Practicing the Art of Soke Hatsumi

Anyone who has trained with Hatsumi Sensei for an extended period of time will understand how difficult following Soke can be. There are many apparent contradictions in his teachings and these lead trainees down many paths in an attempt to capture the art that Soke is passing on…especially as there is no codified certification program that one can turn to for assurance.
As Hatsumi Sensei is a consummate artist, and teacher of art, and its application in real life, we need to look at the whole package of our training with him in the context of how things operate in nature, or in the real world. In our modern world, with the easy access to massive amounts of information, it has become more and more difficult to differentiate the useful from the wasteful. How do we learn what is good? This is the lesson of Hatsumi Sensei and in order to “get it” you have to be able to hold several competing ideas in your mind at the same time.
Many have talked about the way of Hatsumi as having no structure, but it really is the structure of no structure. In this article I want to give you a possible way of looking at training with Soke that, if you can open your mind enough, may give you a tool in your journey.

Do what he SAYS:
Starting with the simplest and most obvious you must actually DO the things he says to do. If you visit soke 2 or 3 times a year you will hear some of the same messages over and over. “I’m teaching to the 15dans”, “Let go of your power”, etc. Some of these things give little direct application or are open to interpretation. But many times Soke will often come right out and tell us what we need to work on to improve our taijutsu.
For instance, he is always talking about conditioning your body to be supple and fluid, developing the capacity to move each segment of your body by itself. He demonstrates this with his ability to wiggle his ears, as well as being able to sit on the floor and put his foot behind his head! Many of these things are almost self-evident, yet often people do not take them to heart and spend the time necessary to develop these abilities. So, at the most basic level, just do what he says!

DON’T do what he SAYS:
In Japanese society the ways of delivering information and teaching are often different than in western society. In the west, we expect our teachers to directly tell us what we need to work on, to “get to the point”, so to speak. But in Japanese culture, this doesn’t always happen, the teacher draws your attention to things that reflect the point he is trying to make, he does not directly state it.
It happens regularly in Hombu training that Soke will have someone show a technique that everyone can work on and to give Soke a starting point from which to teach. Normally, he has them show it a couple times then proceeds to illustrate important concepts or principles. But sometimes he has that person come back out and repeat the movement over and over. Saying things like “ pay attention to his feet, nobody is moving their feet the same way, or watch his distance, the distance is very important”.
Of course you would think that he is telling everyone how good or correct that person’s technique is, sometimes even saying how good that person is, but usually he is trying to let the demonstrator correct his own inefficient movement. This becomes clear when, after letting the attempts go on for several minutes, Soke finally teaches the movement, moving to the opposite side as the demonstrator or taking a completely different distance.
I have spoken to a few friends who have had this situation in the dojo with Hatsumi Sensei, and they all realized that he was teaching them indirectly, and training the rest of us to develop the eyes with which to see correctly.
So it is important to take everything Hatsumi Sensei says ‘with a grain of salt’, as the saying goes. Not necessarily because he is purposely trying to deceive you, but because of the deeper lesson that might lie behind his words. It is the principle of Kyojitsu Tenkan Ho.

DO what he DOES:
This sounds so simple. Of course it is natural to attempt to replicate what is being shown in a class, so go for it to the best of your ability. Try to replicate exactly what he is showing. It will not be possible, usually, but if you just automatically say “that is Soke and I can don’t that” or “that’s not realistic, I would do this”, you are missing out on the learning opportunity. Don’t do what you can already do well!
It is okay to accept that you won’t be able to exactly duplicate what Soke has done, he can’t even duplicate it! But it is in the striving to replicate that understanding can come.

Don’t do what he DOES:
After you have worked on replicating to the best of your ability, you will begin to find the limits in that method. So next, try to capture the essence of what he does. Discover the key point or “kaname” and attempt to integrate that into your particular situation, working with your partner. Then take that key point and see how often it is applicable in the rest of your training, outside of Hombu. If Soke is demonstrating 力を抜く (the principle of suddenly dropping out the muscular tension) by lifting his elbow under his uke’s armpit, holding him aloft for a moment then rapidly dropping down, but you can’t seem to get into that position with your uke, then you must find an alternate location to employ the same principle. Thus, NOT doing what he is doing…

DO what he USED TO DO:
“That’s not how soke got to where he is today; you have to go through the same training he did to get to where he is now”. I’ve heard this a million times, and to a certain extent, it is true. There is a process of skill development that is necessary in order to even understand progressively higher, more difficult concepts. Our progression goes from simple to complex, hard training to softer training, obvious to subtle. If you try to take these things out of sequence, you will have gaps in your ability and you will be forced to go back to the beginning and relearn, forcing the process to take much more time than it originally would have.
So learning the process he went through (he and his top students will tell you), then making sure to cover the same areas he did, will help you on your path to capability in Hatsumi Sensei’s art.

DON’T do what he USED TO DO:
When Hatsumi first started his ninja training, there was no training manual. We’ve all seen the scrolls and their translations, as well as having the Japanese teachers explain them to us, there is no clear and concise pedagogy written in the scrolls. It is clear that Hatsumi had to” figure it out” (he has said this exact thing on multiple occasions).
In any process of discovery like he did, it is inevitable that there will be ideas or training methods that are effective and some that are not so effective. Everything we study evolves, so the methods of 40 years ago may not be the most efficient. There are many beliefs and opinions about how this is best achieved. You should take the time to find out what the best training approaches are by studying the people who embody the results you want to achieve. Thereby skipping some of the dead ends involved in figuring out a system virtually from scratch.

DO what his top students DO:
Some years ago Hatsumi Sensei made it clear to the world just who his top students were by designating them the 四天王 “shitenno”, and calling them the “true shihans”. Some people were not happy with the four names he chose, believing that their teacher should really be in that list. But it is Soke’s list. And he has admonished us on many occasions that we all need to train with all 4 of them in order to more fully understand his art. They each reflect a deep, sometimes unique understanding of Hatsumi’s art, and can clearly demonstrate their capability of this understanding! This is not to say that everyone will be able to train with all 4 of them all the time, but making sure to spend as much time as you need to be able to demonstrate your understanding of what they teach. Obviously as time passes we will have less and less chance to actually train with these four teachers…

DON’T do what his top students DO:
As with the admonition above to not hold too seriously to what Soke says, you also need to train with people who don’t necessarily follow Soke too closely. An interesting thing happened a couple years ago while several of us were in Hombu talking after a class in which Soke was repeatedly pointing out the bad habits of a particular instructor who was there that day. Not in the oblique, subtle way mentioned above. This time Soke was talking directly, saying things like this person has many bad habits in their taijutsu and they were passing these bad habits along to the students who trained with him. This is unusual and represents a considerable amount of agitation on the part of Soke.
So there we were after class talking, when one of the Japanese students states that he will ask Hatsumi Sensei why he allows this person to teach at Hombu if he feels so strongly that he is passing along dangerous information. I thought he was joking and promptly forgot about it. The next week when I saw my Japanese friend he said to me, “I asked Hatsumi that question from last week”. It took me a moment to remember what he was talking about, and then it dawned on me. “You’re kidding”, I said, ”What did he say?” (Now the answer to this question really sums up the difficulty in trying to learn Hatsumi Sensei’s art) “He said, he wants there to be bad teachers, so that everyone has to figure out on their own how to tell good taijutsu from bad…!”
With these differing perspectives hopefully you will have a little bit easier time trying to follow the seemingly capricious actions of our grandmaster.
Good luck in your journey.

Rob Renner
2012

要

“Kaname”

This year, 2012, Hatsumi Sensei, the grand master of the Bujinkan, has chosen as his theme the idea of Kaname (要). In English, this translates to the ‘crux‘, ‘essence’, ‘pivot’, or the “vital point”. A simple example of a kaname might be a door hinge, which has a bolt running through it, this bolt (steel rod) is the kaname. Pull this bolt out and your doors fall down. It is the vital point that holds it all together.

Over the years Hatsumi Sensei has taught and shown many principles and ideas, but this emphasis on the essential pieces seems to tie all the previous material together, allowing us to focus on what’s truly important in our taijutsu. In fact it seemed to me that this way of looking at our budo is in itself the critical point!

Everything has a kaname, and when it comes to the practice of martial arts, this idea of finding and using the “kaname” or ‘vital point’ is essential.

There are 3 major kaname that Hatsumi Sensei has been emphasizing:

間合いの要 “Maai no Kaname”

空間の要 “Kukan no Kaname”

動きの要“Ugoki no Kaname”

These 3 areas of focus will give us several crucial concepts to work with that will facilitate a deeper understanding, as well as a functional capability, in our martial art training. I will only be able to give a general sense of these ideas, a more thorough understanding can only come from direct hands on training.

*Of course all three of these areas are integrated so that you cannot isolate or understand one of these kaname without understanding and using the others.

1. 間合いの要 Maai no Kaname – The Vital Point of Distance

It is obvious that, in a fight, distance is constantly fluctuating, and of course, we must learn how to be effective at all ranges. But the first (or primary) distance we must become intimately familiar with is when our “safety zone” has been compromised. We need to learn to read the true range of our opponents and their weapons, and then discover how to be just outside of that range, this is the vital point.

In Japanese budo there is a saying:

肉を切らせて骨を断つ

“Let your opponent cut your flesh

so that you can cut him to the bone!”

To be at this distance -where you can cut your opponent to the bone, while he merely cuts your flesh- you must be right on the edge, which is to say close enough to be cut!

Hatsumi Sensei has talked about writing life on one side of a piece of paper, death on the other side, and the distance between those two words, life/death, is called kami hitoe, 紙一重

(the thickness of a single sheet of paper, or as we say in English, “by a single hair’s breadth”).

This is the cutting edge where you win or lose. This *primary distance is “Ma-ai no Kaname – 間合いの要

As Nagato sensei, one of my instructors likes to say, “Be at the distance where your opponent believes he can reach you, but really you are just out of his reach”. Although the range changes depending on weapon and opponent size, the end product is the same.

*Some of the particular mechanics of doing this I have written about in a previous article on “Shinnenjutsu” (mind control, which is about our perceptions and how to control another person’s perceptions). It will be worth your time to review that paper and refresh yourself with the details.

2. 空間の要 Kukan no Kaname - The Crux of the Kukan

There are many possible translations of the Japanese word kukan, but for our purposes we will use the idea of  “the shape of the space – through time”. This definition allows us to look at a movement or technique, moment by moment, as it unfolds over time. A simple example would be the track a sword will take when swung by a swordsmen.

Imagine an opponent standing before you with the sword held over his head. If you look at all the possible paths the sword could take (he has a 360° range of choices) as it travels on its way to your body, you can get an idea of the shape of the space through time.

Obviously, until you can determine which of those paths the sword is actually taking, you don’t want to put your body into any of the potential pathways. You want to move to the “safe” place. This can be practiced with a punch, kick, or any type of weapon. Just remember that each weapon has its own unique characteristics, so you will want to study how the weapon could be used and how the person’s body changes shape during that use, then you can begin to anticipate what will most likely come next, thus allowing you to position your body appropriately in the “shape of the space” or kukan.

Another aspect of this kaname is studying the structure of the human body and how it can generate force so that you can adjust your opponents body just enough to take away his ability to deliver force without doing so much to his structure that he feels compelled to violently react.

As an exercise have someone take a stance where he can hit a pad with full force, then without allowing him to move his feet, slightly shift his shoulders and hips out of alignment with each other. See how little movement it actually takes to greatly diminish his ability to strike in any meaningful way. Understanding what shapes you need in order to deliver force as well as take away the ability to deliver force is also “Kukan no Kaname”.

1. 動きの要 Ugoki no kaname – The Essence of Movement

• Hiding your movements

So, you’ve started to dial in your distance, you have begun to see the possible patterns emerge in the kukan, now we must learn how to move in that kukan to properly control the distance. Although this sounds easy, you will find that a lifetime’s worth of habitual movement will make this the most challenging area yet!

Let me ask you an obvious question, if you were to telegraph your movements to your opponent, do you think he would let you perform those movements on him? Of course not! And yet we all have many unconscious, habitual “preparatory” movements that telegraph our intentions to our opponents.

Do this exercise and you’ll see what I mean:

Stand in front of a mirror with your feet in a neutral position, next to each other, watching your head in the mirror. Then, step forward with your right foot. Notice how your upper body first shifts left? In the opposite direction of where you want to go?! This is our habitual way of walking. Every time you go to move/step, you have this preparatory shift, which telegraphs your intention to your opponent!

It should be clear that we need to learn to move in such a way as to NOT telegraph our intentions. Although learning how to use our body so that we don’t telegraph can really only be taught in person, play with this simple walking exercise: Stand with feet together, then load all your weight onto one leg, hold that position where your leg is loaded, then suddenly (with no movement of your body in the opposite direction!) pick up the foot that is loaded and fall. It need only be a small, falling step. You can quickly see how much preparatory motion you unconsciously use just to take a step. Obviously, as this is connected with our footwork, we need to be able to hide where we intend to step, so that, in combat, by the time our opponent perceives our movement, it is too late.

The easiest direction to begin this practice is sideways, then forward, and finally backwards. As you do this you will begin to see that you can move without first shifting and alerting your opponent. You will begin to be able to move in the direction you want to move in, not the OPPOSITE one first!

• Shiho Dori

Connected to the ability to hide your intention is the ability to move along the correct angle when you are attempting to apply a technique to your opponent. Some of you may be familiar with the technique 四方取りshiho dori, the “4 ways of taking or capturing”, from Kukishin Ryu. But the concept of shiho dori as it was taught to me is more broadly applicable.

Most of us are familiar with the idea of the weak line, or the “triangle point” as depicted on the left. If you draw a line between Uke’s feet, then draw a line perpendicular to it, you will have the weak line. Another method is to make a triangle with Uke’s feet being two points and a point along the weak line as the third point. However you learned this is not important, the information it gives you about someone’s structure and how to take them down is. For a very simple mechanical reason this concept works; Uke has nothing with which to brace his structure along the weak line. Of course, this is only true when there is no connection between you and him.

However, if there IS a connection between you and your Uke (let us say you have him in a double lapel grab), then the “weak line” changes into something else, the shiho dori, as depicted in the graphic below.

Now when I talk about a connection between you and your Uke, I don’t mean merely touching him, but having a strong enough connection that he is relying upon you for support. This could be in the form of laying your weight on him so that he must brace under your added weight, or, from the opposite perspective, you could be partially supporting him. Either way the connection has to be such that he cannot continue attacking you without first readjusting his structure. You, as the tori, must be able to instantly disengage and move in any direction. Once you understand how to manipulate the human bodies’ structure (remember Kukan non Kaname), you will find it easier to have more and more control over the Uke’s body at this point. When you are able to have a connection wherein you can manipulate your Uke’s shoulder, spine, and hips while he is unable to deliver force in your direction but you are free to disengage and move in any direction, then you have a zero point.

When you arrive at this point, then, and only then, the lines of the shiho dori appear. These lines are mathematically precise. They are difficult to find in training because they are constantly shifting with the movement and placement of the Uke and Tori. If you can imagine being positioned as the graphic above shows you can begin to get the idea of where you would need to move. It doesn’t matter which way either the Uke or Tori is facing, once you have the zeropoint connection, these lines are there. To effortlessly take you Uke down, you need to step/fall along one of these lines, either forward or backwards. Both you and your Uke must move along the lines – precisely. The fulcrum of your connection is usually moving above these lines.

Again, without direct guidance in how to apply the principle of shiho dori, this will seem confusing. But the dramatic improvement in your taijutsu, once you do learn how to implement shiho dori, will make you feel as giddy as a school girl!

• Press-Pulse-Press

Quite possibly the most fun of the ugoki no kaname, this concept of “Press-Pulse-Press” or “PPP”, will be immediately recognized to anyone who has spent some time training with Hatsumi Sensei.

The basic idea is this; as you apply a technique to your opponent (for the sake of simplicity let us say omote gyaku), you put just enough tension into it to get a response from your Uke (‘Press’), either in the form of him bracing to resist you, or him trying to drop his body under his wrist to escape the lock. As soon as you feel this you suddenly drop the power out of your hold while simultaneously dropping into a crouch (‘Pulse’).

This rapid loss of pressure (which your Uke was using to maintain his structure) will cause your Uke to wobble off-balance. Without waiting for them to regain their position, put the tension back into the gyaku (‘Press’) as you move in one of the 4 directions – no telegraphing!

If done correctly, they will drop to the ground. Usually laughing because they can’t understand why they fell, since you didn’t force them down. (This is why I say this is the most fun of the kaname as you will be doing a lot of laughing as you begin to use this idea throughout your training).

This is what Hatsumi Sensei means when he talks about “chikara no nuki kata”, the method of dropping your power out.

* I purposely left out a few details in the above description since it must truly be felt to be understood and a thorough description would take many pages to cover! Suffice it to say that each one of these pieces takes several hours of explanation just to see the ideas somewhat clearly in your mind, physically doing them at will, much longer…

Of course there are many more ways of looking at the idea of Kaname, some more straightforward and some even more esoteric. Trying to quantify everything is useless, but these particular ideas have been incredibly useful in helping people see and understand the taijutsu Hatsumi Sensei (and his top instructors in Japan) is doing.

Finally, don’t get too serious about these things, in the words of Hatsumi Sensei “play!”

Rob Renner

2012

Shinnenjutsu – 心念術

“Controlling your opponents perceptions”

Part 2: “Proprioception (Perception of Body Position)”.

In Part 1 of this article on Shinnenjutsu, we talked about Visual Perception, and how controlling your opponent’s visual perception, in effect, controls his mind.

Now we are going to look at some of the really fun stuff, Proprioception, and how you can take control of another person’s mind through touch. This area is talked about quite a bit in the Bujinkan (kinesthetic words like; relax, don’t use power, etc), but understanding the mechanism of controlling another’s perceptions through touch, and how to apply it, are another matter altogether.

Let me state here that this is by no means the “definitive” and complete answer to the “magic” that Hatsumi Sensei and some of the Shihan demonstrate, but it does go a long way to giving you a set of tools that will allow you to see and understand, as well as perform, the kind of things that Sensei does with his Budo Taijutsu.

Before we go into it, we need to understand a little bit about what Proprioception is.

The Proprioceptive Sense refers to the sensory input and feedback that tells us about movement and body position. That is the position of the body relative to itself (i.e.; the arms related to the torso), and the body relative to whatever it’s touching (the ground, a chair, another person, etc). . It is one of the “deep senses” and could be considered the “position sense”

It’s “receptors”(called proprioceptors) are located within our muscles, joints, ligaments, tendons, and connective tissues. The skin, whenever it is stretched or pinched, also plays a huge role in positional awareness.

If this proprioceptive sense is not receiving or interpreting input correctly within these muscles, joints etc., then we refer to it as Proprioceptive Dysfunction.

Without proper messages regarding whether muscles and skin are being stretched, whether joints are bending or straightening, and how much of each of these is happening, people will have the following “clinical” signs of Proprioceptive Dysfunction (an actual disease)…

• · Difficulty “motor planning”; i.e. conceptualizing and figuring out what each part of his body needs to do in order to move a certain way or complete a task (what is an unconscious sense to us, becomes an active, conscious, frustrating sense to them)
• · Difficulty executing those planned movements: i.e. “motor control” (the brain may know what to do, but they can’t figure out how to make their body do it)
• · Difficulty “grading movement”; knowing how much pressure is needed to complete a task (i.e. hold a cup of water, hold and write with a pencil, turn the page of a book, hit a golf ball into the hole, etc.)
• · Difficulty with “postural stability”; i.e. the ability to hold and maintain one’s postural muscles and responses, giving you a sense of security and safety during movement

As you can see from the above, this sense of Proprioception is a key component and enormously important for us in the study of Budo Taijutsu. Although we are not creating a permanent case of Proprioceptive Dysfunction, the immediate effects are the same and thus useful for our purposes.

Related to Proprioceptive Dysfunction is the idea of Proprioceptive Dissonance.

Dissonance means disagreement or incongruity, the idea of Proprioceptive Dissonance refers to a situation wherein the proprioceptive sense is being given two or more different and antithetical (competing) messages, causing the mind to send faulty info back to the body.

(It is important to note that your proprioceptive response occurs at the level of the nervous system, which has a very fast response time, not the much slower, higher-order conscious thought processes that we typically associate with “mind”)

Now that we have a definition of Proprioception and why we might want to cause Proprioceptive Dysfunction and Dissonance, let’s look at some ways that we can implement them into our taijutsu.

Proprioceptive Dysfunction

First, the receptors in the joints send two important pieces of information to the mind:

• Amplitude of movement
• Speed of movement

Amplitude refers to the distance that a joint is moved, while speed of course, refers to how fast that joint is being moved.

Amplitude

So, when a joint (arm, leg, head, etc) is being moved too far, your proprioceptors send a signal alerting your mind that you need to make an adjustment. If an attacker has grabbed you in “kumiuchi” and you respond by pushing and pulling on his arms, his body will automatically adjust in order to keep a strong and balanced position.

You can use this reaction in two ways.

Method 1:

The first is by not moving the arms (relative to the opponent’s torso) but leaving them in place and moving your body around them. This is where the principle of “move your body around the weapon, not the weapon around your body” (sabaki gata) comes into play.

(Don’t get caught up on the word “weapon”, in the case of omote gyaku, the “weapon” is the wrist, or the place you are using to control your attacker. It is much like a fulcrum and your body is the lever)

At the Bujinkan Zero Point Dojo here in Japan, we use the idea of Initial Contact (the moment you “come to grips” with your attacker) to convey the principle of sabaki gata. At the moment you and your attacker “clinch”, there will be a “shape” to where your two bodies are connected (look at the places you are connected, then look at the angles between his arms and torso – this is the shape).

In order for you to create Proprioceptive Dysfunction, you need to leave that “shape” the same as you move with your feet, up to the point at which his balance is taken, but not so far that he has to take a step or falls down. If you move him past this point, his sense of balance will kick in and he will regain his structure.

(This maybe somewhat difficult to do at first, but it will come quickly with a bit of practice.)

The important thing here is this: your opponent will believe his balance and structure are okay, because you have kept the amplitude of movement small.

The other important piece related to this is speed.

Speed

When we talk about speed here, it is always relative to the attacker’s speed. You essentially want to mirror the timing of his movement. In the above example from kumiuchi, if your attacker puts tension into his arms and presses you, you must move with the timing of that press. This sounds self-evident, but most of us will want to move faster in an attempt to “beat our opponent to the punch” so to speak. This is counter-productive for the goal of mind-control.

You are probably familiar with the admonition to slow down when practicing your taijutsu. Besides the need for skill acquisition (which you must do slowly at first, then gradually at increasing speeds in order for maximum integration), there is another reason for moving slowly: it deceives your opponent’s proprioceptive sense (shinnenjutsu).

In order to demonstrate this, grab someone nearby by the arm and jerk it, you will see how they automatically adjust to accommodate and tense up. This is called the stretch-reflex, it’s a proprioceptive tool and its purpose is to prevent the muscle from incurring damage, this reaction (the tightening up of the muscles around the part of the body being jerked on) is amplified in a high-stress situation.  This also means you will be helping your opponent generate more force against you. Unless you are confident that you can easily overpower every person you might meet, try to avoid this.

Just as with controlling our opponent’s visual perception, you want to move first, but move slow. When you feel like you’re moving slowly enough, try to move even slower. In practice, take it down as slow as you can while still maintaining good structure.

The second method to play with is;

Method 2:

Purposefully moving your attacker’s arms in order to elicit the proprioceptive response you need from him.

Again, from kumiuchi, this time you can push with your right arm onto his left arm as if you were going to take mushadori, at the same time turning your body and softly slipping your left elbow over his right arm. At the moment he reacts to the movement of his left arm (proprioceptive response) by tensing his body in an effort to prevent your taking the mushadori, you drop straight down, trapping his right arm with your left in the ”real” mushadori! This is a more obvious example of shinnenjutsu.

____________________

Proprioceptive Dissonance

In implementing Proprioceptive Dysfunction we seek to send incorrect or incomplete signals to the proprioceptive sense, in effect controlling our attacker’s minds through deception. Now, with Proprioceptive Dissonance, we will take control of our opponent’s mind (proprioceptive sense) through confusion (sending too much and/or competing information).

In order to successfully do this there are several movement principles you will need to implement:

• Many Points of Contact – “Glad-wrap” his body with yours.
• Push – Don’t Pull.
• Use 3 dimensional movements (spirals or arcs).
• Move into the space they need to occupy next.
• “Slide” along the contours of the body

Many Points of Contact:

In the Bujinkan we are often admonished to have “as many points-of-contact as possible”. The general understanding of this is because it allows us to “control” (through feeling) what our opponent is doing. This is true enough, but there is another reason it is so useful, because all these points of contact are sending information to our opponent’s proprioceptive sense (he is feeling too), which means that we can send the information that we want to send, creating Proprioceptive Dissonance (mind control).

I use the term “glad-wrap” (the plastic that you use to cover food and store it in the refrigerator), because, when you cover the food, glad-wrap takes the shape of the food, but it doesn’t actually move the food!

Because you have these points of contact, you can apply pressure with your whole body, (knees, elbows, hips, etc) not just your hands. This means that your opponent’s mind is busy trying to keep track of all the sources of information coming in, much more than it normally deals with on a day to day basis. Since you are “covering” your opponent’s body, you can apply specific pressure throughout your opponent’s structure.

(How to apply this pressure is covered next)

Push Don’t Pull:

This idea is a bit harder to convey in terms of what is meant by “pushing and pulling”. Generally, the force of your pressure should travel away from the body (push), not travel back into your body (pull). The motion of your force when doing a push-up is, of course, a push; the motion of clapping your hands is a pull, because if your hands did not stop each other they would continue to travel until they touched the body.

When you are touching your opponent, they are relying on you for proprioceptive feedback that allows them to maintain balance and posture – in effect, you are supporting them. The act of pushing takes away this support. Pulling does the opposite; by pulling, they move closer to your center, which gives them increasing amounts of valid information that their proprioceptive sense will take advantage of.

Use 3-Dimensional Movements (Spirals or Arcs):

Proprioceptive Dissonance occurs from receiving too much and/or competing data. Therefore, we want to use more complex movements (3D), instead of less complex movements (2D).

If you push your opponent’s shoulder straight back it sends some data to his proprioceptive sense, if you push his shoulder in an arc towards his weak line (90 degrees to the line that runs through his heels), it sends vastly more data to his proprioceptive sense. Now, if you push his hips in an arc that is 90 degrees to the arc his shoulder is moving through, you will overload his proprioceptive sense, once again, taking control of his mind.

Move Into the Space They Need to Occupy Next:

As you move around your opponent, keeping lots of contact, pushing along their body, not pulling, you need to move into the space that they will need NEXT.  Hatsumi Sensei is always talking about “tsugi tsugi” the next next, meaning; be looking for where your opponent will have to go next in order to keep attacking you successfully, then take that space (controlling the kukan).

For example; if you push someone into their left, rear quadrant, you need to move around their body and into that space first! At this point, they will be slightly leaning on you, because you are still “covering” them like glad-wrap, which means that they are now relying upon you for their balance and sense of position. From here it is quite easy to “take them out” as they will not be able to appropriately respond to whatever you do.

(As you can imagine, in order to do this well, you will have to be very close to your opponent. In training, I talk about keeping them in your “hug zone”, the place where someone would be, if you were hugging them. This will mean less distance to cover.)

Slide Along the Contours of Their Body:

Hatsumi Sensei does this quite often, rather than shoving his opponent, he gently “slides” his arm or leg along the shape of his opponent’s body. There is a touch-response that reacts to this, causing the body to move away from the touch. If you push too forcefully the effect is negated.

For instance; if you place your left hand lightly on your partner’s right shoulder, then slide it along his back to his opposite shoulder, you will find that he has shifted his balance over and onto the front of his left foot.

(Of course if he knows what you are doing in advance he will resist and move differently!)

Since this is a subtle shift, it is most useful when your opponent is already moving.

In order to truly appreciate this (and all of the Proprioceptive Dissonance factors), it must be felt in person. Anyone who has trained with Hatsumi Sensei has heard him say this. Another thing that Sensei says, in every class, is to play with these ideas.

This brief article really cannot do justice to the subject at hand. I encourage everyone to look into the role that Proprioception plays in our martial art and to come to Japan and study it in person.

If you want more information or want to train with these concepts first-hand, go to: www.zeropointbujinkan.com.

Rob Renner

September 2007

Shinnenjutsu – 心念術

“Controlling your opponents perceptions”

Also translated as intention technique, mind reading, mind control, and manipulation of another’s thoughts or perceptions, this concept lies at the heart of Budo Taijutsu.

Disclaimer:
Over the years Hatsumi Sensei has used different “themes” related to a particular school of the Bujinkan to illustrate or point to the essence of Budo. Similar to having many different people describe a particular object, Sensei’s use of these themes, and the interpretations of them, to give us many different viewpoints from which to gain an understanding of Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu. There seems to be a common thread to all of these themes, that is, the manipulation of truth and falsehood in what our opponent perceives. This seems fairly obvious on the surface, but there are many differing opinions as to what that means. I offer my own opinion; based on my search for a scientific, replicable explanation for the “magic” that Hatsumi Sensei is able to do. By no means am I claiming to have “the secret” to Budo Taijutsu, but the subject matter in this article has gone a long way to my understanding, and replicating, the abilities that Sensei demonstrates. I reserve the right to change my mind at any time as new and better information comes along that allows for a more complete understanding of Sensei’s art.

Part 1: Visual Perception

Sensei is always saying that Budo is not about being strong or weak, fast or slow, it’s about taking the shape of the attack and then manipulating what our opponents believe to be happening – shinnenjutsu. Now, there are many different ways of looking at this concept, for instance, there could actually be some kind of force that exists that can be transmitted from one mind to another, however, as far as I know we don’t have the tools to measure such a thing in a tangible, repeatable way that can be systematically taught. So what I want to concentrate on is the magic that IS available to us, the things that we can physically do with our bodies in training? Therefore, we will look at shinnenjutsu through the idea of controlling your opponent’s perceptions, focusing on the 2 primary areas of perception related to movement:
Visual Perception and Proprioception (Perception of Body Position).

Because of the size and depth of the information, I will cover these two areas in two different articles. This article will cover the first of the two:

Visual Perception:

The human eye sees Motion first, Shape second, and Color third.

Generally speaking, what this means is that, as you become aware of something, it’s motion (relative to your position) is perceived first, followed by the shape of the thing that moved, and after, by more fine detail, such as color or texture. How does this affect us in terms of our taijutsu? As we will see below, it’s really the first two that concern us.

1. Motion

If the eye sees movement first, then that means your opponents body will react to any sudden or big movement on your part. So, our goal, in order to control our opponents mind, is to move as little and as slowly as possible. How do we do this effectively?

Of primary concern is your distance. Hatsumi Sensei calls Budo Taijutsu the Martial Arts of Distance for good reason.

Let’s use Muto Dori as an example. When performing muto dori, Sensei tells us to put our head in a place that is easy to cut, while moving our feet to a position that cannot be cut. What does this mean?
To begin with, you must be at the edge of your opponent’s effective striking range, meaning that he can’t strike you without stepping. Your distance should be such that, as he steps forward to deliver a strike, you have sufficient distance to simultaneously step back out of his reach, but just barely!
(Sensei says the difference between being too close and being too far is the thickness of a piece of paper!)

If you practice this concept the way that Hatsumi sensei demonstrates it, you will find that moving your feet actually pulls your head back out of reach of your opponent. The effect on your opponent occurs when he attacks you, because, as far as he can visually perceive, you have not obviously moved your head, so he will believe he has succeeded in his goal of hitting you – his mind, through his visual perception, still believes your head is in the same place (shinnenjutsu). This will cause him to continue with his (now obsolete) attack, giving you the opportunity to affect him from a safe vantage point.

The opposite of this is:
beginning your motion by moving your head first, an instinctive movement based on the flinch reflex, which can be trained out of our habitual movement through Progressive Impact Training. (This training protocol is simple, but will be left for another article.)
Moving the head first gives our opponent all the information he needs to correct his attack “on-the-fly” (as he is attacking). This is because of our dominant ability to perceive motion and correctly triangulate the destination of a moving body (movement first!)

(Not to mention that pulling your head out of alignment with your shoulders and hips makes you open for the inevitable follow-up attack, since you will be momentarily “stuck” in place as you struggle to regain your center of balance in order to move again!)

The next component we must consider in order to control our opponent’s visual perception is:

2. Silhouette (Shape)

Remember, the second thing the human eye perceives is silhouette (shape). This relates to our position relative to our attacker. Predominantly, we want to be “squared-off” or torso face-forward to our attacker. If you have trained with Sensei at all, or even watched his videos, you will have noticed that he uses the “shizen kamae” where he is face-forward to his opponents 99% of the time. This is not because he is old or lazy!
One of the main reasons is this: when trying to control your attacker’s perceptions we want to give him a target, while at the same time being able to move in any direction. If you are squared-off, and at the correct primary distance, there will be a triangle created with your forehead and shoulders, your attacker’s brain (visual perception) will focus on this triangle, whether he does so consciously or unconsciously.
(The head and upper torso are where we gain the bulk of our visual information in a fight situation.)
As he is tracking this “triangle” , you should be moving with your feet, he will not be aware of how the rest of your body has shifted to take control of the kukan. Nearly everyone knows about the narrowing of focus (tunnel-vision) that occurs in high-stress situations, we can use this to our advantage by showing him what we want him to see (visual perception).

Turning your body completely side-on to your attacker presents a smaller target, very useful if he is shooting arrows or throwing spears at you and you are in formation with many other soldiers, but less useful if you want to hide the direction you will be moving to next. When you are side-on, you have allowed your opponent to “cross your T” as they say in the military, meaning that he is able to get all his weapons on you, but you can only present one side (half, or less, of your weapons) to him. We must remember that people almost never throw only a single attack, and when you turn so far as to be side-on, you will be open for that next attack.
So, be squared-off, presenting a target your opponent feels he can easily reach. Because you are in this position, you have the mobility to move in any direction. Also, since your face–forward position creates a larger silhouette, as you counter-attack, bringing your weapons toward him from your centerline (tight, controlled attacks…not wild, swinging arcs that are easy to discern and prepare for), he will find it very difficult to perceive what the counter-attack is until too late.

(Keep this in mind: when I say things like “be squared-off”, I do not mean perfectly, or at all times! Remember, these are rules-of-thumb; as such there will always be exceptions to the rule. For instance: when slipping forward alongside the blade in muto dori, you will of necessity turn side-on to your opponent – but only for a brief moment, then you are back to squared-off. The important thing is that you can perform the rules-of-thumb at will, and then it will be your choice to move differently, not forced upon you because you can’t do anything else!)

So, in order to take control of your opponent’s visual perception, in effect, controlling his mind (Shinnenjutsu):

• Use a kamae that allows for you to bring all your weapons to bear on your opponent (torso squared-off).

• Move with your feet first, allowing your head to be pulled or pushed in the direction you want.

• Move as little and as slowly as possible.

These two pieces, movement and silhouette, are really just the beginning. Obviously there is much more to the subject of visual perception than I can address in a short article, things like:

• 1 body motion, 2 steps

• Move Down, then Over

• Leave your Head in place, move your body

and many other principles of Budo Taijutsu.
Not to mention studying the ever-changing theories about how the eye/mind connection function. It’s also true that you can’t begin to truly understand this kind of thing without sufficient training under someone qualified to teach it to you. There is so much more depth to understanding the movement that I have described above.

While many people may already have a good grasp on the importance of controlling our opponent’s visual perception, it is the second area, that of Proprioception, that has been overlooked, yet holds the key to some of the greatest “magic” in Hatsumi Sensei’s budo.
In the next article I will introduce you to the ideas of Proprioceptive Dysfunction and Proprioceptive Dissonance.

If you have any questions or want to contact me please go to www.zeropointbujinkan.com.

Rob Renner
August, 2007

*Written by Japan resident and long time Bujinkan member, Vaughan Moir.

I live in Japan and travel to Chiba monthly to train with Soke and the four Shihan. For the last couple of years I have also been training with some of the foreign instructors living in Japan. While they all have something to offer, training with Rob in the Zeropoint system has been by far the most valuable training. Why?:

1. You learn skills that enable you to isolate and then integrate movements that are fundamental to Bujinkan Taijutsu.

2. Having learned these Kihon movements, you are able to understand how Soke and the Shihan are using taijutsu and kyojitsu to affect their opponent’s balance and control the kukan. Zeropoint training provides a key to clarifying and defining the Bujinkan’s fundamental movement, giving you a structure with which to look at what Soke and his top shihan are teaching, and therefore adds value to your training in Japan.

3. You learn a series of exercises that will quickly transform your reflexes, and from that, the way that you train. Many people try to show their “feeling” of Soke’s movement, but Zeropoint training has specific drills and exercises that directly affect your taijutsu.

At first I thought that there were all these amazing coincidences occurring; I would train with Rob, then train with Soke or the Shihan, and see exactly the same points emphasized. After a few months, I realized that the Shihan were doing these things all the time.

No coincidence! I just never had the eyes to see what they were doing before, despite having trained in the Bujinkan for many years. Zeropoint training gave me those eyes.

Add value to your training! Check out Rob and the Zeropoint Dojo while you’re in Japan.

Vaughan Moir

What are the basics (kihon)?

基本

(Kihon; foundation, basis, standard)

Many people talk about the importance of learning the basics (kihon) in our martial art.

“Without a good foundation”, they say, “You can’t really achieve a high level of ability”.

In fact, there are some people who go so far as to say that it’s worthless to train with Hatsumi Soke, because he is teaching so far beyond the basics.

* (I think it appropriate to add here that every art has its basis in logical structure, however wild and seemingly unconnected some artists’ works appear to be.)

It’s easy to pontificate about the importance of learning the fundamentals, but here is the real question; “what are the fundamentals?”

When someone speaks about the “basics of Budo Taijutsu”, what are they referring to? If you ask ten different people to be specific about what constitutes the basics, you will get ten different answers. But for practical reasons the truth has to be simpler than that.

The Criteria for Determining the Basics:

If you wish to design a teaching model to give someone a skill-set one of the crucial elements to the planning of this design would be to “begin with the end in mind”.  Everything in the model must correlate to the end product you are seeking.

In the case of Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu – the “end” -  is Hatsumi Soke.

Since Hatsumi Sensei is the definition of Bujinkan, then our goal is to have taijutsu skills comparable to his. Whether or not you believe this is even possible is irrelevant, if you are trying to learn (or, more importantly, teach) Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu, Hatsumi Soke is the model.

So, with Hatsumi as the model, then everything we do in our training should be designed to give us the same skill-set he has. If you are practicing basic movement that looks or feels vastly different from the look and feel of Hatsumi Sensei’s movement – it is wrong!

This is not to say that there aren’t people teaching useful things other than what Soke is teaching, and some that are very strong fighters doing things their way, but if we are looking to have Soke’s skill-sets, then we have to be more rigorous in our definition.

Creating Habits:

Let’s look at this logically, why would you imprint your nervous system with a movement methodology that you knowingly were going to have to throw away and completely change down the road? For example; many people feel that practicing Sanshin and Kihon Happo with wide stances and big, overly-exaggerated movements, where the whole body moves as one big brick, for years– regardless of the technique (distance and/or speed) involved – is essential to developing “good basics”. They say that eventually you will get rid of these big movements and start to use smaller, more refined movements. However; your Central Nervous System has already created the neural pathways (habits) that your body will use, making it extremely difficult to erase the inappropriate sense of timing and distance that will have been created. This, of course, will add years to the amount of time if takes to develop the Hatsumi skill-set – giving credence to the theory that it takes 30 years or more to achieve a good level of ability and understanding in this art!

*This last paragraph has caused some confusion concerning the practice of certain movements.

Let me be clear; I am NOT saying we shouldn’t practice wide stances or wide, deep stances! Of course there are techniques in our art that require wide foot placement (ie; Togakure ryu katas, some ukemi from the TenChiJin, etc).

What I AM saying is that we must practice ALL the types of movements we will be using in training. This means practicing Sanshin with the WHOLE RANGE of possible foot positions and leg angles, from both feet not moving while standing in Shizen no Kamae, being able to deeply flex your knees, hips, and ankles, to a very wide Ichimonji no Kamae, where the back leg is deeply flexed and the front leg extended. And ALL the combinations in-between!

I do personally feel that we should give more of our practice time to the movements that we encounter the most frequently in training (and this varies depending on the individual as well as the dojo), since we are trying to ingrain these movement patterns into our nervous system.

As Soke often teaches, we must not be victims of our habits, indeed we need to have as many options available to us as possible in order to fit “appropriately” into any given situation. If we only train one set way of moving, however powerful and devastating that movement is, we have cut ourself off from this capability.

A Principle-based approach:

Having explained some of the methodology behind efficient design of teaching models, let us also look at the idea of principles. A principle is like a mathematical axiom, it must be consistently true to be a principle. For example, in math we might use the formula “if A+B=C, then C- B= A”. This is a mathematical principle; it is always true.

Much like the use of muscular force in Budo Taijutsu, if you never retrain the body’s natural “flinch-reflex”, then every time tension or force is applied to your body, you will react with tension and force, which creates a vicious cycle of increasing forces, wherein the person able to generate the greatest muscular power or force, at that point, is going to “win” in that technique.

Therefore, one of the main principles (as constantly suggested by Hatsumi Soke), is rewiring your nervous system to respond differently to force or tension being applied to your body (and by extension, your mind).

So let us agree that, for the purpose of learning Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu, the basics (kihon) must model Hatsumi Sensei’s current movement, and that any deviation from these principles is inefficient, and thus to be avoided.

What are the pieces that make up the kihon?

Now that we have defined the basics, we need to take a closer look at the individual elements that can be considered kihon. Take care not to confuse the set of techniques known as “kihon happo” with the kihon, which are foundational movements and methods of body and weapon use.

As it has been explained to me by the top Japanese Shihan here in Japan, and constantly taught by Hatsumi Soke, there are several areas we all need to consistently be training.

1. Taihenjutsu (body changing technique) This falls into 3 main phases;

A) Whole-body Mobility and Strengthening.

B) Solo Ukemi (more than merely “rolling around”, it is receiving and translating the force of gravity as we fall from all possible positions).

C) Partner Ukemi (receiving and translating the force of an attack from a person; kicks, punches, pushes, and pulls)

1. Distancing; Learning how to consistently be in the place where your opponent(s) cannot damage you, but you are free to do whatever is necessary in that moment.

A) Muto dori (Unarmed against a sword)

B) Uke kata (jodan uke – upper receiving, chudan uke – middle receiving, gedan uke – lower receiving)

1. Striking; with and without weapons, beginning from the closest distance possible then working your way outward.

We will look at these 3 areas a bit more in-depth.

The theme for this year is Saino Kon Ki – translated as “talent or ability”, “spirit or soul”, and “capacity”.

One way of looking at this concept is seeing how they are all connected, each aspect building on the previous one.

(This is related to the other overriding theme for this year – 繋がり　- tsunagari or connection.)

How long does it take to achieve mastery? Well, according to research cited in his book “Outliers”, by Malcolm Gladwell, it is 10,000 hours.

This seems to be true regardless of the field of endeavor. Whether you are a professional athlete, musician, or an entrepreneur, it just seems to take the human brain and body 10,000 hours to thoroughly understand AND integrate the skills associated with your chosen endeavor.

What does this mean for us as budoka? Well, if you’re training twice a week for a two hours each time, then about 50 years should do the trick!