A Line in the Sand

We live in the Now, always. Yesterday a memory. Tomorrow a hope.

We also draw a line and stop and start a new year (whether calendar year or birth year or other event). The new year a mnemonic device to give some meaning to the endless progression of Now.

One year ends and we take stock in new life and death, accomplishments and delays, success and failures. Then the new year begins and once past we're back in the ever present Now.

Teaching a free program, the economic times leave almost nothing available for excess (whatever that was I haven't seen it in a decade). They have an impact on students though as it takes money t drive to attend even free training, but we've been pretty stable on that level.

One friend in another area of the country had to close his program after at least several decades of training. There wasn't one cause but the unsettled economic times greatly contributed to his student decline.

The death of a dojo I find as saddening as any thought. I've been fortunate not having any family losses this year, but friends haven't been so lucky.

In fact I've reached the age where I pay attention to news stories about younger individuals deaths too.

The year's been good for my karate. Fighting age's deterioration I find my decades in tai chi very much the way I MUST warm up for training. When I can't do so injury frequently occurs, small nagging pulls and strains, but I fight the fight as best I can.

My ongoing study into the application potential of karate technique continues with many new training ideas.

I was also privileged to train once again with John Kerker and his in depth knowledge of Isshinryu application. A few short hours once a year, but always driving into my studies.

My programs, youth and adult, have moved forward this year too. People come and go, but we're working towards a new approach to sharing the youth program and I look forward to seeing how it takes.

Likewise the adult program has moved from a brown belt level into sho-dan level training. The group is so small, everyone having to shoulder adult responsibilities training occurs when possible, but they don't stop and progression remains constant. In fact two new Ni-Dans this year, their moving into personal adult focus at a Dan level for life.

The instructors continue to make solid progress too.

So as the year ends, YouTube tells me I've viewed about 40,000 videos the past several years, absolutely nothing martial has escaped my view.

Translations such as Mario McKenna's new translation of Nakasone's "Karate-do Taikan" are more impressive becuause it actually fits our studies too.

So the line in the sand is drawn (or will be) and then the sand shifts, the wind blows, the rains come, the tide moves in and out and line or not remaining it continues to be NOW.

May all enjoy the Now of their New Year with great sucess for 2010.

The Art of Attack - an Inquriry

Last evening I saw in the news the Pope had been attacked and knocked down as he was going to deliver Christmas Eve Mass. Recently a couple attended a White House dinner without invitations. Ex-President Regan was attacked in 1992 while receiving an award. It is likely very few people in the world have security as that of the President of the United States, or the Pope in the Vatican. But these few instances show that even effective security can be breached.

There are underlying principles behind those occurrences that can work be used to craft a more effective attack as well as be used for a more effective defense. A consideration in our martial studies should be the study of strategy and tactics in both offensive and defensive situations. They’re really flip sides of the same coin.

Article 13: The Eight Precepts of ChaunFa from the Okinawan Bubishi (1) states: 7. See what is unseeable and 8. Expect what is unexpected. I would restate it for this discussion as: what you don’t see or expect can get you. Offensively you want to find a way to be unseen, to set up your attack so it can’t be countered, Defensively you want to extend your awareness to see the attack coming and drive through it to end the threat.

Considering the assault on ex-President Regan April 13, 1992 when an anti-nuclear weapons protester accosted the former president

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q93XHjsiMd4

I remember reading about this when it occurred. It was discussed that the attacker moved through the auditorium and across the stage to first grab the award from it’s perch and throw it to the floor and then step forward to dislodge the President as the video shows.

I think what happened is he never paid any attention to the President, such focus would have drawn the attention of the President’s guards. If he was just keeping his focus on the award, nobody was guarding it and slow measured movement would have been unconsciously ignored. Then reaching the award the rest comes into play.

The couple slipping into an un-invited White House event is another example. They were known, some plausibility for their presence must be assumed, as they looked the part of attendees, and in the end they got close enough to shake the President’s hand.

Take a look at last night’s assault on the Pope where A woman jumped the barriers in St. Peter's Basilica and knocked down Pope Benedict XVI as he walked down the main aisle to begin Christmas Eve Mass on Thursday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpDffQJjm9c

Surely everyone in attendance was reviewed as to their carrying obvious weapons, and of course her being a woman was probably a threat discount in some of their eyes too.

On the plus side none of the above carried out serious violence in those incidents. But the potential was clearly there.

Now it’s time to go to work, what are the underlying reasons their entry into each situation worked, how could it have been stopped, how was it unavoidable?

When facing an attacker if we assume they’ve been properly trained and prepared, it is likely we will be unable to respond. If they are improperly trained and prepared, that doesn’t make them less dangerous, but they’ve entered our event horizon so that we can choose to respond. Can we turn the table and not raise our hands to begin ‘fighting’ but find a way to be a target and use that opening when they attack to in turn make our response below their perception horizon?

So how do we use this?

More to come.....

Notes:

(1) Bubishi – the Classical Manual of Combat – translated by Patrick McCarthy page 187

This also became the Isshinryu Code of Karate adopted by Shimabuku Tatsuo.

A Christmas Trip to Okinawa on Me

It's the season for sharing and if you are like me, and no trip to Okinawa is on your horizon, allow me to give you a free excursion to Okinawa, by using Okinawa BBTV http://www.okinawabbtv.com/ .

It is not a newspaper, or a news feed, but a site that shares a great deal of informaition on Contemporary Okinawa. Some of their article links are there forever, others are posted and in a month or two disappear to be replaced by something else.

The site allows you to explore Okinawa's flora and fauna, its sea life and birds, its shores, young women bikini interviews, their festivals, competitions, food, geography, music (Okinawan classical and Okinawan Contemporary - including one time a great rock band Stinky Hole), it's dance, bull fighting, sumo competition and even karate.

While most of it is written in Japanese, there is even a section for English speakers and even includes instruction on how to speak Okinawan hogan dialect.

They have an interesting selection on Okinawan Karate at http://www.okinawabbtv.com/culture/karate/index.ht

I even see a current section on Kyudokan Practice with Syoute-Tsuki and Group Prctice videos shown at http://blog.okinawabbtv.com/kyudokan/?itemid=25842

The site is literally filled with links that you can explore and visit many of Okinawa's wonders.

You find a people who love to get together in festivals, very akin to our country fairs, as well as perform exhibitions on many arts with presentation groups similar to the Mummer groups of Philadelphia Penna, who compete and demonstrate each New Years day in parade.

They even share footage of the invasion and occupation of Okinawa during WWII, a most pivotal event in their contemporary history.

If you're like me and want to try and understand Okinawa's roots of Karate trying to cultivate a greater appreciation of this beautiful island and its most interesting people, to understand how their past shaped their present and future, this can only assist your journey.

This site is prepared by the Okinwans for the Okinawans themselves, but they are also sharing it with all of us too.

May your browsing OkinawaBBTV bring you much happiness this Christmas Season.

Merry Christmas!

Thanksgiving - Giving Thanks

Thanksgiving is much more than time spent with the family or eating a big Turkey dinner. It is a time when we should remember to give thanks.

Many years I held a turkey trot, or rather a early morning work out on Thanksgiving, having fun with Chin Na techniques not part of our normal study. It was a time when my adult students lived closer to our dojo. But times change, and our arts focus changes too.

Over my years I've been touched by maybe a thousand students, hard as that number is to realize for I only see them as faces one by one. You share their time with you, and much harder you share their decision to move on to something else, a very important and necessary decision in thier lives. I remember to give thanks for that time.

You share death, something you were never taught. During my years in karate you lose a child, you lose a parent, you lose a former student, you lose a student, you lose an instructor.

Karate is after all a shared group experience, intermixed with your life, family and friends and students. We train hard, focus intensely at times, but in the mixture of isshin and zanchin that possess us we never are really prepared that such losses accompany our studies.

May we all give thanks today for our blessings, for those who've shared the lines of our lives, for the memories that we retain of our departed friends.

2009

The friendly Ghost!

For many years I’ve followed a Halloween ritual for my youth students of practicing some ghost techniques the class before Halloween.

Always a brief description of how they incorporate magic to learn how to be somewhere else when being attacked. The class then followed a series of shifting drills of increasing complexity to let the class have some fun

This year, however, most of the class were new beginners with only several weeks training. They’re still in the stage of not knowing their right foot from their left foot. I didn’t want to drop the idea and decided to take it down to a much lower level.

Essentially I decided to have them shift to the side to make a school yard push attack miss. I quickly found out that trying to have them raise their hands to parry was too much so I took it down to its base. An attacker steps forward with their right foot and makes to push them with both hands. Their response was to shift to the left side and turn slightly towards the attacker in a cat stance.

I had them practice the shift a few times and then I went down the line with my lightest touch to their shoulders. To a person they stood there and watched me touch them, and they didn’t move.

I realized as an authority figure they didn’t understand they weren’t to stay there. So I kept working and in a while when I came in with a push they had shifted to the side.

On Tuesday night, after two weeks I told them I was really going to push them into the wall or over and attacked them one after the other with speed. To a person each one shifted away before I even got close. Enough skill development to begin to show them how to use their hands for a 1-2 parry movement with the shift.

More than an interesting exercise at making them into a ‘ghost’, it started me thinking about our advanced studies (where direct ghost techniques are only a very small part of the studies) and years of work understanding how to use kata technique to break, down, smash, etc. an opponent. But very little time making sure we can successfully walk away.

Except under very defined conditions, do we really have to demolish an attack? Certainly if the attack is life threatening towards us or others, there is justification to go full out, but if someone’s messing around, unstable in their life, etc. is our response to really use our karate each and every time.

I think we have to do some solid thinking about practicing sound alternatives, now to have the option to disappear and be somewhere else, when that makes the most sense.

Just a small piece of ghost technique potential, but something to consider.

The Ghost Departs

The Ghost Techniques cover a wide range of evasion studies. Several of my friends have requested a more detailed explanation so I would like to discuss one way to avoid an attack. This will be focused on the use of the lower body during the evasion, the first layer of training. One method of evading a striking attacker.

I suggest using a standard attack for basic training, in this case an attacker step into you with their right foot and throws a right lead hand strike to your solar plexus. This creates a nice linear attack to use for basic training.

The evasion pattern would be as follows:

1. As the attacker starts their attack towards you, you step forward with your left foot and place it slightly past their in stepping right foot.

2. As you’ve done that you start shifting your head and body 90 degrees to the right.

3. Conclude that movement parallel to their striking arm, as tight to their arm as you can get it.

4. Then turn your head 90 degrees clockwise to face the same direction their arm is striking.

5. As you perform step 4, take your right foot and step back. This is 180 degrees from your starting position and your right foot faces the same direction as their striking arm.

6. As this is being done your torso turns 90 degrees to the right so it lines forward with your face.

7. Shift your weight back on your right foot and then draw your left foot back, behind you as you continue to face to the direction they’re striking.

8. You then commence to step backwards, one foot after another, somewhat akin to a moonwalk.
At this point you’re several steps behind your attacker moving from them.

The timing involved is as they’re striking you’ve shifted alongside their arm, and as their strike concludes you’ve begun stepping back. You have ‘vanished’ from their vision to the front, and each subsequent rearward step moves you further away from them.

Defensively if they are capable of turning and attacking you, you have the option of dropping your weight and exploding into their direction without having to turn as they’re then doing.

The motion must be practiced till it is natural and you can flow into it.

The key points are:

First, regarding being able to shift parallel to their striking arm. In my experience even experienced karate-ka often find that when they step out and turn in they’re not comfortable by being parallel to their arm and so their left foot stays away from the attacker’s line of attack. You need that closeness in order to shift most quickly and not be as obvious to the attacker.

Second, the right foot stepping back is a crucial movement to master. The swifter you can do so the quicker you vanish.

Third, the moon walk, an amusing description, really shifts you behind and away from your attacker. The smother you move the greater the distance.

Only after you can perform this movement correctly, should you begin to consider the use of the upper body to assist the evasion.

Frequently I will use a ‘Kamae’, such as from Isshirnyu’s Wansu or Chinto kata as I step in, not to strike their arm (and trigger a response from them) but to meet their arm with your arms as they rise to form the ‘Kamae’ as their arm passes towards your original position. This rising movement will softly redirect them away from you as you then begin your retreat. In similar fashion the opening of an Aikido Irimi-Nage can be used or a basic Siliat Tjimande similar to a movement in Isshinryu Chinto Kata.

The next step is to examine a wider ranges of attacks to determine which ones this works with. Examples would be the ‘boxer’ shuffle, roundhouse attacks, etc. Other angles of execution can be explored too.

May you become skilled and learn to disappear.

Remember what you don't practice you cannot do!

Conversation with a Ghost

A long, long time ago when I lived in a different land one of my friends Ernest Rothrock shared with me one of his advanced students training manuals. Within that manual was a description of a training series of Ghost Techniques. In turn it was 5 years before I began to work out what they may have been following those notes and discovered a new twist in my martial studies.

I do not know their genesis, but the idea of the Ghost Technique is interesting, how to move so when your attackers attack reaches were you were standing, you are somewhere else.

They were just a series of movements to shift around an attacker such as you wanted to be directly behind them when their attack was complete, to completely disappear from their sight, or more directly, become a Ghost. The underlying principle was very simple you were to use Magic to disappear.

Magic of the mundane sort, not of Harry Potter’s studies.

I came to realize that Magic was not just for Ghost Techniques, but was the true basis of martial study. The Magician misdirects your attention so you watch one hand and not see the other hand move.

Okinawan Karate in its essence was an art of self defense, how to disrupt an unexpected attacker. It was not crafted to just work in a ring against an aware opponent, too often what Karate is focusing on today, the better ring fighter, or the street fighter wading into the street fight, instead of ways to break an opponent so no fighting is ever required.

Let me simplify this a great deal. Suppose I teach my students an art with one technique, now to break the nose of any attacker 100% of the time. Nobody would attack you if they knew you would be breaking their nose because of that attack. The attacker attacks those they can dominate to destroy. If they start doing so and their nose is immediately broken, it was because of Magic, their awareness did not include the ability that their prey was the hunter. They start the attack and their nose breaks by magic, no matter how that magic is performed.

In actuality my instructors have always been Magicians. As a brown belt sparring with Charles Murray I was never able to touch him once no matter how I attacked, he was always ¼” out of my range, but at any time he could walk all over me. A year after I made my black belt I visited Florida and Charles and I took the time to work out together and my first move nailed his nose, in that case Magic allowed me to do what he knew I couldn’t do – one time. Of course after my Magic was another story. Magic is the only way to describe Tristan Sutrisno ending up standing atop my shoulders before I finished trying to punch him.

The secret is not just training and skill, though the magic doesn’t work without those components, the secret is the way of misdirection, exactly as the stage magician does to the audience.

A person who attacks, does so because they know where you are and are so sure of that knowledge very frequently their attack shifts to an ‘automatic’ attack, not relying on their senses to target properly. Understanding that allows one to shift, move, etc. so you’re not there. It might be as simple as just shifting back a bit so their focused attack just hits air. It may be a movement shift to move outside of their attack laterally. It may be movement patterns in any direction to evade, entangle or counter an attack.

When you think about it a block itself is magic, you’re removing their attack from it’s intended target.

This brings to mind what is the focus of our Karate when we understand the use of magic in all situations?

Our kata studies have thousands of applications and we spend years learning the raw movements and then crafting how they fit many different attacks. That is the shape of how our karate can be used. But that is training, is that the purpose we should be choosing.

There are so many ranges of what an attack may be. Someone beating up another person leaves one set of focus to respond. Someone attacking use when we don’t expected leaves another.

But Okinawa through many instructors and words as in the Bubishi, would suggest we work to use our senses, or eyes and ears, to not be caught unawares. If that is the case and our awareness shows the attack unfolding is the correct response to sing Tennessee Ernie Fords words from ‘Sixteen Tons’. “If you see me coming better step aside, a lot of men didn’t and a lot of men died. One fist of Iron, another of Steel, if the right one don’t get you then the left one will!” Certainly one aspect of our studies leads us to wish that we respond thus.

Perhaps the crafted skill we develop can be better used to evade, to disappear intelligently and avoid the attack and fighting.

Personally I consider fighting the lowest level of our abilities. I concede there is logic in demolishing or destroying an attack under many circumstances. The difference is being unable to do so and thus having to fight derides the skills we work to develop. As a person I do not have a right to ‘punish’ an attacker, even though I do have the right to demolish their attack (which has many levels of meaning all appropriate situationally).

I think it is far better to become a ghost, whenever possible.

The first time I tried using one of Rothrock Laoshi’s Ghost techniques, when my student finished striking I was standing 10 feet behind him watching with amusement his astonishment that I was no longer before him.

In many cases, especially with our newest students, lower level Ghost techniques studies make a great deal of sense, how to learn to evade an attack, how to use their attack focus to allow them to retreat at a direction their attacker isn’t watching. How to not be there.

I’m not going to give a step by step look at my studies, just a suggestion how to use the magic. I find it very useful to look into your eyes, show a grin on my face and suggest “Come on Karate boy hit me, come on really, really hit me…… got it in you?”

And then disappear!

For the record, I’m an aging, slowing, decrepit karate-ka and I know you’re all younger, faster and better looking………………..come on Karate-boy..

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My next post will discuss several basic ghost technique studies for training the newest youth students.