Author: Ellis Amdur Page 3 of 10

1982. I hated teaching English, so I got an idea. I searched the Tokyo yellow-pages, and found “Private Detectives.” There were four or five Japanese names, and then: Torrance Investigations. So I called and arranged to meet the man himself in a Tokyo Station restaurant at 7:30, Saturday evening. We exchanged brief descriptions and hung up. I got there at 7:15.  I figured if I was going to get a new job, I shouldn’t be late.

The restaurant was a run-down place in a sub-basement floor. You bought meal tickets at the front, taken by white-jacketed snot-nosed young waiters with curly permanents, and three maître’d: little old Japanese men in tuxedos with brilliantined hair. It looked like an old, very neglected hotel restaurant.

I scanned the place, and there was no Jack Torrance. He said on the phone he was 6 feet, 190 pounds, fit, slightly balding. “You’ll know me.” I’m rather nearsighted, and could see in blurry vision a white man on the other side of the room. Didn’t seem to fit the description, but who knows. So, I went across the room and I could see he was a seedy badly-shaven little guy, balding with a fringe of white hair. He looked up at me with a sneer.  “Yeah?”

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When Milton A. “Hank” Gowdey, 67, was seven years old, some tough boys at Webster Ave School, Providence, called him a sissy and beat him up – until he began to study jiujitsu. [1] Gowdey sensei, born in 1919, would recall that he was bullied, because he was the only Scottish kid in a mostly Italian neighborhood. The other kids thought he was rich because he had a football. He began studying Yabe-ryu jiujitsu in 1926, at the age of seven. [2]

Tired of being bullied as a boy, he went to the dojo, or school, taught by Master Sesu Quan Setsu, a Buddhist monk, at the Biltmore Hotel. [3] “When I began [4] studies with the master, training sessions were after school three days a week, $7 for five lessons” he said. “Basic training was to serve the Sensei, or teacher. We students cleaned the dojo, cooked his rice and tea, never to his satisfaction – for at all times he was testing our humility. My parents allowed me to stay from Friday after school until Sunday evening. Sleeping was on the tatami (a straw mat). I came to conceive not just by words, but mostly by osmosis, an understanding of the way.”

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For those familiar with the martial art of aikido, there is a certain man, born in 1940, who had remarkable influence on many individuals, both positive and negative, and for many others, who had only peripheral contact with him, he assumes immense symbolic importance, far beyond many of his contemporaries. This was Chiba Kazuo.

I have practiced with many individuals who trained to be powerful in the service of their country or an ideology—they had a cause. I’ve practiced with many others who wanted to be powerful because it is, quite simply, a wonderful thing to be strong. I’ve practiced with many others who strove to become powerful because they had been victimized before, and they wished to either ensure that they could ‘stop it’ this time around, or more pervasively, transform themselves so that they no longer had a sense of personal identity with the helpless victim they once were.

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Japanese martial arts, as codified systems known as ryuha was developed in the Edo Period (1603 – 1868 CE). Also known as the Tokugawa era, this was perhaps the most successful totalitarian state ever developed. Through an elaborate system of checks-and-balances, the Tokugawa family, in the role of shogun, ruled a vast archipelago, comprised of separate feudal domains. Unlike Europe, they were able to maintain this essentially feudal federalism even with the rise of an economy based on the capitalism of the merchant class.

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Shatili Village [1]

Deep in the Caucasus mountains of the Republic of Georgia, there was a place where people still wore mail armour and fought with swords and bucklers well into the 20th Century. This wasn’t a theme park or living history experience, but the region of Khevsureti. Occasionally referred to as The Land of the Lost Crusaders, (a label coined in the 19th century by Russian author Arnold Zisserman, and which scholars from the region have vociferously denied) Khevsureti is a remote region where travel is difficult. Villages that can be seen from one another may have been three days’ walk apart, down a ravine face, across a ford, and up the other side. Perhaps this isolation explains how the Khevsur people managed to preserve their traditional forms of fighting for so long.  

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Foreword

BaduanJin 八段錦 (‘eight brocade exercise’) is a classic system of Chinese physical culture. Such systems are generically called qigong. There are an almost innumerable number of qigong sets that integrate, in different proportions, breathwork, stretching, physical exercise and meditative practices. Some are crafted to enhance health; others are for the purpose of developing power or martial arts abilities. Each set can have quite different effects on body and mind. Baduanjin is known to enhance skeletal-muscular fitness and vascular health, as well as enabling practitioners to modulate and control their emotions. [1] The term ‘brocade’ can be interpreted in a variety of ways. One that the author finds most useful is that brocade refers to the body’s web of connective tissue (fascia, ligaments and tendons). These are stretched and strengthened through the integration of specific physical movements with certain breathing techniques.

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What Are Kata?

It is in vogue—and has been as long as I can remember—to deride kata as idealized, sterile, impractical choreography, a poor simulacrum of real combat. Only through unrestricted freestyle practice, such critics say, can one truly understand the realities of combat. Before I question this absolutist assertion, I will start by saying that I’m a proponent of sparring, and freestyle practice—but it is not fighting any more than pattern drills are. Only fighting is fighting. Once you bring weaponry in, how do you do this safely without killing each other? In fact, that is true for unarmed competition as well.

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Araki Murashige (荒木村重)

Araki Murashige was a warlord in central Japan, from an area that encompassed Settsu, Itami, and Izumi (all part of current-day Osaka prefecture). For a relatively brief period of time, Murashige sided with Oda Nobunaga when the latter’s sphere of influence started extending into his region. Murashige was a man of culture and leadership, exemplifying two values Nobunaga treasured. He became one of his top generals, alongside such legendary warriors as Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Shibata Katsuie, and Akechi Mitsuhide.

Nobunaga was a paradox—an elegant beast. His character was perhaps similar to one of Machiavelli’s princes: intellectually curious and highly adaptable, yet utterly ferocious when opposed, a man responsible for the torture and slaughter of tens of thousands of men, women, and children.

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