We're the Problem

Who's the more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?
- Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars

Apparently this happened a couple years ago, but I was only alerted to it recently by this thread on Martial Arts Planet. Famous (or infamous) "ninjutsu masters" Ashida Kim and Frank Dux are now inductees into the United States Martial Arts Hall of Fame. I don't know how legitimate or prestigious the United States Martial Arts Hall of Fame is, so I don't know if this is a great honor or just an excuse to throw a party. I do know, however, that any "hall of fame" that includes Kim and Dux is inviting some pretty big questions about its selection process.

I am, as I keep saying, only a beginner myself, so I can't make any criticism of these two men solely on my own meager authority. But the good folks at bullshido.org have taken Kim and Dux apart quite handily: here and here, respectively. At the very least, these two have extremely questionable credentials and are propagating a movies-and-comic-books perception of the martial arts. Worse, the information presented by Bullshido makes a strong case for outright lies and fraud.

And yet, both these men are receiving honors like induction into the United States Martial Arts Hall of Fame. Both are successful instructors. Kim has made a living for decades writing ninjutsu books. Dux has even been the subject of a major motion picture starring Jean-Claude Van Damme.

If the evidence against these two is so strong and so available, how have they become so successful? Why have people been so willing to give their money and their respect to two men who can be easily discredited with a simple internet search? Back in the Eighties when they were first cashing in on the ninja craze, perhaps a lack of information might have been blamed, but we've had Google for more than a decade now. And even without it, shouldn't reasonable adults be skeptical of claims to have trained under secret masters or won secret tournaments that no one else has ever heard of?

Before I go too far, let me make clear that the purpose of this piece is not to discredit Ashida Kim or Frank Dux. If a few people, after reading this piece, are inspired to learn the truth about these two for themselves, so much the better. But Kim, Dux, and many others like them are just symptoms, not the disease. Here, they only serve as a starting point for a discussion of something much bigger than them. I hate the players far, far less than I hate the game.

Snake oil salesmen, as some savvy readers are likely already thinking to themselves, are hardly unique to the martial arts. Every field has its share of charlatans and underqualified hacks looking for an easy dollar. But in the martial arts, the easy dollars seem especially easy to come by. What makes the martial arts exceptional is not an abundance of snake oil salesmen, but an abundance of eager snake oil consumers.

There are plenty of examples right here in the Milwaukee area (my little blog can't do much harm to Kim and Dux, but I won't be naming these names). I could direct you to a popular taekwondo club in a southern suburb of Milwaukee run by a "master" whose fifth dan in taekwondo comes from an organization that doesn't exist. It took me ten seconds on Google to find this out; dozens, perhaps hundreds, of students are willing to pay this man up to $160 a month for training but couldn't be bothered to take those ten seconds.

I could direct you to a kenpo instructor on the south side of Milwaukee who was kicked out of the organization that oversees his tradition and stripped of his rank by its board of masters. This information is supplied helpfully in the Yahoo! Local reviews of his club. He continues to make a living as a teacher of said tradition, however, and his club was even recently featured on the local news.

I could direct you to a martial arts club in the northwest part of Milwaukee that is part of a successful nationwide chain. The "grandmaster" who founded that chain has been fined for consumer fraud, has spent five years in prison for conspiracy to commit tax fraud, and claims to have won a championship tournament that does not exist. His clubs have also been widely accused of cult-like behavior by the media. All this information is readily available on Wikipedia.

Note the commonalities here: (1) they're all being kept in business by many paying customers, and (2) very damning information about all of them is only a click away on some of the most popular search sites on the internet. This is not a case of secretive businessmen protecting their livelihoods by keeping their shady practices under wraps; their secrets are out for anyone who bothers to look. But people, even people smart enough to accumulate a lot of money for themselves, aren't looking. Why not?

I think the answer lies in the popular perception of the martial arts as something esoteric and inscrutable. People assume that they can't understand the mysteries of the martial arts on their own, and so put their trust in anything they see in movies or hear from someone in a fancy costume. The sport of mixed martial arts is slowly chipping away at this perception, but not quickly enough for my tastes.

For example, Florida judge John Hurley recently declared from the bench that the hands and feet of anyone with a black belt in karate should be legally considered deadly weapons. That's right, moms, your 12-year-old who's put in three-and-a-half years at Master Bob's Karate in the strip mall is now a deadly weapon.

This kind of ignorance boggles the mind. John Hurley is no one's fool. Besides being a former attorney with a law degree, he's also a former Navy intelligence officer. He wasn't born yesterday. Why is he willing to accept such a fanciful, romanticized understanding of the martial arts without question, even when his understanding of the martial arts is about to be a focal point of a ruling? I think he, like so many others, has never considered the possibility that a deeper understanding is available to a layman like himself.

The legal implications of this kind of misconception are staggering, but that's not the worst of it. Meet Jim Green:

Yes, that's a child Green is teaching to take falls from imaginary forces. It should go without saying that I find this despicable and dangerous.

Personally, I don't care whether or not Green honestly believes his karate gives him telekinetic powers. What really frightens me is that parents (no few of them, judging from the kids sitting along the edge of the mat) were happy to entrust their children to a man who wants to use them as props in his magic tricks. They were undeterred by their knowledge of basic physics and apparently unwilling to to seek out a second opinion before investing their money and their offspring.

I've never encountered anything quite this outlandish in my own aikido (though examples of such things in aikido can certainly be found--a quick look through YouTube turns up at least two telekinetic aikido masters), but I have had instructors try to teach me how to throw opponents with "spiritual energy" and try to demonstrate how they can increase the pressure their body weight puts on the mat through manipulation of ki. In cases like this, I nodded and smiled politely, but my common sense was unshaken (it is worth noting that I no longer train at the club where these instructors teach).

I don't think this shows exceptional willpower or wisdom on my part. What makes me different from the willing victims I've profiled in this piece is my confidence (the result of reading I did on the subject before I started training) that nothing in the martial arts is too mysterious or magical for my uninitiated mind to comprehend.

Such confidence is not hard to come by and does not require martial arts experience. We have the internet. We have libraries. We have televised mixed martial arts competitions with experienced commentators who get paid to explain how techniques work. In today's world, there are simply no excuses left for being duped into martial arts nonsense. We have every defense we need right at our fingertips.

Martial artists like myself love to complain about charlatans who stain the reputation of the martial arts. I think it's important, though, to remember that people like Kim, Dux, and Green aren't really the problem: we are. We're the ones begging, and even paying, for the opportunity to be fooled. Others may be telling the lies, but the lies need us to feed them.

What I Like

I have a former instructor (the friend I mentioned here) who has said to me multiple times, "Once you've seen good aikido, you know bad aikido." He says this to me whenever I say that, because I'm still a relative beginner, I have no business judging instructors. Despite his encouragement, I'm still not convinced I have any business deciding whose martial art is good or bad; those whom I might potentially judge still have every right, I think, to tell me I have no idea what I'm talking about.

That said, the more I train and the more I talk to experienced martial artists, the more confidence I have in deciding what I like. This confidence is what fueled the decisions I started to make in "Aikido for Me" and continue to make as I explore new places to train.

I recently visited a school of Wing Chun kung fu and saw lots of things I like. Does an abundance of things I like make an objectively good club? I, arrogantly, like to think so, but I'm not going to make any such claim here. What I am going to do is make some observations of things that I like, using this club as an example, and try to give readers an idea of what I'm looking for when I visit a martial arts club. You can decide for yourselves whether or not you agree.

I like friendly instructors. A surefire way to scare me off is to begin our relationship by either ignoring me or lecturing me on how serious/important/powerful/difficult your martial art is. I wrote about a Shotokan Karate instructor like this last summer. A good instructor, I think, makes an effort to be someone people enjoy training with.

The instructor at this Wing Chun club was always smiling. He was happy to talk with me when he wasn't too busy with his students, and when he was with his students he was not above joking with them like the fellow adults they are. There are those who believe that this kind of attitude results in wasted time and half-hearted training, but I didn't see any of that at this club.

I like students who look like they're having a good time. There are a few things in my life worth getting really serious about, like my family and my job. The martial arts have definitely made me a healthier and happier person, but they're just not in the family/job category of importance. I have very little patience for those who treat the martial arts as something too serious or too sacred to be merely enjoyed. There are very few of us who really need advanced unarmed combat skills, and those of us who need exercise have many cheaper and more efficient options than martial arts training. If there is no enjoyment, there is no reason to train at all.

The students at this Wing Chun club were obviously enjoying the process of learning their art. They smiled when they discovered new things, they laughed at their own mistakes, and they treated each other like friends rather than animated training dummies. Apparently, there are people who have a problem with this, but I can't imagine why.

I like seeing some students who look like they could beat me up. At this Wing Chun club, I saw a few guys that I definitely wouldn't want to mess with. I don't necessarily believe I'll ever be one of those guys, but I do like to think that my training is the kind of training that those guys find challenging and interesting.

My own discipline of aikido has a reputation for being the martial arts refuge of the weak, the old, and the out-of-shape. It's not entirely true, but it's truer than I'm happy to admit. One of several reasons I'm looking for an alternative to my current aikido club is that I'm tired of training with people who would have a hard time with a few jumping jacks, let alone a live application of martial arts techniques.

That's not to say that instructors who can no longer practice everything they preach are of no value; in fact, they are often great instructors (anyone who has trained with the great Hiroshi Ikeda can back me up on this). No one expects Doc Rivers to be able to get back out on the floor and guard Chris Paul. But in my day-to-day training, I want to work with people who can push my body to its limits. It's one of the reasons I started training in the first place.

I like honesty in instruction. I'm not training to become a vigilante crime fighter, and I hate--hate, hate, HATE--all the arguments on message boards and YouTube about what works "on the street" (the suburban cul-de-sac where you live is not "the street", mmakilla12, and you haven't been in a fight since grade school). All that said, I like to see an instructor doing his best to be honest about what works.

At this Wing Chun club, I heard the instructor say things like, "That's only working because he's letting you get away with it," and, "That's not going to move someone who's a lot bigger than you." He would then show alternatives. He had no illusions about his art being an ultimate fighting style, but he wasn't teaching a dance, either. He looked for things that didn't work like they were supposed to, and corrected them, even when they were executed with good form and had all the aesthetics of good kung fu.

In my own aikido, I struggle (internally, not verbally) with instructors who teach "center" and "connection" but have no time left over for the positioning and unbalancing that make throws and takedowns possible against an uncooperative opponent. The aikido they teach often looks very pretty, but doesn't bring down partners who haven't been conditioned to take falls. I'm sure some people genuinely enjoy this kind of martial arts training; they can have it. I want a reality check every once in a while.

I like seeing students sweat. I don't really feel I've gotten my money's worth unless my gi needs washing after a class. There will be time for tai chi in the park when I'm 80; right now, I want a workout. Like most martial artists, one of the reasons I first got into martial arts training was exercise.

The students at this club worked hard enough that they needed sweat rags and water bottles. Even when they were doing choreographed forms, they practiced with enough energy and did enough repetitions that it worked up a sweat. There are many people who equate traditional, stylized arts like aikido and Wing Chun with yoga and chi gong. Not here. The students at this club, despite their traditional, stylized training methods, were working hard.

I like clubs that keep pretense to a minimum. I am turned off by martial arts instructors and schools that take themselves and their traditions too seriously. I want to laugh at instructors who expect to be called "master". I am baffled by classes conducted in foreign languages students can't even pronounce, let alone understand. And I bristle at students being taught to treat their uniform and gear as religious relics. I think these kinds of things are usually the efforts of overzealous, misinformed Westerners trying to achieve what they perceive to be authentic Asian-ness.

My own experiences with authentic Asian-ness have been quite the opposite. I had the great privilege last fall of training with the aforementioned Hiroshi Ikeda, an internationally renowned master of aikido. When Ikeda Sensei's luggage did not arrive in time for the class, and he had no gi or hakama to wear, he dismissed it with a laugh and taught the class in his jeans and tee shirt. And though he occasionally stumbled over his English, he never spoke a word of Japanese after he greeted us with, "Onegaishimasu."

This Wing Chun club was similarly unpretentious. Clearly, clothing was supposed to be dark and functional, but I didn't see a set uniform. There were belts (sashes, in this case) that showed rank and official club shirts, but not everyone wore them. No one was speaking Chinese, except to call the instructor sifu ("teacher", similar in use to the Japanese sensei). Other than the occasional bow, there were no other Chinese affectations, either. Weapons and other equipment were treated as tools; they certainly seemed well cared for, but there was no sign of worship.

I like up-front information. I have complained before about martial arts clubs that aren't forthcoming with basic information. I regard any club with suspicion that doesn't supply information about rates or schedules until after the prospective customer has heard a sales pitch. Are they afraid their prices will scare me away? Are they gauging my gullibility? No matter how many times I think it over, I can't come up with a good, honest reason a club would conduct business this way.

The first thing the instructor did when I sat down was hand me a schedule, tell me what the monthly rates were, and tell me what was included in membership. He also told me that membership was month-to-month, which meant no contracts. That reminds me...

I like clubs that don't make their students sign contracts. Contracts are, in my humble opinion, a blight on the martial arts landscape. There are those (mostly people who run contract clubs) who defend them, and some even make some pretty good points in the process, but the fact remains that a contract can really only do one thing: force people to keep paying for something they no longer want.

What if I get hurt? What if my schedule changes? What if (as is happening to me now) there are changes at the club and I'm not sure if it's the place I want to train anymore? What if, a few months in, I decide that my body's just not up to the demands of the training that goes on at this particular club? In any of these cases, if I'm locked into a contract, I have to keep paying. Even more frightening are stories I've heard (here, for instance) of clubs that have closed down and sold the contracts to collection agencies, meaning that students have to keep paying for training at a club that doesn't even exist.

This Wing Chun club was not cheap (about $100 a month), but didn't seem to have any trouble hanging onto students without using contracts. And that makes me wonder why so many clubs seem to think they're necessary.

Finally, I like clubs that don't cost a lot. I debated with myself about whether or not to include this last one, because there are many very good clubs--the one I talk about here included--that aren't cheap. But I'm not a rich guy. I'm a lowly special education aide at a tiny little non-union public charter school. I have rent to pay and a baby on the way. I don't have much of a discretionary budget. The martial arts are wonderful, but they're not worth cutting into food and rent for. I can't afford expensive clubs, and I don't think the martial arts can afford to become exclusively a rich man's hobby.

I don't have a clever way to wrap this up; it was never really more than a glorified list. All I can say is, this is what I like. What do you like?

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.

How to Get My Attention

Yesterday, I happened upon the very closest thing to a perfect martial arts school web site I have ever seen. I was literally trying to contact this place within 45 seconds of seeing the site. Here it is:

Mind you, this is not the front page; this is the entire site. Without watching any videos, enduring any cheesey music, scrolling through any lengthy mission statement, or even clicking any links, I am provided with exactly what is being taught, exactly who is teaching it, exactly when it is being taught, exactly where it is being taught, and what deals are offered to students.

Sure, the paragraphs at the top of the left column are a little corny, and the whole thing is excessively capitalized. But I don't care. In a quick glance, I already have most of the information that I would ask for in an e-mail, much of which the average for-profit taekwondo school is unwilling to give me unless I talk to them in person.

Oh, and that part about "No Contracts or Registration Fees"--I have to admit, that helps too.

I understand that martial arts schools need to attract the attention of children and parents, most of whom know nothing about the martial arts, to stay in business. But in order to stay relevant in a world where krav maga and MMA sportfighting are as accessible as karate, traditional martial arts--that is, the kind whose practitioners wear pajamas with colored belts--also need to attract and keep grown-ups who are serious about their arts.

I wonder what might happen if, rather than trying to dazzle us with logos, sort-of-true histories, strategically-placed quotes from parent testimonies, full-length instructor biographies, and action-packed videos, martial arts establishments simply told us what, when, where, and how much and let the quality of their training speak for itself. Maybe the world of for-profit marital arts instruction would crumble around us.

But I can say this much: it worked on me.

How I Got Here

I have been asked before how I chose aikido as the martial art I wanted to train. The truth is, I didn't.

I never painstakingly researched the relative merits of different of martial arts. I never asked for a lot of input from experienced martial artists on what would suit my goals or my body type. I never took introductory classes in different martial arts to see how they felt.

What I did do was go online and look at the web site of every martial arts training center within 20 miles: taekwondo dojang, judo dojo, kung fu center, whatever. If what I saw looked interesting and there was an e-mail address provided, I shot them an e-mail asking for more information.

My questions were, I thought, pretty reasonable ones. What styles did they teach? How much did they charge? When were their classes? As it turned out, nearly all of the people I contacted were unwilling to part with even this most basic information. The responses were all the same: come on in, see a class, and we'll talk about it.

I, for one, didn't want to devote an evening to seeing a class and listening to the instructor's pitch if I didn't think the program would fit my budget or my work schedule. So most of these places never heard another word from me.

A funny thing happened, though. The e-mail I sent to a small nonprofit aikido club got a reply in an hour-and-a-half. The reply gave detailed information on the club's class schedule, fees, and monthly dues. The dues were reasonable and the classes were mostly at times when I could attend, so I decided to go see a class.

I liked what I saw at that class, so I went to another class. I liked what I saw at that class, too, so I decided to join the club.

In the end, I chose a dojo, not an art. Rather than trying to judge the relative merits of the different arts available to me (something I was wholly unqualified to do), I went to the place where the people had been forthcoming and honest with me.

I suspect I am not unique in this. How many other would-be martial artists are out there who have decided not to pursue the martial arts because every instructor they contacted came on a like a used car salesman? If more private martial arts establishments dealt with people as openly and honestly as that small nonprofit aikido club, I might be paying twice as much or more for karate or jujutsu somewhere else.

Private instructors, are you listening? I could be paying for your kids' braces right now if only you'd been willing to tell me what, when, and how much.