Author: Ellis Amdur Page 4 of 11

Jim Ingram at ninety years of age

An elderly man in ball cap and windbreaker walks his toy dog around the neighborhood. Beneath the visor of his cap, eyes smile from behind his glasses. He waves and nods to people as they pass. A harmless old man. But what the passers-by don’t know is that they have been assessed for potential danger. This smiling old man constantly scans the environment for threats and items that he might use as weapons: without paranoia, he catalogues them. In his own estimation, he won’t last long in a fight at his age, so this, too, he takes into account.

On June 12, 2021, Jim Ingram died at the age of ninety. Among other things, Ingram was the founder and head of the Amerindo Self-Defense System. He created this mixed system, drawing from numerous combative traditions, mostly Indonesian in origin, but also including modern military combat training, all filtered through Ingram’s real-life experiences. He considered this to be a family art, making all of his students part of that family. His students all call him Oom, meaning Uncle in his mother tongue, Dutch.

When Ingram heard of the death of one of his seniors or contemporaries, he would say: “When a teacher dies, a world of knowledge is lost.” In the following, I share a little bit  about the man who gathered, tested, and passed on this knowledge, and how his personal vision of survival intersects with other martial traditions–about this world of knowledge that has recently been lost.

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On May 8th, 2021, I conducted an interview with Harvey Konigsberg, 7^th dan shihan under Yamada Yoshimitsu, head shihan of the United States Aikido Federation. Konigsberg sensei is one of Yamada sensei’s most senior students. He has been a member of the New York Aikikai for over fifty-five years. He also has his own dojo in Woodstock, New York where he resides with his wife Carolyn and four cats.

Konigsberg sensei is also a professional artist. What makes him unique hinges upon two elements: his masterful ability to combine aikido movement with the penetrating stroke of his artistic brush.  In whatever he does, he is an artist working his craft. His aikido informs his art, and his art informs his aikido. When one views his aikido paintings, they come alive. They capture your spirit. When you are on the mat with him, he takes your center in an instant, but always with a smile and a grin: as if to say, “Wow, how did that happen?”  I hope that those who read this interview will come away with a glimmer of what this amazing teacher and artist has and continues to give to both his aikido students and to his fellow artists.

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When born in a static culture, one can largely follow in one’s parent’s footsteps. In such a world, barring invasion or changes to one’s environment, things are largely unchanged from generation to generation. One has seen one’s father and mother pass through each stage of life before you. From birth to death, one is guided all the way.

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My father was forty-one years old when I was born. As a young man, he achieved his dream of being a lawyer. However, he was an idealist, and couldn’t tolerate the compromises he had to make, particularly in regards to truth, in order to function within the American legal system. After the 2nd World War, his father invited him to join him in the family business, and that was intolerable in other ways. He soon quit, and worked for the rest of his life honorably, doing a job he did not like, to ensure that his family would live well and safely. He practiced a little law, mostly pro bono, and otherwise provided information on real estate transactions for businesses (a rudimentary version of what Google and Facebook offer customers today)

In between those two periods, he was a spy.

I have moved this essay, excerpts above, to my Substack, where a lot of my essays, particularly those not directly concerned with martial arts will be published. 

Eight o’clock arrives, but no detective, so I went up to order some dinner from the front. The little seedy man, the kind whose nickname is always  “Whispers” or “Pittsburgh Phil” in B movies, sidled up to me and said, “You say you know Jack . . .”

I replied, “I didn’t say that.”

He sneered, “But you said you’re going to meet him.”

“Yeah, I called him on the phone.”

“Just why did you do that?”

“Why don’t you find that out later. . .” and just looked at him, deadpan.

He couldn’t hold a direct look for very long, just said, “Oh . . .” and scuttled back to his seat.

I have moved this piece, excerpt above, to my Substack, where much of my shorter work, particularly that not directly concerned with martial arts, will be published. 

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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 aikidō, there is a certain man, born in 1940, who had remarkable influence on many individuals, both positive and negative. 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 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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