Iaido: Cutting to the quick

MANY PEOPLE OUTSIDE JAPAN have become aware of the martial art of kendo, in which the participants use bamboo sticks as sword substitutes in a competition that resembles a fencing match.

Yet few people even in Japan know of the martial art of iaido, which uses real swords. Even the most basic acts can be dangerous:

Intense scrutiny is also paid to the drawing and sheathing of the swords — “it’s easy to lose a thumb if you do that wrong” — and to the spiritual aspects of the samurai code.

This article in the English-language Mainichi profiles iaido master Yuta Kurosawa. Here’s the English website for his dojo, Butokuin. I’ve added the link to the column at right.

UPDATE: Reader Tomojiro passed along a link in English for koryu, or the older martial arts. Read more about them here; I recommend the Ryu Guide page. I’ve also added this link to the right sidebar.

San Francisco’s Shaolin Controversy

AFTER STUDYING BUDDHISM in Hong Kong for 40 years, Stephen Ho immigrated to San Francisco and decided he wanted to open an American branch of the famed Shaolin Temple, the birthplace of both Zen and Kung Fu.

The temple’s abbot in China gave Ho his permission and dispatched a monk who had trained at the temple for more than 20 years to help.

But Ho—who never trained at the Shaolin Temple himself–thinks the monks from China don’t perform enough sitting meditation or hold enough “philosophical discussion”. He plans to cut them off and find some priests more to his liking.

For their part, the Shaolin monks live in a rundown former rooming house in Oakland, and are presenting some astonishing demonstrations of the effectiveness of Qigong practice, such as withstanding sledgehammer blows to the arm while steel bars beneath are broken.

An aide to the San Francisco mayor says the Shaolin monks don’t know much about Buddhism, but others retort that neither the political aide nor Ho, a retired IBM engineer, know much about Shaolin. The monk’s defenders say Shaolin kung fu is indeed a form of meditation.

Here’s the full report from the San Francisco Chronicle.

For more on the connection between mysticism, the martial arts, and Qigong, here’s a previous Ampontan post about the Japanese ninja master, Masaaki Hatsumi.

And this is apparently the website for the Shaolin Temple in China, complete with photos of a Vladimir Putin visit. They don’t seem to be averse to a little commercialism, but as an article on the site explains, they can’t even use the term Shaolin Temple in Japan because someone else holds the trademark.

Martial arts or mysticism? The difference is paper thin

Skeptics suggest the ninja and the techniques they practice are more myth and mutant turtle than martial arts, dismissing it as Oriental dirty fighting taught by frauds. But the skeptics might be surprised to know that ninjutsu is still alive and kicking at the Bujinkan Dojo near Tokyo in Noda, Chiba Prefecture, taught by 76-year-old Masaaki Hatsumi. This 34th linear grandmaster of the Togakure Ryu, who is also the keeper of eight other martial arts traditions, calls himself the world’s last ninja.

Hatsumi is more than just muscle and guile—he’s an accomplished man by anyone’s standards. After graduating from Meiji University, where he studied theater and osteopathic medicine, he opened an osteopathic clinic in Noda and practiced until 1990 when other commitments began taking up too much time.

The soke, to use his title within the art, has written more than a dozen books, some of which have been translated into English, and countless magazine and newspaper articles. In addition to more than 40 training videos, he wrote, directed and acted in 50 episodes of Jiraya, the most popular children’s television program of its time in Japan. He was the martial arts advisor for the James Bond movie, “You Only Live Twice”, appearing in an uncredited cameo as Tanaka’s assistant on the train, and the American miniseries Shogun.

He has conducted training seminars for the FBI, CIA, and Mossad, and for police in Britain, France and Germany. And while you’re catching your breath, I’ll add that he is a past President of the Writers Guild of Japan, a singer and performer on the guitar and ukulele (in night clubs with a Hawaiian band), and an accomplished painter and calligrapher.

At this point, you may well be wondering if he also walks on water, but some people wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand. In martial arts circles, legend has it that Hatsumi has the ability to control the weather, heal broken bones at his dojo by touch, and correct deficient eyesight without lifting a finger.