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Kūkan (空関): The Empty Gate

From Bujinkan – The Magick & The Mundane by Shawn Gray

When I was asked for a theme for three upcoming Bujinkan seminars (details below) that I’ve been invited to give in April, the concept of Kūkan immediately came to mind. Kūkan is a term that gets thrown around a lot in the Bujinkan, and Chris Taylor, host of the Vancouver seminar, asked me to elaborate more specifically on how we’ll be approaching it…

When Hatsumi Sōke uses the word Kūkan in the Dōjō, it’s most often simply translated into English as “space”, but as is often the case when Sōke speaks, there is frequently a deeper sense than can be conveyed in a single word, and the translator is often pressed to succinctly express the full meaning of one idea as Sōke quickly moves on to the next. For instance, there’s another word that Sōke uses from time to time that’s also translated as “space”: Kokū. In both Kūkan and Kokū, the same character for Kū ( 空 ) is used, which has the meaning of emptiness or void. When this character is pronounced Sora, it means “sky”. It can also be pronounced Kara, as in Karate ( 空手 – “empty hand” ).

But while both Kūkan and Kokū are often simply translated in the Dōjō as “space”, they have quite different meanings. Kokū refers to boundless, limitless space, space that has no borders or boundaries. This term thus often refers to the heavens, the cosmos – outer space. Kūkan, on the other hand, could in one sense be rendered as inner space – it refers to space that has borders or boundaries by which it is outlined or enclosed and by which the shape, dimensions / size, or range (distance) of the space are defined. The character normally used for the Kan of Kūkan is 間, which depicts a sun ( 日 ) in the space between the two doors of a gate ( 門 ). The doors define the space or interval that the sun’s light shines through. This character for Kan can also be pronounced Ma, and it is used in this form in another term often used in the Dōjō – the term Ma-ai ( 間合 ), meaning “distance”, the interval between two points.

In thinking about the theme for the upcoming seminars, however, I decided to play with the characters a bit. Instead of the Kan normally used in Kūkan, I thought of another Kan – the character used in the word for “joint”, Kansetsu ( 関節 ). This came to mind because the skeletal joints are an example of Kūkan within the body structure. The little spaces between our finger joints, for example, are what enable us to use our hands with a dexterity that wouldn’t be possible if our fingers were each formed from a single, solid bone. (Similarly, the links in a chain employ empty space for flexibility – and even a rope derives its suppleness EmptyGatefrom the small spaces between the strands of which it is composed.) This Kan ( 関 ) is used to convey connection and relatedness. Budō ni kan-suru ( 武道に関する ) means “related to Budō”, for example. So Kūkan written as 空関 has the sense of “related to empty space”.

Additionally, the character 関 literally means “barrier” or “gate” (a gate being a wall or barrier with an opening in it). Thus, Kūkan written as 空関 also has the sense of being “void of impediment or obstacle” in addition to the sense of relation to empty space, and it’s this idea that I’d like to get across in the Taijutsu techniques that we’ll be working on in the upcoming seminars. Creating space allows one to pass through obstacles without impediment, resulting in smooth, effortless, and efficient movement in the same way that one passes through the empty space in a wall created by a door or gate. An opening is an opportunity that may look like nothing – and it is! That’s what makes it useful. I sum up this paradox with the phrase Nai ga aru ( 無いが有る ), meaning Nothing (or more accurately, nothingness) exists. The theme of these seminars thus refers to finding and creating empty spaces, and using those openings to one’s advantage in Taijutsu. I look forward to seeing many of you in Stockholm, Brussels, and Vancouver!

Kūkan Ikkan!

Shawn Gray
Ryūun (龍雲)

160430 Seminar T-Shirt
~ Upcoming Seminars (2016) ~
“Kūkan: Nai Ga Aru”

Apr 16-17 – Stockholm (details)
Contact: Kent Thorén (email)

Apr 23-24 – Brussels (details)
Contact: Jan Ramboer (Facebook)

Apr 30 – Vancouver
Contact: Chris Taylor (Facebook)


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A Guide to Happiness – Kōfuku No Shiori（幸福の栞）

From The Magick & The Mundane » Bujinkan by Shawn Gray

Kofuku No Shiori - JapaneseA couple of weeks ago I posted a few of observations about Kōfuku No Shiori on Facebook – posting a longer follow-up here at the suggestion of friends.

Kōfuku No Shiori (幸福の栞), which translates as “A Guide to Happiness“, is a short text by Takamatsu Sōke. In seeing the Japanese original again recently, a number of things came to mind and I thought it might be good to post an English translation that will perhaps breathe some new life into this well-known and meaningful piece. Here’s the Japanese original:

幸福の栞
皆さん、互いに憂を捨てて幸福を得ましょう。皆さん、幸福は人生最高の満足です。悲しみとか不満とかを捨て、思い直すのも幸福です。災害、病害を前知して覚り改めることも幸福です。皆さん、幸福は眼前に持って居ります。これを掴むと掴まぬにより、不幸とも幸福ともなるのです。何人もお聞きになり、お尋ね下されて、幸福の栞を拾おて下され。
Let’s break it down and see what we can find …

1) 皆さん、互いに憂を捨てて幸福を得ましょう。

The first thing that strikes me when I read the Japanese is the use of 皆さん (“Mina-san“), which means all or everyone. It begins the first sentence, and you can see that it appears at the beginning of two other sentences in this text as well. This is interesting because it indicates that Takamatsu Sōke was consciously addressing a group of people – all of the readers. The original context may have been such that it was intended for his own students, or for a specific group, such as a group of Hatsumi Sōke’s students at the time. Nevertheless, when we read it today, we can read it as if it’s addressed to us, the readers, as well. Why is it significant that the text is addressed to everyone? The rest of the first sentence sheds more light on that, beginning with the next phrase, 互いに (tagai-ni), which means together, mutually, or with each other. The opening sentence ends with the verb 得ましょう (emashou), meaning to obtain or to attain, with the verb ending (~shou) being used to further suggest togetherness in the same way that we use the word “let’s” in English (tabemashou = let’s eat; ikimashou = let’s go). So, in writing about Happiness (幸福, kōfuku), the author isn’t simply saying, “Be happy”, he’s saying “Everyone, let’s attain happiness together.” That’s quite a significant difference. There’s more here, too. He also refers to the throwing or casting away (捨てる) of sorrow (憂, urei – also translated as grief, etc) in this same context of togetherness. An accurate rendering of the first sentence in English would thus be, Everyone, let’s together cast away sorrow and attain happiness.

2) 皆さん、幸福は人生最高の満足です。

Once again, he begins with 皆さん, Everyone, and simply states that happiness is the most satisfying thing in life (a more direct, literal rendering would be, happiness is life’s ultimate satisfaction).

3) 悲しみとか不満とかを捨て、思い直すのも幸福です。

Ultimate satisfaction sounds great, right? Everybody wants that! The author recognizes that it’s not that simple – human beings struggle with feelings of sorrow and discontent. The author urges us to find Happiness by discarding those negative feelings and taking another look at our situation. Sorrow (悲しみ, kanashimi) and discontent (不満, fuman) are pretty straight-forward to translate, and although 捨てる (suteru, used above as well) has a wide range of possibilities (such as “throw away, “leave behind”, “discard”, “abandon”, “dispose of”, etc.), I thought “cast away” fit well in this context.

What I found interesting here was 思い直す (omoi-naosu). Omoi is from Omou (思う), “to think“. Naosu (直す) is interesting here because not only does it have the meaning of doing something again (repeating something), but also because it carries the sense of “fixing”, “correcting”, or “repairing” something in the process. For example, in addition to having the sense of repeating something, Naosu is also commonly used to say things like “I’ll fix the chair” or “I’ll correct the issue”.

I’ve rendered Omoi-naosu as “re-thinking” to convey the sense, which I think is implied in the original Japanese, that Happiness is achieved here not only by simply looking back upon sorrow and discontent in life, but by actively choosing to discard sorrow and discontent and re-think (re-frame or “correct”) our perspective on our life experiences. I think Takamatsu Sōke is observing that Happiness doesn’t come from our external circumstances but from the perspective that we choose to take on those circumstances: Casting sorrow and discontent away and re-thinking is also happiness.

4) 災害、病害を前知して覚り改めることも幸福です。

Like the previous sentence, this one is simple, direct, and to-the-point in the Japanese. The first two terms are 災害 (saigai – calamity, disaster, or misfortune) and 病害 (byogai – disease or blight). Saigai can perhaps be understood as the calamity itself, and Byogai as the bodily effects of the calamity. 前知 (zenchi) refers to foreknowledge or anticipation, 覚り(satori) means understanding (but also with the sense of enlightenment or spiritual awakening), and 改める (aratameru) refers to correcting, rectifying, or improving – similar to the idea expressed by Naosu above. Once again, Happiness isn’t a product of our circumstances, but a product of our perspective. Anticipating and correcting one’s understanding of the ravages of calamity and disease is also happiness.

5) 皆さん、幸福は眼前に持って居ります。

Again, 皆さん, Everyone. Again, short and to-the-point: Everyone, happiness is waiting there before your eyes.

6) これを掴むと掴まぬにより、不幸とも幸福ともなるのです。

There are a couple of interesting points here as well. The first is the use of これ (this) at the beginning. What does this refer to? Does it refer to happiness? It could, yes. It could also refer to the previous sentence as a whole, which gives a different sense to what follows: whether you grasp (掴む, tsukamu) this or don’t grasp (掴まぬ, tsukamanu) this. So the phrase could mean a) whether you grasp happiness or not, or b) whether you grasp the point of the previous statement (about happiness waiting there before your eyes) or not. Maybe they’re both the same thing. ;-)

Another interesting point here, I think, is the mention of 不幸 (fukou, unhappiness) as the alternative if you don’t grasp it: Whether you grasp it or not determines your unhappiness or happiness.

7) 何人もお聞きになり、お尋ね下されて、幸福の栞を拾おて下され。

I like the way that Takamatsu Sōke ends this piece. He doesn’t say, “There’s my advice, take it or leave it” or, “That’s the word on finding happiness, there you have it.” He encourages the reader to go out and find the guide for Happiness for themselves by asking (お聞き) and inquiring (お尋ね) of everyone (何人も). Ask others, get opinions, and find it for yourself: Ask everyone, inquire of them, and find the guide to Happiness.
I think these together form a pretty accurate translation of Kōfuku No Shiori:

Everyone, let’s together cast away sorrow and attain happiness.
Everyone, happiness is life’s ultimate satisfaction.
Casting sorrow and discontent away and re-thinking is also happiness.
Anticipating and correcting one’s understanding of the ravages of calamity and disease is also happiness.
Everyone, happiness is waiting there before your eyes.
Whether you grasp it or not determines your unhappiness or happiness.
Ask everyone, inquire of them, and find the guide to Happiness.

 

20151022_010046

‘Kōfuku’, by Hatsumi Sōke

 

Takamatsu Sōke led an adventurous life, but in hearing and reading stories over the years, “happy” isn’t always the first word that comes to mind – at least not when one looks at the external circumstances of his life. But as the wise Ninjutsu master teaches us here, it’s our internal perspective that matters. Looking back over painful or unfortunate circumstances, re-considering, re-thinking, and re-orienting our perspectives can allow us to lead fuller, happier lives. In a recent message I received from Shiraishi Sensei, he referred to ‘the study of Ninjutsu, which creates happiness’. I’m willing to bet that he’s read Kōfuku No Shiori a couple of times.


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Muto No Kyojitsu (無闘の虚実)

From The Magick & The Mundane » Bujinkan by Shawn Gray

Greetings!

Back after a _long_ hiatus, with a brief post to explain the theme for two Bujinkan seminars I’ll be doing in January – Vancouver (Jan 4/5) and Houston (Jan 11/12). Maybe writing this will also spur me on to go back and pick up Path to the Heart of the Flower, a story that I began to write in early 2012. I also have some other ideas that I’d like to write about, but it’s hard to find the time. Thanks to those of you who keep asking me to write, as it helps to keep it on my mind and pushes it a little higher up on the priority list. :)

When the seminar hosts asked me about a theme for training, I thought back over some important things that Hatsumi Sensei focused on in Hombu Dojo Keiko this past year. The official theme of training as announced at the beginning of the year was Ken (劔), the straight, double-edged sword, but as often happens with Sensei, the theme had completely morphed by the second half of the year. In fact, we rarely used Ken at all in training for most of the whole second half of the year. I’m not sure the reason, but we somehow found ourselves doing a lot of Muto Dori (無刀捕り) work against both regular Katana (刀) and Bo (棒). Sensei continued to stress the central importance of Muto Dori throughout the end of the year, with much mention of the role of Kyojitsu (虚実) within Muto Dori movement.

Hell under the upraised sword . . .

Hell under the upraised sword . . .

I’ve always liked to cheer for the underdog. I like strategies and techniques that enable a physically weaker person to even the odds against a physically stronger person. That’s why I like Gyokko Ryu movement. Sensei emphasized the importance of this kind of movement a lot early in the year,  and especially at the Bujinkan Women’s Taikai in March. In fact, Sensei stressed that women’s self-defense was the last and greatest thing that he learned from Takamatsu Sensei, stating that this idea reflects the pinnacle of Taijutsu training. The use of weakness to defeat strength.

This idea is highlighted even further when the opponent has a weapon and the defender is unarmed. Facing a physically bigger, stronger opponent can be daunting enough as it is, let alone an opponent who’s trying to take your head off with a meter-long razor blade. Learning to deal with this type of situation is challenging for even the most skilled martial artists, which is precisely why Muto Dori should be practised with  proper Kihon (基本, fundamentals / basics), practised well, and practised often. The lessons learned can be applied not only to classical scenarios with swords, but also to modern situations where an opponent might have a knife, a stick, or virtually any other kind of weapon. Or no weapon at all – Muto Dori principles can just as easily be applied against unarmed attacks.

That brings me to the concept of Kyojitsu (虚実). That’s Jitsu (“fact, truth”) with an ‘i’, not Jutsu (“art, technique”) with a ‘u’. Different words, different meanings, different spellings. The word Kyojitsu is made simply by putting the Kanji for “lie” or “falsehood” next to the Kanji for “truth” or “fact”. False-fact. Lie-truth. How does this make any sense? This is a great term because the composition of the term itself teaches us about the nature of its meaning. That is, that its nature is illogical. By definition, it doesn’t make sense. It’s not supposed to make sense. Sensei often talks about common sense being of no use in a fight – that one needs to throw away common sense in that situation and adopt un-common sense. Fighting is crazy, and war is insane. Why should one human being want to harm another human being in the first place? Perhaps that’s the actually the root of the issue, but standing around philosophizing about it in an illogical situation will only get you cut down by that meter-long razor blade. There’s a time for thinking, and a time for doing. Standing unarmed in front of a sword-wielding attacker is not a time for thinking. People involved in serious accidents or other life-threatening situations often say that in the midst of the craziness, in the midst of the chaos, it was as if their mind shut off and they went on to auto-pilot. That is, they stopped thinking, and just acted. To many people, even the idea of stop thinking sounds illogical. How do you stop thinking? Not by thinking about stopping. Only by doing it. This concept don’t think, just act is essential to Muto Dori. To do this, of course, requires a lot of practise. Your body needs to know what to do when you put it on auto-pilot, and it learns what to do through repetition, training, and practise. A Gokui (極意, mystery / secret) of Muto Dori teaches this importance of doing:

振りかざす太刀の下こそ地獄なれ
一と足すすめ先は極楽

Furi kazasu tachi no shita koso jigoku nare
Ichi to ashi susume saki wa gokuraku

Hell under the upraised sword,
one step forward is paradise

... step in, and Heaven is your reward.

… step in, and Heaven is your reward.

So let me see, this angry guy is brandishing a meter-long razor blade at me, and you want me to … what? Stepping in might sound illogical (not to mention dangerous). On the spot, it might seem to make more sense to turn and run away (when in fact turning your back could be even more dangerous). This daring to step in, this stepping forward instead of away, this doing, is one example of Kyojitsu.

In thinking about these ideas, I realized that there’s a Kanji meaning “fighting” that is also pronounced “To”: 闘. One can therefore write Muto the regular way (無刀), which means “without a sword”, and one can also write Muto as 無闘, “without fighting”. (Wouldn’t you know it – the day after I realized this about these Kanji, I discovered the same use of it in Sensei’s latest book, Ninja Taizen.) This kind of wordplay is another example of Kyojitsu – first the word means one thing, and then it means something else. Or, you think it means one thing, when in reality it means another.

So this is the type of concept that we’re going to be working with at the two seminars I’ll be teaching in January – “Muto Dori – Muto No Kyojitsu” (無刀捕り：無闘の虚実). I guess you could also call it, “Head-scratching non-combative unarmed responses to armed attacks” if you like. :-) I hope this short article has helped to shed some light on the ideas behind the theme. If you’ll be in Vancouver or Houston during the dates listed above and would like to attend, please contact me on Facebook or by email at [email protected], or contact the seminar host directly via the Facebook page.

無刀捕りの極意は無闘捕りの得。
体術の極意は平和の道なりと知る。

The secret of Muto Dori is achieving a state of non-combat.
The secret of Taijutsu is to know the path of peace.
~ Hatsumi Masaaki Soke ~


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Path to the Heart of the Flower (V) – Back to Canada

From The Magick & The Mundane » Bujinkan by Shawn Gray

Thanks to everyone who has continued to prod me to continue writing this blog! Life gets busy, and it’s always easy to find other things to do, but … here we go again. :)  (Yes, I promise I will eventually get to the end of this story! (Does it really have an end? Not sure about that one…) )

Last time I wrote a little bit about Karate training in Kumamoto and Kendo training in Hiroshima. Chitose Soke and Fujiwara Sensei were both amazing gentlemen who I’d learned a lot from in the short time I’d spent with them. In Part II, I wrote about my Karate training in Fukuyama with Kanao Sensei, who I continued to visit every weekend for training. In November 1990, he’d used his connections at the Fukuyama Post Office to make me “Postmaster-for-a-day” and weaseled me into being the poster-gaijin. A local TV station and 3 local newspapers came to cover the event. I discovered the old newspaper clippings in my closet and thought it would be fun to post them. :)

Postmaster4ADay3 Postmaster4ADay2 New Years Postmaster

By the time May 1991 came around, it was time to wrap up my time in Japan and head back to Canada. After many heartfelt goodbyes to the good friends I’d met, I got on the plane back to small-town New Brunswick and back to college. I flew from Narita to L.A. and then to Eastern Canada from there. My bags weren’t as eager to get back to Canada right away, and decided they wanted to go to Brazil from L.A. instead of back home with me. It was 2 weeks before I got my luggage back – and, thankfully, all of my Kendo gear was still intact. :)

I worked summer jobs landscaping and mowing lawns to pay for the coming semester at college. The year in Japan had taught me a lot – and one of the things that it had taught me was that I didn’t want to me a missionary. The missionary that I’d been assigned to work with in Japan was so uncultured and racist that it had turned me off completely. I decided to do one more semester at the small Christian college I’d spent 2 years at before going to Japan, and then head to the opposite side of the country to a bigger university with more options when that was finished. But before starting the fall semester, I was interested to see what Karate training would be like at my home Karate club after having spent nearly a year training in Japan. I made a habit of arriving early to class so that I could work on the material that I’d learned from Kanao Sensei before the class started. Not long after I’d been back, while I was reviewing one of the Kata I’d learned in Japan, a senior member of the club approached me and asked me where I’d learned it. When I told him, he requested that I not tell or show anyone else in the club what I was doing. You see, I was still a brown belt, and apparently what I was working on was 3rd-degree black belt material in Canada. Woooo. Wouldn’t want to upset anyone with that now, would we? Wooooo. I rolled my eyes and agreed to keep it quiet. I practiced that material at home in the backyard from then on – along with the Kendo bokken kata that I’d learned from Fujiwara Sensei.

The summer came and went, and I found myself back in the dormitory at college. I roomed with my best friend Jack, who had a habit of sleeping in. I had a remedy to help him with that – it was a bamboo shinai training sword that I’d brought back from Japan with me. It seems one’s shins can only take so much before one prefers to get out of bed. :) Oh well, at least it got him to chapel some of the time. Chapel attendance was mandatory. (Yes, it was a college, not a kindergarten.) By this time I’d been promoted to Shodan (1st degree black belt) in Karate, and started a training club at the college, hoping that it might help people with fitness and discipline, and help me to remember the material that I’d been working on as well. I have a feeling that it fizzled out shortly after I left. Rooming with Jack did have its perks though. Jack was a bit of a computer whiz, and had his computer hooked up via a 2800-baud modem (or something like that) to the phone line. A full four years before Internet service started to really take off in Canada, I saw a picture of a naked woman appear on the computer screen. Slowly, ever so slowly, one slowly-inching pixel-line at a time. I forget just how long it took the image to finish loading, but once it was completed, I wondered if maybe there was something to this computer-network thing after all. It was October, 1991. Nobody knew what a Facebook was. And luckily, none of the faculty found out about the image on the screen, or I might have been demerited, suspended, punished – or just sent straight to hell. :)

Anyway, that semester passed pretty quick, and I was off to Vancouver, 5,000km away on the other side of the country. Although I’d been dumbfounded at the size of Tokyo (around 25 million), Vancouver was still pretty big by Canadian standards, at around one-tenth that size. Still pretty daunting for someone from a town of 3,600. I knew no-one in the city, and found myself in a youth hostel trying to find an apartment and a job before my money ran out. I had no idea what the city was like, and made a quick, desperate decision to rent a place that I went to look at one night. It was furnished. Pretty shoddily, but it was furnished. The first night I slept there I heard a huge crash right behind the wall of my room at about 4:30am. I discovered that my building was literally right next to the port and there was a freight rail line that ran right behind the building. Two train sections had bumped together to connect them, which is what had made the crashing sound. The next morning, I walked out into the sunshine and found myself dodging used condoms and needles on the sidewalk. Apparently Commercial and Hastings wasn’t the best place to be living. I found a job at a local Japanese tourist gift shop while waiting for the summer semester of the Canadian Summer Institute of Linguistics to start. It took me about 20 minutes to walk to work, and on the way I’d regularly be propositioned by drug dealers and prostitutes. After I’d been there a couple of months, a Vietnamese gang broke into a place up the street and killed 4 people to burgle their house. I decided I should probably look at finding a better place to live. Around that time, I read a newspaper article stating that women between age 20-25 who lived in the few-block radius I lived in were 25% more likely to die of homicide or drug overdose than anywhere else in Canada. I accelerated my new home search and found a place in New Westminster. I didn’t see a prostitute there for a full 2 weeks, so it seemed like a much better place to live.

First Bujinkan SeminarDuring this time, I was of course looking for a Bujinkan dojo to train in. I figured a city like Vancouver must have a Bujinkan training group, and I found what I was looking for – a seminar advertisement – at “Golden Arrow Martial Arts Supply.” I was ecstatic – finally a real, legitimate Bujinkan dojo. I called the number listed and made plans to attend the seminar, which was held at a school gymnasium in White Rock, just south of Vancouver. I got the bus out to White Rock and was happy to participate. There were a lot of differences from what I was used to. The group hadn’t been going that long, so most of the students were still fairly junior. I’d been doing martial arts quite seriously now for over seven years and had recently come back from a pretty full-on experience in Japan. But when I looked at the kind of things that were being shown, I was intrigued and could see that this would be a very interesting art once one developed a bit of skill at it. I began to train with the instructor in his regular classes, continuing my Karate training in parallel for the first few months. I had committed a number of years to Karate now, and didn’t want to put it aside lightly.

I was approaching my Nidan (2nd Dan) grading in Karate, which was a pretty big deal. Grades work differently in Karate than in the Bujinkan. The two top people in my Karate style in Canada were both Japanese gentlemen – one was 7-Dan and one was 6-Dan. These were considered very senior ranks in our style, so even a 2-Dan wasn’t anything to sneeze at. But I was becoming disenchanted with the Karate training. I found the local instructor in Vancouver to be unnecessarily stern and overly formal, much more so than the Japanese instructors I’d trained with in Japan. I was forbidden to cross-train in anything else, even though the Soke (grandmaster) in Japan had encouraged me to train in Judo and Kendo in parallel to my Karate training. The training itself was very much geared towards winning points in tournaments, and they were strict about the contact rules – that is, you could easily get disqualified for hitting too hard. Our instructor would pair us up and have one person hold a pencil upright between his thumb and index finger. You had to hit the pencil and whip your hand back without knocking the pencil over – that would indicate that the strike was too hard and would result in a tournament penalty. It really seemed like nonsense to me, and this made it a bit easier to make the final decision to put down my Karate black belt and step out of my white uniform, and step into a black Bujinkan uniform and put on a white Bujinkan belt.

All the while I continued to dream of going back to Japan after completing my university studies. I was now enrolled at Trinity Western University (just outside Vancouver) working towards a BA degree in Intercultural Religious Studies with a Concentration in Linguistics. But most relevant to this particular story, perhaps, is that I was now training in a legitimate Bujinkan dojo that was connected to the Bujinkan headquarters in Japan. I found out that the Hombu Dojo in Japan was in a place called Noda – not Iga where I had gone looking for Hatsumi Sensei a year and a half before. The two places are actually about 500 kilometers apart. I had been way off. Next time I could get back to Japan, I’d be sure to be at the right place.


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Path to the Heart of the Flower (IV)

From The Magick & The Mundane » Bujinkan by Shawn Gray

Finally, some free time to blog again!

In the last blog article I wrote on my early adventures in Japan, I related how I went to Iga in search of Hatsumi Sensei in October 1990, but didn’t manage to find him.

After not having found him, there was nothing else to do but return to Hiroshima and continue with my English teaching schedule. I also went back to my Karate studies, and continued pounding my fists into bloody hamburger against trees.

Back to Eikaiwa!

Back to Eikaiwa!

Back to Blood!

Back to Blood!

In December 1990, I had the opportunity to travel to the Chito Ryu Karate Hombu Dojo, located in Kumamoto, on the southern island of Kyushu. The Dojo was equipped with two bunkbeds, accompanying four people. When I arrived, there were two guys visiting from British Columbia, Canada, also staying there for training. (I wish I could remember their names after all this time, so that I could track them down. It would be fun to share stories again.) The Soke (Grandmaster) was 40 years old at the time. His father, the founder, had died in 1984. (From what I’d heard, an elder brother had been destined to continue the leadership of the style, but from what I heard, had been disabled in a car accident and therefore unable to continue with training. The younger son, next in line, had been in Tokyo pursuing medical studies, but was recalled to Kumamoto by his father to take over leadership of the lineage.) I stayed at the Dojo for two weeks, and greatly enjoyed the training. I was awed by the skill level of Chitose Sensei and his senior instructors. In the backyard behind the Dojo were two Makiwara punching posts. Wooden covers protected them from the rain, and on the covers were painted a Japanese character which is very familiar to my fellow Bujinkan practitioners. The character is pronounced “Nin“, and is the first character of the word “Ninja.” What was this character doing displayed so prominently at a Karate Dojo? Although sometimes understood in ninjaphile circles to mean “stealth,” the character is more widely used in more mainstream Japanese to mean “restraint,” “patience,” or “perseverance.” It was with these noble ideals in mind that we forged our minds and bodies in the daily training at Hombu Dojo. Kata, Kumite, and Makiwara training were all part of this. By perseverance and austerity in training the body and mind in the way of the Bushido ideal of the Samurai of old, we pushed our mental and physical limits beyond what we thought possible.

Makiwara with "Nin"

Makiwara with “Nin”

Aside from the training itself, there are a couple of memorable experiences from that time in Kumamoto. One was when Chitose Soke took the other visiting Canadians and myself out for a visit to Kumamoto Castle, one of the three premier castles in Japan. Scars from the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 (when Samurai warriors of Satsuma province rebelled against the imperial forces of the Meiji government) pock-marked the stone walls. It was an impressive edifice. Soke took us out for sushi afterwards.

Another memory was from one night when my two new Canadian friends took me out for a night on the town, Kumamoto style. I had never been out drinking in Canada before, let alone in Japan. I had no idea what kind of town I was in or where we were going. Before I knew it, we were sitting at a table ordering drinks, surrounded by very nicely-dressed ladies from the Philippines. I was from a farming town of 3,600 people on the Atlantic Coast of Canada. It took me a while to catch on that these ladies worked here. Anyway, we kept ordering and my two Canadian friends were on my left, engaging the ladies in deep conversation. Almost as if they’d met before. I felt a nudge on my right and turned to see what appeared to be two of the local Japanese bikers. They seemed friendly enough. The one next to me, I discovered through our broken conversation (my Japanese vocabulary was probably about 30 words at this point), did well in the local boxing scene. At least that’s what he told me, as he kept grinning and pointing to the biceps bulging out from under his cut-off denim vest.

I was starting to feel a little bit uncomfortable, but couldn’t really understand why. I started to think I should ask my friends when we were planning to leave. I turned to my left to ask my friend when we were going to get the check, and then felt a fist slam lightly into the right side of my face. My friend turned. “What?” “I think maybe we should go. This guy just hit me.” “Wait a second.” He turned to confer with the other friend. I turned to my right and smiled nervously at the two grinning Japanese guys wearing black leather. They looked like they were having fun. A moment later I turned to the friend on my left again. “What.” Again a punch from the right hit the side of my face. Harder this time. “Look man, our friend on my right here has now hit me in the face twice. We need to go, now.” “Ok.” My two friends stand up. Both of them were about fix-foot two. Sturdy Canadian farming boys. I turned to my right. The two Japanese dudes were gone.

We paid the bill and headed down the elevator. It came to a stop at ground level, and as we stepped out into the parking lot and the doors closed behind us, we found ourselves on the back side of a slowly-shrinking circle, on the perimeter of which were four or five tough-looking locals. The friend on my right made a quick beeline to the right, down an alley. I was close behind him. Closer than I normally am to other guys. We zig-zagged quickly through some alleys and eventually found ourselves with our hands on our knees, panting and out of breath, outside the Hombu Dojo “bunk room.” There were just two of us. The other Canadian friend was nowhere in sight. It was around 2am. We waited. We didn’t want to wake anyone and cause a scene. We waited some more.

After what seemed like at least 20 minutes, our friend loped quietly out of a side street and over to join us in the shadow of the Dojo roof. “Where were you?” “What took you so long?” “What happened!?” He told us that he didn’t see us bolt away right away, and before he knew it, he’d been surrounded. As the four or five tough guys closed in, one of them had pulled a knife. Our friend had a quick eye and saw the guy start to draw. He jumped on him and punched him to the ground, and then made a run for it. It took him a while to give them the slip and sneak back to join us at the Dojo without being found. We quietly slid into the Dojo dorm and into our bunks, glad to be alive. The next morning Soke asked us how our night had been. We played it cool and made like nothing out of the ordinary had happened. He smiled.

The next day was the day he took us to Kumamoto Castle. On the way in the car he told us that he’d heard about what happened, saying he was glad we got through it ok, and apologized “for those with bad manners.”

Chitose Soke and 2 Canucks

Chitose Soke and 2 Canucks

Before I left Kumamoto to go back to Hiroshima for the New Year, 1991, Chitose Soke gave me some training advice for when I got back. Study also Kendo, for speed and timing, and also Judo, for throws and locks. I was a bit surprised to hear this. Martial arts masters aren’t always known for recommending that their students study other arts. Soke’s openness in this way really impressed me.

When I got back to Hiroshima, I asked around about Kendo training. There was a small Okonomiyaki bar in Hiroshima run by a young Japanese woman and her American (Seattle, I think it was) husband. He was very into Kendo, and was proud of doing it in Japan as a foreigner. He had photos of his shop and would brag about being a 3rd Dan, which I think he said was one of the highest ranks of any foreigner in Western Japan at the time. I have no real way of knowing whether that was true or not, but that’s what he’d say. He agreed to bring me along to his Kendo class and introduce me to his teacher, Fujiwara Sensei.

With Fujiwara Sensei

With Fujiwara Sensei

Lesson with Fujiwara Sensei

Lesson with Fujiwara Sensei

Fujiwara Sensei was a wonderful old (to a twenty-year old!) Japanese man who always had a huge smile floating across his face. He had a very soft, gentle manner and a kind way of speaking. For some reason he took a real liking to me and, in addition to selling me $1,300 of training gear for $300 and giving me a set of Hakama with both of our names embroidered in it, also refused to let me pay for lessons. This irritated the American guy who introduced me. Fujiwara Sensei had been his teacher for years, but he always had to pay for his lessons. I was unable to explain why Sensei seemed to like me so much. Maybe it was just because I was always so polite. I’d always greet him with the extra-polite, “O-kawari arimasen ka?” (“Has there been no change [in your health, etc.]?”) He’d always smile widely and say, “Hai, arimasen!” (“Yes, there hasn’t!”) My American friend was less than impressed. He’d pound the hell out of me when we were paired up in the Dojo and I would go home with headaches from getting hit on the head so hard repeatedly. I didn’t know what to do. I could not force Sensei to take the money. Out of desperation I would bring bags of fruit to the Dojo and force them on him. The Japanese students would laugh at this, but I didn’t know what else to do. I was never ranked in Kendo, although in addition to the regular Suburi and Randori training, Fujiwara Sensei also taught me 5 Bokuto Kata forms and 2 Shoto Kata forms. I seem to remember that these were for Shodan level, but my memory could be wrong on that.

Kenjutsu Lesson

Kenjutsu Lesson

As far as Karate ranking went, I went to Japan as a brown-belt. Kanao Sensei in Fukuyama wanted to promote me, but said that Chito Ryu had prohibited ranking of foreigners to Yudan grades (black belt grades) in Japan. Apparently some Japan-promoted foreigners had in the past gone back to their home countries and caused political problems by claiming their rank from Japan was worth more than a locally-given rank of the same degree. So I wasn’t promoted during my stay in Japan, but Kanao Sensei did teach me some very interesting Kata that made things interesting when I got back to Canada. ;-)

To be continued…


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Path to the Heart of the Flower (III)

From The Magick & The Mundane » Bujinkan by Shawn Gray

In Part I and II of this adventure, I wrote about how I made my way to Japan in 1990 to teach English, pursue Karate training, and look for ninja grandmaster Masaaki Hatsumi. I had arrived in Japan in early August, and now, finally, in October, after getting settled into my apartment, teaching schedule, and Karate training, it was time to set off in search of the ninja master.

Getting information about ninja masters wasn’t as easy in 1990 as it is today. There was no Internet, at least not as we know it now. I remember writing letters home that would take a week to ten days to get from Japan to Canada, and a ten-minute phone conversation to connect with family cost me $100. The only information I had to base my search on was contained in two books on the ninja that I had brought with me to Japan. Both of these books were authored by the same American student of the grandmaster, and both of them pointed to the Iga region as the home of the ninja clans. Eager to meet Hatsumi Sensei for myself, I made plans to visit the area, the city of Iga–Ueno, located in present-day Mie Prefecture.

To plan the trip from Hiroshima to Iga–Ueno, which took around 6 hours at the time (I assume travel times have shortened in the time since), I went to the tourist information centre in Peace Park in central Hiroshima, about 200 metres from where the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. (I had lived across the street from this location the first month I was in Japan, before relocating to the suburbs, and had been able to see ground zero out my kitchen window.) While the lovely ladies at the desk looked up train connection options, I watched televised footage of the carnage that was going on in Kuwait at the time. Saddam had torched the Kuwaiti oilfields, prompting George Bush Sr. to order the invasion that would drive him back to Baghdad.

Train information and tickets in hand, I was finally ready to make the trip. It was only a weekend trip, two days and one night, so I packed light, but made sure to take my two ninja books with me for reference. I got as early a start as possible, and made it to Iga–Ueno station early on the Saturday afternoon, images of the mystical ninja floating in my teenage head. Exiting the station, the reputation of the city as the home of the legendary shadow warriors was immediately apparent.

Iga-Ueno Station - October 1990

Iga-Ueno Station – October 1990

I couldn’t bring myself to pose behind the mask. I was looking for the real deal, not a propped up wooden cut-out for tourist photos.

From the station, I made my way to the ryokan inn where I would be spending the night, checked-in, and then excitedly made my way to the ninja museum, where I was sure to find the next clue in my search for Hatsumi Sensei. The ninja exhibit was fascinating, complete with purple-clad kunoichi female ninja agents, a creaking nightingale floor, hidden compartments, and trap doors. But I was really after information about the living master himself.

Proceeding into the museum proper, I slowly made my way past the many exotic artefacts, pausing to inspect them, unable to decipher the Japanese descriptions. Approaching one glass display case, I stopped in my tracks – I had seen something that I recognized. Underneath the glass was a partially unfurled makimono scroll. I had seen this very scroll before – there was a photo of it in one of the books I had brought with me! I excitedly ripped open my pack and quickly leafed through the book until I found the corresponding image. There was no mistake – the photo in the book was of exactly the same object I was looking at, as if I had taken it myself only moments before. This was a valuable clue in my search – it provided a link between what I had read about the ninja warriors and the exact place where I was physically standing in that moment. Surely a meeting with Hatsumi Sensei himself was only moments away!

I flagged down one of the few staff floating about the place, and in my awkward Japanese asked about Hatsumi Sensei. Her response was a blank expression. Hatsumi Sensei? Bujinkan? Another blank look. When I persisted, she wandered off to find a more senior person who might know more, and soon returned with an elderly gentleman. Between my dreadful Japanese and his attempts at English, he made it known in no uncertain terms that he knew nothing of the whereabouts of Hatsumi Sensei or of anything regarding the Bujinkan organization. I couldn’t believe my ears. I had come all this way to find him. And the photo in my book was proof that I was on the right track! How could the staff not know anything? I tried again to get more information from them, but they simply shrugged, and as the afternoon waned, I left the museum, crestfallen.

On the way back to the ryokan, I tried to make sense of what had happened. I was obviously at the right place – the photo in my book was proof of that. There could really be only one explanation. The staff had lied. There must have been some invisible, unspoken test that I had unknowingly failed and, having been deemed unfit for acceptance into ninja training, I had been sent away empty-handed. From what I had read of the elusive ninja in the books by the American student (who, by his own account, had managed to gain acceptance into the clan himself), it was likely that they were watching me right now, monitoring my movements. Maybe the ryokan staff themselves were also in the employ of the clan. Perhaps if I conducted myself well, someone would appear and tell me that I had passed the test after all. These were the thoughts of a 19-yr old from a small Canadian country town, brought up on fantastical ninja books and then transported into the mystical homeland of the ninja warriors, only to be denied in the end.

No ninja appeared at the ryokan that night. Or the next morning. There was little else to do but have a look around Iga–Ueno, including the castle. Photos were not allowed inside, but I did take a picture of an old palanquin from the doorway. This would have been carried on the shoulders of two retainers, the person of importance, such as a regional feudal daimyo lord, seated in the red box-like structure in the middle. I also got a shot out across one of the tiled roofs – tiled roofs are very exotic – and one of the castle moat, which conveys the mystique that I had come to associate with the image of the ninja through the books I had read.
Iga-Ueno Station - October 1990 Iga Ueno Castle - Palanquin Iga Castle - Roof Iga Castle - Moat
The day was passing and it was time to return to Hiroshima. No ninja having appeared, it was with a heavy sigh that I boarded the train and watched the misty mountains of Iga pass slowly out of sight.

I may have waited just a bit too long for the ninja to appear – I missed my connecting train in Kyoto. It was already late at night by this time. It was dark and the temples were closed. The only thing I found open was a portable ramen noodle stand close to the station. I had a bowl of hot noodles to console myself and, as I had little extra money, curled up to sleep on the concrete sidewalk in front of Kyoto station, using my pack as a pillow. It seemed an appropriate finalè to the ill-fated trip. I caught the first train back to Hiroshima the following morning and just managed to make it to my first English class on time. It would be another four-and-a-half years before I finally caught up with the legendary ninja master…


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The Meaning of ‘Shihan’

From The Magick & The Mundane » Bujinkan by Shawn Gray

What does the title Shihan mean?
This blog post is in response to a question that I received on Facebook the other day:

I’m surprised every time I see people in the Bujinkan title themselves as Shihan. If I’m not mistaken you never present your self with -san added, this is only used when addressing others. So would not the same thinking apply to Shihan?
I’m not sure when people started doing this, maybe when they got tired of “just” having 15 dan? However, this are just my own thoughts, which very likely can be completely wrong [:)] I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this. Maybe this could lead to yet another great and educational blog post of yours?

In the Bujinkan martial arts, the title “Shihan” has come to be used to refer to anyone ranked Judan (10th degree) and higher. Many people seem to think that it was always used this way, but it actually used to be used differently. So for this blog post I’ll be discussing what the word Shihan means in general, and how it’s come to be used the way it is in the Bujinkan.

師範

The word Shihan is generally defined in regular Japanese as instructor, teacher, or model. In Japan, there are various groups, organizations, or situations where both Sensei (the much more commonly used of the two terms) and Shihan are used, and in such cases Shihan is generally used to mean senior instructor, senior teacher, etc. This is common in the martial arts, but both words are  often used in other areas of Japanese life as well.

As far as the use of the word Shihan in the Bujinkan martial arts goes, the term was originally used to refer to the senior Japanese students of Hatsumi Sensei. That much is common knowledge, but many people I’ve spoken with over the years were unaware that Shihan was also used to refer to the senior Japanese students even before they reached the rank of Judan. Even now many people don’t seem to be aware of this – most people seem to think that the title is synonymous with the rank of Judan and up – and indeed, in a large sense, this is the meaning that it has taken on over the years. However, the senior Japanese students of Sensei (and two foreigners that I know of – there very well could be more) were called Shihan (by Hatsumi Sensei himself) before they reached the rank of Judan.

Over time, as the senior Japanese instructors began to reach ranks of Judan and above, they of course continued to be called Shihan. As time passed, foreigners began to associate the title Shihan with the colourful Judan patch. As more time passed and foreign students also began to reach ranks of Judan and above, they started to call themselves Shihan, thinking that it means a rank of Judan or higher, and perhaps desiring a new title after having already “achieved” the title of Shidoshi way back at Godan. Eventually, people began to think that having one of those Judan patches on one’s uniform makes one a Shihan, and this has become the default understanding that we see in the Bujinkan today.

In Japanese culture, just as with a title like –san, a title like Shidoshi, Sensei, or Shihan is not something that one applies to oneself. It is not something one puts on one’s business cards. It is not something that one uses to refer to oneself in class, or on one’s own website, or in email or other correspondence. It is something that others apply to you out of respect. In speaking of respect, it is my opinion (because this is the way that my teachers taught that it should be) that one should not force one’s students to call them by any particular title. This is something that should come naturally from the students’ side. If someone wants to be a Sensei or a Shidoshi or a Shihan, it is more important to act like the type of Sensei or Shidoshi or Shihan who deserves that title. In simple terms, respect is something that should be earned rather than demanded.

It’s important to realize that the word Shihan doesn’t just refer to a number on a rank certificate. This is one possible reason that Hatsumi Sensei refers to good Shihan (meaning that also, by unspoken implication (quite important in Japanese culture), there are not-good Shihan as well). In speaking of good Shihan, Sensei is indicating that it is more than just a numerical value written on a piece of paper. It is something other than simply that. There is a reason why we have both the numerical grade names (Judan, Juichidan, etc.) as well as the title Shihan. Through observing the people and the circumstances in which Hatsumi Sensei refers to people as Shihan, it is my opinion that he is using the title with an expectation that the person indicated is willing and able to take on positions of leadership and responsibility within the Bujinkan organization. More than just a numerical rank grade, it is a title that acknowledges leadership. These two things, rank and leadership, are not at all necessarily the same. Simply because someone is a skilled martial artist doesn’t mean that they are ready, willing, or even able, to take on a role of leadership in the Bujinkan and assume the responsibilities of service (let’s not forget that leadership is service) that are required of a leader. True Bujinkan Shihan are able to act as leaders and role models for others, leading by example and inspiring others to become martial artists of true ability, humility, integrity, and sincerity. These abilities don’t come from a rank number, but from a heart set on the true values (価値観, kachikan) and virtues (武徳, butoku) of the martial arts.

I hope that this article has provided some insight into the meaning of the word Shihan, particularly with regard to the history of the use of the term within the Bujinkan and how it relates to leadership in the organization.


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Koppō & Kaname: The How and the What of Bujinkan Martial Arts

From The Magick & The Mundane » Bujinkan by Shawn Gray

Time has flown by since my last blog entry, and I’d like to thank the readers who took the time to share their comments here on the blog and share links to it on Facebook. Your feedback indicated that there’s still an interest in the personal histories of people who’ve devoted significant chunks of their lives to train at the fountainhead of Bujinkan martial arts in Japan, and at the same time several readers mentioned resonances with their own martial quests, creating new links and points of comparison. In the time since, life has continued to be challenging and exciting. Taxes, Training and Translation work have occupied much of my time, and I also made the decision to close down my guest apartment in Noda as of the end of April. (There were a number of reasons for the closure, but rest assured, the original guest apartment in Abiko is still available.)

Right after making the apartment move, I left Japan for six weeks to visit family and instruct at a number of Bujinkan seminars in Canada (“Sakura No Kaze” in Vancouver, and then at Bujinkan Manitoba in Winnipeg) and the U.S. (Bujinkan Sanami Dojo, Austin, June 9/10, and in Denver the following weekend). During the Q&A session at the end of the seminar in Winnipeg this past weekend, there was a question about the differences between the concepts of Koppō (骨法) and Kaname (要, also pronounced Yō). Afterwards, the seminar host, Adam McColl, asked if I’d write a blog post about it, and so here we are. :-)

The Bujinkan training theme of the year in 2000 was Kotō Ryū Koppōjutsu (虎倒流骨法術). The regular way of writing Koppō uses the kanji meaning “bone (kotsu) method (hō),” due to the characteristic use of the body’s skeletal structure in Kotō Ryū. Kotsu and Hō combine phonetically to make koppō. In his own characteristic style, Sensei often used a double meaning of kotsu that year to convey an important aspect of the year’s theme. It happens that, in Japanese, the kanji for kotsu meaning bone (骨) can also be used to mean “knack, skill, trick, secret, or know-how.” Sensei used this double-meaning to emphasize the importance of gaining an intuitive understanding of how a technique works – the knack or trick to applying a given technique well.

It’s interesting that now, twelve years later (one cycle of the Chinese zodiacal calendar – both 2000 and 2012 are years of the Dragon), Sensei has chosen Kaname as the theme. I went into some detail about the meaning of Kaname in a previous blog post, and I won’t repeat all of that here, but the relationship between the two terms Koppō and Kaname is an interesting one. Whereas Koppō relates to how a technique works, Kaname relates not only to how a technique works, but to its essential, defining characteristics. Koppō relates to method, Kaname adds the element of essential identity – it includes not only the way of applying a technique, but the essence of the technique itself.

Another important point to note is that the name of the training theme for 2012 includes the word Mamoru (護), which means to protect. Another reading for this same kanji is Go, as in Goshinjutsu (護身術), “self-defense“. In the name for this year’s theme, the kanji are written together as Yōgo (要護), meaning “to protect the essence.” In the previous post on Kaname, I discussed various things that essence can mean in this context, but in comparison to Koppō, the method to a technique’s application, Yōgo tells us that not only is it important to be able to make a technique work, but that there are essential points that are necessary for it to work properly, and that although variation, or henka is an indispensable concept, there are certain defining characteristics that are to be preserved. Although we can make (or even “force”) a technique to work, its essence is lost if the essential points are not preserved. To learn budō properly, we must not simply fall back on henka as soon as we run into difficulty – to do so would be laziness. We should take the time and make the effort to learn the techniques of our art correctly and thoroughly, discovering, understanding, and integrating the essence of each waza so that we can not only practice Bujinkan budō properly, but also, as teachers, responsibly preserve its essence as we transmit it to the next generation.


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Path to the Heart of the Flower (II)

From The Magick & The Mundane » Bujinkan by Shawn Gray

In Part I of this article, I wrote about how I became involved in Japanese martial arts and the reasons for my growing interest in all things Japanese. I arrived in Japan in August 1990, the 45th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. My 1st month in Hiroshima was a time of adjustment – and many social faux pas (which continue to this day!).  In time, I took over the majority of English classes offered by the small English school where I was working, which was run by an American Christian missionary and his family. In fact, I myself had come to Japan on a “religious activities” visa, sponsored by an American missionary organization and the small country Baptist church in which I spent most of my youth. The church had a history of almost 200 years–and I was its 1st ordained missionary. :-)

I still hadn’t realized at the time what a monocultural environment I had come from. Most of the people who lived in the rural Canadian province where I was raised are of Anglo-Saxon descent-there were very few people of other ethnic and cultural backgrounds (although that has changed a lot in subsequent years, from my understanding). But for me in the 80′s, I knew almost noone who wasn’t a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. There was one Black girl in my elementary school (who had been adopted by a Caucasian family), and the 1st Asian person I met was when I was around 15 years old. The 1st Japanese person I met in my life was when I was 19 years old, a few months before I left to go to Japan. She had married a French Canadian man in the city where I started college, and keen to talk to our anthropology class about Japan. When she found out I was about to go to Japan, they invited me over to their home for dinner. Wow–a real-life Japanese person! How exotic! (And Buddhism, wow – you mean there’s more than one way to look at the world?? :-)  )

Now I was on Planet Japan. People still had 2 arms and legs, but so many things were so very different from the small country town where I grew up. But I was open-minded and hungry for knowledge and experience -I began to carry around a dictionary and notepad with me wherever I went. When I heard something I did not understand but sounded useful, I would either look it up on the spot, or make a note of it to look up in the dictionary later. I would try to do this with at least one or 2 words per day, and then use those words in real situations as many times as possible that same day. This is how I learned Japanese. I never studied the language in school.

The summer in Hiroshima is unbearably hot-especially for Canadians. I grew up playing ice hockey on frozen rivers. Here, temperatures were in the high 30s centigrade, but the worst thing was that humidity. By 8 or 9 o’clock in the morning, you were already covered in sweat. I got used to walking around with my clothes sticking to me like what felt like “saran wrap.” Not the easiest thing to get used to. The weather very slowly began to improve by September, and since I was now into the swing of things with my work schedule, it was time to get my Japan martial arts training under way.

Through my karate instructor back in Canada, I got the contact details for the closest instructor in my style (Chito Ryu). Kanao Sensei lived 2 hours away by train, in the city of Fukuyama. Since that was too far for me to travel in time for regular weeknight classes, he agreed to meet me on a weekend. His cousin spoke some English, and was the facilitator for our 1st meeting. Kanao Sensei was a 4th Dan at the time, which in our style meant that he was a senior instructor. There were no easy black belts in our style. In fact, if you weren’t Japanese, you weren’t even allowed to get a black belt in Japan in Chito Ryu.

Kanao Sensei graciously agreed to teach me on the weekends. I would take the train two hours to Fukuyama and he would teach me at his home, in the garden behind his house and in his car garage if the weather was bad.  Sometimes I would stay overnight and we would train both days. We did a lot of Kata training, and a lot of Makiwara training, which involves punching a target over and over, and over and over, and over and over, hundreds of times. For untrained fists like mine, the target, a post or tree, was wrapped with rope made of rice straw (Maki = to wrap; Wara = straw – sometimes thin boards were substituted, as shown in the photo below). After a few dozen strikes, my tender knuckles would split and begin to bleed, and after a few hundred repetitions, the straw rope would be covered with blood. Sometimes this was followed by knuckle push-ups on the concrete floor of the car garage. Kanao Sensei didn’t seem to mind getting my blood on the floor of his garage, and I would often go back to Hiroshima with my knuckles covered in bandages, which made for great conversation in my English classes the following week. Call it masochistic if you will, but it certainly did foster a spirit of determination, focus, mental control, and perseverance.

Kanao Sensei worked at the Fukuyama City post office, and without really realizing what was happening, before I knew it I was postmaster-for-a-day, and was interviewed by the local media, appearing in the local newspaper (photo below – Kanao Sensei is on the far left). There weren’t many foreigners around those parts in those days, and it appeared that they found me to be just as exotic as I was finding everything about this new country to be. It was quite an experience for a 19-year-old with only half of a college education, from a town of 3,600 people on the other side of the world, and as life goes, it was shaping my future much more profoundly than I could have guessed at the time.

Having now become used to my work schedule, and having established a relationship and training regimen with Kanao Sensei, the next thing to do on this great adventure was to track down Masaaki Hatsumi, the legendary ninja master. I say “track down” because it was still before the Internet, and ninja masters were not advertising. I had no address, no phone number, no connection with anyone who was training with Hatsumi Sensei. All I had was a couple of books by Stephen Hayes, and the only location mentioned in the particular books that I had was the historical region of Iga, currently known as Iga-Ueno, in Mie Prefecture, about 6 hours by train from where I was living. And so, once my schedule allowed it, in October of 1990, I set out for Iga in search of Masaaki Hatsumi.


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Path to the Heart of the Flower (I)

From The Magick & The Mundane » Bujinkan by Shawn Gray

February 9th was the 20th anniversary of my first day of training in the Bujinkan. I mentioned it on Facebook, but was encouraged to write a series of blog articles about a bit of my martial arts history and how I found the Bujinkan and made my way to Japan to train with Hatsumi Sensei – to approach the heart of the flower that is Japanese martial arts, budo. I’ve always found it fascinating to hear stories of the adventures of my Sempai here (Mark Lithgow, Michael Pearce, Mark O’Brien, Andrew Young, and Mike L) and, now in my 17th year in Japan myself, I thought it would be fun to look back over the years, and in remembering, share some of that with the readers of my blog.

Black Belt Magazine – Feb 1984

Like many of us in Bujinkan, I was originally attracted by the ninja image. It was 1984, the same year that I started karate practice. In the small town of 3,600 where I grew up in Eastern Canada, there was a Chito-Ryu Karate club, which I joined after 9 years of ice hockey. I quickly came infatuated with Japanese martial arts and would frequently go to the magazine rack at the local gas station to check for the latest issues of martial arts magazines. It was on one of these visits that I found Black Belt Magazine, Feb 1984 issue. I was young. I was impressionable. I was hooked.

But how was a young New Brunswick lad supposed to access this ninja training? I was in junior high school. I couldn’t go to Japan. I couldn’t even go to Dayton, Ohio. But I could join the Shadows of Iga Society and Robert Bussey’s Warrior International as a correspondence member, so that’s what I did. I also got hold of some Japanese split-soled tabi boots and shuko hand claws and spent a lot of time running around in the woods climbing trees and sneaking up on unsuspecting neighbours and making blowguns from copper pipe. Luckily, I survived. Sometimes that rather surprises me.

I kept up with my karate practice quite seriously, entering and coming home with trophies from a number of provincial tournaments. I was invited to go to the Canadian national championship tournament, but it was held in Vancouver, 4,000km away, and I was in high school. I entered a local college and took liberal arts courses, and in my second year was presented with the opportunity to take a year off my studies and go to teach English in Japan. It was a dream come true, needless to say, and in August 1990 at age 19, I got on a plane and flew to the other side of the world, from a town of 3,600 to a city of 25 million.

I somehow managed to find the people that were meeting me at Narita airport. They had come by car to pick me up, and I remember that traffic was absolutely gridlocked all the way back to Tokyo. A trip that would take an hour by train took us six hours by car. After having already traveled through a 15-hour time difference in 24 hours, it seemed to take forever. We finally arrived at the organization’s Tokyo headquarters in Shinjuku, where I stayed for the first 3 days for an orientation program. Shinjuku is one of the major Tokyo metropolitan centers and one of the biggest train stations in the world, and having come from such a small town it amazed me that I had to look straight upwards to even see the sky. There were so many skyscrapers and so many people and so much concrete and so many wires and lights and sounds – I was at first afraid to even go exploring outside alone because I thought I’d get lost and never be able to find my way back (most of the streets in Japan don’t have names). The city seemed to go on forever. This wasn’t like visiting another city, or even another country. It was like visiting another planet entirely. Planet Japan.

Atomic Bomb Memorial, Hiroshima

After the 3-day program in Shinjuku finished, I boarded a Shinkansen high-speed bullet train bound for Hiroshima, where I had been placed to work as an English teacher. The ride took around 5 hours from Tokyo back then, I think (it might be a little quicker now). The train sailed along so quickly and smoothly it felt like I was riding in an airplane. I was going to be one of the first occupants in a newly-constructed apartment building that was going up near the place I’d be working, 30 minutes out of central Hiroshima by bus. Since construction wasn’t finished yet, I stayed in an apartment in downtown Hiroshima for the first month – right across the street from Peace Park, ground zero for the atomic bomb that had been dropped there 45 years before. I could see the famous bombed dome monument from my kitchen window, and would often go walk through the park to sketch, practice my haiku, or just people and pigeon watch. When I saw something interesting, I’d sketch it or write about it in a journal. (I didn’t blog it. I didn’t Facebook it. I didn’t Twitter it. It was pre-Internet, and life was good.) Peace Park also had an international cultural center where I could get travel and tourism tips in English, and also watch news on TVs with English subtitles. I remember taking the 30-minute bus ride in to Tokyo to keep up with the first Gulf War (the Bush’s first attempt at Hussein) on their TVs. They also had a library with a lot of English books about Japan – but you couldn’t check them out, you had to read them in the library. It was here that I discovered Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor and film director Yukio Mishima, and with my interest in Bushido, the way of the Samurai, I was fascinated to discover that his failed coup d’etat and suicide by ritual disembowelment occurred literally 2 hours before I was born. (The things that fascinate 19-year-old Bushido enthusiasts!) The library also had a copy of Yoshikawa’s Musashi, the life story of the famous samuraiwarrior. It was quite a thick book, and since I couldn’t take it home with me, I went back again and again, gradually working my way through it. I was completely enamored with bushido, the samurai code of honour.

One of my first memories in Japan, while settling into my English teaching schedule and still living across from Peace Park, was of one of my neighbours – an interesting American guy named Richard (no, that’s not him in the photo, that’s me, trying to teach English). After I’d been there some time, Richard announced that he was going on a trip to China and asked me if I’d look after his place while he was away. Turns out while he was in Hong Kong he found out that there was a film production looking for extras and he applied and got a part in the film. The movie was Kickboxer with Jean Claude van Damme. (Richard is the reporter who interviews “the champ” after the match right at the beginning of the film.) I wasn’t much of a movie buff and didn’t realize what a big film it was until later. I later moved out to my apartment in the suburbs and we eventually lost touch, unfortunately. I should look up his name in the movie cast members and see if he’s on Facebook. That would a riot. (I wonder if he signs autographs…) Another interesting memory was the time that he told me that he was going to be away for a couple of days to go talk to someone regarding a misunderstanding that he was having with a gangster who thought he was seeing his girlfriend. I was supposed to call the police if he wasn’t back in 2 days. I hadn’t even been in Japan a month yet and already I was making such interesting friends. :)

I soon got into the swing of things with my weekly schedule of English classes – class size varied, but I think overall I had 90-100 students per week. After the work schedule was sorted, I started getting to know my way around my new neighbourhood bit by bit and began to explore the wonderful, exotic treasures of Japanese culture: go,(the board game), sado (tea ceremony), shodo (calligraphy) and, of course, budo, Japanese martial arts. The first thing on my list for that last activity was to make contact with my karate sensei – and the next was to track down the ninja master Masaaki Hatsumi.

(To be continued in Part II…)


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