ledyard Sensei and recommend his blog. I have never met Ledyard Sensei, but his online writing alone has been a tremendous influence on my fledgling foray into the martial arts. No small part of the credit for my decision that aikido is a real martial art worth my time and effort should be given to him. He is an icon of American aikido and a treasure of the martial arts world.

All that said, I, humble sixth kyu that I am, am about to disagree with him.

It's not that I doubt Ledyard Sensei's claim that aikido changes lives. I certianly believe it is changing mine. What bothers me is the hard dichotomy he is drawing between martial art and sport on the grounds of his art's life-changing potential.

He is not the first to do so. The world is full of martial artists claiming, "My martial art is not just a sport; it's a way of changing lives."

What I want to know is, whoever said that sports don't change lives?

There is no question that martial arts training can make us "less fearful, stronger, braver, more compassionate". We gain courage and confidence when the martial arts make us face our fears and insecurities. We become stronger as the martial arts hone our bodies and minds. We become more compassionate as we learn that others' pain, joy, failure, and success are the same as our own. The martial arts can teach us discipline and perseverance, and can be a tool for the cultivation of mindfulness (in the Buddhist sense of the word).

But as I see it, all these things can be said just as accurately of ice hockey.

The hockey player has ample opportunity to face his fear and insecurity, to hone his body and mind, to feel pain and joy and learn the pain and joy of others, to learn discipline and perseverence, and to develop mindfulness and awareness. I suspect many have achieved changed lives on the hockey rink.

I even once saw a television documentary about how ice hockey brought together families of different creeds in parts of Northern Ireland torn apart by sectarian conflict. Could it even be that through ice hockey "the whole world could be brought into a state of harmony"?

Alright, maybe I'm pushing it a bit.

We have all heard the martial arts called "a way of life". The more I train, the more I come to see martial art as an activity, something I do rather than something I am. The "way of life" perception, I think, stems from the observation that people can make real positive changes in their lives through martial arts training. But unless a lot of other things--like ice hockey--are also "ways of life", I'm not sure those changes qualify the martial arts for that lofty distinction. No doubt, for full-time professionals like Ledyard Sensei (or Sydney Crosby, in the case of hockey), it really does become a way of life, but the rest of us, I think, are best described as sportsmen, or even (gasp!) hobbyists.

To admit this doesn't mean conceding the point of changing lives. It means recognizing that the capacity to change lives is everywhere, not just in our chosen discipline. It means recognizing that there is nothing shameful or inauthentic about sport.

Those of us who train in pajamas-and-colored-belts martial arts studios these days are aware of a large section of the postmodern world that thinks we are engaging in childish playacting and nonsense. Until we stop insisting that we are better than than the rest of the world's athletes by virtue of our choice of activities, I'm afraid they might just be right.

P.S.

Normally I would have ended there, but I'd like to add a little extra in reference to Ledyard Sensei, with whose words I have just taken liberty. As with most of my posts, this one will be copied onto AikiWeb, which means there is a very real chance that Ledyard Sensei himself will see it. I hope not to offend him.

To his credit, Ledyard Sensei prefaces the passage I quoted above with these words: "I have decided to explain what I believe about Aikido, and what I see as the mission of [my aikido club]. Folks can decide what these things mean to them, personally." In so saying, Ledyard Sensei opens up his remarks to interpretation and separates himself from most of the people this post is intended to critique, so I beg his pardon. His words, in this case, were just too perfect to pass up.

Domo arigato gozaimashita, Sensei.

Aikido for Me

Do nothing which is of no use.
- Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings

An injury has kept me out of aikido for the better part of the last three months. My recent return to the mat came with a boxing wrap on my left wrist and no small amount of trepidation about that wrist's future. I am a guitar player, after all.

In the meantime, as I feared, my source of free taekwondo has dried up, at least for a while. Aikido and I are left alone with each other, and I confess to some discomfort with that idea that has kept me anxiously thoughtful during my hiatus.

I have written extensively (here, here, here, and here) on the question of whether or not aikido is--or can be--everything I want it to be in my life without something else on the side. It's a question I've struggled with during my absence from the dojo, and one I wanted answered beyond all doubt before I returned and exposed my wrist to any possibility of re-injury.

What I concluded after three months of deliberation is that I come to the dojo looking for three things: (1) a martial art, (2) exercise, and (3) a tool for discovering and changing myself.

I won't stress much over the third item on the list, since I think any activity that serves as an object for mindfulness and perseverance can become the kind of tool mentioned therein. But there is some aikido, I think, that doesn't fill those first two criteria.

There is a breed of aikido that functions more like yoga or tai chi: a meditative dance that builds flexibility and supposedly develops the mind and spirit. It is martial in origin, but embraces little or no element of danger. It teaches control of the body, but does not push the body to its limits. Shoji Nishio, one of aikido's great masters, speaks of this kind of aikido in his book Yurusu Budo when he says, "In many settings these days, aikido is becoming little more than a kind of health exercise pursued by the elderly, and women and children."

My impression is that many people embrace this kind of aikido, and I (unlike Nishio Sensei) have neither the wish nor the authority to question them. But for my part, I am not particularly interested in aikido of this sort. I joined the club looking for a martial art. And while this kind of aikido might well be art, I don't think it's martial. What's more, it isn't much of a workout.

My humble sixth-kyu assessment is that there are a couple people (a minority of the large cadre of instructors) who sometimes teach this kind of aikido at the dojo. I like them, I respect them, I don't want to question them, and I certainly have no business telling them what or how to teach. I am, as the name of this blog makes clear, a newbie, and my instructors (and most of my training partners) have every right to tell me to stfu n00b. I would be arrogant indeed after a year-and-a-half of aikido to question or criticize the aikido of an instructor. 

But that doesn't mean I want to buy what every aikido instructor is selling.

What I decided during my time off was that, if I am to continue as an aikidoka, if I am going to build an aikido that meets my needs, I need to start being conscious of my goals in aikido and what I am doing in pursuit of those goals. That means, I think, becoming a little more picky about whose classes I attend. Not because I think I know aikido better than my instructors (or anyone else, for that matter), but because I know what I am looking for and I need to start going where I find it.

If this seems a little arrogant to some, I can endure their criticism. My time and my wrist deserve nothing less.