Little Known Ninjutsu History: Toda Shinryuken Masamitsu
Little is known about Ninjutsu – since it’s been open to the West in only the past 30 years. Where does it come from? What inspired masters to keep with their training? How did they begin? Where here is a little background that goes past what is considered ‘common knowledge’ that is really not so common.Ninjas Are SUPPOSED to Steal – in the Right Way
Nature’s Ninja
Yesterday, I was walking through Harajuku, on the way to an Emergency Training meeting for local community members. I was there to represent the Guardian Angels, and it was nice to learn a few new twists on some First Aid and other details. I’m sure I’ll be writing about that soon on the Guardian Angels Blog, but that’s not what this one is about.
While walking from the train station, I saw some guy just sitting on a step to a local building, eating his breakfast, minding his own business … while his pet monkey was getting all sorts of crazy attention (and some crazy foreigner even stopped to take a picture for this blog).
The strange part, at least to me, was that this little monkey could get all this attention from the people who noticed him (maybe “her” – I respected its privacy, and didn’t really check) … yet some people completely passed him by.
I don’t get it – people walk past a monkey on the street and don’t notice?!
Well, the really useful part was noticing that this monkey, which somehow could travel under the radar of some folks, was also able to get plenty of breakfast, all on its own, even with a leash attached. He found food all over the place, including little bits that dropped from other people sitting and standing nearby … usually without them even noticing! This was one smart little thief!
Normally, I couldn’t really condone the use of skilled thievery as something to emulate as a higher moral standard … but maybe that’s about to change …
Our New Goals as Thieves
Sensei was careful to guide us on quite a few topics during the week of official Dojo-cho training here in Japan. Certainly, he spent a lot of effort on correcting technical issues and adjusting our understanding of the different tactical applications of timing and distance: what we normally describe as ma’ai 間合い as it related to our training.
In addition, he included another topic that was important for us to hear as instructors. “In all the old arts of Japan, including carpentry and visual arts and even Budo … there are some things that aren’t openly taught … that’s because they can not be taught – it’s not possible. It’s up to the students to ‘steal’ these teachings. “
Of course, it’s not possible to physically steal these kinds of things – it’s up to us as students to find ways of grabbing the various pieces that we see, hear, and experience … and then try them out and play around with them, until they become our own “possessions” that we “own” for ourselves.
In a very simple way, if you’ve ever driven a stick-shift car (or a motorcycle), then you could certainly try to explain the details of driving up a hill from a complete stop. There are things that you do need to do for it to work, but the actual feeling of balance between driving too fast and slamming into something, and not giving enough throttle and rolling backwards, and stalling out completely … you can’t really teach that feeling – and it’s the feeling that makes the difference – but you can’t teach it! It has to be tried and experimented and eventually each “student” will learn the nuances in their own way, from watching and feeling other drivers do it their ways … until they can “steal” those details enough to make it happen the way they want to do it.
Now, that’s a pretty simple exercise, especially compared to the technical and emotional difficulties inherent to the study of our Budo. You can easily imagine the level of complexity being much higher than this example, which in turn, requires more and more finesse and subtlety and refinement in your “stealing” abilities. You will have to put in some very hard work and diligent practice to even begin noticing the parts that you’re currently missing …
Said another way, first we have to “know what we don’t know” so that we can learn it, or in this case, “steal” it during our training. That’s a move from “unconscious incompetence” to “conscious incompetence” and it marks a huge breakthrough in every kind of learning we will ever do.
I hope to discuss this in some greater detail, either here, or on the mat. Enjoy training – I’ll be back in Los Angeles soon.
Read MoreCan Martial Arts Training REALLY Help with Leadership & Business Success?
Martial Arts Helps Develop Leadership? That’s What We’re Told …
The martial arts “industry” of professional instructors (of which I guess I’m a part by default) has been trying its hardest to convince moms and dads around the world that their kids will benefit from martial arts in ways other than fighting and self defense.
At my Dojo, we have a “Leadership Program” that actually takes time to talk about important personal and moral issues, and how our inherently violent training can be put to acceptable use. We ask some deep questions about why we train, to help counterbalance and better understand how we train.
However, there is still plenty of doubt: punching and kicking certainly doesn’t seem like a very good way to learn about leadership skills in the modern day, in which (I hope) we’re moving away from violence and towards a harmonious future as a species on the planet. This has become one of those things that just seems so disingenuous to most people, so used-car-salesman type of thing to say. Imagine: “Mrs Jones, little Bobby will learn to be a caring leader among his peers … Now punch that pad harder, Bobby! An enemy deserves no mercy!” etc. That’s how most of the world MUST see this discussion going.
Here’s why martial arts helps:
In Dr Stuart Brown’s book, Play: How it Shapes the Brain
First, it’s obviously important to recognize the signs of people wanting to have fun and enjoy what you’re doing. If everything seems like a challenge (especially a violent challenge), then you’ll be too distracted to get anything done. This is one very simple way in which we can learn through martial arts the experiential difference between fun aggression and dangerous aggression. There just aren’t too many safe outlets for experiencing violence, so martial arts begins to fill that gap better than anything else!
Martial arts is a great opportunity to experiment with some danger without becoming truly violent. We can immediately understand, through socially acceptable “training” that some things are ok, and others are not. This is important, according to Dr. Brown:
I studied murderers in Texas prisons and found that the absence of play in their childhood was as important as any other single factor in predicting their crimes. On the other end, I also documented abused kids at risk for antisocial behavior whose predilection for violence was diminished through play.
While there must be some actual science involved in this discussion (coming up!) we should also take a look at some more anecdotal yet obvious arguments, too: animals (even wild animals) play a LOT, but they certainly have a 24/7 need for being careful and alert. Heck, we see animals even do things that are inherently dangerous as play!
Bears wrestle for fun, goats jump around on high cliffs, just about every animal plays a variety of “chase the siblings” – yet none of this helps them immediately gather food or avoid becoming food. We know, though, that they’re never discouraged by their parents. Can you imagine telling your mom and dad you were going to go wrestle a bear or jump around on a cliff?! I know they’re better at it, but you get the idea – they’re playing!
So, let’s face the obvious: for this kind of pseudo-violent play to exist within so many species for so long, there MUST be some actual value. Otherwise, natural selection would have weeded it out long ago. But that’s still guess-science. Here’s some better stuff.
A neuroscientist, Sergio Pellis, and biologist, John Nelson, in Australia:
measured brain-size and tabulated play behavior in fifteen species of mammals that ranged from dogs to dolphins. The found that when they made allowances for differing body size, the species with larger brains (compared with body size) played a lot and the species with smaller brains played less.
Another researcher, Jaak Panksepp:
has shown that active play selectively stimulates brain-derived neurotrophic factor (which stimulates nerve growth) in the amygdala (where emotions get processed) and the dorolateral prefontal cortex (where executive decisions are processed).
Warning:Not an excuse to only goof-off
In an earlier post on the topic of Expertise, I pointed out the importance of guided, purpose-driven training. You can’t become an expert at any particular thing by goofing off in general. You DO need to find where you can improve, look for flaws, and go about the direct business of making those improvements and eradicating those technical flaws.
The athletic researchers for that series of books pointed out that such directed training is NOT inherently fun. Certainly, there seems to be some inherent fun to swing a sword around. However, there is no such default enjoyment to be found in doing hundreds of repetitions of the same cut, trying to make the grip loose and tight at the right moments, or having the sword tip and handle tip stop in exactly the right points, or finding the various timing options for the hips to rotate, or finding the perfect weight shift through each foot, etc. That’s hard work! It’s even dull and boring, when compared to swinging hard and jumping around like a monkey.
And THAT’S WHY MOST PEOPLE DON’T BECOME EXPERTS! They want to do the fun part only. Training has plenty of fun parts, so it’s easy to do them and still have challenge and variety. It’s even worse than that, too: you’ll enjoy the parts you’re good at, so you’ll have more fun doing those, and tend to avoid the parts that need work. But be careful to have enough directed training if you’re planning on reaching beyond average skills.
There is a LOT more to say here, and if you’re interested, I’d like to continue exploring this topic here. Let me know what you think. And, if you’re interested, buy a copy of Play by Dr. Brown
thought provoking article on competition and learning
Thanks to Janou, who just sent me this article. Our case at the Dojo is interesting – ours is not a regular class, because ours is designed to help us deal with competition at its most extreme – life or death struggles. I highlighted a couple of areas (so they’ll look sort of like this) that might make for good conversation, in case you don’t have a chance to read the whole thing. It was even longer than this, and this is the shortened version!
Maybe you haven’t heard me talk about this kind of thing yet, but educational models really fascinate me. I -really- want to figure out how to make it possible for more people to learn things more easily and as fast as possible. So, if you have any relevant information on the topic, I’d love to hear from you about it. In fact, just today I was talking with some folks about to graduate from their Masters program in Education, and I had a great time. Great timing on this article, Janou!
COOPERATIVE LEARNING MAGAZINEOf the numerous benefits of cooperative learning (CL), the one that first appealed to many of us was its status as an alternative to competition. Some combination of observation, personal experience, and research has made it painfully clear that setting children against one another is destructive. However, a significant proportion of educators who share this belief nevertheless feel compelled to add that, of course, they are not saying all competition is inappropriate; offered in moderation and kept in perspective, there is room for some win/lose activities.
I would contend that such qualifications are based less on any advantage of competition per se than on a general reluctance to take a stand that might be viewed as extreme. A middle-of-the-road position offers clear rhetorical advantages, conferring on the person who holds it an appearance of being reasonable and realistic. But the simple truth that we sometimes fail to grasp is this: Not everything that is bad when done to excess is harmless when done in moderation.
1. Competition is to self-esteem as sugar is to teeth. The more we care about helping children to feel good about themselves — and especially to maintain that core of acceptance even when they fail — the less we would ever want to put them into a situation where they must work at cross purposes with others. Competition makes self-esteem precarious and conditional: One’s value is contingent on how many people one has beaten. Winning feels good for awhile, but it never addresses our basic needs for security or competence. Moreover, the more we compete, the more we need to compete; it takes increasingly dramatic victories to reclaim the good feeling brought about by the first one — rather like developing a tolerance to a drug.
2. The central message of all competition is that other people are potential obstacles to one’s own success. Competition creates envy for winners, contempt for losers, and hostility and suspicion toward just about everyone. Not only is it irrational to help someone whose success might require your failure, but competition creates a climate in which such help is unlikely to occur in any case. Researchers have found that competitive structures reduce generosity, empathy, sensitivity to others’ needs, accuracy of communication, and trust. These results follow naturally and logically from competition itself; the problem does not rest with the individuals involved and the way they approach a contest. Moreover, contests between teams teach that the only reason to work with others is to defeat another group of people who are working together. Cooperation becomes the means; victory is the end.
3. Not only does excellence not require competition; it usually requires its absence. Scores of studies by now have shown not only that carefully designed CL is more successful on a range of achievement measures than other classroom structures, but that competition in particular undermines success. This happens for a number of reasons: Competing reduces the probability that cooperation, which does promote learning, will take place; it generates anxiety; it leads children to attribute their victory or loss to factors beyond their control, such as innate ability or luck, thereby reducing the likelihood that they will try harder next time; and it functions as an extrinsic motivator, reducing interest in the task and creative performance just as other artificial inducements have been repeatedly shown to do (Deci and Ryan, 1985; Kohn, 1993; Lepper and Greene, 1978).
If we are questioning whether competition is appropriate, then, our point of departure must be the overwhelming evidence that it is counterproductive and destructive. In light of the detrimental effects on how children feel about themselves, treat one another, and learn, it is reasonable to ask why we would ever want to set up competitive structures. While it seems less risky (particularly in a culture still wedded to the idea that people must struggle to be Number One) to say merely that competition should be limited, our obligation is to try to justify any win/lose structures, and, if we cannot, to do all we can to eliminate them.
These structures include versions of CL in which tournaments are set up requiring groups of students to try to defeat each other — a virtual recipe for destroying any sense of community in the class as a whole — as well as competitive activities that take place outside of CL. The latter, in turn, includes programs where the imperative to beat one’s peers is about as subtle as a slap in the face: spelling bees, grading on a curve, posted charts of the relative performance of all students, and awards assemblies (which might be defined as events held in an auditorium that instantly transform most people present into losers). Then there are the subtler examples of competition whose effects may not be immediately apparent to teachers: whole-class “Who can tell me…?” sessions in which students must race to be first with the answer, and classroom management strategies in which the teacher makes an example of one child by praising his or her behavior in front of everyone else.
It is not just the losers who suffer from these practices. Even those who emerge triumphant come to see themselves as valuable in relation to their win/loss record, learn to view others as rivals rather than collaborators, and are handicapped in terms of learning. Why, then, are so many educators reluctant to see their intuitions (and, in some cases, their data) through to their logical conclusion, which is the abolition of competitive activities?
Finally, some educators acknowledge the destructiveness of competition but insist that they are doing children a favor by having them compete since this will prepare them for the rivalry they will encounter when they leave school. To this we can respond as follows:
(1) Students in our society already are very well acquainted with competition. Even if some experience with it were useful, children have more than they could ever need outside of the classroom. Our challenge is not to offer them more of the same but to provide alternative arrangements to help them achieve a sense of perspective about the competition that proliferates in our culture.
(2) While a case can be made that students would benefit from a curricular unit in which they explicitly consider the effects of competition, talking about it is quite different from immersing them in it. By way of analogy, consider the distinction between teaching children about religion and indoctrinating them to be religious. The justification of competition casts it in terms of the former, but the actual practice looks more like the latter.
(3) The notion that we best prepare children for unpleasant experiences by providing them with unpleasant experiences at a tender age is exactly as sensible as the proposition that because the environment is teeming with carcinogens, children ought to be exposed to as many cancer-causing agents as possible while they are young. In fact, the psychological benefits of failure are overrated; it is an experience that quickly becomes redundant and gratuitously punishing. Making children compete in order to teach them to cope calls to mind an ironic notice I once saw tacked to a wall in a sixth-grade classroom: The Beatings will continue until morale improves.
(4) Even to the extent that some experience with failure is useful, let us remember that failure does not require losing any more than success requires winning. As far as I am aware, no evidence exists to suggest that the particularly toxic form of failure that comes from being defeated by someone else provides any psychological benefit beyond what could be derived from failing with reference to absolute standards or one’s own expectations.
(5) Finally, while we want to cushion children from the effects of the adversarial experiences to which they will be subjected once they have left school, we also want to prepare them to evaluate and, if necessary, change the systems that create those experiences. Our choices about classroom structures should not depend primarily on how well they match our society’s institutions. Rather, our institutions should stand or fall depending on how well they serve the sort of values represented by cooperative learning.
In short, I believe there are no compelling reasons to have students try to beat one another, even for a small fraction of their total educational experience. Of course, I want to make common cause with those who would greatly reduce but not eliminate the use of competition at school; our perspectives are more similar than different, particularly from the point of view of mainstream American thinking. But I also want to invite such people within the CL movement to question why children should ever be encouraged to view their peers as obstacles to their own success.
www.alfiekohn.org — © Alfie Kohn
Read MoreHow to Be an Expert
There have been quite a few studies done to find out what goes on in the development of expertise in any field: music, academics, sports, etc. Chances are, if you’re already training regularly at the Dojo, you’re trying to reach some level of relative expertise. Well, wouldn’t it be nice to know how to be more efficient about that?
It turns out, there are a few factors involved that seem like common sense once you hear them, but might not be impacting your study and training as much as they could or should. Take a look at the video I made to ensure quicker acquisition of the material. Please discuss this idea in class, with your friends outside the Dojo, and leave comments (and maybe even argue about it) at the end of this post.
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