Another small Saturday morning. I love the focused training afforded by limited attendance. Fellow members, what did you miss?
Two keys that I have presented before. Irimi nage direct as concept and nikkyo as concept. And while I taught them as techniques, the true value resides in the movements that they represent as concepts.
First irimi-nage-direct, aka Hubud Lubud. As a concept, uke can deliver any upper-zone attack: roundhouse punch, straight punch, shomen, yokomen, angle 1/2, it really doesn’t matter. The flow pattern of hubud gives you the answer: intercept, redirect, trap, retaliate. Yes, it is a 4 to 1 action chain. So as Master Keating would say: “Time to hit the gas son!” The variable control that we develop in training is practiced slow to fast. Your ability to deploy your skills should have that full range and this morning we practiced going to the top level.
Starting from jo-dan tsuki (to push the emotional and psychological level), nage had to slip the punch while intercepting on the inside line, use the back hand to clear the attacking arm, then trap it to allow the clearing arm to strike irimi. Master the pattern, then increase the speed. While developing this ballistic phrasing, notice that you can truncate the movements, use the back hand only to intercept, redirect, smother and counter punch all in one move; or pak soa with the front hand rather than intercept; or flow farther up uke’s arm to do a palm strike or elbow strike. The point is to develop the concept.
Your goal is to move beyond the kihon as a means to preserve, prevent and protect and develop the top level and terminate opposition quickly. You need to have the calm presence of mind to move up and down the continuum with emotional equilibrium. Every level of skilled deployment deserves and needs the same level of decisive action. Smooth deployment is key to speed. Remember this is a 4 to 1 beat response: you must be quicker. No hesitation in body, mind or spirit. (For a visual reminder, watch the opening dojo scene in Above the Law. Segal wasn’t always a joke; as Mulligan sensei told me, he has never been thrown irimi-nage harder than by Steven Seagal.)
To expand of the concept: irmi-nage-direct is a bold entry move focused on a very slight angle change in relation to the attacker’s initial line. Therefore we linked the irimi-nage technique to ikkyo’s response. Look at ikkyo anew. Rather than always see ikkyo as a RvR/LvL encounter, recognize that it can be done LvR/RvL – follow hubud as your teacher. Uke attacks R to the upper line. Nage intercepts L on the inside line, then picks up uke’s attack R. Nage will use the low-to-high pressure of the RvR to fold uke’s attacking arm at the elbow where nage’s L hand struck, stuck, and remained as a fulcrum. As nage advances, nage’s L hand moves from the inside line to pick up the outside of uke’s humerus. To expand the concept further – note that nage’s initial intercept could be simplified to a counter-thrust on the inside line: uke attacks R, nage counters with a thrust to the face (angle 7) [the response is angle 6 if uke attacks L]. Look to see the movements as concept to move beyond the limitations of sclerotic techniques.
We moved from irimi to nikkyo. After a remedial reminder on the importance of hand position and joint alignment to cause maximal impingement (bone locking), we explored nikkyo for what it is: a knife disarm.
Nikkyo as a concept starts by picking up the uke’s distal part of the arm from the outside. From the contact, nage must slide his shyutto to the joint, then “roll” the knife hand over uke’s wrist to catch it from the interior side – a single snake disarm and counter cut. This one is kuden-level.
When I began training, I was told that the minimum time commitment to earn shodan in Aikido is to train three classes per week for a period of five years – and this presumes progress through time on the mat under competent instruction with honest training partners. If you do the math, however, the USAF requirements indicate that just under seven years would be required at the three-class per week minimum.
For many people even that level of dedication is difficult. We are pressured for time with work, family commitments, and entertaining distractions. Training is something we fit into the schedule. Yet training time is critical to development.
And I don’t mean just showing up to train. Time on the mat is only one metric to measure progress and not always a good one. One needs to actually learn from their training time on the mat. As Bruce Lee observed, perfection may be the goal, but the real question is, “For what level of imperfection will we settle?”
Every time we step on the mat we have the opportunity to improve. Training with a partner is a gift. With good training, each player gives the other the ability to elevate their skills through honest feedback (physical more importantly than verbal). Time on the mat with a partner is without a doubt the most effective way to learn the art because you have an instant feedback mechanism. You can each help train the other to somatically feel the progress.
Solo training is a way to augment and accelerate your basic skills. The math is simple – ten minutes of solo training a day adds over 60 hours of training time per year, when done effectively.
To maximize the benefit, focus on isolated skills and physical development that may be outside the everyday norm – for example shikko and shinkokyu. Shikko is an unfamiliar body mechanic for many of us and shinkokyu is a way to learn to be grounded. Both basic patterns of movement are absolutely necessary to master, but are too rote and repetitive to take time away from training and practice on the mat. Master them by mindfully practicing solo. Do you stand at work? Subtly shift shinkokyu to get in repetitions. Practice moving from standing to shikko to walking while at home. Tenkan around obstacles in your house.
Have very specific goals. Practice your sword cuts. Do 100 shomen strikes per day. Then move to yokomen, then tsuki, etc. It is important to be mindful, but at the beginning simply do the cuts. Keep at it, as you develop stamina, your goal will be to develop proper form. Incrementally add the number of consecutive cuts per day but the goal is to get to 1,000. It is impossible to do 1,000 cuts wrong – meaning if you can do 1,000 consecutive cuts, your form must be correct because you have gone beyond physical limitations.
Importantly, employ proper visualization. Professional athletes use visualization techniques to improve performance and there are programs happy to teach you how to better visualize. For me, visualization entails recalling the patterns from inspirational teachers and by envisioning weapon to target strikes. Create linkages, find the smoothest path from target A to target B, move along the crispest tangent, or the tightest arc to minimize your movements. Or simply follow a scripted routine each morning to encourage a relaxed but ready state.
O’Sensei tiesho – compare the shoulder/breath relaxation exercises with those from Systema.
There are any number of discrete skills that can (and should) be practiced solo daily. Here are some suggestions in addition to those mentioned earlier:
Attacks: jodan/chudan/gedan tsuki; shomen/yokomen/gyaku yokomen; use empty hand and weapons (ken/jo/tanto).
Strikes: once the attacks are familiar – try hitting a pell with your weapons and the bag empty handed. Hit speed bags and heavy bags alike. Use a makiwara, or my favorite >Bob<. Steal a variety of strikes from other arts (for example: Systema relaxed strikes).
To break it down, think of practicing those elements of movement that can be done independent of a partner. The most obvious should be suburi in general. Suburi is essentially about repetition and then more repetition. The point of extended repetition is to force the body to figure out how to use a weapon efficiently – just keep swinging the weapon and you will be closer to the most economical path of motion. Suburi is faster and more fluid than kihon patterns.
Kihon movements are the fundamental building blocks – and some can be done independently of a partner. Kihon are prescribed and idealized movement patterns – closer to kata than energetic actions. Kihon should be done slowly enough to allow full intellectual processing of the movements – a high level of reflexive awareness. Follow this line of reasoning and you may develop heretical thoughts like adding kata to Aikido.
Just remember: because the ultimate goal of Aikido is to connect, to have an energetic exchange, solo training can only be a supplement and not a substitute for time on the mat. Nor are videos a means to replace competent instruction under a qualified teacher.
Keep Training!
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Harder than it seems – try using a silk scarf to augment your solo training
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I have suggested earlier that re-contextualizing the movements is also a key to effective training. By classifying techniques in a matrix and by re-presenting techniques through narrative or graphical depiction is a means to better understand the material. Just remember your classifications will be an indication of your particular context and dispositions. An amusing aside to illustrate the point: In 1238, Alfonso X of Castile published Libro de los Juegos – The Book of Games. The book classified games according to categories sensible to his kingly status: games played on horseback, those played dismounted, and those played while seated.
In the 19th century, anthropology’s great achievement was humility. Cultural relativism and structure-functionalism arose as correctives to imperial arrogance; a way to see “the native” not as savage, but as human within a coherent order. Yet in the 21st century, those same theories can feel dangerous. When all practices are deemed culturally valid, cruelty masquerades as heritage. The Economist ran this story about witch killings in India:
October 21, 2017 p 43
Is there anything so utterly primitive?[1] (Yes, I use that term pejoratively.)
And India, by any measure, values education. According to 2019 data from the Centre for Global Development and UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report, primary-school teachers there earn about four times the national GDP per capita, one of the highest ratios in the world:
What is education worth
In the United States and Britain, the figure hovers around 1.1 to 1.2×. The inverse correlation between national wealth and relative teacher pay is striking: the poorer the country, the higher the social premium placed on teaching. It suggests a tacit recognition that education is civilization’s most reliable lever for progress. Ignorance, it is said, should be forgiven because it shows a lack of access to information. And yet India is a country with a long history respecting education and teachers are demonstrably respected.
And yet ignorance endures. My patience for it wanes with age. I grow impatient for people to be better. Fear of otherness remains universal. Europe trembles at immigration, and demagogues feed on that fear, as John Lukacs warned they would. [2] Populism is the old tribal instinct in new clothes: the need to define oneself as not-them.
November 17th, 2018
And fear is justified by those bouts of violence by the Other: that all-encompassing label for the outsider. And thus we maintain our identities and define ourselves as being not-like-them.[3]
Is Aikido an antidote to such exoticism, the Way of Harmony made literal? Perhaps. One learns to connect with a partner, then with a dojo, a community, a nation, and, by extension, all of humanity. But I am not optimistic. Humanity remains mired in tribal reflexes. What I do believe is that honest training builds character. And character, once tempered, becomes a prophylactic against primitive fear.
John Stuart Mill would have understood. Civilization, he wrote, depends not on conquest but on the moral education of its citizens. To educate is to enlarge sympathy, to make the mind supple enough to recognize another as equal, even when alien. Aikido, in its best form, rehearses that lesson daily: tension without hatred, conflict without dehumanization. Education and practice alike are the disciplines by which we hold the line against relapse. A 19th Century reminder from JS Mill.
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[1] Update 10.7.2020 – the persistence of “culture” as a limitation of human progress
Region is a strong predictor of female survival, literacy, autonomy, employment, and independent mobility. A woman with the exact same household wealth/ caste/ religion will likely have more autonomy if she lives in the South.
It does not seem to be a function of wealth, nor was colonialism a major factor. And cousin marriage, which is more prevalent in the south? Alice notes:
Southern women may have gained autonomy despite cousin marriage, not because of it.
Islam, however, is one factor:
In sum, gender segregation became more widespread under Islamic rule. Men continue [to] dominate public life, while women are more rooted in their families, seldom gathering to resist structural inequalities.
But perhaps most significantly:
Female labour force participation is higher in states with traditions of labour-intensive cultivation…
Wheat has been grown for centuries on the fertile, alluvial Indo-Gangetic plain. Cultivation is not terribly labour-intensive, though cereals must still be processed, shelled and ground. This lowers demand for female labour in the field, and heightens its importance at home.
Over the centuries, male superiority may have become entrenched.
Finally:
Northern parents increasingly support their daughters’ education, but this is primarily to improve their marriage prospects, not work outside the home.
There is much, much more at the link, including some excellent maps, visuals, and photos.
[2] John Lukacs tried to warn us against this populism. He learned history’s lessons hard and personally. His obituary from the The Times of Israel is copied (with links added) below:
John Lukacs, iconoclastic historian and Holocaust survivor, dies at 95
A biographer of Winston Churchill, the Hungarian-born scholar lamented the erosion of ‘civilization and culture of the past 500 years, European and Western’
NEW YORK (AP) — John Lukacs, the Hungarian-born historian and iconoclast who brooded over the future of Western civilization, wrote a best-selling tribute to Winston Churchill, and produced a substantial and often despairing body of writings on the politics and culture of Europe and the United States, has died.
Lukacs died of heart failure early Monday at his home in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, according to his stepson, Charles Segal. He was 95 and had lived in Phoenixville since the 1950s.
A proud and old-fashioned man with a prominent forehead, cosmopolitan accent, and erudite but personal prose style, Lukacs was a maverick among historians. In a profession where liberals were a clear majority, he was sharply critical of the left and of the cultural revolution of the 1960s. But he was also unhappy with the modern conservative movement, opposing the Iraq war, mocking hydrogen bomb developer Edward Teller as the “Zsa Zsa Gabor of physics” and disliking the “puerile” tradition, apparently started by Ronald Reagan, of presidents returning military salutes from the armed forces.
“John Lukacs is well known not so much for speaking truth to power as speaking truth to audiences he senses have settled into safe and unexamined opinions,” John Willson wrote in The American Conservative in 2013. “This has earned him, among friends and critics alike, a somewhat curmudgeonly reputation.”
Lukacs completed more than 30 books, on everything from his native country to 20th century American history to the meaning of history itself. His books include “Five Days in London,” the memoir “Confessions of an Original Sinner,” and “Historical Consciousness,” in which he contended that the best way to study any subject, whether science or politics, was through its history.
He considered himself a “reactionary,” a mourner for the “civilization and culture of the past 500 years, European and Western.” He saw decline in the worship of technological progress, the elevation of science to religion, and the rise of materialism. Drawing openly upon Alexis de Tocqueville’s warnings about a “tyranny of the majority,” Lukacs was especially wary of populism and was quoted by other historians as Donald Trump rose to the presidency. Lukacs feared that the public was too easily manipulated into committing terrible crimes.
“The kind of populist nationalism that Hitler incarnated has been and continues to be the most deadly of modern plagues,” he once wrote.
He belonged to few academic or political organizations and was unafraid to challenge his peers, whether Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Hannah Arendt, or British historian David Irving. In “The Hitler of History,” published in 1997, Lukacs alleged that Irving was sympathetic to the Nazis, leading to threats of legal action from Irving and the removal of passages from the book in England. In recent years, Irving has been widely condemned because of his ties to Holocaust deniers.
Hitler and Stalin were Lukacs’ prime villains, Churchill his hero. Lukacs wrote several short works on Churchill’s leadership during World War II, focusing on his defiant “Blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech as the Nazis were threatening England in May 1940. Lukacs wrote that the speech was at first not well received and that instead of having a unified country behind him, Churchill had to fight members of his own cabinet who wanted to make peace with the Nazis.
“If at that time a British government had signaled as much as a cautious inclination to explore a negotiation with Hitler, amounting to a willingness to ascertain his possible terms, that would have been the first step onto a Slippery Slope from which there could be no retreat,” Lukacs wrote in “Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian,” published in 2002. “But Churchill did not let go; and he had his way.”
One Churchill book attained unexpected popularity after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Rudolph Giuliani, then New York City’s mayor, held up a copy of Lukacs’ “Five Days in London,” declared he had been reading it and likened New Yorkers to the citizens of London.
Quietly published in 2000, the book jumped into the top 100 on Amazon.com’s best-seller list. But Lukacs was not entirely grateful. He noted that “Five Days in London” had little to say about how Londoners endured the Nazi assault, and he rejected comparisons between London in 1940 and New York City in 2001.
“The situation was totally different,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer at the time. “As a matter of fact, it was much worse in England.”
More recently, “Five Days in London” was widely cited as a source for “Darkest Hour,” the 2017 film starring Gary Oldman in an Oscar-winning performance as Churchill.
The historian was born Lukacs Janos Albert in Budapest. Lukacs had a Catholic father and Jewish mother, making him technically a Jew, although he was a practicing Catholic for much of his life. For the Nazis, who occupied Hungary in 1944, being half a Jew was enough to be sent to a labor camp.
By the end of 1944, he was a deserter from the Hungarian army labor battalion, hiding in a cellar, awaiting liberation by Russian troops. Within months of living under Soviet control, he fled the country on a “dirty, broken-down train” to Austria. In 1946, he arrived by ship in Portland, Maine, his youthful affinity for communism shattered.
Lukacs was a visiting professor at Princeton University, Columbia University and other prominent schools, but spent much of his career on the faculty of the lesser-known Chestnut Hill College, a Catholic school (all girls until 2003) in Philadelphia where he taught from 1946-1994. He was married three times (his first two wives died) and had two children.
A pessimist by definition, he often expressed personal contentment. He wrote warmly about his enjoyment of romance, friendship, books, teaching and the rural life, the “pleasure of fresh mornings, driving alone on country roads, smoking my matutinal cigar, mentally planning the contents of my coming lecture whose sequence and organization are falling wonderfully into place, crystallizing in sparks of sunlight.”
“Because of the goodness of God,” he concluded in his memoir, “I have had a happy unhappy life, which is preferable to an unhappy happy one.”
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[3] Yet that right of self-determination and definition is a sacred right. The very definition of sovereignty. Look to the Sentinelese in their vigorous defense of their island. Survival International actively protects the Sentinelese’s isolation and both India (which has jurisdication) and the United States both refuse to prosecute the killing of misguided missionary John Chau. Is this the origin of the Prime Directive from Star Trek?
Protective Arts 