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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