Author: Ellis Amdur Page 8 of 12

Rather frequently, I get asked how I’ve published my books. I also get asked how I write my books. I’ll answer the latter first. Depending on the book:

• I think of things and I write them down
• I think about things, research them, think about them some more, and write them down
• I imagine things and write them down
• I sit with my fingers on the keyboard and think – I wonder what will happen today – and then something other than me writes them down.
• What I never do is write an outline

OK, that’s taken care of. How did the manuscripts get from there to HERE?

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Some time ago, I was sent a set of related questions on licensure and succession within koryū:

• What are your thoughts on koryū that predominantly only give out one menkyō kaiden, essentially declaring that person to be sōke. Would that mean the rest of the senior practitioners are not allowed to teach or open their own school, since they didn’t achieve the highest possible teaching license?
• What’s your thoughts on those who stay for decades, even though they would never receive a full teaching license, or how about other schools that might take a person thirty, forty or fifty years to get a license. Is it fair to a practitioner in one of these schools who, even though they have already learned and mastered everything there is to know, they are blocked from teaching? At the same time,  they are unable to break away because they would lose legitimacy or recognition to be a certified instructor?
• How about those that face discrimination against them as foreigners, whether it is openly shown or not? In other cases, there’s clear favoritism, either to a family member, or to someone who plays the school’s political games–only Japanese people–or people the sōke or shihan likes–ever get promoted. What’s your thoughts on that?

In what follows, I address these questions as if talking to someone specific: “You.”  I do not mean the person who asked the initial questions whom honestly, I don’t remember (it’s been three years since I received the questions). It’s a rhetorical device only.

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Ballet Boy

In Dueling with O-sensei, I presented the story of the ballerina who had a challenge match with a taekwondo black belt. Here’s another ballet story that definitely deserves retelling.

My wife was a principle dancer for the American Ballet Theatre, and for some years after she ended her career, she would teach during ABT’s summer intensives for young people. One year I went along with her, and after her class, ended up in a bar-restaurant, with a group of her colleagues, some of the greatest dancers of the mid twentieth century. One thing about retired ballet dancers: they end up in two forms. Half of them are stunning: elegant, noble men and women, the best looking older people on the face of the earth. And the other half are “F**k it. I trained since I was a child, I watched what I ate, I obsessed over every calorie and every movement of every muscle. No more.” And you’d never imagine they ever danced – they are overweight, lumpy, poor postured . . . but even so,  they still have the best looking legs you could imagine.

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If you haven’t read it, the best loved aikido story (after Ueshiba getting enlightened after taking a challenge from a military man who attacked him uselessly with a sword) is Terry Dobson’s “Train Story.” I used to have people come up to tell me the story, and I’d tell them I knew it, knew Terry, was hanging around when he wrote it, and they’d insist on telling me anyway. Look – it’s a wonderful story. It influenced me profoundly and I hope, one one occasion or another, I have exhibited the compassion of that old man. But somehow, I’ve always had bad luck on Japanese trains.

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There’s this obsession whether aikido is street creditable. Heck, I know of an aikido club amongst correctional officers in one of the most hardcore prisons in America, and they tell me aikido has been more than useful.

So did I ever use aikido on the street? Yes, I did. Back in the early 70’s, I used to train at Terry Dobson/Ken Nisson’s Bond Street Dojo and also Yamada Yoshimitsu’s New York Aikikai (known to some as as 18th Street). I was a member of the former (I lived in the dojo) and a guest at the latter. I subscribed to Terry’s patchwork ideology: “Aikido is an art of love that will save the world, and if you are concerned about self-defense, you have to ask yourself, what is this ‘self’ you are concerned about, and how can you protect a ‘self’ without love . . . and if you piss me off,  I will probably f*ck you up, given the right provocation.”

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When I was twelve years old, I wanted to do karate. Actually, another boy to whom I’d already lost a fight was taking karate, and I didn’t want him to have the jump on me that much more. My parents, however, thought it was low class, and refused. I kept nagging. Finally, my father took me down to the basement, picked up a length of two by four, maybe eighteen inches long and said, “If you can break this with your bare hand, I’ll let you do karate.” Honestly, I don’t know if Oyama Masutatsu, the ‘God Hand’ himself, could have broken a piece of dry wood that short, unsecured. Surely, my father thought, I’d try it once or twice, and give up and leave him alone.

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Several decades ago, my friends Phil & Nobuko Relnick, high ranking members of Shinto Muso-ryu and Tenshin Shoden Katori Shinto-ryu were traveling in Portugal. They visited a school of jogo do pau. Phil and Nobuko wanted to pay proper respect to the school they were visiting, and in proper Japanese fashion, asked, “Who is the instructor.” The older men looked puzzled, conferred with each other and pointing to one man, said, “Probably him. He’s the oldest.”

Martial arts rooted in a locale, be it a village, a hunter-gatherer band, or a faction in  a city, often did not have ranks, in the sense that we imagine it. Rather, the people with the most skill (of any age) were treasured and respected for their utility and elders were respected for their knowledge, their history and their authority as elders. This certainly is true of Japan. For thousands of years, villages and hunter-gatherers protected themselves, and they organized using the same hierarchical systems that kept the rest of their society intact. Skill and valor gained one accolades, and age and past actions gained one authority. Even after the central Yamato government coalesced through building a conscript military,  there were warrior bands in the frontier areas that eventually developed into the  bushi. They had leaders, to be sure, but within their bands, seniority (both age and entry into the group) carried considerable weight. This still applies within Japanese martial arts today. Senpai have authority simply by being there first.

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by Pedro Escudeiro

The 3rd of October 2017, at Ginásio Clube Português,

How old were you when you started practicing martial arts?

I must have started judo sometime around the age of twelve or thirteen, at the Budo Academy in Lisbon. I reached green belt, but then karate classes started–I was there from the start. Our teachers were all Portuguese. Since no one had visited Japan to receive direct instruction, their technical knowledge came from videos they ordered from Japan. A couple of years later, though, we had our first international seminar with a Japanese karate master: Murakami Tetsuji, from Shotokai Karate, a student of Egami Shigeru sensei. After this seminar, Murakami sensei became the leader of our karate group. There was another group of karate practitioners, students of a South African master, who initiated Shotokan Karate in Portugal. [Editor’s note: Although Shotokan and Shotokai come from the same antecedents, they are quite different, as can be seen in the links.]

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