Author: Ellis Amdur Page 5 of 12

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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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.  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.

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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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.

Any competition with rules is actually a kind of kata. For example, how would MMA change if you could bite? How about finger breaks? Like the legendary (did it really happen?) ‘wrassling’ of the Mississippi Riverboat Men, eyes could be popped out of people’s heads, noses bitten off, fingers broken one after another. Then again, isn’t the reality of human combative situations that fighters often have friends and allies? Shouldn’t it be permissible for someone in the audience to throw in weapons, like one of the old ECW wrestling matches?  How about a live grenade and stop the entire show right there? True story follows:

When I was a young man, training muay thai in Koei Gym in Asakusabashi, Tokyo, a Thai boxing coach tried to recruit me to go to Thailand to fight, specifically to be a two-meter-tall, half-starved middleweight freak farang who would travel with him to the rural areas to fight village champions and make money through betting on the outcome. I said that as middleweight, I’d be so weak that I’d barely be able to move. He said, “Yes! We bet on you to lose! If you win, someone might throw a grenade in the ring.”

Kata is any imposition of order on the bloody chaos of combat. The only question of value, then, is if the pattern drill serves the purpose for which it is created. If I bring a pattern to a tailor, will the clothes fit? If I bring a music score to an orchestra, do the various parts create harmony among the musicians? If I develop a martial arts pattern drill, does it create training scars, habits that actually make you vulnerable rather than stronger, or does that kata enable you to integrate skills so that you can use them effectively, without hesitation, in combat or competition, whichever is the purpose?

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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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In a recent blog, I questioned the mythos around the founders of various traditional ryūha. However, beyond the question of whether the founder truly created his martial system in the archetypal manner that is the usual account, there are several other questions:

• Did the putative founder actually have any role, direct or indirect in the creation of a particular fighting system?
• Did the founder even exist?

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