9. Dan and Kyu…and You’re Welcome!

Ranking in Budo

The subject of ranking terminology in martial arts has been repeated several times by other writers and commentators, but it bears repeating, if only because there are always new students entering the fold. If you are a beginner, the mystique of that cloth black belt around the waist of your teacher may be fascinating. Fraying at the edges, it seems a mark of the “master,” something that you aspire to gain some day as a visible token of your physical prowess, perhaps. Belt colors are the visible symbols of the dan-kyu ranking system, a tradition that, actually, is not all that old.

In what are called the “modern” Budo, such as Kendo, Aikido, Judo, Karatedo, and so on, ranks are based on the dan-kyu system. As far as most researchers can tell, the system was devised (or if not totally devised, then adapted and wildly popularized) by Kano Jigoro, the founder of Kodokan Judo.

By all accounts, Kano was quite an intellectual. As Japan rapidly modernized around the turn of the 20^th Century, Kano strove to recast the traditional grappling arts, collectively called jujutsu, into a universal, systematized, and popular physical activity akin to a Western sport. Kano’s professional career was as an educator, trained at the best Westernized institutions of learning in Tokyo, and he saw much that he thought was dangerous, nonsensical, and/or backwards in the attitudes and training regime of many jujutsu schools of his time. The general public, enamored of all things Western and foreign, looked down upon these schools as being backwards and furukusai, having a rotten smell of the old. Moreover, as Kano described, many schools taught without rhyme or reason regarding their training system, bullied and beat up beginners, fought in the streets, and even engaged in bloody public matches in front of drunken audiences looking for cheap thrills. Hey…sound familiar?

Kano wanted to change all that. There was much that he felt was worthwhile in the Japanese grappling arts, and much that he thought Western sports culture could offer to the Japanese public. Thus was born his Judo, a system of sport, physical activity, and to a relatively minor level, self-defense. Kano and his top students took what they thought were the best techniques and ideas of many different jujutsu schools and incorporated them with what they thought were the scientific and logical process of Western sports and wrestling to create Judo.

Kano systematized the training into a progressive system of learning, from ukemi (tumbling) to nagewaza (throwing), to newaza (ground grappling), to atemi (striking). He encouraged the tightening of rules of contest, within his school and without, held frequent lectures to encourage not just the physical aspect of Budo, but also the intellectual and philosophical parts as well.

Kano had, unusually for anyone in any culture, a broad outlook. Kodokan Judo was his gift to the world. His top students regularly engaged in heated contests with representatives from traditional jujutsu schools. However, he continued to seek the advice and input of jujutsu teachers, and he encouraged the spread of other martial arts, such as when he supported Funakoshi Gichin’s introduction of Karatedo to Japan, and when he encouraged Shimizu Takaji to spread the art of Jo (a short staff) in Tokyo.

Well, one of the innovations of Kano’s was the dan-kyu ranking system. Previously, rankings in the old jujutsu schools were a mish mash. Different jujutsu schools would rank their students according to different criteria, and award ranks with differing names and titles. There was no national standard. Kano wanted to change that. By creating a national uniformity to Judo ranking, he probably knew that the standards could be expanded to include international ranking standards, thereby helping to spread Judo worldwide.

The older system, called the menkyo kaiden system, is really not one general, universal set of ranking. For example, my own school of the Takenouchi (or Takeuchi) –ryu ranks students according to shoden mokuroku (meaning you know the “entry level” methods), chuuden mokuroku (“middle level” techniques) and okuden mokuroku (“secret” techniques). But there is a parallel ranking system that defines what you can teach and how independent you can be, and a third system adopted from the dan-kyu system to make some sense out of this whole big gorilla.

Other schools may have other terms, such as oku-iri sho, kirikami, menkyo kaiden (license to teach based on you knowing all the methods), etc.

In the menkyo kaiden system, when you joined a school, you were a nyuumon; a student who had just entered the school. Then you trained for a while before you attained shoden mokuroku or its equivalent, which is like wearing a white belt for years until you were suddenly rewarded with a black belt.

Kano probably felt it was rather discouraging for beginners not to see visible signs of advancement until you got a black belt, so he devised several gradations of ranking leading up to the black belt, and grades after attaining the black belt. From white to the first rank black belt, you were either a white belt (no rank), or sankyu (third level), nikyu (second level) and then ikkyu (first level), progressively, with ikkyu being just before black belt. Sankyu to ikkyu were designated by a brown belt. Maybe. I’m not sure if Kano devised the brown belt or not. And I don’t really trust some web sources enough to state definitely yes or no.

Upon reaching a physical and mental level that showed you understood the basic principals of Budo, you were given a shodan (“beginning” dan), the first rank of black belt. In Japan, having a shodan is laudatory, but it’s not the big deal we in America sometimes think it is. A shodan simply means you “get it, sort of.”  So now comes the REAL training. That’s what a shodan means. You are actually only beginning the real stuff.

Subsequently, you work towards a nidan (second level), sandan (third level), yondan (fourth level), and so on.

Kano created ten dan levels, awarding juudan (tenth dan) to only the very best of his students. Very, very few Judoka (Judo players) in history have reached juudan. One of the few was the famed Mifune Kyuuzo. If you see videos of him, you may realize that his skill and teaching level was extraordinary. So juudan was a big deal indeed.

In most cases, by the time a Judo student reaches godan, his best competitive years are over and the rankings are awarded based more on technical mastery, teaching ability and contributions to the sport.

The system worked so well, and was so easy to understand, it was adopted by the newly formed systems of Kendo and Japanese Karatedo, and then with Ueshiba Morihei’s Aikido.

So the main demarcation was the shodan, or beginner’s black belt. You either had a black belt (yudansha) or didn’t (mudansha).

You will see, sometimes at seminars, some Judo teachers donning a red-and-white belt in lieu of a black belt. This belt is often worn by instructors who are godan and above, with acknowledged teaching capacity. Since a hakama obscures kendo and aikido teachers, wearing this red-and-white belt is unnecessary, and in fact, kendo teachers don’t wear a colored belt other than their usual cloth obi under their hakama to hold their jacket together.

Whence came the other various colored belts for the other kyu ranks below sankyu? In all likelihood, it probably came from the judo teacher named Kawaishi Mikonosuke, according to researchers more versed in Judo history than me. Kawaishi taught in Europe before and after World War II.

By all accounts an innovative instructor, Kawaishi felt that he needed to add more ranks, especially in the lower levels, to motivate and inspire his European students. Hence, the green, yellow and purple belts to denote yonkyu, gokyu, and rokkyu and whatever else is now used. Quite possibly, he also introduced the brown belt, but of this I’m not sure based on my cursory search online. (He was also one of my Judo sensei’s original instructors, and through that connection I think I learned very strong groundwork, a characteristic of Kawaishi-style judo.)

The thing with adding more rankings, of course, is that if you charge for ranking, you can fill up your coffers more by adding more ranks, each with a fee for being promoted. When I trained in a community Judo club, we paid a few dollars for registering our sankyu and above rank with the Kodokan. That was it. When I joined a for-profit Karate studio, I found there were a lot more ranks I had to pay for and a lot more money involved. Well, the studio had to pay rent and pay its instructors. I don’t begrudge them. But creating more ranks is a clever way to generate more income.

I have heard of some martial arts schools even expanding the ranking past tenth dan. and way past gokyu (or fifth kyu). You can get 15^th dan, for example, in their schools. What they do is up to them, but frankly, in my opinion, at a certain point too much ranking starts to reek of money grubbing. What’s next? 22 and ¾ dan? 49th kyu?

So I remain deeply ambivalent about how ranking is done these days. It’s necessary to recognize the skill level of the practitioner. Officially recognized ranking also verifies that the person is in proper standing with some certifying board. On the other hand, it can get out of hand in terms of money involved, and it can also become politicized, and the worst effects can occur when you combine money and personality politics.

My own iai sensei, the late Ohmori Masao, was highly ranked by the All Japan Kendo Federation. That gave him political power to shield me, I found out, when there were some xenophobic voices in the iai world that wanted me and other foreigners out of Iaido. On the other hand, one of Ohmori sensei’s own teachers, Oei Masamichi, never held a Kendo-sanctioned dan rank. Yet, because of that fact, Ohmori sensei viewed Oei sensei, who passed on the once-secret Tosa province art of Eishin-ryu iaijutsu so it could become the Muso Jikiden Eishin-ryu and Muso Shinden-ryu, as a superlative teacher who did not bow down to partisan politics. In addition, he held the greatest respect for his contemporary, Iwata Norikazu. At a certain point, I read that Iwata sensei decided that he wouldn’t seek any higher rank from the Kendo Federation. He would simply teach anyone regardless of affiliation, as long as they were interested in learning. Without the need for ranking and approval or disapproval by any governing agency, he is free to teach whoever wants to learn from him.

Not seeking ranking, in those cases, freed such teachers from being beholden to certain political bodies that govern ranking. While in general such bodies are good for maintaining standardized levels, as I said, sometimes when co-opted by the wrong individuals, the whole system can be distorted to serve money and personalities. By circumventing ranking, teachers with established and unassailable credentials like Oei sensei or Iwata sensei sidestep those pitfalls.

I am not recommending that everyone abandon ranking, however. I am simply stating notable exceptions to the case, and these two teachers can be considered as being so good, they were “beyond” ranking. Kano also envisioned, probably, that the whole concept of the juudan in Judo originally was that at that point, you were beyond ranking entirely. Not many of us other mortals can claim such skill and teaching level.

Thus the “tradition” of the black belt and dan-kyu system is relatively new. It began with Kano Jigoro at the turn of the 20^th Century so it is about 100 years old. –Not that old, considering that various forms of the menkyo kaiden system goes back maybe some four centuries-plus.

A friend of mine who does research in karate history has also told me that prior to the 1900s, Karate apparently had no Japanese-style ranking system. That makes sense, since Okinawa, the birthplace of Karate, was originally its own kingdom, separate and apart from Japan proper. And, the dan-kyu system, as explained, was actually taken from Kodokan Judo and applied to Karatedo much later in time as part of the Japanification of Karatedo.

So what, you may ask, was the ranking system of ancient Okinawan Karate? Well, my acquaintance thinks there weren’t any. If you were good, people knew you were good, and that was that. Word of mouth spread quickly in a small country like the Ryukyu kingdom. Practice would be performed bare-chested, in loose trousers, without any belts or other forms of visible ranking. The teacher would observe your training and when you attained a certain skill level, he would tell you to go study with his best friend, who specialized in another set of kata. Circulating among the different karate masters and gleaning the best of all of them, you eventually became a master in your own right and were recognized as such because everyone else knew your skill level. Then you began to teach others. It’s a simplified description, but in any case, in “ancient times” your level in Karate apparently wasn’t decided by the color of a cloth belt.

More or less, the same free form, communal method of teaching was embedded in other Okinawan arts such as sanshin (the stringed banjo-like musical instrument of Okinawa) and Okinawan udui, or dance. And just like Karatedo, all that changed under the influence of Japan, when the Ryukyu kingdom became annexed as part of Japan. So now you have distinct, separate schools of Okinawan dance and sanshin, with teaching licenses and rankings bestowed by certified teachers.

Where do you stand in all of this? Well, you stand with whatever your school and system does in terms of ranking. No more, no less, unless you run away and make your own system. Then you can do whatever you please, I suppose.

If I demystified the whole “black belt” mystique, then my job is done. Ranking, as a guide to your level of skill, should not be the primary goal of your training, else you get too wrapped up in the ranking and color of that cloth belt around your waist and not the true goal of the ranking, which is to indicate mastery of training; mentally, physically and spiritually.  A black belt, after all, means nothing if the rest of your life is a shambles, or if it doesn’t help you develop health, happiness and inner peace. There is no profit in attaining a black belt if you end up a vicious, narrow-minded thug. You may have gained a colored cloth belt but lost the world. One needs to have some perspective regarding the black belt and ranking in martial arts.

As the late actor Pat Morita said in the movie, “Karate Kid,” his belt was from Sears Roebuck and he used it to hold up his pants.

8. But…Does it work? –The “Warrior’s Mind”

The other day I walked past a dojo where a group of earnest karate students were practicing their kicks and punches. They looked pretty good in their nice, white, traditional karategi, but after a few seconds of observation, I surmised that none of them, not even their black belt instructor, had a kick or punch that would keel me over with one “killing blow.” And that’s not saying much, because I’m an aging old geezer over 50 years old.

So…does traditional karate NOT work? Is it true that the only really practical martial arts are the ones where you “rock and roll” and mix it up, like judo or Brazilian jujutsu, or the MMA type stuff?

Well, since it’s my blog and it’s my opinion, I’d say for the majority of people in a dojo like the one I saw, not really. But lest you think Wayne-o has gone over to the Dark Side, I’d say maybe almost the same percentage of practitioners in MMA and other nontraditional martial arts are also incapable of really mixing it up.

Here’s the sad truth, as I see it. Whether it’s MMA modern cage fighting or traditional budo, the majority of students in the United States (I can’t say my observations are any good outside of the US) are probably going to be mediocre when it comes to a high stress, truly combative situation. Will they be better off compared to if they had not had ANY training at all? Perhaps. And that goes for myself. I can’t truly say I’d be the last man standing in a violent confrontation, and I’m not talking a drunken brawl over spilled beer. I’m talking a life-and-death situation.

I would say, however, that all things being equal, MAYBE a judoka or MMA practitioner might have a slightly better chance of survival because of the high level of endurance training they undergo, and that on average active judo, karate and MMA players are younger and more reslient, and being younger they are able to train harder and longer. But take out factors of youth and training time, and I’d say any kind of martial arts training, on average, will give you only a marginally better chance of survival.

UNLESS…(there’s always a caveat with me)…unless you train with real intent. I don’t mean coming at each other with a beer bottle in practice and cracking your partner’s head if he/she fails to properly block your swing. I mean with real focus and mental intensity. In other words, you really, really think about what you are doing when you are practicing, and you don’t waltz around like two contestants in “So You Think You Can Dance.”

If you read books by folk who do real research in survival and combat stress situations (and not books by “wannabe’s” posing with camo pants and short little weenie knives), books by folk like Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (On Combat, at www.killology.com) and Ben Sherwood (The Survivors Club), you will note that in many high stress combative and extreme survival situations, the major factor for survival is not physical (although repetitive combat and survival training does help), but mental. You have to have a “survivor’s mind,” or a “warrior’s mind.”

For some illiterate, ignorant nutcases, that means being a stone cold psycho killer one step away from lawlessness. You know, like those bad guys in the old “Karate Kid” movies: “Yes Sensei! No mercy, sensei!” There are, unfortunately, people in our midst who don’t have a mental barrier that keeps them from hurting other people. They have no compunctions when it comes to killing, maiming, stealing or hurting other people. That’s not a warrior’s mind. That’s being a psycho.

But that’s not the case at all when you dissect what writers like Grossman and Sherwood are saying. What they are saying is that through proper training, the mental as well as the physical is conditioned to be prepared and to react properly under duress, without freaking out. Under high stress situations, our body goes through documented physical changes, including the release of hormones that can stimulate our brains in different ways. Our nerves react with either the fight, flight or freeze as stiff as a board impulse, brought on by thousands of years of genetic imprinting. Our breathing gets faster, our vision narrows, our heartbeat speeds up and our blood is flooded with hormones that move us to either run as fast as we can, flail away at our attacker, or freeze in disbelief because “it can’t be happening, it can’t be happening!”

Unsticking our body and minds and then getting them to move in the right way in order to survive a combative or survival situation requires two things: preparation and proper mind set. As far as preparation goes, that can mean proper budo or martial arts training. Whether it’s classical budo or MMA type training, if your body has been properly trained in repetitive combative or semi-combative situations, you should be somewhat physically prepared to do something. Preparation in a survival situation, as Sherwood culls from actual incidents, can be as simple as knowing where the exits are on an airplane before an accident happens, or buckling up your seat belt before you drive on that really accident-prone stretch of highway, or avoiding a darkened alleyway because you heard that it’s frequented by muggers late at night.

Having the proper mind set, what Grossman calls a “warrior mind,” is being able to have some amount of control over your instinctive, subconscious impulses with your cognitive mind, even in the midst of the chaos and “fog of war,” violence or traumatic incident.

Sportive type martial arts advocates often decry “traditional” martial arts practice because they see kata geiko (practice of preset “forms”) as “unrealistic.” However, you could classify a lot of training that modern law enforcement and military units undergo as kata geiko. Running through a simulated urban environment shooting at targets is a form of kata geiko, for example. Repeating evacuation procedures for flight attendants is kata geiko. If, therefore, kata geiko is not any good, why are they still used as a major form of pedagogy in modern systems of combat and survival training?

In budo, kata geiko performs the same function, more or less, as in more modern systems of training. Sans being put in actual danger, kata geiko offers a modicum of safety while the student performs physical movements that may be necessary in high stress situations. By repeating the training over and over, the movements become almost instinctive. Having the movements be instinctive is a good thing, because in actual situations, the cognitive brain can “freeze” or lock up. So if you take too much time thinking, “Well, I’ve got to make a fist. Let’s see, close my fingers together, thumb over other fingers, thrust out the fist, strike the guy with the knuckles of my fist just below his nose…” That’s too much thinking, especially when a part of your brain is screaming, “Oh my God, Oh my God, he’s trying to kill me! I can’t believe it! Let me out of here!”

No. You just have to punch your attacker in the face without having to think about HOW you are going to form a fist and make a strike.

The weakness of kata geiko for classical budo students is that it can become a dance. It can be shorn of their combativeness, their intent, their seriousness. If you don’t practice a karate kata with proper focus and intent, and then you try a half-arsed punch at your attacker and he’s still standing, you are in real deep poo poo.

Lest the MMA and sportive crowd snicker at the kata folk, there is also a danger in too much sportive training done the wrong way. Again, if you treat your training too much like a sport, while you may gain a lot of physical conditioning, you may not gain the proper mindset for a combative or survival event. An actual violent or survival confrontation is not a sport. There are no rules, no out-of-bounds targets, no neutral corners. “Playing” at a martial art like it’s a game doesn’t help in the development of a proper mind set.

That’s why, I suppose, when I was a young judoka, judo was treated a lot differently than it usually is today. I talked about it once with an old-timer judo instructor. We both mused over the differences in intent. In the old days, he said, we never could just amble off the mats to drink water and lie around in between matches. We had to sit up straight and focus on the practice. That was because, I now realize, judo still retained a sense of  budo-ness; it was still trying to develop a warrior mind, not a sports mind.

The judo sensei shrugged his shoulders and commented further. Nowadays, he said, students think nothing of walking off the mat, sucking on Gatorade or water from water bottles, lying on their backs and talking amiably with each other. “Well,” he concluded. “It’s a sport. What can I say? It’s not like the old days. We can’t force them to endure, to do shugyo (severe mental and physical discipline).”

It’s even worse if you talk about the kinds of aerobic exercises that use martial-artsy moves like kicks, punches and blocks. All the examples I’ve seen have not convinced me that they have any shred of real utility in a combative situation. The intent of those exercises is mainly for sheer aerobic exercise. In most cases, I see most of the practitioners executing movements with terrible form, poor kime (focus) and with very little delivery of real force at the point of attack.

One famous movie star testified that after doing a form of aerobic kick-boxing, he felt confident that he could “kick ass.” I don’t think so. He looked pretty good in spandex tights hopping around, but as far as really stopping someone in their tracks with his bare hands…Uh, nope.

Unfortunately, whether it’s classical budo or modern MMA type martial arts, you can’t FORCE someone to develop a “warrior mind.” You can encourage them to focus on training, but it’s hard to outwardly judge intent, focus or mental preparedness. You can only suggest it to others, and prepare your own self, mentally, for such real life situations.

Going back to that karate club with the bad techniques: What I will say is that the members appeared to be trying hard. Some kind of training is better than nothing, and perhaps given where they started from, the members may have come a long way in their physical dexterity. I couldn’t say. So they were crappy. But maybe they are better than if they had done nothing at all. I have to give them that much.

But the biggest fallacy for any martial arts student is to be smug. Performing kata half-assed or “playing” at randori or groundwork without focus and intention are both detrimental to the development of the “warrior’s mind.” I’m not saying that everything should be stoically, deadly, boringly serious. No, what I’m saying is that practice, whether kata geiko or free “sparring,” should be focused and thoughtful, and one should never be satisfied with what you can do. You should always strive to get better in some way. By striving, the mind is actively engaged in honing the movements, in paying attention to what’s going on. By focusing on practice, you focus on training the mind and body to have the proper movements and reactions “stick” to you mentally and physically, with less and less effort.

That, for me, is to have a “warrior’s mind.” And maybe, just maybe, your techniques MIGHT work.

7. McDojos, McDonalds and Masa’s Sushi

Sooner or later, if you frequent the online chat boards dealing with martial arts, you’ll encounter the derogatory term “McDojo.” Like a fast food chain of restaurants, a McDojo is often in a strip mall, offering to give you a quick taste of generic martial arts training, quite frequently from a franchised, formulaic enterprise. Like a fast food restaurant, the food will be homogenized, reduced to the lowest common denominator, and served up quickly. YOU TOO can earn a black belt in X amount of months, guaranteed as long as you pay your money. Hot showers, padded walls, no need to learn too many arcane terms or rituals…as long as you pay your money. You can drop off your kids and leave them there for several hours’ worth of organized yelling, screaming, kicking and punching…as long as you pay your money.

Sounds like the worst aspects of greedy capitalism wedded to organized violence, doesn’t it?

Actually, for someone on the totally opposite end of the spectrum, I don’t think I knock the typical McDojo as much compared to other purists. The way I see it, there’s a wide range of ways you can organize a training system, with McDojos on one end and the really, really “go away kid, yer botherin’ me” traditional dojo on the other end. It’s a spectrum, and the lines get really blurry in between.

It’s not that making money is wrong. Even in the most traditional of dojo, money and capital are needed for a variety of things, such as paying rent, electricity bills, organizational fees and so on. I learned that the very hard way, by not having enough money from student fees to pay all the rent. One has to learn to budget and plan, unless you’re independently wealthy.  It’s very rare to find any budo group that shuns money of any kind. The economics simply would be impossible for it to survive in this day and age, where there are no daimyo lords to sponsor your training.

Anyway, there’s a range. And there’s some good in McDojos too, as long as you don’t expect them to offer you what they can’t.

What McDojos are good for

McDojos are great for a physical kiddie activity that’s an alternative to soccer, Little League Baseball, and so on. Their classes are usually big, full of boisterous kids screaming at the top of their lungs, and having a good time rolling around atop the foot-thick multi-colored tumbling mats. They’re also great ego-boosters for the parents if Junior Boy gets a black belt in half a year’s worth of training.  You can brag about it to the neighbors.

Because they are organized as money making ventures, you can bet that the  leaders of the dojo have a concern that they have lots of kids in the classes, so they’ll pep up the regular training with lots of tournaments, picnics and other family friendly activities. There’ll be frequent promotions. There’ll be lots of tournaments where your kid has a chance of winning trophies taller than them. And maybe, the kids will get a little healthier and develop a little more self-discipline from the training.

If a McDojo is able to offer up all of the above in a satisfactory manner, then it’s a good McDojo. It’s still a McDojo, but it’s a decent one. You can’t knock it for not being what it’s  not supposed to be.

It’s the same with our local McDonalds. It offers decent hamburgers and fries. Not great. Nor would I compare it to the bistro 15 miles away that serves Pan-Pacific New Age cuisine such as buffalo burgers with zesty sesame sauce, or even the cheap Japanese noodle shop on King Street that makes its own noodles and broth from scratch. McDonalds is all about a mediocre meal served quickly with lots of saturated fats that fill you up quickly when you don’t have the time or effort to cook your own food or drive farther out to a better restaurant. It fills you up. You can’t ask for much more. And you know what you’ll be getting. Walk into any McDonalds in any state of the Union, and aside from just a few items that are a nod to the local tastes (in Hawaii, it’s Portuguese sausage, eggs and rice on the breakfast menu, and a bowl of saimin noodles for dinner and lunch), the food is pretty much the same. Bland, but the same. No surprises.

Step into one outlet in the chain of Joe Blow’s Tae Kwon Do and MMA Grappling McDojo (which probably also promotes cardio kickboxing for the parents) and you pretty much get the same kind of training no matter which outlet you call upon. No surprises.

…And that’s about it. You can’t expect much more because they’re not designed to offer more. We’re talking mass production. We’re talking maximization of profits. We’re talking FRANCHISE!!!

Do you detect a smug sense of elitism on my part? Au contraire. The McDojo supplies a necessary need, else they would not exist in such proliferation, just as McDonalds exists because it also serves a need, and profitably at that. I teach and train in a small group. But we couldn’t possibly ever offer martial arts to lots of little kids who are screaming to punch and kick like their favorite anime action character. We simply aren’t geared for that.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are what I would liken to a one-of-a-kind craft shop, or a fine dining experience with limited seating. The food is exotic, the taste is acquired, and it’s not for everyone. Masa’s Sushi down the street seats only eight customers. It is barely profitable, but the proprietor is the chef himself, and he makes sure every one of his customers (and he knows all of them by first name) is happy with his specialty sushi menus. Masa’s personal tastes can’t be easily reproduced and franchised, so it will always stay small. Perhaps a couple of his assistant chefs, after decades of working with him, will open up similar small restaurants in other cities. But Masa’s will always be small-scale, for the connoisseur who knows how fresh maguro should taste, who can discern the quality of the beans used in the natto sushi.

It’s not for a lot of people, and it was never meant to be. In many ways, that’s how a lot of my former teachers and associates teach martial arts. It’s a craftsmanlike tradition, taught in small groups, with one-on-one instruction.

But the variety of martial arts enterprises is a RANGE. In the middle are a lot of modern budo organizations. They are big, like Shotokan or Aikikai. They have “franchises” in which the outlets offer more or less the same fare (specific kata and/or kumite). They also manage to embrace some “small group”  values such as a somewhat high level of quality control and training, adherence to high technical skills development, and so on. These groups may have somewhat large classes of adults and children, but they stress rigorous discipline and attention to excellence. Competition may be possible but it has its place, and flashy, crowd-pleasing impractical techniques (that look good at anime conventions and cosplay fests) are not permitted. By their nature, they won’t attract as many off-the-street students as the dyed in the wool McDojos. They’ll attract people who prefer the integrity of such training, but who don’t have the inclination or cultural or personal character to pursue more idiosyncratic forms of martial arts.

So having a range of martial arts school types are, in my opinion, as natural as having a range of restaurants, from fast-food franchised burger joints to Dennys to one-of-a-kind fine dining.

The problem I DO have is when people try to randomly stick the characteristics of one system of teaching onto another. Usually, this means some McDojo tries to use a methodology or concept that by necessity just doesn’t fit. For example, some unscrupulous McDojo, in an attempt to exoticize their schools, have found fit to go beyond simply labeling their teachers “sensei” to calling their top masters “shihan,” “kyoshi,” “soke,” and so on. Perhaps they’ve exhausted all the shock and awe that came with the title of sensei, or of giving themselves 13th dan ranks.

But come on. I can  understand “shihan” if you’ve been given that teaching title in a very carefully regulated and systematized association such as the JKA (Japan Karate Association’s Shotokan system), but “soke” Joe Schmoe of his own Schmoe-ryu Kempo Kung-Fu Mud Rasslin’ Kurottee? That’s like someone saying, “Yeah, I’m the master chef for the Evergreen Mall’s McDonald’s.” Nope, bubbah. You’re not a master chef. You’re a fry cook.

The baggage that comes with being a soke can take up a whole other blog, and it goes beyond simply declaring yourself the master of your own style, which you may think only entails punchin’ and kickin’ and ninjerin’ around. There’s a lot more to that, and it will, as I noted, take another blog.

That caveat aside, I can see the worth in a McDojo. I wouldn’t want a bunch of screamin’ crazy kids trying to join my own little dojo anyway, just as Masa wouldn’t want people to take up his eight seats and then try to order some Big Macs at his sushi bar. A McDojo has its purpose. A middle-of-the-road large dojo that has lots of students and offers strict training in judo, aikido, kendo, karatedo, etc., has its purpose and clientele, and we have our own little, tiny clientele too. But let’s not mix them up and pretend that they’re all the same.

6. Step by step and inch by inch

Budo pedagogy: progressive learning in budo

Jeremy Beatty, Yagyu Seigo-ryu Batto-iai

A short while ago, a curious incident occurred in my dojo. Well, it was curious for ME. I’m not sure if it registered at all on the other people involved. Anyway, we had an eager, excited new young student in our iai class. I took him through the first reishiki (forms of etiquette) and the first kata. He was doing poorly at it, but I figure, given time, he’d be fine. He just needed to hone his movements. So I told him to work on what he learned for a while and left him alone.

I turned my attention to another student and tried to correct his techniques for fourth kata. The new student ran up to watch what we were doing, even to the point of trying to imitate some of the form. Ignoring this red light, I walked away and approached another student, who was doing the ninth kata of the series. The new student ran up to us too and watched us eagerly, then he blurted out, “Wow! Can I learn that too?”

I had to pause a beat to even comprehend that on this, the first night he actually stepped on the floor to learn iai, he wanted to jump all over the place. After recovering from my amazement, I could only laugh in disbelief and then replied with a curt, “No!”

I turned away. Then my conscience took the better of me and so I turned back to the crestfallen student and explained to him that in a budo training system, you do the forms in a progressive way, going from the basics and moving up to more advanced sets, only through the guidance of a teacher. You don’t jump around, especially when your basics were still so shaky.

I’m not sure if he understood where I was coming from. When I thought about it, I realize that quite often, the pedagogy of teaching budo (which is very true in koryu but holds no less authority in many modern budo that are taught traditionally) may be completely foreign to modern youngsters and teens brought up in a society of instant gratification, infantile pop culturalism, and denigration of excellence and striving. Then again, the pedagogy is not exclusive to budo. The essence of the way you train in budo is the same in many traditional arts or apprenticeships, and in my old age, I think it may have to do with simply the way humans learn certain things: very slowly, empirically and through many, many years of effort.

That’s anathema to people raised on instant-everything. Learn form 1, move on to form 2. They get the sequence, but their body dynamics, timing, distancing…everything that really makes up the art…suck. Try to tell those people to wait and they get indignant. They may protest, “I can do Ippon-Me Mae! Why can’t I learn the next kata?”

Sure you can do Ippon-Me, sort of. You can do it but your basics suck. If you can’t do a kiri oroshi right in Ippon-Me, what makes you think you can do it right in Nihon-Me Ushiro?  You just end up with someone who can do a lot of things badly.

When I first started doing iai seriously in Kyoto, one of my teachers was famous for making his beginning students do only one kata over and over again for hours on end until he/she “got” it.  You never progressed beyond that until you reached a level that satisfied him, and that level was extremely high. Even my main teacher was firm about having me learn one kata at a time decently before moving on. He was less strict about getting it “perfect,” but he did advise me to focus on quality of the kata I knew, not on the quantity.

“If you just practiced these kata over and over…” and he ticked off a list of only five forms, “Then all the rest of your forms will be fine,” he said. Years later, I am coming to understand what he meant. The basics count. Big time. They are your foundations. If your foundations are based on a hill of sand, you’ll never build anything enduring on top of it.

Focusing on the basics is not something a lot of modern-day students want to hear. But it’s necessary. You don’t have to be 100 percent perfect in doing a front kick, for example (most of us will, after all, never reach “perfection”), but you should reach a certain level of expertise in a basic movement before trying to move on to work on more advanced work. However fancier or complex an advanced form may be, it will still look like junk unless the basic forms that make up the advanced form are at a decent level.

Eagerness and enthusiasm are good things to have. But you shouldn’t have them overwhelm equally important elements of patience and striving for perfection of form. I still like to go back to the first kata of Muso Jikiden Eishin-ryu and repeat it several times before I get into the specific techniques I want to work on during practice.

And after all, the best musicians still go back to playing basic finger exercises. Tiger Woods still practices his basic swing, ballet stars still work on basic form, form, form.

5. When it’s time to quit

Budo should be fun! A student enjoys sake through a lotus stalk after hard practice.

I’ve previously written about joining a classical Japanese martial arts.

But conversely, there are times when you should quit a budo.

This sounds like heresy, right? Maybe it is. But at a certain point in time, you may stop and think, “What the hell am I doing? I’m not enjoying myself, I’d rather be (insert a pastime here), and I’m hurting too much after practice.”

That’s when it’s time to reassess your goals and personal feelings about your martial art. Sometimes careful reflection rejuvenates your commitment. Sometimes, if you take a long, hard look at the physical, mental and emotional toll a budo takes on you, it may be time to leave. Okay, you may think of yourself as a “quitter” and you forego rational and logical conclusions and continue to beat yourself up mentally, physically and emotionally. Let up, bro. There are other things in life besides the dojo.

This sounds antithetical to promoting the martial arts, but I’ve left a couple of schools myself and feel better for it. So I “quit.” Hey, I’ve still got a happy life and a decent job. That’s the more important things that matter more than a pastime, be it budo, golf or playing bridge on Saturday nights.

To start with, you have to go back to why you joined a budo in the first place. Hugh Davey (Shudokan Martial Arts Association) and I were sitting in front of a cheap Japanese restaurant waiting to be seated and we conjectured that if all you wanted to learn was how to defend yourself, most moderately athletic people could learn that in a few months, give or take a week or so. So then what comes after that. Between the two of us we had close to 50 years’ worth of martial arts backgrounds, and yet we figured that nothing more really comes out of it if self-defense is all you’re looking for. Learn how to punch, kick, gouge eyes and knee a groin, and the rest is pretty much learning about the mindset and strategies of personal self-defense. You don’t need to perfect a front kick for years to defend yourself adequately. So we concluded that folks like us who continue to practice for decades are probably two shakes short of crazy.

On the other hand, if you enjoy budo practice for other intangibles, such as the physical exercise, the body dynamics, the camaraderie, the philosophy, the history, the sheer FUN of doing it…then you continue budo…Until these don’t become fun any more.

Several reasons may therefore impel you to leave. If it’s the physical exercise, then if you conclude that the physical training is hurting you more than it is helping you, you’re basically beating up on yourself. You could pull back on training and realize you’re not a twenty-something anymore. If that’s impossible given the training requirements of the style, then you may consider leaving so as not to water down the training system.

When you get older, your body ages and weakens. Age has its advantages but as a middle-aged guy, let me tell you, what it does to your body sucks. So you may have to forego training simply because your creaking old body can’t take the punishment anymore. No shame there. We all get old. Football players, for example, age really fast. You don’t see many 50-something-year-old professional football players still in the first ranks of the pro leagues, do you? The body can take only so much punishment from a contact sport like football before it simply gives out. Ditto extreme sports like rugby, boxing, pro wrestling, and so on. The lifespan of athletes in those competitive sports tend to be rather short. Why wouldn’t competitive judo and karate be different?

When I was in my mid-20s, I started graduate school. I was holding down a part-time job to pay the bills and I loved martial arts so much I was training in karate, aikido and judo at the same time, all the while jogging several miles a day. My body fell apart eventually and I realized overtraining was a bad thing. (D’uh!) I had to concentrate on getting a degree so I scaled back my training. By the time I finished graduate school I was getting close to 30 years old, and my schedule didn’t allow the freedom anymore to train as hard, and besides, my body was already aging. I had to focus on only a couple budo that I could do that wouldn’t hobble me when I needed to go into work. Doing competitive judo and karate, and then doing hours and hours of aikido simply was not physically possible for me anymore. So practicality forced my eager hand to scale back on training.

Another problem may arise when political and interpersonal dynamics become messy. A dojo is a place for training, but to keep it going, you need structure. The dojo needs to have a teacher, it needs to be part of a system of budo, and oftentimes, the technical system is held together by an organization. The organization can be big, such as a national group, or it can be an independent dojo run solely by the teacher. In any case, the political and social structure of the dojo may turn sour. Rather than subject yourself to that kind of emotional and psychological anguish, you may rightfully decide to leave.

There was one aikido dojo I used to train in that didn’t feel quite right. Instead of helping each other, oftentimes students who were senior to me (in spite of having trained in aikido for some four years prior, I donned a white belt to practice at this place) tried to beat on me or poke me when I was trying to work slowly on a technique. It took all my self-control not to side kick or punch out those students  in reaction to their snitty jabs because by then I had all those years of aikido, a dan ranking in karate, and a dan ranking in judo.

But where did that snotty attitude come from? It came from the senior teachers, who had a problem with their self-esteem. Soon enough, I began to understand the dynamics of the place. Some teachers hated other teachers. They were jealous of their ranking and spent a lot of time maneuvering to put other factions under their power. It was not a happy place. Eventually, I left. I didn’t want to deal with those off-the-mat politics. Later, I learned that the head instructor finally left and set up his own dojo because he was disgusted with the politics as well, and a huge split fissured the remaining teachers into two parties, with each side threatening to sue the other side in civil court. Do you need that kind of b.s.? I would hope not. Luckily, living in Hawaii the were always alternatives to training at that really spiritually draining place.

There was a karate group I used to train in where the physical training was excellent for young folk. It was intense, physical and challenging. However, over the years I was training, the whole system slowly began to focus on tournament sparring, something I had very little interest in. But I was just one of many low-level black belts. If I didn’t like what the head instructor was doing, then I couldn’t really challenge him on his decision to focus on tournament play to the detriment of everything else. It was his dojo. So I left.

As for judo, I enjoyed it immensely as a young man. But the emphasis in many judo dojo nowadays is on competition, especially since it’s now an Olympic sport. The intensity of keeping up with national-level competitors for me was too much when I had to also work and go to graduate school.

Did I wimp out? You could say that. On the other hand, I had reached a level where I was training with folk from the US Judo Olympic team. They could wipe the floor with me when it came to stand-up randori, but due to my training in Kawaishi-style judo, I managed to hold my own and even tie them up in matwork. And in karate and aikido, I had excellent instructors and trained with a number of very good karateka and aikidoka in the day.

It was just that the politics, emphasis and personalities made things very uncomfortable. And so, because I didn’t HAVE to do it for a living, when it ceased to be fun, I left. After over a decade of training, I walked out the door and never returned.

Although I still miss judo randori, the beauty of doing karate kata and the smooth flow of aikido, I don’t miss the politics and the wear and tear it took on my body. Your experience might be different, of course. One of my friends teaches Okinawan karate and he spent years researching the roots of karate, traveling to Okinawa to study under the best teachers of his system. If I were younger and not involved in what I’m doing now, I’d study with him. His style is wonderfully technical, powerful, and is doable even for older people. When I “retired” from competitive judo, I still helped out with a children’s judo dojo to enjoy being thrown and tumbling around with the kids, until my work schedule precluded that. And I find that my early aikido training really helps my current jujutsu training.

In the end, however, I left. I quit. Yes. I was a quitter.

But I was lucky to have stumbled into other martial arts that seemed appropriate for my lifestyle, personality, work commitments and locations. I eventually began a study of tai chi chuan and classical Japanese martial weaponry. Then I spent some time in Japan and began my lifelong study of iai and Japanese kobudo. Lest it sounds like I was hopping from style to style, I remain somewhat amazed that I have been in the Muso Jikiden Eishin-ryu iai system and the Takeuchi-ryu Bitchuden kobudo for some 24 years now.

The head instructors I met impressed me as teachers and as human beings. The political structure of both organizations were bearable, i.e., they pretty much left me alone and rarely asked anything of me. I’m a cranky old guy and not being asked to do a lot of organizational stuff was a real plus for me. The fellow students I met were accommodating, friendly and helpful. There would be an occasional jerk, but not more so than what you would find anywhere in any endeavor. Moreover, as I aged into my middle ages, I found I could still train without falling apart physically. The training for iai and kobudo could be structured so as to take into consideration my oncoming physical senility. So I stayed.

If the groups suddenly turned into a crazy cult that worshipped Brillo Pads, would I leave? In a heartbeat. I love training. I love budo, but it’s a PART of my life. It’s not my whole life. It enhances my life, makes my life richer, and enhances my health and sense of well-being. I enjoy it a lot. Training in budo gives me a lot of personal satisfaction, health, poise and stress relief. Once it becomes a drain, once it becomes a negative in my life, once it becomes a weird sucky cult, I would quit.

4. The Keikogi–Do Clothes Make the Budoka?

The standard karategi

Okay, so you joined a club. Now you get to buy one of them there cool looking pajama uniforms. After all, half the coolness of joining a martial art is looking tough in one’a them there white PJ’s, right?

Of course, you do run the risk of putting it the outfit on WRONG and then you look like a  total dorkwad, too. So for the complete beginner, here’s a little primer on how to wear those white pajamas. Or, we should call them keikogi (practice outfits); or more succinctly, depending on what you practice: judogi (outfit for judo), karategi (outfit for karate), kendogi…or simply dogi…well, you get the idea.

So that’s the terminology. A practice “uniform” is a something-or-other-gi, the “gi” meaning something you wear. For kendo and aikido people, you also strap on a hakama, a sort of wide breeches. It’s not a dress. It’s got pants legs, albeit they’re very wide, to allow for a wide freedom of movement.

To hold the top together, you use an obi, or cloth belt. For many Japanese martial arts systems, the obi color also denotes what rank you are; white or different colored belts to brown signify a -kyu level (such as sankyu, or third kyu), black means “black belt,” or yudansha (“someone who holds a dan rank). Kodokan judo also instituted teaching ranks, or professorship, which are signified by a yudansha being allowed to wear a checkered red and white belt. We’ll discuss the significance of the belt and the kyu-dan system later.

For now: the clothes.

When I was researching the origins of the white keikogi for an article in Furyu, I found scant historical resources. No one really knows its exact origins, although it’s pretty clear that Kano Jigoro, the founder of Kodokan judo, was probably involved in its development. He standardized the white cotton, thickly woven practice outfit used by judo players when he developed judo in the late 1800s, early 1900s. Like his own judo, the judogi was probably an amalgam of what he thought were the best, most logical and most practical points of traditional Japanese wear and Western athletic wear. Instead of hakama, he opted for a simple pair of pants and a jacket that could be grappled and pulled and yanked without tearing apart. The simple white outfit was practical as well as philosophically compatible with his concept of modern judo: a Western-style athletic endeavor that nevertheless contained some elements of traditional Japanese style shugyo, or austere mental, spiritual and physical training.

As such, the judogi was simple, austere, tough and without any ostentation.

Although there were antecedents, Kano appears to have been the one who really popularized this type of training outfit. In addition, Kano also popularized the kyu-dan ranking system. And we’ll talk about that later as well.

In due time, aikido and karate adapted the judogi.

One karate friend who has interviewed a lot of prewar Okinawan karate masters noted that some of them have alluded that early 20th Century karate was often done bare-chested, sans the stereotypical karategi. There were, they conjectured, two reasons for this: one, the Okinawan practitioners were often poor, and could ill afford specialized training outfits. And/or, in any case, when doing dynamic tension exercises, the sensei (teacher) could tell if the right muscle groups were being utilized by the student if he could see their muscles contracting and expanding. Hence, even now when doing a kata like Sanchin, many male practitioners take off their gi tops.

In any case, the white gi has evolved into blue-colored gi, striped gi, gi with longer tails to tuck into hakama, and thinner gi for karate, outfits with black edging for Korean Tae Kwon Do, and even multi-colored, stars-and-stripes forever gi for good ol’ American style kurrottee gee. Some modern martial arts also take to festooning their gi with all sorts of patches and sponsorships, so that their gi looks less like an outfit for austere spiritual training and more like the pajamas of an Indy 500 race car driver.

Putting the gi on is simplicity itself. Slip on the pants, cinch up the cords so they don’t fall off. Then put the top on. grab the left and right lapels with your two hands and pull them out in front of you. Tuck the right edge into the left side of your body and the left side over the right, so that the left comes around to your right hip. Karategi have ties that help you to secure the jacket in place. Please don’t tuck the wrong side in. Reversing it, so that the right edge goes over the left is only done (in Japan) for dressing a corpse.

Holding the gi close, wrap the obi around your waist and tie a square knot in front.

Simple enough? Not quite. You need to make sure that the obi rides just above your hip bone. For men, it shouldn’t ride too high. For women, riding high is OK due to the different hip structure. When seen from the side, the obi tends to slope down slightly at the front compared to the back. The knot in the front should go around all the obi wrappings. The ends of the obi should come out of the sides of the knot and hang down. If the ends are too long, you need a shorter obi. Or you could tuck the ends back up into the obi itself, so they don’t get in the way.

–Interestingly, I found that tying up the obi in the front was also not standardized until somewhat recently. I was helping Charles Goodin (http://museum.hikari.us/) set up a show about the history of Okinawan karate in Prewar Hawaii. He had an amazing trove of old photos, culled from different resources. Among them were Okinawan karate practitioners dressed in thick judo-style outfits. They held their tops together with a standard cotton martial arts belt, but it was tied in a loop, sort of a half-butterfly knot, and cinched at the side, like how some Okinawans used to tie up their regular, everyday obi and kimono.

The lapels should be prim and closed up. That means the jacket should be big enough so that it at least covers up the chest when you are not grappling or having it yanked around by an opponent.

If you do aikido, you slip a hakama over this. If you do kendo, then you just use an uwagi (top) and a hakama, sans the cotton trousers. Tying up and wearing a hakama can be somewhat more complex, and in fact I found that aikido people do it differently, as do Shinto Muso-ryu jo people, as do kendo people, as do different ryu (styles), so if you are at a loss as to how to wear a hakama, ask your own sensei or your seniors.

Hakama over a gi.

One of the reasons Kano chose a white gi was hygienic. You can wash it and dry it and you don’t have to grapple with bare nekkid men and go skin to skin all the time, catching their fleas and skin rashes. So I think it behooves you to keep your training outfit clean and neat. If you had a particularly exhausting session, wash your outfit! There is no glory or machismo in coming to class stinking of stale sweat, although it might keep people afraid of grappling with you.

Another reason might have been aesthetic: a simple outfit allows you to concentrate on the main point to budo, the training. So my tendency would be to forego the many patches, insignia, and assorted paraphernalia. Stick with basics. As a corollary, while military dress uniforms allow for shiny medals and spit and polish buttons, you don’t go into battle dressed like that. You go in as simply as possible.

As far as accessories go, you’re not prancing down Rodeo Drive, girl (or guy)! Traditional Japanese budo dictates that you remove jewelry, watches, earrings, etc. Jewelry is both an aesthetic distraction and a real danger to you and your training partners. It can get caught during a throw and may hurt you or your partner. Or you may implant your “Waialua High School Class of ’98” ring design on someone’s face when your punch goes wild. Not very nice. Aesthetically, removing jewelry is part of the shugyo process. Training is not the time to show off your wealth or to call attention to your outward beauty.

Going further, being physically clean (yes, guys, wear washed undies; please no two-day old stinkers!) is the accepted norm. Although budo is a physical regime, it’s not considered cool to stink and look like you just got out of two months in the wilderness. Being filthy and gross may seem manly in some subcultures, but it’s not in budo. You should avoid really strong perfumes or colognes.

Lest you think these considerations seem prissy for budo, it’s not limited to these art forms. The same restrictions tend to hold true in many other traditional Japanese pursuits, including tea ceremony (be clean, dress clean, no jewelry or strong perfumes while doing tea), flower, music, dance and so on.

Again, the reason for this is that in all such arts, you are participating in something personally enjoyable for yourself, but it’s also a form of shugyo, of personal training of the mind, body and spirit. As such, there’s a tinge of asceticism to the training. So think Quaker furniture, not Louis XV. Think Franciscan monks chanting in a monastery, not a Black Eyed Peas concert in the park.

A couple other notes, which may turn into rants: First, the dogi or keikogi are meant for training. In Japan, I’ve seen little kendo kids hurrying to practice on bicycles already dressed in kendo outfits. That’s cool in Japan. And maybe for little kids in America, it’s kind of cute to see those little urchins dressed in clean white outfits piling into and out of an SUV, stopping at a grocery store or Pizza Hut on the way home.

But for adults, in America, I would advise that if your training area has a place to change, take advantage of it. Avoid driving to practice dressed in your outfit. Wearing a karategi with a white belt is simply asking for trouble if you encounter some drunken or crazy person with a history of violence while you’re buying a hot dog at the 7-11 on the way home. Plus, mustard stains are hard to get out of a white gi. I know. I’ve tried.

I recall a story someone related to me from my youthful days in karate. He was a professor at a local college, a studious, bespeckled, skinny guy who just started karate. On the way home, two drunken thugs in a beat-up truck noticed him driving his BMW dressed in a white gi with a white belt and started following him, making obscene gestures about what they proposed to do to him when he stopped his car. Fearing that they might injure his wife if he drove straight home, he stopped his car (not the best tactic, in my opinion, but anyway…) on a lonely stretch of the road and stepped out to meet them. We had just begun nunchaku practice so he could only think of draping it around his neck. The thugs ran out to attack him. He told me that the only thing he remembered from training was to swing his nunchaku at an attacker in an arc, so he did that. The wooden tip struck the first attacker on his head just when he was about to throw a haymaker punch, and he fell face forward to the ground. The sudden attack from what seemed like an easy mark probably scared him more than hurt him. The thugs ran back into their truck and drove off quickly, leaving my friend unscathed.

While I was happy that my friend avoided physical damage, I dissected the lead-up to the confrontation and surmised that the whole affair might have not happened had he changed his clothes and not stood out like a sore thumb while driving. And it would have been a sorry affair had we not been practicing nunchaku, but doing something like sword or sai work. Yikes.

When you doff your keikogi, you can simply throw it into your gym bag and head home. If you want to be more disciplined about it, you can fold it flat to be neat and have it take up less room. The pants are laid flat on the floor, then folded over lengthwise so the legs are on top of each other. You fold the pants into thirds, making a neat rectangle. Likewise, you place the uwagi, or gi top, flat on the floor, lapels tucked in, right on top of left. Fold it in half lengthwise at its spline so that one sleeve is right on top of the other sleeve. Fold the sleeves at the elbow and shoulder so it sits atop the uwagi in a rectangle. Fold the gi from the bottom up in thirds so the fold covers the folded sleeves. There, you have a neat little bundle!

You can also slip the pants into the uwagi bundle and then wrap your obi around it, making a neat little package if you like.

As soon as you get home you hang up the gi to air out, or throw it in the laundry.

As for folding the hakama, I found that different people do it differently, so I’d recommend that you consult your sensei about folding and storing it.

3. Mon Iri 2–Joining a budo

The Choufukan dojo in Kyoto, Japan. 2009.

What is the “entering” process? Where do you begin in joining a Japanese martial art? In my last entry, I indulged myself and waxed nostalgic about how I got started in budo. It was fun to compare notes with some readers who talked about their own experiences and motivations. This entry will be more informative, mainly for folk who are new to budo, or classical Japanese martial arts. For the rest of you who have years behind your belts…heck, you know it. But let me indulge.

Anyway, I’ve had enough years and joined enough clubs to have some idea of what to do/not to do, so maybe some suggestions may prove helpful to those of you just starting out.

Finding your way

So let’s say you are either a teenager or adult and decided that hey, maybe some vigorous exercise would take some weight off your gut, and learning to defend yourself might be a valuable plus, and you would like to give traditional Japanese martial arts a try. You went to some MMA workout sessions, some kung fu, Tae Kwon Do, escrima, boxing, amateur wrestling, basket weaving classes…They’re all good, but somehow they don’t appeal to you as much as sweating in those cool-looking white cotton jackets do.

You find some traditional Japanese martial arts school addresses in the phone book, from posters and flyers, or from word of mouth. You call them up, ask to observe a session. Whether you show up stone cold or not, you should always ask to observe a class before jumping in. That’s not only good for you to get the “lay of the land,” but for the instructor to talk with you and go over any preflight paperwork or discussions before the training.

Having a shokai, or someone who knows both you and the sensei (instructor) vouch for your own good character is not terribly necessary anymore. If it’s a very traditional dojo, especially what we call a koryu (more on that in a while), it’s a very nice touch, but no longer a requirement. It used to be a pretty important part of whether or not you got your foot in the door in times past, however, and if you do have a buddy who is already training there, or know a friend of the sensei, that does help because it’s a traditional form of Japanese etiquette. The sensei feels a connection to you, and there is someone he trusts who will attest to your character.

Here’s the deal. When we discuss classical, or “traditional” Japanese budo (martial “arts,” rather, they should be called martial “Ways,” but nobody uses this term in the popular English vernacular), we are talking about those schools that are embedded in Japanese cultural matrix. Some of these traditions and habits are wonderful and I think it will echo or add to your own best cultural habits. Some of these traditions can be maddeningly awkward and (to our minds) backwards. But they’re part of the whole package. You can enjoy and endure it, or you can just leave and do something without that baggage, such as cardio kick-boxing. Nobody’s stopping you. But you can’t have it both ways.

Do you feel bowing to another person or the enshrined spirit of the dojo (training hall) goes against your fundamentalist Christian belief that you bow to no one other than Christ? There’s the door. Don’t let it hit your butt on the way out. Do you have a thing against training with women or people from a different religion, ethnicity or sexual persuasion? Well, as that popular YouTube video says, “Don’t be ninjering nobody that don’t need ninjering.” Don’t expect to have your prejudices and eat it too.

The traditions, in fact, are the flavoring that sets classical budo apart from other martial arts, and if you don’t like that, then you simply have to accept that your tastes run to other forms of martial arts. Case closed.

In any case, you are allowed to observe a class. I’ve been on both ends, as a teacher and as a potential student, and here’s what you really should do to get off on the right foot. Come dressed appropriately. Don’t show up in your ten-day old sweat pants and t-shirt with holes in ‘em and chili nacho stains all over. You may think it makes you look rugged and tough. That only makes you look like a scum bag. You don’t have to be dressed for a Senior Prom, but wear clean, informal clothes such as a washed polo shirt to show respect to the dojo and teacher. Don’t let your boobs hang out by wearing low-cut, tight bikini tops. And that goes for you women, too. Think more like Sunday School, less like gym class.

One of the things you have to get out of your mind is that a dojo is not simply an Orientalish workout gym that’s for purely physical grunt-and-groan training. It’s not. Whether the training space is a beautifully handcrafted post-and-beam, polished and oiled wood structure, or a rented room at the YMCA, a dojo is a place for mental and spiritual polishing, not just physical exertion. So you pay respect with your proper attire. And a traditional teacher WILL notice. He/She will notice things even if he (I’ll use the male pronoun from here on, but there are women budo teachers as well as men) doesn’t say anything about it.

As much as you are checking out the practice and instructor, the instructor is checking you out the moment you stepped through the doorway.

So you come in, introduce yourself, ask to observe the class, and sit where you’re told to sit for visitors. Sit properly, without being too stiff or without slouching over. Perish the thought, but don’t get horizontal and open up a bag of potato chips. Again, quietly observe the class as a way of showing respect. Wait until there’s a break and the instructor has time to talk to you, or wait until the end of the session. Don’t try to engage the teacher in the middle of class unless he makes the first move.

Even if you’re so excited you can barely hold your pee in because you so badly want to join, wait. The worst thing you can do is go up to the teacher in the middle of training and tug on his sleeves and beg him to join. You can jump up and down with joy and wet your pants later, at the end of class. The teacher is busy. And out of the corner of his eyes, he’s watching you.

–This etiquette of sitting quietly, by the way, nearly did in a friend of mine. We had a nice laugh over dinner as he recounted the situation. Having trained in various forms of Asian martial arts for decades, he was steeped in their culture and tradition. One of his friends one day suggested a Western body-movement studio to help rehabilitate his nagging back ache. So he called, made an appointment to observe a class, went to the studio, and sat in a corner and watched. Quietly. All six-foot-six, heavily muscled, bald-head of him sat quietly, without uttering a word, through a whole session while the female teacher and her student worked through body stretching machines in tight-fitting leotards. Shoulder rotations. Leg splits. The teacher (who eventually overcame her initial qualms and actually married the lug) felt unnerved, she said, because of his stoic silence. Was this guy a masher?

In a Japanese budo setting, my friend was being very polite. In a small room with two women spreading their limbs apart, the silence and attentive behavior seemed like stalking. So you should temper your behavior when it is appropriate!

In sitting quietly and observing class, you are already starting the process of entering the training. Observing (kengaku) is, after all, one form of training. The instructor is also observing your behavior and bearing and if you appear attentive, that’s a positive character trait for a potential student.

In a typical traditional dojo, classes are often small, maybe 20 or less students. Bigger dojo, even in Japan, can range higher, but there will be more assistant instructors to spread the teaching load around. Any bigger than 20 without higher ranked students helping to teach and I wouldn’t recommend the class. In Japan I’ve trained in dojo that sometimes only had two people, including me and another student, besides our teacher. And I’ve been in classes where several clubs would train together that had upwards of 50 people, but at least ten of them were fourth dan (a high “black belt” rank) or higher. So the ratio of beginners to advanced people still ended up about 1 to 5. Personal, specific instruction is one of the nice traits of classical training.

Look at the class and study the environment. Besides the student-teacher/higher ranked student ratio, is the dojo hygienic? My first judo hall was in a dilapidated meeting hall whose walls were more termite bodies than wood, but the mats were always kept clean.

Observe the interaction between the teacher and the students and between students.

Dave Lowry, an author whose writings are an excellent resource for any martial artist (his books are available at Borders, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com), advises that you look at the sensei and try to envision him without that magical cloak of sensei-ness. Strip him of his black belt and white gi (training outfit) and in your imagination place him in an outside environment. Is his character someone you would trust in an office setting? In the streets? In a school? With your children?

The difficulty of training will range, depending on the level of skill and the style of martial arts. Back in the early 1960s and 1970s, during the first American martial arts “boom,” a lot of dojo sprang up run by former military servicemen or college exchange students who received a couple years’ worth of training in Japan or Okinawa. Their version of training, therefore, sometimes ran towards the militaristic and–some might say–fanatic. –Ten thousand push ups before you have knock-down-drag-out sparring sessions. That’s how they learned it in the Old Country and they mixed it up with gentle tidbits gleaned from their own modern military boot camp workouts. (“Yes Sensei! Five thousand front kicks, sir! Right away! Hoo-yah!”) I daresay if you like that kind of training, some of those sensei are still around, leading the exercises with arthritic knees and deformed fists. But by and large, I think you should find that modern budo training should be a lot more along the likes of a very focused, attentive physical workshop than a drop-dead from sheer exhaustion test of nerves. –Unless you LIKE that kind of training, and I’m sure you’ll find it.

There are also different forms of traditional budo: The “modern”’ forms such as judo, aikido, iaido, kendo, karatedo, naginata-do. There are also the rarer “old” forms, or koryu, which are distinctive subsets of swordsmanship (kenjutsu), sword-drawing (iaijutsu), grappling (jujutsu), jo, and so on.

Maybe you’re not so drawn to competitive grappling after you’ve seen a judo class. Well, maybe you might enjoy fistic sparring a la  modern, AAU-type karate. Or you like karate kata more than sparring, so you could find your way to a traditional Okinawan style karate school. Or you like banging people over the head with a bamboo stick: try kendo. Or you just want to go through forms for the sheer beauty of it and your competitive days are behind you: try the koryu. There are a lot of flavors and tastes in just classical Japanese martial arts alone.

–Just a caveat: The modern budo forms are often run in America through large national governing bodies. There may be some maverick schools, but by and large, most of them adhere to a standardized and clearly discernible training method. There are national and state organizations for judo, aikido, kendo, and karate. So if you join a judo club and the teacher begins to teach you “secret judo-ninja stars throwing methods,” it’s easy to find out whether this is legitimately part of the art or not.

The koryu schools, however, are by their nature smaller and more fragmented. Where there is only one kendo standard of training, to which many state kendo federations work towards, there are a variety of, say, kenjutsu schools based on different strains and traditions. A Yagyu Shinkage-ryu kenjutsu school will have different kata (forms) and training methods compared to an Ono-ha Itto-ryu kenjutsu school. This is great for preserving a variety of ancient, historical techniques. But it’s also a lot easier for a scam artist to make up his own koryu form because there’s no comparative national and international standard against which to compare it. I’ll discuss the problem of fake teachers later. For now, be forewarned.

There is no national certifying body for koryu in America, but you can go online and make a query in discussion sites like e-budo.com, or at the Shudokan Martial Arts Association, or by reading up on posted stories about koryu at koryubooks.com.

Sign me up!

So let’s say you really like what you see, you like the vibes of the class. You want to join. You talk to the teacher or one of his sempai (top students) for more info.

The reality of modern day martial arts practice is that you have to pay dues. Even in Japan or China, there’s no such thing as the romantic notion that you are going to mooch off your sensei and train 24/7 in martial arts for years and years until you master the Dim Mak Death Touch of David Carradine, God rest his whacked-out soul. Your teacher has to pay his bills, just like anybody else.

How much tuition is reasonable? That depends. Professional or semi-professional martial arts teachers need to eat, so they will charge you appropriately. I’ve heard that in some places, upwards to $100 a month is considered ho-hum. I charge $35 a month, and all of it from my five students go towards covering the rent. My friend uses a spare room in a recreation center for free so he charges only $5 a month to cover sundry supplies. I would think, however, that if you pay more, you should expect more, such as more training time, relatively speaking, or better facilities. Due to its popularity, MMA and  composite grappling schools charge a pretty penny, but you may find that nonprofit judo clubs, which teach pretty much the same thing except you do a lot more bowing, may even be free for little kids, or only a few bucks a month. So tuition varies wildly.

Some schools will charge an initial sign-up fee. That’s appropriate. I’m not a big fan of long term contracts. If you end up not liking the class after one or two sessions, you should be able to quit without taking a big monetary hit due to a contract.

Practice times: I only train once a week due to my busy work schedule, although I really would like to have structured training times at least twice a week. For larger, better-run schools, two or three times a week is a really good schedule. You should try to see if the training times meet your own work and family schedule. Ask what they think would be the best frequency of training for you if you can’t make each and every session.

It is not bad behavior to ask a teacher, at this point in your steps toward enrolling, what the provenance of the school and his own training are. If a teacher sniffs and says, “Only the top students are allowed to learn the secret origins of my Baka-Tare-ryu,” then thank him and leave as fast as you can. Something is rotten. In asian cultures, a mark of pride is the ability to trace oneself to one’s teacher and teacher’s teacher. That shows a connection to an appropriate lineage, like how proper breeding records are a mark of pride for dog owners in the American Kennel Club. If it’s a purebreed, he’s got papers. If it’s a mutt, then he should say it’s a mutt.

The sensei may then ask about your own background. He’s as curious about you as you may be about the school. Be forthright and honest. Consider it like a job interview. If you were in a different martial art school, but left, be honest about your training history, but (like describing a former job) don’t badmouth the previous teacher or school needlessly. It reflects badly on you. If you had legitimate reasons for leaving, then of course you can offer them up: You moved across country. You hurt your back so tumbling is out, kendo is in. You can’t do competitive judo anymore due to bad knees so you thought you’d try naginata…

I wouldn’t say things like, “Man, I didn’t like krotty point competition and quit because it’s unrealistic in a street fight, I wanna learn your jew-jits because it looks like it kicks ass!” Uh-uh. Bad idea.

When my jujutsu sensei encouraged me to start a club in Hawaii, he said, “Don’t worry about how strong or tough new students are, or how good they are in martial arts to begin with. Get students who have good character, because your students’ personal character is how people will judge your school.”

I’ve made mistakes in character judgements over the years, but by and large, I’ve come to realize the truth of my teacher’s words. I try to encourage people with good character to stay, and shady characters to leave. When you are talking to a potential teacher, be on your best, most humane behavior. You don’t have to make “big body,” you don’t have to show how macho you are. Just be yourself, and hopefully you, unvarnished, are a person that the teacher will like.

In other words, how you comport yourself, how much respect and self-control attitude you display may have more impact on a teacher like me than any physical or technical skills you may have in the beginning. And at least for me, having a sense of humor is a plus. Budo is serious. It can be deadly. It can be exhausting (but hopefully NOT sadistic). But really, the reason you signed up is because it’s a whole ton of fun, isn’t it? Laughter, when appropriate, should be allowed in the dojo.

Readers: Comments on your first encounters with a budo school?

2. Mon Iri–Entering the Gates

Waimea Bay, North Shore of Oahu, where I was born.

Everyone has a story about how they got started in budo. For me, it was because I had the classic 98-pound weakling syndrome.

If you were to try to find my original dojo, you’d end up in a dead end road facing a field of six-foot tall scrub grass and weeds. The dojo where I first started my budo journey is no longer to be found.

But almost a half-century ago, there used to be a derelict cast-off building that the sugar plantation in my home town loaned out to a group of Nisei plantation workers to start a judo club, the largesse of the company probably stemming from the notion that any sport or pastime that kept its workers and kids happy, healthy and out of trouble is good for business and productivity. The building sat in a dirt lot, cleared in the middle of the sugar cane fields, along a poorly maintained asphalt black top road with more potholes than you could count.

The wooden building would shake noticeably if a heavy judoka was thrown. Us young boys used to joke that the structure was held together by the termites holding hands. A plastic tarp covered thick padding on the floor, and as I recall, there was a raised stage in the front. It was probably a town meeting hall before it was converted.

That humble small-town dojo was where I began my budo journey.

I was, as I said, a typical candidate for those back-of-comic-book ads that promised bullies would no longer kick sand in your face if you signed up and paid for their regime. I was sickly, without much social graces, awkward, and a bookworm. My mom remembers having to force me to go outside to play. I’d rather be reading library books in the house. If neighborhood kids picked on me, I’d run home crying because I didn’t know how to fight, or at least that’s how my parents recalled my early childhood.

By the time I was in elementary school, even a tomboy girl picked on me in the schoolyard. She could smell my timidity. That was one of my first experiences with girl-boy relationships, and I’m sure it scarred me for life. First she beat me up. On top of not knowing how to hit back, I already had a notion that I wasn’t supposed to hit girls. Then she felt bad about beating me up and in an odd way got attracted to my hopeless nobility, I guess, because after that J let me to play with her during recess. And she kissed me under the cafeteria table one day because she thought I was sweet for not punching her back. Maybe that’s the pattern of my love life since then: women beat me up and then take me in. Who knows? Maybe it’s a Freudian thing.

Anyway, one day I got tired of being picked on, teased and laughed at for being a Clark Kent without a Superman alter ego. I didn’t want to get beat up anymore. I didn’t want to play organized sports like Little League or Pop Warner football (my younger brother did all that, and so well that I couldn’t hope to compete), so why not judo? I watched a session. Judo was fascinating. It had a cultural component. It was Japanesey. It could teach me how to stand up for myself in a schoolyard fight. I could get strong!

For five dollars a month, I signed up. During the first couple sessions, all I did was practice ukemi. Tumble. Front, back, side, forward roll, back roll. Once I got the hang of that, the old codgers took me to Level 2: learning how to take falls while being thrown all over the place in randori.

I was taught very little about throwing somebody ELSE in the beginning. The idea was, I suppose, that I had to learn my ukemi first before anything else. If I could get launched clear across the room and still end up unscathed, then I could take on anybody in a judo match and not get too hammered.

So for an hour-and-a-half each session, my body, so unused to physical exercise, was put through the mill. Old-school judo folk will know what it’s like: warm ups including stretching and calisthenics. Then strength and endurance exercises, like squatting and hopping around the room. Ukemi. Randori. Session after session, I was thrown and thrown and thrown.

I used to get home, take a bath, and then lie on the living room floor, my body in complete pain. My mom, bless her soul, would rub Ben-Gay and Salonpas all over my aching back and legs and console me that I could always quit if it hurt so much.

I was determined, however, not to fold. This was my first foray into the weird, wonderful, odd world of real physical sports. It was the first time I ventured into the world of men and boys, that strange world of locker room humor, male bonding, old men teaching young boys the intricacies and lore of a sport. How could I quit so soon? I needed to prove something to myself. I needed to feel like I belonged to a male lodge.

At bedtime, I literally crawled from the living room into bed. And I’d do it again the next practice session.

Eventually, I was taught a throw or two. And then newaza, or grappling on the mats. My introduction to newaza was inadvertently very “old school.” I was thrown down and the sensei put his forearm around my neck. I struggled…And then I saw black. I woke up, dazed, with the sensei looking at me with a surprised look on his face.

“Don’t you know to tap before you get knocked out?” he asked.

“Uh…I was knocked out?” I said. “You tap to give up?”

The sensei laughed and then proceeded to show me how to tap out from a choke. Good thing he showed me that before he did an arm bar on me!

Eventually the aches and pains of pushing my body in physical exercise eased. I progressed to learning different throws. My body grew leaner, stronger, and in growing confidence, I felt more capable and self-assured physically.

As a child, I had grown up reading about heroes and super-heroes and their feats of derring-do. Judo was a concrete, real-life adventure that made me feel like one of those heroes, in a juvenile, adolescent sort of way. Hey, Bruce Wayne became Batman through sheer force of will and training! Holy tomoe-nage, Batman, I could train hard too and become a super-hero, if only in my mind!

One funny outcome: other kids stopped picking on me. It wasn’t because I had become more belligerent. Far from it. Yet somehow, I suppose my newfound self-confidence kept all but the most rabid school bullies away from me. The more I practiced, the less I found myself being physically bullied. One of the reasons I started judo was to defend myself, but self-defense became less and less a major priority. I began to have other goals: developing greater finesse in my techniques, learning better body movement, engaging in tournaments, and so on.

I was far from the best judo student. There were a host of other kids far stronger, faster and more technically adept than me. But I had found a place. I felt like I was part of a social group. I was part of a group of guys, engaged in a sportive ritual, and I belonged. No matter how well or badly I did on the mats or in a tournament, I was a member of a dojo.

Developing a healthy body from judo eventually opened up other avenues of physical activity for me. During high school, I left judo practice for months on end to pursue more popular sports such as football, wrestling and weights. But I kept going back to judo. Something about the structure of the dojo environment, the budo culture, kept pulling me back.

Even now, I have a fuzzy, warm nostalgia for that old dojo and its termite infested walls. It may not have had the fanciest facilities, but it was a great nurturing ground for me when I was a child just learning how to be a man. The judo dojo accepted me for what I was. There were no first string, second string or bench warmer status to demean you. We all participated, we all got some kind of ranking step by step, we all trained together and bowed and paid respects to each other, regardless of prowess. It was a great introduction to an egalitarian, communal system of physical activity.

I started from there. Little did I know, at the time, that this introduction to budo would lead to a lifetime of training in various budo, ending up where I am today. My own private life is all the more richer for having started, not just because of my improved physical health, but because of the mental stimulation, friendships and experiences I enjoyed through the years, gifted to me by budo. And so, perhaps, that is why I continue to train, and study and learn.

…So readers, what about it? What were YOUR first motives for starting budo, and how did you start?

1. Starting late in the blogosphere

A view of Kyoto from the hillside dojo of my sensei.

Okay, so here’s my first blog about my musings on classical budo. I arrived late to the blogosphere because, frankly, I didn’t think much about it. I mean, how much ego tripping can even I endure writing about myself, probably mainly for myself?

Then again, after seeing the movie “Julie & Julia,” I thought, well, OK, blogging does assume you have a fan or readership base (even if it’s yourself), and it does assume a certain amount of self-gratification, but what the heck. I did a magazine (the late, lamented “Furyu”) once, so why not try this out. Only this time, I won’t be putting any money into it, won’t be losing money, and as such, I’ll simply focus on my own classical budo experiences and thoughts.

It will be a more internalized series of musings, perhaps rambling, perhaps idle, maybe possible profound (if only to my dog), but without limitations as to esotericness or general readership comprehension. You want general basic martial arts chop sockey, go read “Black Belt.” This blog is basically my own ramblings, to set in words some of my loosely flowing thoughts.

Umm…Hmmm. So let’s see how this bloggy thing works!!! Off we go!