Dueling with O-sensei, Chapter 20 – “Musubi: Tying Together or Tying in Knots”

 From the book Dueling with O-sensei: Grappling with the Myth of the Warrior-Sage

Musubi is a talismanic word in some aikidō circles. Its mundane definition is to tie things together. In aikidō, it is often linked with another term, awase (to link or blend together). For those with a romantic view of aikidō, this is imagined as a martial pas de deux in which, at the moment of contact, peace is established and two spirits blend together in harmony.

This was not the viewpoint of Ueshiba Morihei, however. To establish aiki was to impose order on chaos. Ueshiba’s oft-quoted formulation of man establishing harmony between heaven and earth made humanity, potentially, a cosmic force, reconciling disorder in any realm, be it that between people in conflict to the universe itself. Musubi and awase, therefore, imply blending and twining with another’s essence to move them in the direction that they should go.

In my last few years in Japan, I had a family to care for, and needed regular work. I began teaching conversational English at a prominent junior high school, part of a complex of educational institutions associated with Tokai University. Perhaps the best part of my job, as far as I was concerned, was an opportunity to practice judō with the junior high school and then, as I got a little better, with the high school team. Tokai University was the pre-eminent judō power in Japan at the time, and they recruited some of the best young champions from throughout the country. Some of the high schoolers were well over three hundred fifty pounds, and could defeat their coach, a thirty-six year old 6th dan, in free-style matches. At two hundred twenty pounds, I did not even line up at the middle of the pack by weight among the forty or more members of the high school team, and as far as skill and strength went, I was near the bottom.

My best training partner, in fact, was an 8th grader, Hasegawa- kun, already six feet tall, and two hundred and thirty pounds. We both trained a lot in harai-goshi, one of judō’s most spectacular throws, and it was odds-on who would nail the other first. We had a wonderful comraderie on the mat, this rough thirteen year old boy and me, a thirty-five year old teacher at the school, and it is sad to remember him. Hasegawa’s father was a violent alcoholic who beat his mother. All the teachers in the school knew it, and Hasegawa confided to several that if his father continued to hit her, he would take care of him. I cannot speak to Japanese culture today, but back in the 1980’s, domestic violence was hardly considered a crime; rather, it was a concern of the family itself. Furthermore, a father’s will was sacrosanct. Hasegawa’s teachers told him to accept things as they were. He couldn’t. The next time his father hit his mother, Hasegawa threw him down a flight of stairs and broke his collar-bone. He was briefly arrested for assaulting his father, and the school expelled him. His mother threw him out of the home. He was immediately recruited by the local yakuza, and several teachers said they saw him touting cabaret fliers near one of the local train stations, an entry-level job in the gangs. The school staff expressed sympathy for him, but also blamed him for not accepting things as a son should—it was not his place to attack his father, no matter what he did to his mother. Sometimes, I felt like I lived on another planet.

I was not a good English teacher. I had twelve classes of about fifty students apiece, and my class was for ‘enrichment’ only. There were no tests and no grades. The students also had an academic English class, replete with archaic grammar, learned by their Japanese instructors a generation before. They had to learn everything by rote, then pass tests, not understanding a word of what they learned. My class was regarded by the students as a vacation from the stultifying regular classes—potentially entertaining—nothing more. I worked very hard. Once I came to class early and made a three dimensional maze with sewing thread through-out the classroom, having the students negotiate while calling out: “I’m going under the thread!” or “I’m going through it!” or “I can’t stand it. I’m just going to tear it!” But my successes were few and far between. As far as the children were concerned, why expend effort on something that would not impact their grades one way or the other? The kids liked me, for the most part, but as a person, not as a great teacher who inspired them to learn English.

Like the kids, I really didn’t like the Japanese school system. Junior high was a very stressful place to be. Children came out of grade school with bright, vibrant personalities—one of the main purposes of junior high school was to pare them down to a common mean. Entry into high school, 100% determined by junior high test scores, determined one’s entire future. Most discipline in the school was enacted by humiliation: children were forced to sit on their knees in the hallway while all the other children passed by; they were called stupid, useless, and ugly by their teachers, and bullying was accepted by staff as a Darwinian response to students who didn’t fit in.

My classes were held in an ‘out-building,’ a two-room prefab structure that was attached to the main building. One day I was teaching a class, and suddenly, we heard smashing noises and the wall adjoining the other room started buckling. At first, we thought it was an earthquake, and kids started plunging under their desks. But only one wall was crumpling. I rushed next door and found our school’s small clique of thugs (in the most minor of degrees) demolishing the room. I yelled, Ungoku na! and the five of them froze, with looks of terror on their face. There was a part of me that absolutely ‘got it!’ They didn’t fit in with their teachers’ ideal of the next generation; they were bored, berated and forced to act as others demanded nearly every moment of their days. And this moment could destroy the rest of their lives.

I yelled again—in Japanese, of course, because no one could understand English, even after several years in my class. “Line up!” Then, “Hands at your sides and clench your back teeth as hard as you can!”

And then I walked down the line and open-handed, full-arm, slugged each of them once across the face, hard enough to send them reeling into the walls and tumbled desks. No one cried. Then I said, “Get out of here. I didn’t see a thing.”

I went back to my classroom and picked up where I left off. My students were the best behaved group I ever had. Afterwards, I went up to the teacher’s lounge. I didn’t have a class for two more periods. About an hour or so later, the principal came up to me with a worried look and told me about terrible vandalism in the classroom next to mine. He asked me if I’d seen or heard anything. I told him that I was utterly at a loss—the classrooms were fine when I was down there. It must have happened after my class. For the rest of the school year, the five young thugs used to follow me around, conjuring up questions just as an opportunity to be close. They did not do any more ‘criminal’ acts the rest of their schooling.

However, it was an encounter with another two students that best illustrates musubi. Japanese school systems have a custom called undokai (‘sports day’). Some time in the school year, the classes are divided into the red and white teams, colors hallowing back to the Genji and Heike clans of the 10th and 11th centuries. Even though the division is arbitrary, the rivalry gets more and more heated, culminating in a day of competitions in front of their parents.

Among my students was a young man—Kitaura. Ask any teacher and they will remember a student like him. He was not a large boy, but like a panther, he dominated any space he entered. The mood of my class was absolutely determined by his attitude that day. Other children tracked him and made sure that they never opposed him. He was quite charming and likeable when he wanted to be, with a beautiful smile, but he also seemed to hold others in a mild contempt at all times. Some he bullied and some he manipulated. He had no friends, but a lot of followers. He also had moments of rage: a switch would seem to flip and he would attack. His fights were not schoolboy scuffles—he was out for blood.

I had another student that year, Sakamoto-kun, a loud-mouthed skinny boy, who wanted everyone to know he was tough and everyone knew he wasn’t. He would sometimes bump chests with another boy, but he always selected his targets well, and just in case, always did this when a teacher wasn’t that far away. Not very likeable, he really wasn’t a bad kid—just scared of being scared.

Sports day finally arrived. We all assembled at the soccer field, all parched earth, with not a blade of grass. Perhaps a thousand parents and other family were sitting in the bleachers, cheering. (In Japan, parents are expected to cheer ‘in general;’ it would be quite unseemly to cheer for one’s own child).

The best event was the kiba-sen (‘cavalry war’). Four boys would link hands and forearms and a fifth, wearing a headband, would ride their intertwined arms like a saddle. Twenty or thirty of these masses of five boys would take to the field, half red and half white. Then they would charge each other. There were two ways to win: the entire mass of boys could crash into another knocking them all over; the riders would try to snatch off the head-bands of their ‘enemies,’ at which point that rider was ‘dead.’ It would get pretty violent, dust swirling on the playing field, with bodies crashing into one another, the boys grabbing and sometimes slugging each other to get that headband.

It ended well, apparently. Everyone was laughing and cheering. But Sakamoto was upset by something Kitaura did and began cursing him right in front of the assembled parents. He thought he was safe—it was one week before the end of the school year, they’d probably never see each other again, and there were hundreds of adults there. Kitaura just snapped. He was ten yards away, and he whirled around and went for him. Every teacher gasped because they knew this would not be an amusing collision, to be laughed off as ‘high spirits;’ one of their students was going to savagely beaten in front of the assembled, tuition-paying parents, who really didn’t have to send their children back to this school next year.

I happened to be in the right place. Sakamoto was standing there with his eyes wide-open, his hands ineffectually raised, and Kitaura’s fist was descending right into his face. I slid behind Kitaura with both hands on his shoulders, and binding our bodies together, his back to my front, I spun. One hundred eighty degrees in reverse, his fist descended on empty air and I kept spinning and traveling at the same time, three complete rotations, completely past the bleachers and around the side of the building. Out of eyeshot, I slammed him up against the wall and said, “What the hell is wrong with you! Why would you attack him in front of everyone? You’d hardly get a blow in before it’d be stopped. Are you stupid? Don’t you know what route he goes home? You do? Idiot! Wait a few days, and meet him somewhere on the way, where no one is around. Now get back there and act like nothing’s happened.” I shoved him and he stumbled away, back towards the other children.

I walked back around the building. Not even a minute had past. Some people, parents and teachers, still had their mouths open, and Sakamoto was standing in the exact same place I left him, with tears in his eyes. It was like the scene had been frozen in amber. I strolled up to him, put an arm around his shoulder, and walking him away from the parents, said, “You know what? For the next week, you and I are going home together.” And each day, I’d ‘accidentally’ run into him during first period, tell him what school exit to meet me, and we stroll off. Each day, we’d take a different route, have a snack and I’d put him on one of a selection of trains and off he’d go home—unscathed.

Several weeks later, the school had a going-away party for me, as I was returning to America. I was going to start graduate school in about a month, and was very worried how I would make ends meet while I got settled. The principal gave a speech about what a fine teacher I had been. (What else could he say? That was the kata.) Then he said that in particular all the staff were grateful to me for saving the reputation of the school, that my quick thinking (no one knew what I said to either boy or my trips home with Sakamoto, just that I stopped Kitaura’s attack) had probably kept uncounted numbers of parents from withdrawing their children and looking for another educational institution. Then he handed me an envelope, saying it was a small token of appreciation from the staff. I opened it later and found $7500.

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