KogenBudo

Akuzawa Minoru: The Body is a Sword: Revised – Ellis Amdur & Rob John

Preface

My original essay, which the reader will see below, was published about ten years ago. It was written subsequent to a visit I made to Akuzawa Minoru’s dojo. Rob John, one of Akuzawa’s senior students, sent me a commentary, where he pointed out several areas where I did not fully perceive or well describe what Akuzawa sensei was teaching. Rob gave a richer, more detailed description of things. Last year (2019), I visited with Akuzawa sensei and Rob again – we’d not spent any time in each other’s company for many years. We spent a wonderful afternoon comparing and contrasting our respective training regimens, and my appreciation for what the Aunkai (Akuzawa’s system) is doing is all the greater, particularly as it is different from my own. One of the most valuable training experiences is to find something different, and rather than trying to re-contextualize it based on one’s own knowledge, appreciate it on its own merits.

Upon my return home, I retrieved Rob’s old critique and sent it back to him with some questions. He informed me that his understanding on several issues had changed. After some back and forth, we decided to do the following: We will publish my original essay as is: It still has some value, but also, it shows well what an informed outsider to a martial system can see and what he may miss. Following this is Rob’s updated commentary, which shows what an informed insider is, in fact, doing. The reader can contrast the two descriptions – we think this will be a productive exercise on several levels. First and foremost is the information. Secondly, it may assist others, outsider auditors to one or another martial practice, in better observing what that other movement system is doing.

The Body is a Sword: Ellis Amdur

I first met Akuzawa Minoru in Seattle at the family home of Rob John, one of his long-term students. We spent a long evening in conversation – finding ourselves to be kindred spirits in many areas. We’ve had very different training histories, and had studied very different disciplines, but we found that we shared a passion for training bordering on insanity – that core understanding that, with enough work, we could get stronger and better each day.

I’d previously spent the afternoon training with Rob along with a training brother. I’d previously seen individuals with extra-ordinary abilities in internal strength, among them Wang Shu Chin, Chen Xiao Wang and Feng Zhi Qiang, but I had little idea at the time what they were doing. I’m sure Rob will not be offended when I say that he was not in the same universe as these luminaries, but no matter. Even as a relative beginner, he showed me some abilities that didn’t make sense to me, based on my understanding of how bodies should work. What was more intriguing was his presentation of some of the basic elements of a logical, coherent training system, developed by Akuzawa, to develop a martial body.

There is no doubt that martial arts systems, despite their many benefits, can obscure the development of a martial body, as one becomes preoccupied with the techniques, kata sequences or the ideology of the school within which one is enrolled. The system can obscure the way to the skills that the founder had.

It is my understanding that Akuzawa was a gymnast in his younger years, something that certainly endowed him with strength and flexibility. He was once a sanda competitor (a modern competitive Chinese martial sport, that includes kick boxing techniques along with throwing methods). He also had some experience with xingyiquan, and Aunkai, the system he created, explicitly includes elements from Chinese jibengong (basic training exercises). He was also somewhat influenced by a several year enrollment at the Daito-ryu dojo of Sagawa Yukiyoshi. His primary influence, however, was a Yagyu Shingan-ryu  instructor. He studied on a personal basis with a teacher of this brawny, powerful school, a different faction of which Ueshiba Morihei studied for a few years in his youth. Yagyu Shingan-ryu includes both taijutsu and very powerful weapons training. However, rather than training in kata, Akuzawa trained in specific physical mechanics that have universal applications. From all the studies I have just enumerated, he has developed a progressive instructional method, that he describes far better than I could do:

By studying the shape of our normal standing posture, we learn to feel how gravity works on our balance and work to eliminate any excess from the body. This refers to unconnected muscles, tendons, ligaments, joints, as well as harmonizing internal physical movement so that one movement does not overpower another. By understanding our skeletal structure, we learn the optimal placement of our joints, and how they interact against an incoming force. This is a direct way to recognize your axis as you adjust and harmonize your balance against a resisting force.

About ten years ago, I visited Akuzawa’s school in Japan. It was their usual night for sparring, but without my requesting it, he shifted the class to a focus on fundamental practice, so that I could get some sense of how they train and what they accomplish through it. The class was a combination of some of his solo training regimen, followed by two-person practices: postural stability tests, both on one’s feet and on one’s knees, and sparring similar to t’ai chi push hands.

So What’s Going On?

Please take what follows with more than a few grains of salt. I’ve only had one chance to experience Akuzawa’s training, and therefore only got a circumscribed view. The limitations were not only on what I was shown, but on what I could perceive.

It seems to me that the first step of training could be likened to framing a house. The basic exercises serve to eliminate weaknesses and in-balances in the body that would make it difficult to learn internal skills. These exercises are rigorous, slow movements with deep postures, including sumo wrestling’s shikko, movements from very low ‘horse stance,’ and an exercise called tenchijin, which is derived from Yagyu Shingan-ryu. I found myself wondering, however, if the long, slow, rigorous standing postures could lead one to rely on the scaffolding that one has so rigorously built. I think of this as “Terminator Body“– imagining the scene in the movie, where, flesh burned away, all that is left is a titanium skeleton, that perfectly ratchets from one position to another, always perfectly braced through joints and skeleton to manage any incoming forces. This is in contrast to pure internal strength where one has the ability to absorb and redirect incoming forces, as well as instantaneously exert power oneself using a relaxed body. It was my perception that most of his students seemed to be using this bracing principle to some degree, but definitely not Akuzawa himself.

It was my sense that the first stage of his work is the mastery of the static postures – fluidity and adaptability with an integrated body come later. He focused on a vertical stance, with some ‘pressure’ (not tension!) throughout the body. At the same time, he emphasized that I should bring the scapula together and downwards. I do not know if this is an integral part of his use of the body at the highest level, or part of the “framing process” (my phrase). This does puzzle me, however, it seems to me that one should be able to keep the chest and shoulders relaxed without drawing the shoulders down, which seems to bring an element of rigidity into one’s stance.

At least in the class that I participated, Akuzawa did not seem to focus on the tantien, the middle area of the body that functions as a kind of differential gear redirecting, absorbing and amplifying force. I am not asserting that this absent from the Aunkai training system – simply that it is not see it emphasized or even referred to in the single class I participated.

I had just come off a knee operation, so was not able to do the classic Daito-ryu derived exercise (aiki-age) where one, kneeling, faces another kneeling person who attempts to pin one’s arms and one raises one’s own arms with relaxed power and no localized tension. Akuzawa and I did do it standing. He has the ability to explode spontaneously, without apparent preparation or wind-up. It felt the same as it did when, as a young man, I had a firecracker explode in my hand.

At this point, let me take a little side-ways jump. I have always been fascinated with Yagyu Shingan-ryu, even though many of the shihan in the various lines who demonstrated publicly did not, themselves, impress me. What has always struck me, nonetheless, was this luscious tensile coiling that they do with their limbs, creating reciprocal tensions throughout the body which, when released, simply explode. For those of you familiar with Chinese martial arts, it seems like baguazhang performed by a bajiquan expert: not the pure ‘dragon-body’ of great baguazhang, but still, a kind of enormously powerful wringing, as if the body was composed of interlaced rubber strips. What Akuzawa’s  instructor  imparted to him appears to me to be the epitome of the possibilities I saw within those movements when practiced by other Yagyu Shingan-ryu practitioners.

The result of this was, when I grabbed hold of his arms, it was as if I was punched through my skeleton at the point of contact, wherever that was. Thinking of his tenchijin exercise, he seems to make his body in a kind of star-fish/five-point star, in which the arms and legs twist, storing energy, around a central axis – the spine. He moves very fast and hits and kicks with truly frightening power (I held a thai pad to feel a few kicks). I trained at Koei gym in the 1970’s, where my senpai was Igari Genshu, the great middleweight muay thai champion. Up to that date, I’d never felt a kick as hard as Igari’s. I won’t say that Akuzawa’s was ‘harder,’ but it was exponentially heavier, and it appeared to me that he was still holding a lot in reserve.

Where Akuzawa really astonished me, however, was his understanding of the use of weaponry and the body. Aside from my own training of nearly forty years in two classical martial traditions, I believe I have observed, on numerous occasions, just about every extant koryu remaining in Japan. There are more than a few that I admire, but there are few, besides my own, that I’d ever want to do. One of the few of the latter was Yagyu Shingan-ryu. The Goto-ha Yagyu Shingan-ryu, in particular, has two weapons practices that I’ve always loved: its bojutsu and a kenjutsu set. The bo has techniques with much the same dynamics as the tenchijin exercise. Because the bo does not have much mass, one cannot reliably defeat another person unless there is a way to exert heavy impact while using the weapon at high speed, all the while maintaining control of both weapon and body. The Yagyu Shingan-ryu use of the body guarantees this. They also have a kenjutsu set with really massive bokken with large padded tsuba. They smash the weapons together very hard, and joined, slowly, powerfully, push the two weapons together, trying to uproot each other, and cut to a vulnerable spot. Upon my inquiry to a senior member of one faction of the ryuha, I was informed that they are methods of power generation, and that in previous generations, one would do these kata alone for long periods of time. There are strong possibilities that these kata, done at their peak, were a method of internal strength training.

Akuzawa proved that to me without a bokken. We were standing around at the end of class, talking and he said, “Of course, all of this is, in essence, kenjutsu,” and clasping his hands, he made contact with my forearms, and began moving from one side to the other, disrupting my balance at each move, uprooting me slightly, then suppressing me, in fluid continuous movements. This was not the clackity-clack type of kenjutsu, where one clashes weapons together, one point after another, or the subtle raptor-like slashes of such schools as Komagawa Kaishin-ryu or Shinkage-ryu. Rather, it was a breaking of the foundations of the stance of one’s opponent, each move levering me deeper into a ‘double weighted’ situation, where my own options to counter became more and more limited. I finally got to feel the potential of Yagyu Shingan-ryu kenjutsu, and I was right – it is a very powerful training method that would be extremely useful, particularly for armored fighting.

I can only think of Ueshiba Morihei’s formulation that aikido is a manifestation of the sword. I am convinced that he did not mean something as simple as aikido techniques are kenjutsu techniques without a sword in one’s hands. I have discussed, in my book, Hidden in Plain Sight, the spiritual implications of likening oneself to a tsurugi, the Chinese straight sword that has such symbolic import in Shinto cosmology. In addition, I think that Ueshiba was also referring to aikido as tanren, the forging process where the body is tempered like steel, a flexible, layered structure with incredible strength and a cutting edge. Akuzawa is living proof that this possibility always existed within Japanese martial arts – and that it still exists today.

Commentary by Rob John on ‘The Body is the Sword’

Ark accepts that his background in gymnastics gave him a significant head start, but perhaps not in the conventional way. Training alongside Olympic hopefuls was (predictably) physically arduous, and it was the need to compensate for his competitors’ greater natural athleticism that led Ark to experiment with using the stretch of the body to offset load.

One line from your commentary struck me as particularly interesting and worthy of further comment: that Ark had “emphasized that I should bring the scapula together and downwards.” This is accurate, but more can be said about what exactly Ark was trying to impart. At the time he made this comment, I believe Ark was still trying to isolate and diagnose the main observable differences between what he was doing with his body and what others were doing. Ark is categorically NOT looking to fix the body in a given posture or alignment. As you say, rigidity is absent from Ark’s own usage. Indeed when one uses Ark’s organization, there is no tension involved in the shape he was describing. It might better reflect Ark’s thinking to talk about the coming together, rather than the drawing together, of the scapula.

In this instructional video, Hejinghan demonstrates an almost perfect flatness of his back and chest—a characteristic I’ve also observed in the son of Chen Peishen, an instructor of Small-Frame Chen t’aijiquan. While Ark used to focus on dropping the chest—likewise describing the result as ‘flatness’—this is organizationally and visually distinct from what Hejinghan displays.

Ever since I’ve known him, Ark has had this characteristic alignment, or organization of the body:

Ark’s particular understanding of ‘flatness’ can’t be achieved unless you’re relaxed and properly aligned. This removes load from the major muscles by bringing it instead to the tendons and fascia (筋膜). But a specific stance or posture is never the end in itself. Rather, Ark cultivates an alignment that induces a precarious balance: instead of stability, he seeks the constant sensation of regaining balance. This invites a focus on the ‘front’ (yin) channels of the body from the very beginning of one’s training. More on Ark’s ‘precarious balance’ later . . .

During his gymnastics training, Ark intuited how to bypass the shoulder muscles, instead, loading the tendon in the armpit and connect this to the psoas muscle, and beyond.

 

Contrary to some people’s impressions, Ark does not ignore the dantien. (Indeed, if the body weight is loaded onto the tendons and fascia using precise alignment, you have no choice but to hook up directly to the dantien.) It is only that—characteristically of Japanese instruction—Ark tends to couch this point in different (and sometimes interchangeable) terms. He uses koshi (腰) or doutai  (胴体) to refer to things familiar to those focused on conventional dantien mechanics. Ark wants to avoid the incorrect impression that he is trying to replicate classical Chinese body mechanics, which he fears would arise if he spoke directly in terms of the dantien – not because of ‘territorial’ issues, but because he is doing something that is somewhat different from the classical model. He believes that whole-body alignment and connectivity are more fundamental: provided you understand the effects of gravity on a body engaged in a whole-body stretch, use of the dantien should follow naturally. If your alignment is pure, movement that does not oppose gravity will arise from the dantien as a matter of course. *(Caveat: He may relinquish more control to the chest when standing upright with knees straight, for strategic purposes)

As just mentioned, there are both important similarities and important differences between Ark’s way of moving and generating power and the methods of the Chens of taijiquan fame. While there is an overlap between how Ark organizes his body and the ‘classical’ model for internal strength, what fascinates me is the uniqueness in his approach. In a way, he worked with the same ‘chain’ seen in the classical model, but rather than focus on the feet-to-waist connection, Ark experimented with the relationship going downward: starting from (i) the head, neck and chin and proceeding down (ii) the chest, waist and legs.

For Ark, a connected body is the necessary foundation without which essential skills cannot emerge; stretch exercises, correctly executed, fortify weak areas. His real fascination lies in exploring what it means to control –  independently at will – distinct parts of a connected body.

In the past, Ark would boost his power by stepping strongly. But when he stepped in this way, he did not store pressure, as often seen in orthodox Chinese styles. (By the storing of pressure, I refer to mechanics visible at 2:42 in this video of Chen Zheng Lei.) In Ark’s approach, there is no need to use dantien storing mechanism, because he can gain significant momentum by simply taking a step. For him, this is a ‘cheat’ in power-production: he avoids the need to generate extra pressure, reducing the time needed to execute his desired movement, and sidesteps the need of a very powerful dantien. Yet the paradox is that the way he steps is powered by the dantien. So, (i) torque, (ii) stepping, and (iii) a highly developed ability independently to articulate different parts of his body to create a spike in pressure, are just some of the methods Ark uses to supplement his basic ability to generate force. All of these are fueled by his core method of alignment.

Many internal art practitioners seek to pass forces to the feet, producing a feeling of ‘rootedness.’ Ark, conversely, seeks to decrease and ultimately to erase any pressure at his feet. He asks: why, in fact, should we seek stability, or rootedness, at all? He instead experiments with instability, which need not be the same as imbalance.

A good pointer towards Ark’s notion of (in)stability is to sit in a chair, with your legs on the floor. When someone pushes against your outstretched hands, you can use the chair to push them away. In other words, they end up pushing through your body into the chair. The chair’s fixed structure results in the force naturally being transmitted into the floor (and back through your body into the pusher). Now, raise your legs into the air and observe your body’s reactions. Your chin naturally ‘tucks’, and the back of your neck rises, to maintain the body’s balance on the chair. You may even notice forces condense into the waist—showing how, with a properly relaxed, stretched and aligned body, the dantien is naturally engaged. This position is not—and will not feel—stable. If someone pushes your outstretched hands, you can quickly feel how it is nearly impossible to push back. Instead, you can use your own precarious balance to ‘capture’ the pusher’s balance on contact. This notion is (partly) what drives Ark’s alignment, organization and movement patterns. Now imagine sitting instead in a wheelchair, held on an incline by its brakes. As you disengage the brake, the wheelchair descends. Again, your precarious balance captures the balance of the pusher, but now, with him off-balance, the acceleration due to gravity knocks him down. And, since the force that brings him down is gravity, rather than a push, your opponent struggles to pre-empt or sense how to react.

I believe Ark has sometimes struggled to understand others’ inability to share in the intuitions and sensations that he obtained organically. But, looking back over the years—and I can’t believe that sixteen have passed since I first met him—what continues to strike me is Ark’s ferocious innovation. His skills at the time I first met him, at the time you originally wrote your article, and even now, continue to evolve and improve rapidly.

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7 Comments

  1. Keni Lynch

    Thanks for this.

    I found Ellis’s explanations more useful, to be honest, and much more closely aligned with my own understanding of internal work.

    Although I appreciated Rob’s focus on the aligned body, I got a bit confused by his image of a guy in a wheelchair on an inclined plane… I mean, where is the attacker on the inclined plane..? Does the degree of incline matter..? And which direction is the incline going in..?

    I mean, because I just couldn’t imagine the first, I thought maybe Rob meant the man was in a wheelchair with the decline going backward. So, when the attacker pushed him, and he lets the brakes off his wheelchair (presumably not totally), then the attacker would get thrown over the defender backward (as in a sutemi-waza). If the brakes were gradually let go, however, the attacker presumably could follow the defender down along the inclined plane, and so the defender would lose all advantage.

    In the best case, I suppose, if the attacker was hurled over him and landed behind him, as the wheelchair screamed backwards, the defender may be able to roll over the attacker with his wheelchair, thereby destroying him twice (brake sparks included for maximum burn).

    Then again, he could lose all control of his wheelchair (due to the brakes not working on a steeper incline..and due also perhaps to his eyes and neck not being quick enough to swivel around to see backwards). Careering backward (fast, depending on the incline), wouldn’t the defender risk being catapulted over the bad guy, now laying prone in a coma at the base of the incline, which could lead, in turn, to the defender getting knocked out upon landing wheelchair up over the dead body of the attacker..!

    But now, let’s look at the attacker.

    How is the attacker supposed to attack someone on an inclined plane..? Wouldn’t his footing already be compromised…since he is forced to dorsiflex his feet..?

    I could only visualize the attacker in mid-air, pushing someone who was sliding down (the inclined plane). But this didn’t make much sense to me, since before the push, the attacker would already be falling straight down with gravity.

    I could only imagine the attacker floating, kind of like the Roadrunner running off a cliff, hovering in midair for a second before plunging to the earth… but eventually, even “he” must fall. I just find it hard to picture what Jon means.

  2. Ellis Amdur

    There is always such a struggle to explain the interaction of two bodies in three dimensional space through words. Whatever elegance or lack of the metaphor, the idea is that one is sort of like one of those inflatable balloon men that does not fall over when in very UNSTABLE positions – https://tenor.com/view/adultswim-loitersquad-balloonman-bully-cops-gif-4890669 – and that in trying to catch/exert force on something intrinsically unstable, you destabilize yourself. That’s my experience anyway – I feel like I’m falling into space in such a way that the opponent should not be able to hit me – yet he does. With incredible power. And by the way, it’s very different from the classic taijiquan yielding – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-WuZmK_FIg

    • Rob John

      Appreciate the feedback Kenny – as Ellis noted these things are difficult to convey at times,and I think he did a wonderfully succinct job of illustrating the point.

      Ellis is correct – the admittedly ungainly wheelchair model is there simply to convey an idea that the person is not entirely “stable”.

      Recently Akuzawa had a discussion with a friend who practices and competes in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. During the conversation he said, “Look, why don’t you practice from an unstable position?
      Most of the time I see you start sitting down with both feet on the floor. How would you successfully kuzushi someone while you are sitting down and have your feet up in the air? (Think of a V-up posture) When you’re sitting down and have the feet in the air, you have no choice but to align the head in a particular manner, and then you’ll feel something substantial in the Hara. When this occurs, you can’t use a normal push, or pull – either of those actions would compromise yourself, but done correctly you’ll unbalance the person you touch”

      The gist was, there is a precarious balance of sorts that he does use in off balancing people, and putting yourself in a posture that eliminates bracing is one way to train the brain to recreate it.

  3. Keni Lynch

    Thanks Ellis. Yeah, I am familiar with the effects. The descriptions both of you gave are partially right and have been extensively written about in various manuals of the internal styles. Relax all body parts (for the chi to flow), adapt to your attackers tension, then send them on their way. To be honest, I don’t really see much in Akuzawa’s work that’s all that different to traditional internals, although he does seem quite stiff to me and rather slow. Even his uke’s seem all too ready to give up once they lose their balance (To be honest, I found the same with Systema folk). Personally, I think the most valuable tip in this article is the one about by-passing the shoulder. That’s something I’ve been working on recently as well. Also, of note is how the chi can descend, as well as ascend. I use both and more. But it is a major step to realize you can also create similar dynamics moving the chi down as well as up. I look forward to any follow up articles. Cheers 🙂

  4. Keni Lynch

    Hi Rob, thanks for the clarification. It makes much more sense now. My dad uses that very same exercise to unbalance people. I think he’s been doing it for years. Legs up, sitting on his haunches (very unstable), and, it seems, no one can push him further off balance to the ground, before they get thrown themselves. Yes, of course, come to think of it, if Akazawa was encouraged to think in that direction by an MMA guy, then yeah, he would have been thinking “Heck, he’s right..!” “Why don’t I find a way that’s not totally reliant on having a stable base (mainly my feet and legs). I came to the realization a different way: by simply following the logic of the fascia system. With enough meditation and research (but, of course, that’s the crux of it… who has time these days?!?), it is possible to replicate much of the advanced work the masters do. I don’t consider myself a master so much as a craftsman, seeking to understand the human condition. I use the martial arts to realize the wonder of being human. As such, art is secondary, since most art is self-centered and has little to do with my quest. It’s almost as if you have to look sideways to see the secrets. You can’t get them by imitation or directly trying (in my experience). You have to soften your personality, let go of what you know, and start from scratch, as if you were a baby, naive without any agenda (other than a burning desire to fathom the truth). Sometimes when answers come to me, I know their worth, but they come unassumingly, almost boringly, plain. One thing is for sure, there is no “absolute technique” or even “absolute rock-solid internal body movement” which rules them all. In my view, at my level of development, for what it’s worth, I see only layering and focusing on different points (as is appropriate on any occasion). The idea of ‘floating’ for example (apropos the inflatable doll analogy) is useful but not always. It’s just another drill. But it is important, since it constitutes the first principle of sensitivity, without which very little else works, even when you have the other layers. In Yang Taiji, we call it Ting Jing or “listening energy.” Happy research guys..!

    • Alex

      Hi Keni
      I really enjoyed Ellis’s article and Rob’s further explanations but not nearly as much as your subsequent posts. They are comedy silver – not gold standard, as that honour is rightfully reserved for something special, like your “Soft Aikido Seminar” video on YouTube. I mean, Dude, that is…actually I don’t know what that is…that thing you do with your hands where you just point at the uke and they fall over, well, it’s pretty cool. To be fair though, I can do something similar with my dog but he does demand I rub his tummy afterwards and give him a biscuit.

      It seems to me that you mansplaned over a helpful analogy with some weird stuff. I mean seriously, I don’t think anyone is actually attacking people in wheelchairs 🤣

      Ok, all joking and jesting aside, you stated that:”To be honest, I don’t really see much in Akuzawa’s work that’s all that different to traditional internals, although he does seem quite stiff to me and rather slow. Even his uke’s seem all too ready to give up once they lose their balance…”.

      It’s the penultimate part of that sentence that needs addressing. I do not say this as a sycophant but as someone who was lucky enough to have their eyes opened: the speed at which Ark can move is, at times, almost imperceptible; and the power he generates is almost incomprehensible. But he has created a system of training that will allow anyone to access the origins of that power in themselves. This is a gift. I’m not saying its better than other internal training systems – I’m not (and never will be) in a position to do that.

      Lastly, I would encourage you to attend one of Ark’s seminars, just to give yourself and your students the opportunity to experience something real.

  5. Keni Lynch

    Thanks Alex. You mistook my comments as being critical of Akazawa’s method. My intention was not to scold him but to query the explanations given to understand him. “Slow” is not always bad but if you have people with little balance, and they fall when you go slow, then they will obviously fall if you go fast. Slow is good only for training in “deliberate practice” of the best moves (aka ‘kata training”). The ukes falling down so easily in his classes has to do with the ukes themselves and is no reflection on Akazawa himself but it could be related, hypothetically, to Akazawa being unwilling to work with people who have greater balance, stronger structures, etc. On the other hand, unless you deliberately advertise to recruit such students, then, like all of us, we get what our local environment can provide. In other words, a motley crew of relatively inexperienced people.

    When you speak of “imperceptible speed” and “incomprehensible power”, you may recall that these things are precisely the same goals in the internal styles. When I say he seems “quite stiff,” I am saying, in a biased manner, that I prefer being soft (as that is also the ideal in all internal work) but I am biased toward softness for a reason (because that is the internal ideal). As for the “slow” comment, I meant he is so slow that it would be relatively easy to find counters and ways out of his moves. The ideal in the internals is also to “hide” what we know by making our moves small. Akazawa, then, for the moment at least, is more interested in fleshing out large movements for his own better understanding of the body as well as for teaching purposes.

    In a way, he and I are interested in much the same questions, although my interest also includes the energetic source of the internal martial arts. There are various theories and it fine with me if Akazawa does things his way and I do things my way. I am also, perhaps like Akazawa, good at getting people to do advanced work right off the bat. My explanations differ though.

    Regarding the “no touch” video you saw of me. That is only one way, one I know, a valid one, of moving people without any obvious contact. All moves are easy once you know them but what I teach is how to know them and what knowing them means, the scientific origins of the moves. This makes it easier to recall them and to use them right away. I have not had the pleasure of attending any of Akazawa’s seminar although I know people who have. There is a stage in our development whereby physical training is no longer needed to understand advanced moves. They come with meditation. Advanced knowing means you can look at what someone knows and see clearly what they don’t. That is, if I am not mistaken, the meaning of “knowledge.” I am glad that you have found Akazawa helpful in your journey to understand the martial arts. I am glad your eyes have been opened, but if they have you would know that he is not the only one who holds secrets and is willing to impart them (or some of them). As for experiencing something “real,” I would like to share a couple quotes I very much agree with: “Humanity cannot bear very much reality” (T.S. Eliot) and “The trouble with fiction is that it makes too much sense, whereas reality never makes sense” (Aldous Huxley).

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