Protective Arts

MIYAMOTO MUSASHI

In an interview, Nishio sensei unapologetically labeled Musashi as “the lowest form of human being.” Understandable. Nishio looked at how little human emotion and human engagement Musashi exhibited; he never married, never started a family, and spent a life dueling to test his skill and mettle. Musashi manifested a coward’s response, by developing skill from a fear-based approach to life: Life denying skill vs life affirming skill.

Nishio sensei’s is an easy conclusion to make, given that in The Book of Five Rings, Musashi admonishes:

Do not sleep under a roof. Carry no money or food. Go alone to places frightening to the common brand of men. Become a criminal of purpose. Be put in jail and extricate yourself by your own wisdom. [1]

Musashi rejects all the trammels of society and suggests breaking its laws to be put in jail. Why? History was not kind to him. Musashi fought on the losing side against Tokugawa Ieyasu whose Shogunate effectively unified the nation by destroying regional authority and power. He is a man who desperately clings to his martial prowess as the only valid means to define himself:

The only reason a warrior is alive is to fight, and the only reason a warrior fights is to win

Musashi is a warrior adrift, without purpose or cause to serve. So he turns inward to define himself:

There is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter. Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself

The external world is a testing ground, opponents are a means to an end (violating a Kantian imperative) to perfect his art.[2] But Musashi is perfecting the art of fighting during the Shogunate when violence is centralized to the state. He is a man out of time.[3]

Therefore, while I understand Nishio’s characterization, Musashi’s writings merit study. The Book of Five Rings are the reflections of a warrior who has refined the lessons of combat to principles.

When I reached thirty I looked back on my past. The previous victories were not due to my having mastered strategy. Perhaps it was natural ability, or the order of heaven, or that other schools’ strategy was inferior. After that I studied morning and evening searching for the principle, and came to realize the Way of strategy when I was fifty.

The Way of strategy is not a compendium of techniques. It is not a fechtbuch. Musashi is claiming to have discovered something more universal

The true science of martial arts means practicing them in such a way that they will be useful at any time, and to teach them in such a way that they will be useful in all things.

These maxims are easy to gloss over because they are concise and can seem perfunctory, or obvious:

If you wish to control others, first control yourself.

The problem is that we all too often forget these lessons, so Musashi shows us how to be mindful: A hyper-vigilance to external sensory information (Cooper) and to internal processing leading to sangfroid:

Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm. Meet the situation without tenseness yet not recklessly, your spirit settled yet unbiased.

Control and calm in the midst of chaos is Mushin.

Mushin: the term is shortened from the Zen principle, ‘Mushin no shin’ (無心の心). It refers to the state of ‘no-mindness,’ when the mind is not fixed, or cluttered by thoughts or emotion. How do we achieve the Way? First the grounding principle:

Do nothing that is of no use.[4]

Precisely! But it is brilliantly difficult to know when we are doing things that are of no use. It is all too easy to cede the responsibility of knowing what is of use to an authority – the teacher – and in the early stages of every journey we all need a guide. Musashi’s biography teaches us that pain and experience are great teachers.

And as important as learning, pain, and experience are, the highest key to understanding is meditative reflection:

It is difficult to realize the true Way just through sword-fencing. Know the smallest things and the biggest things, the shallowest things and the deepest things.

A poetic way of reminding us to think! When we practice a martial art it is all too easy to focus on the physical aspects of learning; how do I move my arm, what is the timing and sequence of operations, because these are necessary to learn. But we must learn to make the broader connections – among the movements and with our partners from the simple act of rotating (camming) your forearm. Moving your hand as if you are turning a door knob, a simple act we repeat many times a day, is camming, which is makiotoshi, which is ikkyo, and ikkyo solves for the infinite. See the smallest things in the biggest things, the budo is not at the surface. By seeking and seeing the connections we can,

From one thing, know ten thousand things.

There are not infinite techniques. There are only limited expressions of the body that can then generate a large number of responses in a large combination of encounters. I look at it like chess – a game played on a fixed matrix with a defined and small number of rules that generates an incredible number of combinations. Do not get blinded by mathematical possibilities! Not all possible moves are valuable. Thus, by knowing principles you can know all the responses you need. And because any given possibility must be instantiated to be real, you are only ever dealing with precisely one encounter and one response at a time. Each encounter also is with a person with their own limitations that we must exploit, therefore, Know the limitations of the body. But more critical is to know the limitations of the mind:

In battle, if you make your opponent flinch you have already won.

Musashi reminds us that we are playing an opponent, therefore mental combat is even more important than physical engagement. Musashi informs Bruce Lee’s later “Be like water” taken directly from the water section:

With water as the basis, the spirit becomes like water. Water adopts the shape of its receptacle, it is sometimes a trickle and sometimes a wild sea.

In the fire section, Musashi outlined three methods to forestall the enemy:

Forestall by attacking
Forestall by responding to his attack by feigning weakness, then attacking
Forestall by attacking when he attacks and meeting him head on

Bruce Lee expanded these to the five methods of attack – which I covered in >this< earlier post. These lessons are explicit in many arts but not well-integrated in many Aikido dojos despite O’Sensei employing them (“Control the encounter before it is enjoined”), or;

In contests of strategy it is bad to be led about by the enemy. You must always be able to lead the enemy about.

Afterall, the distillation of combat is goal oriented: to win. And to win will often require an attack, which is a mind-set embodied physically:

When you decide to attack, keep calm and dash in quickly, forestalling the enemy…attack with a feeling of constantly crushing the enemy, from first to last.

Because Musashi wrote when violent encounters were likely and because he was a swordsman, the language of winning is combative. Combat is life, you cannot keep them separate:

In all forms of strategy, it is necessary to maintain the combat stance in everyday life and to make your everyday stance your combat stance. You must research this well.

The Book of Five Rings enjoyed currency as a business text and I am sure it will continue to flux in and out of vogue. The point is winning does not necessitate violence red in tooth and claw but it does require decisive action. You cannot win by defending is perhaps the most important lesson for a martial artist who aspires to non-violence.

Which leads to my favorite conclusion for deep consideration:

No man is invincible, and therefore no man can fully understand that which would make him invincible.

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Resources

The Book of Five Rings

Searchable PDF The Book of Five Rings

Heiho of Musashi

Additional meditations on Musashi’s Book of Five Rings and >here<

Visit Ganryu-jima – the uninhabited island where the duel between Musashi and Kojiro was fought.

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[1] Note the similarities with Plutarch’s description of Spartan training – agoge (ἀγωγή).

[2] Mark Manson on Kant.

[3] I wonder if The Book of Five Rings wasn’t a job interview in the same way Machiavelli wrote The Prince to ingratiate himself to the Medici.

[4] “Do nothing of no use” – O’Sensei echoed Musashi in his Secret Teachings of Budo, poem #29. “What use to learn this sword work or that! Cut off all thought of useless things.”

HUMAN FRAILTY

The human body has numerous design flaws. Poor eyesight (40% of Europeans and 75% of Asians need corrective lenses), an optic blind spot, choking remains a problem (air and food enter via the same tube), etc.; simply stated, humans could be better engineered. But our big brains and the division of labor allowed us to become the dominant species and because of social specialization we do not have to have a perfect body design.[1]

A well-versed martial artist will use that big brain to study these design flaws to exploit weaknesses.

The following then is an exploration of how to exploit physiological weaknesses – a focus on bunkai or application rather than the flow (ki no nagare). Effortless control requires that nage understands how to exploit these design flaws first – concentrating on the stopping points in each technique before moving past ‘hitting the points’ to concentrate on the connections between the points.

Aikido teaches some basic nerve, muscle and bone manipulation – exploiting structural weaknesses. The bunkai or application of a coercive force is not emphasized but remains a critical skill to acquire.

Ikkyo. At its essence ikkyo is a levered re-direct. The nuances have been discussed in earlier posts, but put simply ikkyo returns a vector of force back toward the assailant through better levers or superior time. The pin, however, is an attack on the elbow joint. The simplest attack is to apply a shearing force against the elbow. As nage directs a downward force just above the elbow joint, nage then lifts on uke’s wrist – concentrating the opposing lines of force at the elbow. Given that we are playing with uke’s bones we will call this the skeletal level (bone locking). Ultimately nage would severely damage the elbow joint should uke fail to comply. A more subtle attack would be to compress the ligaments using the shyto (hand edge) against the area just at the ‘funny bone’ above the elbow joint. This pin can be executed one-handed by a skilled practitioner. It is a pain compliance technique and therefore not designed to cause permanent damage to uke. Nage can also exploit a true pressure point control, by attacking the nerve complex (again at cavity above the elbow, or along the ulnar nerve against the humerus). The nerve attacks require the highest degree of precision and therefore are more difficult to achieve outside the training environment in the dojo. Again, nerve attacks will only result in a temporary loss of function.

Nikkyo. Nikkyo attacks the wrist joint. There are two primary variants on a wrist lock – the first where the wrist is bent 90-degrees (or more) before applying a rising force (i.e. through the thumb raising the little finger to the sky with rotational energy) or the second where the wrist is kept in line with the ulna so that the forces concentrate at the wrist but the entire forearm is used as a lever. (Understand the physiology of nikkyo and kote-gaeshi becomes nothing more than the anterior [uke’s palm up] application of nikkyo [uke’s palm down].)

[An observational digression: kotegaeshi attacks the wrist along the lines it would normally bend. The converse line of attack is possible but not emphasized in Aikido because it requires controlling the fingers. When I was in high school, boys would test their mettle in a game of Mercy where we would interlace our fingers and force each other’s wrists backwards in a contest of strength and pain tolerance. Small circle jujutsu also exploits the smallest bones, but pain compliance or even breaking the finger joints is not sufficiently debilitating for battlefield efficacy. Working the distal joints to gain control of the larger joints is a great skill to master however, so do not ignore finger locks.]

Once the nikkyo control is established, then nage drives to the pin. The bunkai is a true driving dive to the ground: Having momentarily arrested uke, nage can then transition the hand controlling the elbow higher on the humerus to forcefully drive uke’s shoulder to the ground (to rupture the bursa or break the clavicle). Once uke’s shoulder is on the ground, the arm should be nearly perpendicular. The standing pin is a muscular attack – bracing uke’s arm in the vertical position with the leg, nage will bend uke’s wrist, fingers pointed down, and continue to exert pressure forcing the fingers down. A more sophistical approach would be to compress the index finger alone. The seated pin attacks the bones: with the shoulder joint firmly pressured to the ground, nage will compress and rotate the shoulder joint in an effort to grind and separate clavicle, scapula, humerus and acromioclavicular capsule.

Sankyo. Sankyo is a progressive attack – first establishing control at the fingers in order to then grasp the wrist lock in a continuous cork screw action that ultimately focuses on the tip of the elbow and then locks the shoulder (lock flow). I prefer the bunkai of sankyo as a knife strip or return, but as a joint lock the focus is on the spiraling energy directed through fingers, through the radius/ulna in order to lock the elbow. Continued application of force will then drive the elbow point forward and toward uke’s face, thereby moving uke backwards allowing humerus to lock the shoulder. Nage then cuts the tip of the elbow down to drive it into the ground. If uke preserves the elbow by dropping the shoulder first, then the elbow is hyperextended and nage can execute a pressure lock or break as the situation demands. This would be a standing bunkai. The controlling lock requires nage place uke’s palm on the knee to exert a twisting downward pressure into uke’s shoulder. The seated variant allows nage to apply body weight and additional range of rotation to further compromise the shoulder structure. The grinding separation is the same vectors as nikkyo’s seated pin, nage just has the opposite hand on top. The force applied to uke is the same because we are attacking the same structural weakness.

I encourage the diligent student to continue this analysis and investigation. Yonkyo is an obvious nerve attack. Gokyo differs only mildly from ikkyo in concept and is a wrist destruction rather than an elbow destruction for its pin. Some will explain that gokyo is a knife defense, I would caution the astute student that all these techniques are weapon disarms so do not become blinded by didactic failures.

Some additional pointers to consider and explore:

Irimi nage is clearly a skeletal / neck destruction, a manipulation of the mandible to rotate uke’s head. The more advanced entry requires a preceding control and muscular attack to the sternocleidomastoid or a nerve attack under the ear to the spinal accessory nerve to better gain control over the mandible. If you cannot control the head, then the throwing arm can become a rear naked choke.

The need for corrective lenses is a reminder that human vision has other flaws to exploit. When delivering a straight thrust (jodan tsuki) the line of attack should be down to visual cone. Attacks delivered straight on are harder to see coming and leave less time for reaction. That’s because punches thrown straight at you are more difficult for your eyes and brain to recognize compared to a punch coming from the side. Our peripheral vision is attuned to pick up movement (rods vs cone concentration) and therefore oblique attacks are easier to spot.

In terms of your own offense the advantage here in throwing jabs and thrusts straight out from your chin and back. If the punch is in line with the eye it bypasses the motion detecting rods in your opponent’s peripheral vision making it much more difficult to detect. Learn to improve perceptual speed to overcome your own biological limitations.

While we can not always overcome biology (pain is a necessary to inform our bodies of danger)[2] by studying human vulnerability we can both better understand how to make a technique more effective (create a path of least resistance) as well as how to better gird ourselves against others exploiting the same flaws in us.

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[1] In the early 1980s Taiwan’s army realized it had a problem. More and more of its conscripts seemed to be short-sighted, meaning they needed glasses to focus on distant objects. “They were worried that if the worst happened [ie, an attack by China] their troops would be fighting at a disadvantage,” says Ian Morgan, who studies myopia at Australian National University, in Canberra. An island-wide study in 1983 confirmed that around 70% of Taiwanese school leavers needed glasses or contact lenses to see properly.

The Economist, June 9, 2022

The design of the human eye is an example of “good enough” but not smart engineering.

Because the nerve fibers coming from the rods and cones need to come together as the optic nerve, which then has to travel back to the brain, there needs to be a hole in the retina through which the optic nerve can travel. This hole creates a blind spot in each eye. Our brains compensate for this blind spot so that we normally do not perceive it—but it is there.
Novella, S. Suboptimal Optics: Vision Problems as Scars of Evolutionary History. Evo Edu Outreach 1, 493–497 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12052-008-0092-1

Cephalopods have a much better design – no exploitable blind spot!

An interesting and general consideration is the future of human evolution. Extrapolation from current trends does not bode well for the warrior of the future. See also >this< post.

Color blindness puzzles me. Why does red-green color blindness primarily impact men? Seems odd given that following a blood trail in the green woods is more difficult. I suffer from partial color blindness and can only see the “16” clearly and it takes effort for me to recognize the “7” while the other numbers are lost in the meaningless sea of dots.

[2] Tiger Man was one of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century greatest adversaries. In the television show he was invulnerable to pain because his nerves had been surgically removed. That impressed me as a great thing when I was a young man, just imagine feeling no pain! A more mature perspective shows how deadly that in fact would be: congenital analgesia is a life threatening condition.

8 COUNT KUMIJO

Muso Gonnosuke Katsuyoshi developed the jō from the longer bo staff after his defeat by Miyamoto Musashi. A good retelling of that tale is >here< (An example of learning from defeat: pain as a teacher.)

The use of the jō in Aikido more closely resembles jukendo (bayonet) techniques than it does koryu arts like Shinto Muso-ryu.[1]

o sensei jukendo.jpg — Because I used the bayonet not a stick

Saito sensei preserved, refined and systematized the Founder’s weapons teaching and later innovation by Chiba sensei drew on the constituent movements from the basic patterns to make sansho. Other instructors studied the koryu more directly in order to expand their art and find connections in the movements among ken, jō, and the empty hand. Nishio sensei is a good example. Whatever the path the ultimate goal is to better understand the potential of human motion.

There are any number of systems to learn that will augment your skill with a jō – but they all share basic movements which must be learned as a foundation. The 8-count kumijo is a short path to learn several of the primary motions.

The 8-count kumijo can be done as a solo kata, but in its paired form each player benefits from feeling the weapon to weapon impact as well as learning timing and spacing. The intervals of distance and time are critical elements of every encounter and in this paired exercise both players mirror each other’s movements:

Junte chudan tsuki
Cover
Yokomen (#1)
Hasso
Yokomen (#2)
Stab to the rear
Strike leg / block
Strike hand

Reset to start the sequence again.

Begin in left hanmi and mark the starting position of your feet. At the end of the 8-count sequence you should end exactly where you started.

Junte chudan tsuki. Lower your center with your quads and draw the jo back until the tip is nearly hidden by your front hand. Your back foot (R) will reach behind you to lower your hips but your energy will always continue to project forward. When the motion is complete, the jō should be parallel to the floor. Your weight distribution should be loaded to the back (R) foot and your front (L) will be light – akin to nekodachi.*

Your back leg and hand are the power source, your front leg and hand are directional guides. Chudan tsuki is an explosive thrust. The toe of the front foot starts to advance as the back leg (already coiled with potential energy) releases and the back hand pushes the jō forward – the front hand keeping the tip on target. The release of energy is like an arrow being released: the back hand is the released bow string, your legs are the limbs of the bow and the front hand the arrow rest. As the front foot takes its closing advance, the back foot continues to push forward and the back hand starts a curling snap to culminate nails up under the armpit. The back foot then slides to meet the front back (R) instep nearly at the heel of the front (L) foot. The path of the jō is straight but the curling action of the back hand makes the tip spiral – so that at impact with the target it penetrates more easily.

Osensei jo.jpg — Look at the tip of my jo

Learning to read the maai is critical. As an instant feedback mechanism, try actually striking a post (pell) it will prove very informative! Even when you strike square and true you will initially be surprised at the amount of force your body must absorb (equal and opposite reaction physics). Strike off target even slightly against a rounded target and your jō will go skidding across and past (leaving your flank murderously exposed). As a thrust tsuki is designed to transfer the most amount of force possible over the smallest surface area to penetrate armor and viscera. The spiral has combative purpose both on entry and on withdrawl.

The spiral on the withdraw leads to your second action.

Cover. The covering action at its most basic is to guard against a yokomen strike. But it needs to cover the entire left flank because you will not know which target level your partner may attempt. Therefore, the cover needs to protect head to foot. As you withdraw your jō from the tsuki, the tip spirals down to your foot as you draw the back hand over your head.

You must sink your body below your rising back hand and turn your hips toward the oncoming strike to receive it with sufficient power. Turning behind your jō also provides more cover. The jō must fully interpose between you and your opponent’s weapon. Your L hand is low enough on the jō to prevent a low line strike from disarming you and your fingers are free enough that a mid line strike will not skid up your jō to dismember them. The lesson here is that you cannot rely solely on your grip and shoulders to block. There is a rolling (camming) action in the jō and your legs will take some of the energy – do not push your jō into the oncoming strike! As a cover there is a great deal to study. Once you have mastered the cover, then learn the bunkai. A block is a strike. The sequence of tsuki to cover can be a dual attack – first the thrust to the belly, then the severing of the Achilles tendon. The cover is spiraling hook to your opponent’s lead leg. Your front hand directing your attack whilst the back hand imparts the spiral energy and raising arc. The budo of Aikido is not at the surface.

Yokomen. From the cover position the top hand (R) slides down while leaving the jō in the exact same place and the low hand (L) crosses in front of your right arm to grasp the top of the jō. The new top (L) hand then snaps down and the bottom (R) hand then arcs to strike your opponent’s temple as you move bodily to the right (your opponent’s left flank). In the paired exercise, if both players attack with precision and determination, each should stop the other’s jō with a single clash. Should you hear multiple bouncing strikes (a tap, tap, tap), then there is a lack of proper energy and control. The crucial lesson is the angle of the attack. Too often yokomen is delivered at a looping angle – too much horizontal action. It should be a snappier acute angle to be a quick downward strike. The lessons from weapons transfer to empty hand.

Hasso. From the extended yokomen, slide your top (R) hand forward toward the tip of the jō at least to the midpoint as you use your back (L) hand to pull the bottom of the jō back toward you without changing the position of the angular plane of the jō. The back hand will push the jō down and around with the front hand acting as the ball joint pivot. Simultaneously step your front (R) foot back as you turn your hips. The jō should naturally and briskly invert so your left hand catches the bottom of the jō next to your shoulder line with the jō perpendicular to the ground. This is a clearing action. After your yokomen strike, if your opponent is still in the fight, your lead (R) leg is the closest target. As your enemy strikes at your leg, you must react from an extended position and the return to hasso is when the action between the points is more important than the starting and ending positions. The brisk turn of the jō and hip turning step removes the target and deflects your opponent’s jō in one beat. (The hasso position also protects your upper line from an angle #2 strike whereas the basic cover protects against angle #1. You will see the hasso used effectively as a cover in shansho.)

Yokomen (#2). From hasso your top hand will be thumb down, nails out. To strike yokomen, flip your top hand to thumb up and strike! This second yokomen is delivered from your side rather than your center line. So the action is more similar to a sword strike. The delivery in the kumijo has the same ‘bounce’ test as the first strike. The slight difference here is this strike has less of a fulcrum action and more of a squeezing closing of the grip at impact.

Stab to the rear. From the extension of yokomen, now an opponent is closing at your back. Look over your rear (L) shoulder to spot your opponent’s lead foot. Without changing the angle or plane of your jō, use your top (R) hand to drive your jō into your opponent’s foot using your back (L) hand as a stabilizing guide and final source of power. Leave your hands in their final position. Your top (R) hand should be thumb and nails toward your face and your lower hand (L) should be thumb away from you. You should be grasping the top third of your jō.

foot strike .jpg — Foot strike done, ready to strike the leg

Strike to the leg. Your stance remained R leg forward as you stabbed the opponent at your rear. This allows the opponent to your front to strike again to your forward leg while your attention momentarily focused to the rear threat. Quickly step into the strike using your jō to either block the oncoming strike, or to hit your opponent’s lead leg first. The result here and the precise footwork is contingent on maai and speed. For kihon waza purposes step forward with the back (L) leg and pull your lead (R) leg offline and behind you. You are now in hidari hanmi (L). In the kumijo both players have blocked the low line strike to the leg, so there is tension at the bottom given the jō to jō contact.

Strike to the hand. Because your hand position has not changed, and because you must maintain dynamic tension with your opponent’s jō, your bottom (L) hand should be pushing toward your opponent, while your top (R) hand pulls toward you. The L hand is a fulcrum and your R hand is using the longer end of the lever. This is a brief moment in time however, since your next move, once you recognize the impasse of the jō to jō contact, is to flip the jō and break your opponent’s hand. The low (L) hand is now the ball joint and as you release the top of the jō from your R hand, augment the energy by snapping your L hand nails to the heavens which will rapidly bring the top of the jō to the back of your opponent’s hand.

Reset. From the final strike to the back of your opponent’s hand, perform a withdrawing slide with your jō now parallel to the ground, hips low and ready to perform junte tsuki. Find your starting mark. You should be in left hanmi with the toe of your left foot touching the initial starting point.

Eight basic moves that cover a good number of the potential motions with the jō (Chiba sensei defines 36 basic movements). Study these movements. They are there to inform your understanding of the universal patterns of motion. The spirals that are thrusts with a jō are found in the rising block of karate’s jodan uke. That same camming action provides the additional shearing force for irimi nage. The hand flip used in count #8 is the same action as kotegaeshi. The rising cut to the Achilles (movement #2) will result in the body position used to throw koyuho. Cognate motions and positions show the way to discovering universals.

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GLOSSARY

Chūdan (中段)

Middle line of the body. The primary target and defensive band in Count 1.

Chūdan Tsuki (中段突き)

Middle-line thrust. The opening initiative-taking movement (Count 1).

Hasso (八相)

Rotational clearing posture; removes the leg and restores centerline (Count 4).

Hidari-Hanmi (左半身)

Left-foot-forward stance. Used in reset and leg-strike recovery.

Jō (杖)

Four-foot staff.

Jōdan-Uke (上段受け)

Rising block. Referenced in universal mechanics (not as a counted movement).

Junte (順手)

Standard overhand grip used in chūdan tsuki (Count 1).

Kamae (構え)

Guard posture. Appears implicitly in stance transitions.

Kata (型)

Formal sequence; the 8-count is a principle-extraction kata.

Kumijō (組杖)

Paired jō practice.

Maai (間合い)

Interval of time + distance. The backbone of all eight counts.

Migi-Hanmi (右半身)

Right-foot-forward stance.

Neko-dachi (猫足立ち)

Cat stance. Initial lower-body loading for tsuki (Count 1).

Yokomen (横面)

Diagonal cut to the temple. Applied in Counts 3 and 5.

Tsuki (突き)

Generic thrusting action. Appears in both forward and rear thrusts (Counts 1 and 6).

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[1] Jukendo – the use of the bayonet as the foundation of Ueshiba’s jō should be rather obvious: In his pre-war manuals he taught battlefield techniques. Refer back to this post for broader context and compare Col. Anthony Biddle‘s bayonet with Ueshiba’s juken-jutsu, they are contemporaries and all militaries at that time had a bayonet curriculum.