Keiko Shokon

Self-Defense

PREFACE

This book, Keiko Shokon, continues where its elder brothers, Koryu Bujutsu and Sword & Spirit, left off. Together, the three volumes of the Classical Warrior Traditions of Japan series offer an overview of the state of the classical traditions. As with the traditions themselves, the viewpoints expressed in the essays in these books are varied, even contradictory — that’s intentional. The only way to convey the myriad flavors of the koryu is through a diversity of voices. And in this latest volume, we’ve brought you more.

Readers of the previous volumes will find few differences; most notably, there’s the absence of the Ryu Guide. Space and finances dictated that we omit it this time, but we hope, in the future, to create a separate volume of short, illustrated articles on the most commonly encountered classical ryu. It’s a long-term project!

We’ve also opted to use endnotes instead of footnotes. This was a difficult decision to make, since I personally hate having to flip to the end of a book chapter to read a note. Unfortunately, the length and frequency of notes caused sufficient clutter on the pages to force the switch. For those fans of footnotes, you have my most sincere apology.

This volume would not have been possible without the enthusiastic support of the readers of our previous books. Without you, Keiko Shokon would never have seen the light of day. Thank you!

The usual suspects once again offered consultation, commiseration, and coffee throughout the excessively long gestation of this book. In addition to my stalwart contributors, who never complained about my delays (though I fear I was rarely as circumspect), the lads and lasses at the Shutokukan and Itten Dojos lent their support at all phases of this endeavor. Thanks also to Quintin Chambers for his words of encouragement in the Foreword. Suzanne Marshall, owner of Patewood Farm, and her horses, Banner, Tesoro Vistoso, Moose, Clark, and R.J. listened to far more than their share of my gripes. Lu Brezler, Steve Duncan, Lisa Granite, Steve Kelsey, John Mark, Yoko Sato, John Sims, Derek Steel, and Bob Wolfe read the manuscript at various phases and offered their insights. Ubaldo Alcantara continued to pester me to get the book finished. To all of you, my heartfelt thanks!

Phil Relnick, my jo sensei, always says that we must have our priorities in the right order: Family, Work, Budo. I dedicate this volume to priority number one: Meik, Mom, Dad, Andy, JoAnne, Carl, Mark, and Mr. Wizard; and to all the members of my budo family — you know who you are!

Diane Skoss

March 2002

KEIKO SHOKON REVISITED: INTRODUCTION

Diane Skoss

The first volume of Classical Warrior Traditions of Japan, Koryu Bujutsu, aimed to answer the question, "Just what are the koryu bujutsu?" Sword & Spirit, volume two, explored the nature of these arts, their hearts and souls and the techniques that comprise them. In the third volume, Keiko Shokon, we turn our attention to the future of these arts. What role, if any, can sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Japanese martial arts play in the twenty-first century?

Margaret Stawowy wrote in her Japan Times review of Sword & Spirit:

I can’t help but wonder what relevance the classical martial arts have in the so-called civilized world, a world where warfare is waged impersonally with computer algorithms, or in the case of guerrilla combat, with increasingly sophisticated ballistics. (March 30, 1999)

This is a legitimate question answered in different ways by the essays in this volume. The koryu offer participants the opportunity to finely hone skills and assimilate standards that are no longer so commonly taught in modern society. Traditional values of perseverance, patience, constant awareness, self-effacement, working towards the good of a group rather than an individual, and appropriate, polite behavior contrast sharply with the get-it-instantly in-your-face brashness of the brave new world of the Internet culture. Nitta Suzuyo, nineteenth headmaster of the Toda-ha Buko-ryu, reveals in her interview with Liam Keeley her belief that training in the koryu promotes physical well-being as well as the development of precise and refined people skills. Each execution of kata is a complex transaction in which both partners must instantly assess the opponent — discerning their current mental state, physical skill level, and intent — then adjust and react accordingly. With training this process becomes a deep and reliable intuition that can appear almost magical to the outside observer. What once was a skill on which a warrior’s life might depend is now an invaluable tool for getting along with other people in all the various relationships and situations that we encounter daily.

The koryu have also provided the technical basis for modern sport forms of Japanese martial arts. Meik Skoss outlines the influence of the Itto-ryu on modern kendo in his overview of the tradition. Ron Beaubien demonstrates how properly developed observational skills can help inexperienced martial artists better appreciate those connections with the past and gain insight into their own training. If what you see isn’t always what you get in the classical traditions, might this not also be true in modern arts as well?

Most Westerners involved in the transmission of the koryu (and undoubtedly most Japanese, too) are quite convinced that these arts are, at the very least, worth preserving as forms of self-discipline. The koryu, like the California condor, are too magnificent to allow to lapse into extinction. Yet as Dave Lowry points out in his essay:

Like the conservationist who lovingly hand-rears a threatened species, thus rendering the offspring unable to feed and reproduce naturally as they should, he risks contributing to the weakening of the very institutions he loves so much and wishes so devoutly to preserve and propagate. (58)

Is the condor chick raised in captivity really the same fowl as its immediate ancestors? As twenty-first-century curators of sixteenth-century arts, we cannot afford to ignore such questions if the arts are to survive and thrive.

The critical issue is context and the native one for the koryu is that of feudal-era Japan. While many argue that modern Japan resembles old Japan no more than our Western culture does, that isn’t strictly true. Many elements of the feudal era and the warrior culture do still permeate modern Japanese culture, and the Asian mind-set, with its Confucian and Buddhist influences, is vastly different from our Western way of seeing things. Modern Japanese culture is still the closest we can get to the native cultural habitat of the koryu, and it is a vital element in these arts’ transmissions. The jury is still out on how successfully the koryu can be transmitted outside of Japan, as we are still in the first generation of that progression. Most of us who are directly involved are erring on the side of caution; to the extent that we possibly can, we are trying to instruct our students the way we were taught, forcing them to step into Japan when they enter the dojo. Americans, in particular, have a general aversion to relinquishing inalienable rights, but in our role as conservators we must stalwartly resist any attempts to modify or adapt the way things are in the koryu to suit American notions of convenience. This cast in stone approach obscures the fact that the koryu have always adapted and evolved. Ellis Amdur investigates renovations and innovations and the question of whether it is ever appropriate to add something new to these old traditions, and if so, who might be legitimately qualified to make these changes.

Inappropriate change is not the only problem faced when the Japanese cultural background of the koryu is missing. Dramatic distortions and misrepresentations become easy in the West. Grandiose titles are part-and-parcel of the American martial arts industry; if one teacher advertises as a Master the next must perforce proclaim himself a Grandmaster. On the next street over, the martial arts school operator suddenly becomes a Great Grandmaster. Foreign terms have even more cache and selling power. Unwitting (at best — at worst, unscrupulous) Westerners have appropriated, misunderstood, and misused many Japanese terms properly applied only in very specific contexts. Soke (headmaster) has been perhaps the most blatantly (and laughably) misapplied. Dr. William Bodiford offers some definitions, explanations, and observations that can lead the non-Japanese martial artist towards a greater sensitivity to the nuances of Japanese language, history, and culture.

Like the museum curator or wildlife conservationist we must surround our charges with an environment as true to life as we can make it and educate visitors about the entire scene. But the koryu are not primarily cultural artifacts. They are ancient but effective systems for training for combat; their efficiency, however, is inextricably bound up with their methods of presentation and transmission — hence the need for cultural guardianship. Lt. Col. George Bristol discusses how the koryu curricula can actually apply in modern warfare — not the remote impersonality of Ms. Stawowy’s query, but in the direct man-to-man combat of the Marine. Lt. Col. Bristol’s observations illuminate yet one more side of the koryu’s modern relevance, exhibiting innovation in its best sense by incorporating both pedagogy and philosophy into the newly developed Marine Corps Martial Art. His ethical warrior harks back to the divine warrior Issai Chozan describes in his eighteenth-century parable, Neko no myojutsu, presented here by Dr. Karl Friday.

This kinship between warriors across the centuries brings us full circle. In the introduction to Koryu Bujutsu I first wrote of Nishioka Tsuneo’s motto, Keiko shokon, most simply translated as Reflecting deeply on the past, illuminate the present. Through study of the koryu, we find that the combative principles encoded in their kata are as valid today as they were four hundred years ago. The rigorous psychological and physical discipline required of the koryu practitioner continues to be an excellent forge for tempering mind, spirit, and body. And, although people and cultures have changed dramatically since the koryu’s origins, the ancient social structure of the koryu still serves as a model of interpersonal relationships that can inform and enhance our modern social interactions. In short, the koryu, by offering a distillation of what was good and useful in the past, continue to provide remarkable lessons that we can use today to enlighten our understanding of who and what we are, and who and what we aim to become.

Diane Skoss began training in aikido in 1982 while at Indiana University finishing up Masters degrees in library science and English literature. In 1987 she moved to Tokyo; there she continued her aikido training and first encountered the classical warrior traditions. After a seven-year stint as managing editor oft Aikido Journal and production manager for Aiki News’ book division, she established her own publishing company, Koryu Books, and started the Internet website, Koryu.com. She holds the license of okuden in Toda-ha Buko-ryu and okuiri-sho in Shinto Muso-ryu, and has dan grades in jukendo, aikido, jodo, and tankendo. She returned to the United States at the end of 1997 and currently assists her husband instructing at the Shutokukan Dojo in New Jersey. She is also the assistant horse trainer at Patewood Farm, specializing in classical dressage.

THE CAT’S EERIE SKILL

A TRANSLATION OF ISSAI CHOZAN’S NEKO NO MYOJUTSU

Karl F. Friday

Turbulence and combat are a part of the lives of all creatures. From the smallest to the greatest, no species is utterly free of violence, least of all man, who has learned to kill not only for food or for self-defense, but in anger or hatred, for profit, and even for pleasure. Yet this creature, man, using the same hands with which he fashions tools of destruction, creates art that celebrates life; using the same mind with which he plots rapine, conceives philosophies that celebrate peace and harmony.

Among the myriad solutions mankind has proposed for taming its savagery none is as intricate or intriguing as the cultural and conceptual traditions surrounding the Japanese practice of the bugei (the military disciplines, or, more popularly, the martial arts). In late medieval and early modern Japan, martial training appropriated the status — as well as the forms, the vocabulary, the teaching methods, and even the ultimate goals — of religion and the fine arts. By the eighteenth century they had evolved into a complex cultural phenomenon in which various physical, technical, psychological, and philosophical factors were believed to intertwine and interact to produce a coherent path that guided both the physical and the moral activities of those who followed it.

The intricate entanglement of tactical, corporeal, mental, and spiritual concerns lies at the heart of classical Japanese martial art, and yet it is often only poorly understood. Scholars and aficionados alike have long been intrigued by the compelling paradox of samurai martial culture and its equation of perfection of the arts of violence with perfect non-violence. But to resolve this enigma, modern observers have tended to fall back on simplistic notions like an unattaching Zen mind that transcends and neutralizes the moral consequences of killing.¹

While this idea is not entirely wrong, it misses a critical point: to the early modern samurai, proficiency in combat and spiritual enlightenment were not contending, or even sequential, achievements; they were interactive and interdependent developments — inseparable aspects of the same phenomenon — to be experienced simultaneously. It was, by this time, a fundamental premise of bugei instruction in Japan that the ability to utterly transcend any attraction to violence was essential to the perfection of combative skills. Pundits, drawing out the implications of a world view (formed at the nexus of Buddhism, Taoism, Neo-Confucianism, and Shinto thought) that stressed monism and the interpenetration of all things and all actions, were insisting that the study of fighting arts not only could but must eventually become a path to broader development of the self.²

One of the best illustrations of the reasoning that underlay this conclusion is Issai Chozan’s eighteenth-century parable about the nature of ultimate proficiency in the fighting arts, Neko no Myojutsu (The Cat’s Eerie Skill). Issai, whose real name was Tanba Jurozaemon Tadaaki, was a retired retainer of the Sekiyado domain in Shimosa Province (in what is now Chiba Prefecture), and a prominent scholar of Shinto, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and military science. He published Neko no Myojutsu in 1727, when he was sixty-nine years old, as part of a thirty-volume work entitled Inaka Soji (The Country Chuang Tzu).³

The text centers on a discussion among a group of cats, concerning their failure to defeat an unusually ferocious rat. Issai uses the cats’ skills and shortcomings as illustrations of successive levels of achievement in martial ability.

NEKO NO MYOJUTSU

There was once a swordsman named Shoken, whose home was invaded by a huge rat that would appear and run about, even in broad daylight. Closing the rodent up in one room, he set his house cat to capturing it, but the rat charged, leaped at the cat’s face, and bit her, causing the cat to squeal and run away. Nonplussed by this result, the swordsman borrowed several neighborhood cats who had made names for themselves as extraordinary rat-catchers, and turned them loose in the room. But the rat sat quietly in a corner until one of the cats approached, whereupon it leaped out and bit him. Seeing this terrible sight, the other cats froze with fear and could not advance.

The swordsman became enraged and, taking up a wooden sword, went after the rat himself to beat it to death. But the rat slipped beneath the wooden sword untouched, while the swordsman struck sliding doors and Chinese paper screens, tearing them to shreds. That spirited rat bound through the air with lightening-like speed, and even leapt at the swordsman’s face, attempting to bite. At length, drenched with perspiration, Shoken summoned a servant. I have heard tell, he said, of a peerless cat about six or seven leagues from here. Borrow it and have it brought here.

The servant dispatched a man. But when he returned with the cat, the animal did not look especially clever, nor did its body appear in any way remarkable. Be that as it may, when the cat was placed in the room, the rat did not move from its corner, while the cat walked nonchalantly across the room, caught it, and dragged it back to Shoken.

That evening, all the cats assembled in the swordsman’s home, with this Elder cat in the seat of honor. The other cats came forward, kneeled, and said, We are all felines of some reputation, long-trained and skilled in this art. Not only rats, but even weasels and otters, we slap down and carve up with our claws. But we have never heard of anything like this ferocious rat. Through what skill were you able to bring it down? We humbly beseech you to share with us your wondrous art.

The Elder cat laughed and replied, "You are all young kittens. Although you are experts in your work, you have not until now heard tell of the methods of the