Comparing Classical and Modern Methods and Mindsets

柔術

Japanese grappling styles varied in the organization of their technical content. Some examples of classical (pre Meiji-era) arts include:

• Tenjin Shin'yō-ryū jūjutsu has 124 kata divided in several sections including themes of idori (kneeling), tachi-ai (standing), and koppo (ressucitation).
• Nakae Kitō-ryū Jūjutsu taught 30 kata, although 21 are preserved in Judo's koshiki no kata.
• Totsuka-ha Yōshin-ryū is said to have preserved 303 kata in four sections (shoden, chuden, joden, kaiden) passed down from older styles of Yōshin-ryū.
• Sōsuishi-ryū preserves a curriculum of kumi-uchi organized into 48 kata. Its weapons curriculum called koshi-no-mawari adds to this.
• Katori Shintō-ryū, albeit a weapons-focused tradition, has a section of 36 yawara kata in its curriculum that are rarely demonstrated.
• In contrast to those smaller traditions, the Bitchu-den of Takenouchi-ryū has accumilated hundreds of kata in its curriculum over almost five hundred years.

The list goes on. In most of these arts, kata is practiced in a clasical manner, with a focus on zanshin (awareness) and combative mindset, with the teacher acting as the attacker to be able to gauge the student's effectiveness and draw out their skill over time.

Transitional or what I might call neoclassical arts typically reverse that role, either having the teacher in the demonstrating role (almost as a form of performance art, especially in arts with complicated many-step techniques or intricate submission holds) or abandon that dichotamy to focus on sport:

• Daitō-ryū Aiki-jūjutsu, a Meiji-era form of yawara, contains 118 'basic' jūjutsu techniques and then adds 53 aiki-no-jutsu kata, 36 advanced or hiden techniques, and a self-defense curriculum of 84 waza. Later additions to its curriculum include so-called menkyo-kaiden kata.
• Daito-ryu Takumakai maintains a curriculum of around 500 techniques recorded in their sōden record of teachings of two of its early teachers, Morihei Ueshiba and Sokaku Takeda.
• Modern Sumo, albeit ritualized grappling, has traditionally 48 basic techniques and today 82 possible winning techniques.
• Modern Judo, albeit a form of sport in the modern era, has 100 techniques encompassing throwing and grappling that are synthesized from Tenjin Shin'yō-ryū, Kitō-ryū, and other sources.

Some of the above grappling styles have a limited curriculum, while others that include a variety of weapons practices (such as the different lines of Yōshin-ryū and Takenouchi-ryū) wind up with much larger set of teachings than those listed as a result, while other such as Sōsuishi-ryū teach grappling, iai, and kenjutsu utilizing a smaller number of teachings. This is similar to fierce arts such as Jiki Shinkage-ryū that maintain a more compact curriculum to great effect.

I wrote recently about some of the effects the rise of standardized sportive kendo had on arts like Jiki Shinkage-ryū. In the case of Japanese jūjutsu, many traditions died out as Japan modernized and Kodōkan Judō became a standard part of the Japanese educational system. Many jūjutsu dōjō wound up teaching a standard Judō currciulum alongside their older kata.

Interest in grappling and throwing was not limited to Japan, although those are possibly the best known examples in the west. In China, qinna is an important part of many martial traditions:

Along with Fujian White Crane, styles such as Northern Eagle Claw (Ying Jow Pai) and Tiger Claw (Fu Jow Pai) have qinna as their martial focus and tend to rely on these advanced techniques.

For example, Eagle Claw contains a set of 108 qinna teachings. In addition, internal martial arts styles such as Bagua, Taiji and Xingyi incorporate various grappling and throwing methods into their curricula.

Shuāijiāo or Chinese jacket wrestling was popular among Manchu warrior caste members in Qing Dynasty China. Yang Chengfu of Taiji Quan fame was a firearms instructor to the guard of King Duan and interacted with the palace wrestling corps during his tenure. Contemporary Shuāijiāo was codified in 1917 and taught in schools from 1928 — I don't think this is accidental, given the popularity of Judō in Japan at that time. Modern Shuāijiāo may have borrowed from or been influenced by Judō in terms of its rules and methods as it standardized.

However, there are several forms of traditional Chinese wrestling that differed in emphasis by geographical region. Shangxi wresting is said to date from the Song Dynasty, and Mongolian methods were practiced especially in the eastern regions. Beijing wrestling was heavily influenced by Manchu buku methods taught as part of the Manchu Imperial Guard Shan Pu Ying ( 善撲营 ) cadre during the Qing dynasty.

Arts like Jiki Shinkage-ryū were said to contain methods of yawara but lost those teachings during the Edo period — famous masters taught at the Kobusho academy of the Tokugawa, where Totsuka-ha Yōshin-ryū was the jūjutsu style favored. Some masters cross-trained in Yōshin-ryū and also learned spear methods related to Shinkage-ryū such as Hozoin-ryū. By the late Edo there was already quite a bit of specialization in martial traditions, especially those associated to elite shogunate academies or domain schools. However, in the case of Jiki Shinkage-ryū, its small sword or kodachi curriculum introduces teachings about power and stability at close range that are useful armed or unarmed. Similarly, classical traditions that place an empahsis on engaging an armed attacker or providing an armed response with small or auxiliary weapons or in batto, deploying a traditional katana, can develop their practitioners to the point where they are formidable at close range.

The rise of popularity of sportive grappling has had a mixed effect on classical grappling — first potentially improving it as it provided a mechanism for repeated free practice and competitive matches and later altering it to be optimized to those supervised encounters within the context of sport. Just because an art has changed to emphasize sport, does not make it less effective in some way than its antecedents, especially if modern fitness methods improve the competitive athletes far beyond levels martial arts hobbyists might have and greater time is spent training in preparation for competition.

However, with the deprioritization of traditional kata, some of the mindset (e.g., zanshin) needed for armed combat can indeed be lost. Strategy can be optimized to the point where it becomes nonsensical in a civilian self-defense scenario (let alone a military environment). Familiarity with weapons practices (deployment, application, retention, avoidance) become lost to the point where we see very stylized attacks in Daitō-ryū and Aikidō using swords.

Meanwhile, modern mixed martial arts raise the level of fitness and training intensity today far beyond that found in the typical martial arts school of the 1980s and 1990s. Early competitions demonstrated the need for a complete approach to free sparring, including grappling and ground fighting, but then evolved over time to incorporate additional emphasis on pugilism once its athletes developed a common expertise with ground-based jūjutsu so that it was no longer a discriminator for one dominant school.

It is fair to say the quality of non contact sport martial arts has on average declined since the advance of mixed martial arts. First, there is a smaller population to draw from as the energy and excitement of contemporary MMA draws interested youth who are willing to push themselves to higher levels of skill. The remaining population interested in traditional martial arts has thus aged — the average age in an Aikidō dōjō might be 50, even given that art's accessibility. In the classical koryū community, small groups might struggle to even train once a week due to other commitments and a limited number of potential training partners.

Traditional arts that restrict teachings (what level person can teach new people kata, who is allowed to work on advanced kata) and teach in a distance-learning seminar or gasshuku format are at a further disadvantage, potentially collecting a larger number of practitioners as a result of a federated model, but then slowing down their progress with infrequent access to instructors, limited access to information (training video, coaching, feedback, progressive testing if they are not allowed to spar on their own), and limited opportunities to train (if upper level teachings can only be done in private, without junior students present, and only done with people of a certain level that might train together only once or twice a year).

Compounded is the case of arts such as those listed above that maintain a large curriculum that has been agglomerated over time around what was once a vibrant and concentrated practice. When you cannot get mentorship often enough and you are attempting to wield a very large curriculum, things will be even more difficult — not just for the student but also the teacher, whose attention is limited.

These are substantial challenges. I appreciate very much that in the kenjutsu I focus on Jiki Shinkage-ryū, while quite small in its number of practitioners, has at least already gone through its near total collapse, and has preserved a set of kata that are limited in number (5 sets of teachings that contain possibly only 33 kata in total) and also well documented due to the efforts of Yamada Jirokichi and others.

Attempting to record variations of teachings (henka) as core teachings in an effort to have a larger curriculum that then must be maintained can disturb the learning process for principle-based martial arts. This seems to me to be the case in Daitō-ryū and other jūjutsu styles with very large curriculum. Maybe the vast number of kata are designed to stop people from learning the core principles of the art, if they were considered upper-level teachings, as opposed to being examples that facilitate the process. Kata as a means of social control.

In my case, although I practiced goshin-jutsu for fifteen years, and then worked on layering a subset of that content on my Gao lineage bagua, it has been over ten years since I have routinely drilled wrist and arm locks, grapples, and throws. Even though the Bagua and Xingyi I practice now contains some similar and some distinct methods, I spend much time on form practice and have to not fall into the trap of thinking I have the same level of raw strength and facility at grappling as I used to, even if my first goshin-jutsu might have been inferior in some ways to what I know now.

Stress testing is important, whether it be sparring (with my Jiki students when I am able to meet with them, with students of other ryū in the past, or in formal tournaments such as those held in the HEMA community) or interacting with other martial artists (as I did at a kagami biraki in Seattle a few years ago, and in Maryland many years ago when people from a variety of backgrounds all did Judō randori together). The randomness of those encounters and the feedback they provide are very useful to people like myself who train in older approaches that seem divorced from modern combat sport.

I really don't think, however, that much of the above is directly relevant to modern military combatives, as much as people who practice kobudō might want to think themselves related in some way to the mindset of elite infantry or special warfare units of today. I think most martial arts hobbyists would fail to qualify to even enter the military or federal law enforcement, let alone complete specialized infantry training or be able to be accepted to or graduate from elite qualification courses.

One example search of competitive fitness results for SF qualification entry include running 5 miles at a 7 minute pace, performing over 10 strict pullups, and completing a 12-mile ruck in under 2 hours 15 minutes.

That is a failure of the man in question, and nothing to do with what martial art they may practice as a hobby. But there is a general point to be made that bushi were fit and strong — watching people move large naginata awkwardly and slowly, barely able to control the weapon, while doing public demonstration is depressing.

Those who have served and experience combat and also became interested in kobudō will do so for their own reasons — earlier in my life I avidly consumed their writings, either Draeger's initial work or the later publications and newsletters written by members of the International Hoplology Society (IHS) when it was most active. Their insights, and how they relate kobudō to modern combative mindsets, are valuable. We are fortunate to be able to benefit from them to the extent we are able.

The training groups in kobudō that hold a high percentage of members with that type of experience are stronger for it, and closer to what the warrior mindset may have been in the past, than those of more academic or technical backgrounds who are merely inspired by the art and culture of past but have never done anything combative in the present day. Most kobudō teachers have never been any kind of armed conflict, be it military, paramilitary (e.g., law enforcement, protective details, other armed security work) or unarmed civilian experience (e.g., in combat sport, street fights, unarmed security work, or simply being the victim of assault).

It would be good for everyone to take stock of exactly what their training and experience is, before over generalizing their (lack of) experience to others. Without combat experience (or even combat sport experience, to circle back to modern grappling), senior teachers should be very conservative in how they extrapolate or interpret older teachings so as not to send – despite the best efforts of those in the past who lived and died by these methods – their students astray. This is an example where the student, if coming from a combatives background, might realize some benefits of what a teacher who has never seen combat might have to offer, by way of classical transmission, but it is up to the student to decide, based on their own knowledge and experience, how to relate what they are now learning to their profession. It is not the civilian teacher's place to espouse on the medieval or modern warrior as if they themselves are one.

So, in short, mindsets matter. Arts have changed over time, and modernization can very well be improvement but preservation needs to be looked at carefully. Given the size of traditional yawara curricula in the past, we need to remember they evolved largely during an extended period of peace during Edo Japan, inforced by a body politic consisting of strict military dictatorship. Novel combative insights in unscripted environments for many koryū may never have happened in the first place.