What is a Martial Art For?

I have stumbled into many discussions on Bullshido, Martial Arts Planet, and AikiWeb lately with people who have a very strong sense of what their martial arts are all about and what is good (and not good) for their martial arts as a whole.

Performance art is not what taekwondo is for and is bad for taekwondo. Aikido is a spiritual pursuit and people who leave the spiritual element out of aikido are missing the point. People who aren't really learning to fight are wasting their training and are diluting the martial arts.

These claims are all rooted in the same basic belief: that a martial art is for something, that it has an objective raison d'etre which is independent of the needs and goals of the individual martial artist. If your practice of the art does not serve this particular purpose, then it is wrong, and, even worse, it harms the art as a whole.

My favorite martial arts blogger, Rob Redmond of 24 Fighting Chickens, addresses this belief in discussing one of his blog entries:

Karate is not _for_ anything. Karate doesn't have emotions. It isn't a person. Karate is a concept, an instruction set, a gathering of principles.

The people who do the Karate determine what they do it for. That is where the purpose comes from -- from the people who do it. Each of them does it for a different reason.

Just because I do not do Karate for a particular reason does not mean the reason is invalid for you. It simply means that we are habituated to thinking about Karate incorrectly and speaking of it as if it had willpower and personality -- as if my doing it one way would affect the other way of doing it someone else practices.

That has come to us, I believe, from the group-think of organized sports, organized religion, and the Japanese culture.

"Gambling isn't good for baseball." What the heck does that mean? It means that the person saying it doesn't like what happens when people gamble. Baseball isn't damaged by gambling. Baseball happens all over the country whether anyone gambles or not. But his experience is lessened, he feels, if the players gamble.

"What is Karate for?" is the same sort of group-think question. Karate isn't for anything. Nothing is good or bad for "Karate." Karate isn't a person.

I'm with Rob. I think a martial art, like all forms of art, exists for its own sake (ars gratia artis). It doesn't need to have a point. It doesn't have to justify or validate its existence by serving a particular purpose. It is up to me to determine what purpose my aikido serves in my own life, and it is up to every other martial artist in the world to make that determination for himself. Their reasons do not  invalidate mine, and vice versa.

This strips me of the authority to say that something is "bad for aikido". I can only speak for myself and my own needs; all I really mean if I say that something is "bad for aikido" is that it is bad for me.

This doesn't mean I don't have complaints about the way some people practice the martial arts; I do. Some people (like the belt-chasers I described in "Karateville") practice martial arts in a way that negatively affects my own personal experience of my art when I train with them. But I cannot be so arrogant as to presume my complaints are -- or should be -- everyone's. I don't have that authority. No one does.

Two Lessons From Tim Detmer

Tim Detmer in 2006. (source)

Twice in the past two weeks I have had the great privilege of training under Tim Detmer, an American-born aikido instructor who has spent the last 29 years living and training in Shingu, Japan. Working with him was in equal measures challenging, educational, inspiring, and exhausting.

If nationality can be measured in years, Detmer Sensei is more Japanese than American. He was born and raised in Seattle, but has lived most of his adult life and done virtually all his formal aikido training in Shingu. He is, therefore, uniquely equipped to communicate a Japanese perspective on aikido to an American audience.

Apart from his insights on aikido method and technique (which would be difficult for a novice like myself to put into words and which would be very dry reading in any case), Detmer Sensei left me with two lessons that I'd like to preserve here, as much for my own benefit as for any reader's.

Do not be too focused on your opponent.

Another way Detmer Sensei put this was: "Do not give him the honor of being your enemy."

Aikido and life work better when we decide on our own course of action based on what we think it ought to be rather than on whom we want to defeat. In aikido, being too focused on our opponents can lead to badly aimed technique, exposure to reversal, and compromised balance. In an argument, becoming too focused on our opponent can lead to attacking the man and being dragged off onto tangents (yes, message board freinds, I'm guilty). In all things, there are goals and obstacles. If we focus on the obstacle, we tend to miss the goal.

One of the instructors at my old club used to say, "I don't care," as nage when talking about uke. I think he was trying to make the same point.

Undertake all things with gratitude.

In aikido and in life, learning to be grateful for what is keeps us from dwelling on what has been or what could be. This not only makes us more positive people, but it keeps us in the now. Detmer Sensei claimed that gratitude was a determining factor in the success of any undertaking.

Another way Detmer Sensei put this was: "Want what you have." He illustrated his point by saying, "I really wish I had a great aikido class with 20 students," then looking around and observing, "I do!"

We in aikido love to talk about taking what we learn in the dojo "off the mat". There are a lot of people who take this idea much further than I'm comfortable with, believing that everything they do is somehow a manifestation of aikido. I don't think I'll ever buy into that kind of thinking, but these past two weeks Detmer Sensei has shared a few things that I'll definitely be taking home with me.

Grappling With Humanity

(Image source: CBS News)

The latest innovation in the world of portable technology is Google Glass, the computer you wear on your face. I have yet to see this thing in person, but I can't help thinking that the first time I do I'm going to find it comical and creepy in equal measures. I mean, dude, you're wearing a computer on your face.

I especially hope that I don't actually have to talk to the person wearing it. It would be positively unnerving to try and have a conversation with someone who may or may not be looking at a LOLcat or a Twitter feed (to say nothing of the less innocent possibilities) while I'm speaking to him. According to an NPR piece I listened to last night, those who are wearing Google Glass are already being labelled "glassholes", and I think I can imagine why.

I'm sure the proponents of progress and innovation would be quick to assure me that I'll get used to Google Glass -- and the imitators that are sure to follow it -- in the same way that I've gotten used the internet, the laptop, and the smartphone before it. They're certainly right that I've gotten used to a lot in my short lifetime, but I think this particular invention might be going a little too far for me.

My whole life, I have watched real interaction with real people being slowly replaced by technology. Video games replaced ball games, discussion boards replaced discussions, virtual worlds replaced the real world. Then laptops let us take these replacements anywhere we could find a place to sit, and then smartphones let us keep these replacements in our pockets all the time. And now, with Google Glass, we will have the option of avoiding human interaction even while ostensibly interacting with people.

Now, before any reader who knows me points out my hypocrisy, let me point it out myself.

I am a blogger. I am a gamer (currently on my third time through Fallout: New Vegas). I am a regular poster on at least five internet forums. I have preferred books to people my whole life, and now I get my books on my smartphone rather than going to buy or borrow them from places manned by real people. In short, I am hopelessly dependent on technology and I am as guilty as anyone of using it as a replacement for a real social life.

All that said, Google Glass still worries me. The times when circumstances force us to come face-to-face with other human beings are the last bastion of real interaction. If I can't go to the store or to a restaurant without a computer screen literally attached to my face, it's pretty much all over. I might as well go full-on Mr. House at that point (if you don't get that reference, good for you). I admit I'm right at the line, but I'm still very afraid of crossing it.

In light of that fear, I'm glad to have aikido.

There is something that has always felt so very separate and different about aikido, like stepping into the dojo is entering another world. I used to think this was about things like the gi and the hakama, the bowing, the Japanese terminology, the weapon racks, the sitting in seiza, and the image of Ueshiba on the kamiza. The more I train, though, the more I come to see these things as nonessential trappings, and the more these trappings lose their novelty for me. What really sets aikido apart from the rest of my postmodern existence is the people.

Grappling is cooperative to the core; it cannot be done alone. Players at aikido, judo, jujutsu, wrestling, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, etc. are unique among sportsmen. They have no ball, no bat, and no racket. They have no net and no basket. Even in practice, they have no pads or bags to hit, and no forms to train against empty air. There is no medium other than another human being -- one whose sweat will be mingled with your own, whose pain will mirror your own, and whose movements will be real-time responses to your own.

Aikidoists generally don't like to think of their art as primitive, but I think there's something wonderfully primitive about it. The thousands of years we have spent developing new, more diluted ways of interacting with other humans, from the first written words all the way to the current generation of social media, are forgotten: come to me, grab hold of me, and throw and be thrown. Aikido training is as low-tech as my life gets and is more physically intimate than anything I do with anyone other than my wife and daughter. It flies in the face of the e-world of profiles, avatars, and typed messages.

Grappling, I think, offers us a unique opportunity to remember what it is to be human. And it is this memory, I hope, that will prevent me from one day joining the ranks of the "glassholes".

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.

Swimming With Sharks

Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.
- Proverbs 17:28

"Take that meathead rhetoric to Bullshido."

"Don't post stuff like that on Bullshido -- they'll eat you alive."

"Are you going to challenge me to a fight like the goons on Bullshido?"

If you frequent martial arts-themed internet communities, you are likely to occasionally hear things like this. Bullshido.net has built up a rather a scary reputation in the martial arts e-world, and I think it's fair to say its members like it that way.

Back in 2010 I decided to make a Bullshido account. I'm not sure what I was thinking; perhaps I got it into my head to go defend the honor of stylized, traditional arts like aikido against the evil hordes of MMA exclusivists rumored to dwell there. I never gathered up the courage to actually post there, but I'm sure that I had Bullshido in mind when I wrote "Haters Gonna Hate" in February of 2011.

My perception of Bullshido started changing last spring, when I began looking up information about infamous "ninjas" Frank Dux and Ashida Kim in preparation for the writing of "We're the Problem". In the cases of both men, Bullshido's Martial Arts Encyclopedia proved an invaluable resource, full of well-researched information from credible sources and solid investigating and reporting done by Bullshido members themselves. Perhaps, I began to think then, this was more than just a hangout for Tapout thugs.

Even that, though, wasn't enough to actually convince me to post there. I still feared an aikidoist like myself would be chewed up and spit out by Bullshido's famous "Bullies". Every once in a while, I lurked on the forums or read through the investigations on the Martial Arts Encyclopedia, but that was as close as I was willing to get.

What finally changed my mind a few weeks ago was a desire to start an "investigation" of my own (I won't go into the details here, but those interested can follow this thread on Bullshido). I didn't want to be that guy who shows up out of nowhere, asks for help with a particular matter, and then disappears, so I browsed around the forums a little bit, hoping to contribute a little to some discussion without stepping on anyone's toes.

Wonder of wonders, these supposed MMA-minded thugs had a whole board devoted to traditional Japanese martial arts. That didn't sound too scary, so in I went. Inside, I even found a thread about aikido. It was a longish thread, already eight pages, so rather than try to read it all and respond to everything, I just gave my two cents in response to the OP.

I braced for impact, not sure what to expect. A caps lock rant? A condescending lecture? A warning? A ban?

"I like this n00b," came the first response. "We shall keep him." It was one of the forum leaders.

It's a strange feeling having all one's preconceptions shattered by a few words.

It didn't take me long to figure out that I'd pegged the Bullies all wrong from the start. Bullshido, I quickly discovered, isn't about declaring the supremacy of a few full-contact martial arts, but about exposing the dishonesty and delusion that plague the martial arts world. Most of its members are more than willing to converse respectfully and open-mindedly with an aikidoist, so long as said aikidoist isn't delusional about the applications of his training and is willing to remain silent on subjects he doesn't know anything about.

That last point is one I can't stress enough. If the stories of Bullshido's single-mindedness about MMA are exaggerated, the stories of their harsh treatment of those who earn their disfavor certainly are not. I know of no faster, more effective way in the world to have one's ego taken down a peg than to spout off on Bullshido without being able to prove oneself.

The Bullies take their proof very seriously: anyone making a bold claim had best be prepared either to cite evidence from a credible source, to participate in one of Bullshido's many meetups, or to be carried away on a wave of condescension and ridicule.

This dynamic, while some find it harsh, certainly has its merits. Many martial artists claim to train "scientific" arts (some Wing Chun players come to mind), but Bullshido is the only group of people I've ever known whose approach to the martial arts resembles anything genuinely scientific. Their acceptance of a claim is not based on who makes it or how eloquently it is made, only on whether or not that claim can be or has been confirmed by experiment. Those who make claims that they cannot substantiate in this way can expect the same reception on Bullshido that a young-earth creationist might receive at a convention of evolutionary biologists.

The internet martial arts community is awash with horror stories about Bullies' disdain for traditional martial arts, and indeed for anything that doesn't belong in a cage match. Many of my friends from AikiWeb and Martial Arts Planet talk about Bullshido the way Tolkein characters talk about Mordor.

But I have experienced no such disdain, and the way I have avoided it is very, very simple: I don't make claims I can't back up and I keep my mouth shut unless I really know what I'm talking about. This humility and adherence to the rules have been the only prerequisites to my acceptance on Bullshido.

I have a hard time feeling sympathy for those who cannot manage these two things. About a month ago I watched the Bullies embarrass and then run off a Bujinkan stylist who was lecturing on unarmed defense against weapons but was unable to provide any evidence in support of his ideas. He seemed genuinely offended that people were not willing to blindly accept his words at face value, and mistook that unwillingness for a refusal to listen to him at all and a disrespect for his training.

He was a living personification of obsolete martial arts thinking: a guy with a black belt told me stuff, therefore I know all I need to know, and therefore anyone who disagrees with me is an ignorant fool. He probably still believes it all, and probably has added to the horror stories swirling around the internet about the evil place called Bullshido where there is no respect for traditional martial arts. The truth is that the lack of respect he experienced was only for him, specifically his willingness to lecture on things with which he had little or no experience.

Socrates tells us that the only true wisdom is the recognition of one's own ignorance. My message to my fellow internet aikidoists -- and, more broadly, to traditional martial artists of all stripes -- is this: if you are willing to accept the truth of your own ignorance, then you have nothing to fear from Bullshido. It is not the boogeyman, and it is an informative and interesting resource.

Memorial Day and Zanshin

War is sweet to those who have no experience of it, but the experienced man trembles exceedingly at heart on its approach.
- Pindar

Today is Memorial Day, the day set aside in the United States for remembering those military personnel who made the ultimate sacrifice in the line of duty. Typically, Memorial Day is the unofficial beginning of summer, the first federal holiday of the year when it's nice enough outside to really enjoy the day off. This particular Memorial Day, though, the weather here in Milwaukee is much truer to the somber occasion than usual (which is why I'm here on my computer rather than, say, outside playing with my daughter).

This past Saturday, I dutifully sent my thanks to all the veterans on my Facebook "Friends" list. One of those thanked, an aikido instructor and former Army Ranger, was appreciative, but made sure to remind me that Memorial Day is for remembering the dead, not just for celebrating the living. My intentions had been good, but I had, as so many civilians do, skipped straight to the fun part of war and glossed over the rest.

Anyone who spends much time on the internet will see a lot of criticism pointed at Americans for being too enthusiastic and too idealistic about war. I'm not sure Americans have a monopoly on such things, but we're certainly guilty. No American my age has ever been pressed into military service or seen his country undertake a war that it had a realistic chance of losing: it's easier than ever for an American to watch a war with the carefree enthusiasm of a fan watching a sporting event.

Such detachment not only dishonors and trivializes the real sacrifices made by real people in war, but it also robs us of an opportunity to learn. Even if we are unlikely to be drawn into war ourselves, we have a great deal to learn from it, as individuals and as a nation. It behooves us, the sheltered civilians, to pay attention, so that we can choose and direct our leaders wisely.

As a martial artist, I like to think of this as a macrocosm of what we in budo call zanshin. In the dojo, even if our training is not an honest approximation of combat (and, frankly, most training isn't), it behooves us to keep in mind the violence from which our art was born. Maybe uke isn't really going to punch me in the face if I give him the opportunity to do so, but it still makes me a better martial artist to be aware of that opportunity and to avoid offering it. Maybe no one is waiting to attack me after I throw uke, but my technique and my stance will be better if I am ready as if someone were.

Zanshin is hard work. Maintaining awareness is not easy, in life at large or in the dojo. This is why we like our war without death and our training without the responsibility of risk management. But the benefits of living -- and of training -- the hard way are many.

Aikido the Word

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Before I start, I'd like to give a warning to anyone reading this. Many people, especially on the internet, find semantic arguments to be inconsequential and pretentious. Little is more common on an internet message board than to see an argument dismissed as "just semantics". What follows is an entry about nothing but semantics written by a guy who is obsessed with semantics, so don't read any further if you're one of those people who find discussions of semantics tedious and annoying. What's more, please don't leave a comment unless you're prepared to have a dry conversation about words with the guy who corrects your use of literally on Facebook. I am that guy. You have been warned.

Aikido is a word that carries a lot of baggage with it. It is, in some mouths, the name of a particular Japanese martial art, but there are many people who seem to want it to be so much more than that, who are not satisfied to see the word confined to the dojo.

This is, as far as I can tell, a phenomenon unique to aikido in the martial arts world. None of my taekwondo buddies ever tried to convince me that the movements of a dancer or a golfer might be just as validly called taekwondo as our martial art, but these exact claims have been made to me of aikido by some extremely knowledgeable aikidoists.

Much of this kind of thinking must be credited to aikido's founder Morihei Ueshiba, in whose writings we find such cryptic lines as: "The Art of Peace has no form--it is the study of the spirit," and: "Any movement can be an aikido technique." Clearly, Ueshiba intended aikido to be more than just a martial art.

This is, in many ways, a very good thing. Ueshiba wanted us to learn more from him than rolling, throwing, and twisting wrists: he sought to show us, through the lens of his martial art, a way to live and move in harmony with the world around us. And there's certainly no need to explain why some more of that in this world would be a good thing.

For all that, though, Ueshiba's vague and idealistic explanations of aikido create some rather daunting semantic problems. First of all, a word for something that "has no form" and which can be applied to "any movement" is a word that has very little meaning of its own. Furthermore, it's hard to justify using such a word as the name for a particular martial art with a particular lineage and technical focus.

Word nerd that I am, such semantic problems bother me more than they bother most people, so I have always tried to use the word aikido as specifically as possible. When I say (or write) the word aikido, I mean Morihei Ueshiba's martial art, whose primary technical basis is Takeda's Daito-ryu aikijujutsu and the practice of which Ueshiba intended to serve as an expression of the principle of aiki.

Some spiritualists might find a definition like mine too confining, and some traditionalists might think it diverges too far from the founder's own way of thinking. The inevitable question is: can't someone who is  dancing, negotiating, or playing a sport be closer to the the principles of aikido than someone who is practicing Daito-style grappling techniques? It's a reasonable question, one that has been issued to me as a challenge by many people who know much more about aikido than I do.

My answer has less to do with aikido than with language, and so I think C.S. Lewis, one of modern history's great authorities on language, can make my point better than I can. In the preface to his book Mere Christianity, Lewis details the demise of a useful word:

The word gentleman originally meant something recognisable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone 'a gentleman' you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not 'a gentleman' you were not insulting him, but giving information...But then came people who said--so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully--'Ah, but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should?...' They meant well. To be honourable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing than to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing...To call a man 'a gentleman' in this new, refined sense becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is 'a gentleman' becomes simply a way of insulting him. When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker's attitude to that object...A gentleman, once it has been spiritualized and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes.

The aforementioned spiritualists and traditionalists are, of course, absolutely right when they say that aikido's principles are far more important than its lineage and its techniques. But I think they cause a great deal of linguistic trouble when they decide that the principles, rather than the lineage and the techniques, ought to be the basis for how we use aikido as a word.

If I say, according to my understanding of aikido principles, that the dancer who moves in flawless harmony with his partner is performing aikido, and furthermore that the martial artist in the dojo who does not grasp the underlying truths of his art is not performing aikido, then what have I communicated? Since there is no clearly articulated and agreed upon list of the principles of aikido, all I have really managed to say is that I approve of the way one task has been performed but not the other. In that case, aikido has, as Lewis explains above, ceased to be a term of description and become merely a term of praise.

If, on the other hand, the word aikido simply names a martial art that was founded by Morihei Ueshiba and gets most of its technical curriculum from Daito-ryu, I can use it to communicate, with reasonable specificity, a particular kind of activity. As an added bonus, this "coarse, objective" definition does not require any judgments on my part about what is and what is not a real expression of the true principles of aikido (judgments I would not feel the least bit qualified to make).

At this point, other objectors are likely to chime in, arguing that since there is no agreement about which styles have truly preserved their Ueshiba roots and which technical curricula are correct, even the kind of definition I suggest will not produce universal agreement about what is and is not aikido. These objectors are correct, but their objection is ultimately irrelevant. My purpose here is not to extinguish all discussion about what fits the definition of aikido, only to provide a definition that allows us to have the discussion. If aikido is no more than a set of subjective principles, there is no discussion to be had.