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The Spirit of Place

Several months ago, I was interviewed by Shibumi Magazine, a Spanish publication that focuses on traditional Japanese martial culture. The interview, in its original form, is soon to be published in Spanish translation. I have somewhat edited it for English language publication

In his “Spirit of Place,” the great Lawrence Durrell wrote that man is the son of the landscape. The cultural niche in which the bujutsu schools arose is far from the current one. The times demand immediacy, a priori, practicality. Do you consider that, being as we are so far away in space-time from that primitive culture, we can arrive at an understanding of the depths of its philosophy, its reason for being, its most intimate essence?

Your question takes some things at face value that are not exactly true. Anything embedded within a culture is eminently practical—it is only when something is grafted into a culture as a fascinating alien subject that it is—or seems to be—unrealistic or impractical. The classical bugei were always pragmatic—just not in the way that people might imagine.

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After my publication regarding teaching Baduanjin in a youth detention facility, I’ve received inquiries about the general subject of teaching  martial arts to young people in either detention facilities, or group-home type settings. Some, aikidoka, are interested in providing training to help these kids in reconciling conflict; some, taijiquan teachers, see a potential for moving meditation/mindfulness/centering, in their practice; some, BJJ practitioners, see their training as potentially teaching controlled self-defense (with rules), to help kids channel their natural aggressive drives in a sports context.. Teaching such kids, though, is not easy. As Geoff Thompson wrote to me after reviewing a 1st draft of this piece: “I have only worked a little with kids in youth detention, but I concur with everything you have said here.  I found it easier to work with murderers and drug barons in Cat 1 high-security prisons than with kids in detention.”

What follows are a list of ideas and criteria, things to think about if you intend to do such work. If you ignore any of these, at “best,” you will be of little help, and very likely, the kids will chew you up and spit you out.

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I was recently afforded an opportunity to talk to a collected group of specialists about my experiences adapting classical martial principles, training, and even technique to modern policing applications. The audience included a few others who have a foot in both classical training and modern policing, and I am very thankful to Ellis Amdur, my koryu instructor, and to Mr. Liam Keeley for that opportunity.

 Ellis’ teacher demanded that budo be applicable not simply in everyday life, but in “moving the world” in ways of consequence, and Ellis feels the same. As do I. Picture the tiger in the wild, not in a cage, and certainly not stuffed and displayed as a museum piece. This approach may be regarded as somewhat outside the norm in the larger koryu community. Some might ask how archaic martial arts, with whatever small bits any particular tradition may preserve of an actual combative curricula, could apply in any practical sense in today’s world, particularly when many practitioners themselves don’t see things that way.

 One word: Uvalde.

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Traditionally Speaking

There is an image today of koryū as small isolated groups of a few students, headed by one headmaster, engaged in a many decades-long pursuit of martial perfection. Something like this can be true today—many people remain students of a teacher for almost a lifetime. I know of individuals who have trained for fifty years without ever receiving certification of full knowledge of the school or a teaching license. But I do not think that this is true to the original nature of koryū bujutsu. Of course, in the aforementioned case, the students in question may simply be incompetent or not suitable, in their instructor’s eyes, but it may also be due to something else—a fundamental change in the nature of martial ryūha within Japan.

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God is anything you need right now (Charles Bukowski)

Recently, a conversation came to mind, one between myself and Terry Dobson. For anyone who doesn’t know, Terry was, for a year or so, a live-in student at the Aikikai Headquarters Dojo, sometime between 1960 and 1962. A little more than a decade later, I lived in his dojo in NYC for about a year. He was definitely my teacher, but at the same time, we were in a relationship vaguely between paternal, fraternal and friends. This conversation pretty well exemplifies Terry and my relationship, but I think it also highlights the truth about all the pronouncements by Ueshiba’s students about what he really meant and what he taught. The first part of the story was part of Terry’s schtick, a lead-in to his teaching where he claimed that the movements of aikido were physical metaphors that both explained how to achieve peace on earth, and through the practice of them, gave the procedure to achieve it.  It was in a conversation between us one day that he tacked on the second portion, that of the 2nd aikido instructor.

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Some time ago, Ellis Amdur asked me if I’d be interested in contributing a guest post for the site. Knowing of my friendship with the renowned grappling expert, “Judo” Gene LeBell, and aware of Gene’s past relationship with the famed budoka, Donn Draeger, Ellis thought I might be able to offer some of Gene’s recollections to provide a different-than-usual take on Draeger, and the martial arts of a bygone era.

While Gene’s memory for details has faded a bit with time, I’ve had a number of extensive conversations with him in the past for various magazine articles, not to mention an aborted collaboration on his first attempt at an autobiography years ago. So I’m probably as qualified as anyone to share his impressions on these matters.

As far as Draeger goes, Gene always spoke very highly of him. “A great judo man” and “the best with weapons” was how he described Draeger to me on one occasion, opinions which probably won’t surprise anyone familiar with Draeger’s career in the martial arts. A generation older than Gene, Draeger came out of that pre-war school of judo which the early Japanese instructors in the West employed. My sense of that type of judo, both from talking to Gene and my own research, is that it was a somewhat more combative style, one laced with a bit more groundwork than would come to be the norm in the postwar years. That’s the style Gene appreciated, and I think he respected that “hardcore” approach in Draeger’s style.

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Kurosu Harutsugi (黒須春次) was born on March 13, 1888, and died March 15th, 1973.  He was born in a farming family, but due to his father’s illness, he had to help him from a very young age. At the age of 18, he began studying Araki Shin-ryu jujutsu in 1906, from Hayashi Hikojiro. His body trained in jujutsu, he was accepted into an artillery regiment. He received a menkyo kaiden in Araki Shin-ryu in 1921 from Urano Kasutsugu Nobutaka.

[NOTE: There is more than one line of Araki Shin-ryu, that bear little relationship to one another. Perhaps the most famous is a a ryuha started by Araki Buzaemon, which has a complicated relationship to the original Araki-ryu torite-kogusoku of the founder, Araki Muninsai.]

A few years after beginning his study of Araki Shin-ryu, he also began training in  Shinto Rikugo-ryu jujutsu,  an amalgam of a number of older schools, and eventually receiving a rank of 4th dan in 1922. Although kata based, it focused on hand-to-hand combat and was, for a period of time, a rival of the Kodokan. (The last known teacher of this school is Shiigi Munenori of the Ichigido).

Kurosu was not satisfied by jujutsu alone, obviously needing to compete. Only judo at that time allowed shiai and he entered the Kodokan in 1913. Very soon afterwards, he was ‘tested’ in a match with four seniors, and after defeating them, was awarded a judo fourth kyu (NOTE: which meant a lot more in those days). He established his own judo dojo in the Shinjuku area of Tokyo in 1914 (remember, he was already had high rank in two jujutsu schools, which he continued training–apparently, this was rather common in those days, enabling the Kodokan to incorporate jujutsu practitioners quickly into their organization). In fact, he was already considered skilled enough that in 1916, he was appointed a judo instructor of the Kenpeitai.

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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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