An Uchideshi Experience: Chapter Nine
The Uninvited
Sensei was out of town, and I had just finished teaching the Wednesday night class when a blond guy in his early twenties strolled into the dojo. Immediately I bowed off the mat, made a beeline to him, and shook his left hand. I had to head him off at the pass because it was immediately clear that this individual was a little altered, if you know what I mean. Barefoot in jeans and a woolen pullover (not to mention the fluorescent green boomerang sticking out the back of his collar), he was a little bit dirty, and very wide-eyed.
I asked if I could help him and answer any questions he might have. He asked a few coherent questions before going off about how he loved the dojo and how he’d like his house in Japan to look just like it. He also thought that it was refreshing to see how clean the walls were, because as he explained, when the Japanese came to this country, “they took their ninja swords and covered the walls of their dojos with the blood of Americans.” This, of course, was before he revealed that he had been buried in ink up to his chest for the past seven lifetimes. He dug me, loved my explanations, and I shook his right hand before amicably parting. Out the door, he headed into the night. Apparently, it was good acid.
He was relatively harmless, but hanging around a dojo, you get an opportunity to see a variety of people come in and out, some invited, some not. Monterey is a pretty nice area, so there aren’t a lot of thugs coming in off the street, trying to test their stuff. But it does happen.
One time I can recall, a huge man stumbled in after class, very drunk from the bar next door, and asked Sensei if he thought he could flip him around like he saw the students being thrown. He was about six feet tall, and at least two hundred and fifty pounds, so it certainly would have been a challenge to get this guy airborne. I didn’t catch what Sensei said to him at first, but the guy was kind of puzzled by what he had heard, and changed his question to “So if I went one (left jab)/two (right cross slowly thrown toward Sensei’s head), you still think you can do it?”
Sensei’s reply shocked him even more than the first. “You don’t understand. There would be no one/two. There would be only one, and it would be over. There wouldn’t even be a two.”
“You really think so?”
“I don’t think so, I know so. There are people who look like they can really do things, and there are people who can really do things. I am one of the people who can.”
Sensei said it with such assurance that you could see it take the fight out our large friend, and finally, seeking confirmation on the secret of Sensei’s confidence, he asked, “You use angles, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Sensei answered, “you are very intelligent. We use angles and leverage.” And with that, they shook hands and the drunken challenger headed out the door.
That’s one way to handle challenges, taking the fight out of a person through psychological or situational manipulation. This, I believe, is a large part of aiki-jujutsu as I’ve come to find out, which was different from my original view.
After putting on a children’s martial arts camp, Sensei, Sheila, and I were on a long drive back to Monterey when I asked him for his explanation of the difference between jujutsu and aiki-jujutsu. Was it simply that aiki-jujutsu used an opponent’s momentum more efficiently than jujutsu, and depended on that commitment to a larger degree as an integral part of the technique? He said that was partially correct, but there was more to it than that. It took me a while to really digest what he said, but I think I’ve got it now.
Psychological distractions, fake-outs, knockout blows through pressure points, switching an attacker’s target to track your hand instead of your face; all of these are tricks and strategies of aiki-jujutsu. But do they work? Well. . . yes and no.
“The more aiki-jujutsu something is, the more bullshit it is,” Sensei explained, “which doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, it just means you have to create an environment or set up the right situation for it to happen.”
Then he went on about knockout blows. Occasionally, he’ll knock out a trusted student at the dojo for a demonstration, but he warned me that if someone is tense or expecting a blow to come, it’s not going to work. You have to create the circumstance, maybe talk to them, calm them down, cajole them, then when the timing’s right, deliver the strike unexpectedly.
It’s really no different than boxing, wrestling, judo, jiu-jitsu, or any other sport. Your competition knows what you’re up to and is generally familiar with the attacks in your arsenal. You have to use combinations of techniques to set your opponent up, or nothing’s going to work for you. To throw an experienced judo player in a tournament without some kind of feint or set-up is nearly impossible. These things don’t just happen; they must be made to happen.
Which is one reason why you don’t learn many of the tricks of aiki-jujutsu before the upper levels of Seibukan. Strategies using real-world variables can fail, and you better have a strong base of concrete physical skills to serve as a backup plan. But it’s good to remember that there are more strategies and options available to a person than they might initially imagine. In the movie Pumping Iron, Arnold Schwarzenegger explained how he could talk opponents into losing before ever stepping foot on the stage of Mr. Olympia, and advocated using methods outside the arena of competition to sway fortune your way. Life is full of variables, why not be creative and use them in your favor?
So what do you when somebody walks in the dojo and wants to prove how tough he is or how “real” the training isn’t? I don’t know. Some people field challenges, some invite them to join the class and feel the training for themselves; others get a large student to act as an escort, guiding them to their next stop. It’s a recurring problem that will never go away, so new solutions must be constantly sought. One instructor I knew had the answer for his school. If someone came to issue a challenge, he’d walk to the back of the dojo, get his 9 mm pistol, calmly show it to them, and ask, “Alright, just how real do you want to get?”
Good question. Do you just want to disprove a particular technique or make it open hand-to-hand combat? Are the challengers aware that the instructor they chose may intend to use weapons, or feel that anything goes, including bites, groin shots, and eye-gouges? A challenge means a tapout to some and a life-or-death struggle to others. Most people don’t want to acknowledge that kind of gravity, but an animalistic, primal response to what a person perceives to be a life-or -death situation is a reality. I don’t think anybody would want to really push the envelope on the question of how real they’d like to get because so few could stomach the truth.
A good friend of mine from Indonesia brought it all into focus as we drove to Santa Cruz to train at Claudio’s. We were jabbering away about different styles, combat effectiveness, the truth in martial arts; in other words, the usual topics for two martial addicts. Then he blew me away by saying, “You know, it’s all bullshit anyway. It doesn’t matter if you know Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or JKD concepts. In my country, if you speak out against the government, you’ll be floating face down in a river the next day, and it doesn’t matter how much you know, there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
That is far more real than I’d ever like to get. Makes the drunk guy throwing out a challenge seem pretty inconsequential, and an overall waste of time. It puts things in perspective, for me at least. It may be tempting to showcase your skills on the street, but consider this: After the fight is over, can the barely victorious really be considered “the winner”? Does the thrill of victory last longer than its legal ramifications, or the healing time of a fractured hand? Think about it.
We’re all role-playing in martial arts, taking our turns in the game, so when challenges arise, I think it’s best to handle them peacefully and continue on. If you choose otherwise, be sure to pick your fights carefully, since the one you waste may be your last.