古現武道

When naginatajutsu was first taught as a specialty amongst Japanese weaponry is unknown. To start with, the claimed founding dates of almost all martial ryūha are dubious.  Many claim a founding date hundreds of years previous to their actual inception. This is not dishonesty; in earlier periods of Japanese history, lineage was as much a spiritual sense as it was historical data. Therefore, lineage records often mixed generations of non-practicing family members, teachers of other ryūha who influenced the development of one’s own, and famous warriors of the past whom the founder regarded as inspirations.

It is likely that the genuine founding dates of naginata-specialty ryūha was in the mid-Edo period. Yazawa Isaō, a 16th generation instructor of Toda-ha Bukō-ryū (now properly known as Tenshin Bukō-ryū) then at Nihon Joshi Daigaku, wrote in 1916 “It is not clear when naginatajutsu began to be taught as a single discipline. I have gone around to the few remaining martial arts instructors of the former domains of Japan, and examined the various military manuals they own. Upon reviewing these I discovered the oldest school of naginata is the Shizuka-ryū.”

Most of the schools she enumerated in her article are long extinct, but even a superficial consideration of remaining naginatajutsu schools will show something curious—many of them include the kusarigama (‘weighted chain and sickle) within their curricula; for example, this is true for Shizuka-ryū, Bukō-ryū, Tendō–ryū, and Jikishinkage-ryū. Given that the naginata-specialty schools became associated with women within a few generations of their creation (certainly by the late Edo-period), I have wondered at the association of these two weapons.

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I wish to tease out the components that I have observed among those who were able to – and did – protect their training hall against dojo breakers or people who challenged them on the mat, striving to embarrass them or worse; those who handled taryujiai; and those who had or have a particular brilliance that has garnered them true respect, not only among other budōka, but among practitioners of other martial arts as well. I am making as clear a distinction as I can between the excellent  practitioner, whatever their rank, and true virtuosos. Were we talking about music, this would be a discussion about what makes Hélène Grimaud, Emil Gilels, Martha Argerich and Marc-André Hamelin incandescent musicians, rather than merely ‘excellent.’

Two objections may be raised to this essay, that what I discuss below does not encompass the complete martial art and training regimen of any koryū and it is at some variance to the way many authorities describe these arts today. My question here isn’t what makes one a comfortable participant in an idealistic martial art, or even a very dedicated student of a physically demanding, even dangerous discipline that has become a centerpiece of your life. My question is not what makes one a good teacher, a great leader of a dojo or someone who can apply the principles of budō in other social settings. My question is what makes one a virtuoso practitioner, regardless of one’s other qualities (and this include morality or spirituality).

NOTE: In it’s first iteration, this essay concerned aikidō. For Roots Still Cracking Rock, it was extensively revised to address concerns specific to koryū-bugei.

This essay is one of many that has been revised to make the writing itself more graceful, but more importantly, to incorporate my own developing perspective on this subject. It is now part of my new book, Roots Still Cracking Rock: Refections On My First Fifty Years Within Classical Japanese Martial Traditions, which in addition to revised essays from this site, contains new work as well.

It is conventional to think of Japanese martial traditions through the lens of the bugei, systems maintained by the warrior class. This is incorrect on a number of grounds. First of all, some venerable systems were founded and maintained by goshi (yeoman), a class of armed farmers who were (with few exceptions) at the very bottom of the warrior class. Rather than serve as retainers to a feudal lord, they were directly situated in the countryside, to some degree independent of domain politics, but more directly influencing (and influenced by) the lives of the peasants. Yes, they were nominally within the warrior class – but they were really apart from the mainstream of bushi culture. Beyond that, by the mid-Edo period, ever increasing numbers of non-bushi entered the majority of ryūha. In fact, in many ryūha, the majority of members were non-bushi, and others were led, even founded by those of the peasant or merchant class. (That they later might receive a bump up in rank by their feudal lord to become bushi does not change the fact that they were originally peasants or merchants).

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There is enormous hype in American media right now concerning vespa mandarina, known in Japan as susume-bachi, AKA ‘sparrow wasps.’ American media has made up a new name for them ‘Murder Hornets.’ I frequently saw them in parks and mountains in Japan–saw one once take down an enormous swallow-tail butterfly on the wing –  and I was one-degree of separation from a couple of marvelous events concerning them.

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Kuji/juji is a specific ritual derived from  Shingon mikkyo, an esoteric sect of Buddhism, known as Mìzōng in China and Vajrayana in Tibet. This is an immense subject, but one way to think of such esoteric sects (mikkyo is a general term for esoteric practices) is they use ‘skillful means’ – any and every ritual that best fits a postulant to become enlightened in a single lifetime.

Shugendo is a syncretic Japanese religion, sometimes regarded as a ‘mountain cult.’ It is an amalgam of primordial Shinto and Taoist ritual practices (the latter, of course, derived from China) and esoteric Buddhism. It is associated with magic, and wonder-working, enacted by yamabushi, postulants who walk deep in the mountains, engaging in severe ascetic practices.  Among its lore is an association with nature’s elemental powers, known as tengu.

Warriors, too, used to go into temples and shrines in isolated forest and mountain areas to engage in ascetic training, and in the process, they utilized mikkyo rituals, sometimes those already present in their ryuha, and sometimes acquired through contact with such ascetics. The questioner refers to muga, a Buddhist term that is usually translated as ‘no-self.’ Or perhaps, the ‘that which is attached or identified with no thing in particular.’ However, whether such warriors were religious or not, their practice was for the purpose of accumulating power, not achieving ‘enlightenment.’ They were training in order to enhance their ability to survive, in order to better serve their lord. Most specifically, this was training in how to more effectively kill in combative engagements. They used mikkyo as a psycho-physical technology to enhance these capabilities.

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Probably only a minority of readers here will even recognise an electric typewriter, let alone have used one. In my high school and college years, however, the devices were something, technologically speaking, right up there between soft contact lenses and artificial hearts and not that far, in our imagination, below airborne automobiles. I covered reams of paper with electrically powered ink on my Smith-Corona for my schoolwork; its humming and the authoritative celerity of its clicking keys made me feel as if I was living in the 21^st century.

My typewriter sat on a sewing table, one made in the early 19^th century, of maple, with the yardstick markings imprinted along one edge, a table having been used, no doubt by tailors in early America, to turn out shirts worn by men who’d fought in the American Revolution. That table was in my bedroom not because I come from a wealthy family who furnished our home with classical, expensive antiques. Rather, my parents were collectors and dealers in Colonial era American furniture and decorative arts. So while some of the  antiques in our home stayed for a very long time, others came and went. Most importantly, however, my point is that “antiques” in my parent’s house did not connote objects that rested behind glass or that were never touched, never used at all. The silverware we ate with, the rugs on the floor, the clock on the mantel; all were a part of daily life for me.

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Any modern sports science expert would cringe at the instructional methodology of classical traditions. The traditional method is often referred to as waza o nusumu (‘steal the technique’). It could also be termed, ‘learning by osmosis.’ An extreme example of this can be found in my recollection of account of a traditional Ainu midwife. She said that she attended births from the time she was a little girl. Her mother had her sit directly behind her throughout the entire birth. All she could see was her mother’s back. One day, when she was a teenager, without warning, her mother said, “You birth this one.” To repeat, she had never seen the birthing process itself, merely observed the movements of her mother’s back, shoulder and arms many hundreds of times. She stated that she simply reenacted those movements, which she had been doing in sympathy for most of her life as she observed her mother – the birth went smoothly and it was the beginning of the rest of her life.

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I recently noticed a question on a traditional Japanese martial arts discussion forum on Facebook: “Is there a proper way to bow?” And this was followed by a lot of sincere answers, most of which were wrong, or not-really-right, at least from the perspective of a traditional martial arts practitioner, where specific acts have specific meanings. In modern martial arts practice, on the other hand, there is often have a laissez-faire attitude, where a lot of things can be ‘good enough,’ based on the instructor’s arbitrary, often not culturally grounded practice. (This goes equally for Japanese and non-Japanese modern martial arts practitioners).

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