Thanks for the recommendations! Understanding enough context to evaluate an author's credibility makes such a difference in research. I've been working on my martial arts thesis for my Karate 3rd dan, and this directly addresses my biggest issues in my own research- finding good, credible, relatively contemporary sources so that I'm not just gassing on about, as you said, "what some higher rank guy said."
Yeah, it can be tough to find those sources in fairness. Academia doesn't take the martial arts too seriously, unfortuantely (a rant for another time). There are some pretty decent popular historians out there as well, but sometimes they fall into pretty amateurish logic traps by academic standards. Yet, you're still kind of stuck reading them because they are what is out there. In my hypothetical dojo of the future, I definitely want a room for a library. Hopefully that would solve the source issue, at least in-house.
I agree 1000% about context - I also think a lot of UA-camrs also only see everything from an American/western point of view and refuse to see outside of it. A perfect example is Aikido - westerners hate it because it’s not effective and the partner is compliant. THAT’S THE POINT - but westerners can’t comprehend training in a martial art and not be interested in “self defense” and/or competition. On a side note - I believe people need to rethink the concept of martial arts. Martial arts as we know really started with jigoro kano - what was practiced before in actual war (real kobudo) was something completely different than martial arts and required a holistic approach to molding a warrior (we still do this today, think basic training - you are broken down, eat/sleep/breath the training environment and you are rebuilt from civilian to soldier. You can’t train an actual warrior the way you train a martial artist, only training twice a week lol). Judo was inspired by these martial systems of combat, the techniques come from it, but has no direct connection to it. (Oh, you covered the last point in the video lol).
As someone who trains 7 days a week and helps coach... I disagree. You can train a warrior over long periods of time just fine. Ive seen it over and over again... I've seen people come 2 times a week to training and build confidence, build stamina, and build dog.
@@jamesmcjamesington631 by warrior - I mean soldier. training a soldier is more than learning techniques, it requires a person to be immersed in the training environment, stress inoculation, training in team skills, discipline, etc. Unless you have infinite money, you can’t recreate that in a civilian context. Your training might be great, but i guarantee your training is not military training levels of difficulty - Nor is it 100% immersive. That’s why no matter how much you train in a ryuha - you can never be a Samurai. The techniques learned are only a small part of the overall training system and even a lot of the combat techniques cannot be trained properly in a civilian context. This applies to the samurai, knights or a Green Beret/Navy SEAL of today, etc. Just because you can shoot a gun accurately, and go through some shooting drills Ranger’s do, doesn’t mean you’re a Ranger. If you want to be an actual warrior/soldier - join the Army. They need people right now.
Your summary is yet another masterpiece regarding the true purpose of martial arts in daily life. I have generally suggested to many of my colleagues that a martial art must be sufficiently functional to keep you safe in 'reasonable' circumstances. If it fails at step one, find another or take up ballet. But the second and most important aspect of martial arts is community, or tribe. Because of martial arts I travelled abroad, for better or worse found my life partner (kidding, she's an awesome pain in the a**e), have children, have a community of people with whom I enjoy associating with, and have made life long friends. I have had many potential students come through my doors seeking the 'the best' system, or simply comparing what we do to to BJJ or MMA, and I have amazing stories of how the process transformed the person (quite distinct from fighting ability). I remember one guy that came in and trained with us for a couple of months who approached me and asked, your techniques work well at my BJJ school but when I'm sparing a purple belt or above they don' t work anymore, why? I didn't have it in me to explain that a purple belt is 7 - 10 years of training vs the 2 months of training he had received and empirically it sounded like he was ahead of the pack by a significant distance. Needless to say he left the next class, claiming that BJJ was superior. I have another long term friend and student that works in law enforcement that practices nearly daily in real world settings. He is getting older now (late 50s), and after I closed my school he went of and did MMA, combat systems, BJJ, and every other fad you can think of seeking the perfect system. He called me just last month (I live in a different country), was stunned that there was no such thing as a perfect system, and that the fads are just that, fads, that aren't offering anything more or less than anyone else in truth, save the stroking of the ego and homes for angry young men. He discovered that there is no hidden secret to be found. He asked when I was returning so he could get his community back and seek the cultural aspects that we always stuck to, and to seek the deeper lessons that martial arts can offer (like the lesson that just like martial arts, life is hard, sometimes confusing, and regularly catches you off guard, just accept it and continue on anyway). You are clearly an expert in history and research, so I set you this challenge, how do you package your thoughts into a marketable strategy? MMA has destroyed the very fabric of the traditional martial arts community, with BJJ leading that charge. Granted, the is some good in calling the 'bullshido' or 'mc-dojo' schools, but there are a lot of schools out there that used to have a genuine positive impact on the broader community, which no longer attract students. Can you think of a way to help these schools get the broader message out?
Your experience seems to mirror mine (almost to an eerie degree, I also met my wife and travelled abroad through the martial arts!) As for your challenge… yeah, that really *is* the question, isn’t it. Regrettably, I haven’t landed on the answer quite yet. I think these are tough times to market abstract and foreign things to an American audience. As you point out, people are looking for silver bullets where none are to be found. Beyond that, I think curiosity for things outside of personal experience seem to be at an all time low. While I’d be the first to admit that my current approach needs improved upon, my first step is just education. Thematically, I try to push back against these ideas of a “perfect system” or “get-good-fast” shortcuts. Long term, though, I think there are only two ways to be sustainable financially in martial arts: government support or capturing popular imagination. For obvious reasons, we can’t really rely on the former. Capturing popular imagination is also difficult, though. I think people need an easily understandable format and a kind of “popular myth.” BJJ is a great example. You see it in MMA and it’s got an “origin myth” in the events of UFC1/2. The difficulty for some of these arts outside of the western dialogue is that the benefits are often subtle and take time to mature. Culturally, people are now primed to compare everything to MMA and only chase the carrot that is right in front of them. So, in lieu of a better answer, I think step one has to be criticism of popular culture as it exists, backed by education. I feel this is overall inadequate and also too slow. I recognize the need for a better solution, but I definitely need to devote more time to thinking on the issue. This would be an excellent topic for a future video, though. Thank you for the thoughtful comment and your continued support.
@@TenguMartialArts If you interested in doing a controversial topic, how about the history of Ninjutsu and possibly the various ryu? I studied Bujinkan as a kid and one of my friends moved to Japan, became a master, then abruptly left (quite famously too apparently). I never understood what happened but I did catch up with him in Japan a while back and he'd moved to another system, but I never found out why... Same story, he lives there, works as a translator, married, kids etc. It's a fun topic but oh man, I don't think some would like the dodgy reality :P
There is a book called “Possible Origins” by Scott Park Phillips that deals with this idea in the Chinese martial arts space. I think that a lot of what he talks about has some crossover with Japan. I don’t know of any volume that covers this explicitly for the Japanese sphere. I did have many, many conversations about it with my mentors while in grad school, though. The theory I subscribe to, personally, is that a lot of the terminology between theater arts and martial arts were homogenized because samurai were expected to be competent at both. It’s possible this also happened technically on some level with physical movements, but without a deep dive into primary sources, it’s only speculation. Basically, it might have been a way to streamline tutelage to samurai clients… A decent case example, however, is that the Noh theater’s stance (kamae) is virtually the same as Aikido’s. Coincidence? Who can say without more research, but it’s something to keep in mind. If the theory I just referenced is true, there are other questions that get raised, too. Namely, which came first? Did theater arts inspire martial arts or the other way around? The answer is probably that it was reciprocal, but again, parsing out watch’s contributions would be an academically laborious undertaking.
@@TenguMartialArts Tangentially, I once saw a video of a play of the story of Yoshitsune that featured a little routine with a Naginata that was quite similar to a Chinese Guan Dao form.
I'm not sure how much I buy the "not from the battlefield" theory. I practice ko-ryu and a large part of curriculum is spear and naginata. I do understand that monks practiced with these weapons in peace time and people would use them in duels (and this is even represented in modern fiction), but the utility and adoption of them for civilian violence seems.. unconvincing. Grappling techniques follow naturally from weapons, even spears. I'm not even particularly attached to the battlefield origin, considering I think training battlefield tactics in the modern era is kind of stupid. Maybe I should actually read the article/book you recommended though :)
The Koryu are especially resistant to the idea given they've been employing the idea the longest in my experience. The concept of "for warfare" is just especially central to to the Koryu these days as they attempt to differentiate themselves from the gendai budo. My synopsis is no replacement for the actual article, but the long and short of it is as follows: 1.) An overwhelming percentage of battlefield deaths were caused by projectiles (spears came in second, I'll return to that in a second). 2.) The ryuha weren't active in such numbers to be militarily useful 3.) Combat formations basically make many koryu techniques questionable given if you broke formation on the battlefield, it often meant you were in the process of losing There is more that goes into this, of course. In particular, disorganized skirmishes seem to be the only real environment where armored grappling might take place, but even then, we run into the issue of the participants just getting speared as easy targets by other soldiers. The thesis that complex grappling systems arose out of group combat just doesn't hold much water. It sort of assumes that everyone just engaged in 1v1's, which was believed to be the case in Pre-WWII Japan, but has long since been debunked. What I will say, however, is that spears were definitely more of a battlfield weapon than swords. Japanese warfare at the time was basically dominated by pike squares, archery, and rudimentary firearms. There were other units like calvary, of course, but what I just mentioned were the backbone of armies. It isn't that swordsmanship or grappling never happened in these settings, but just by raw archeological forensics and army loadouts, its dubious that such a statsitically small number of cases became the comparatively complex systems found in Koryu. Again, Friday doesn't really offer a counter origin theory in his article, but personally, I think most of these schools were being built out primarily by duel experience--almost every founder was doing Musha Shugyo. It's not impossible some military drilling and battlefield tactics found their way into the schools, but I personally don't think they were all that foundational.
Really glad I came across your channel. The algorithm seems to be working today.
I needed a list of books to read this year: great timing!
This is fantastic extra readings for my university course thank you!!!
Thanks for the recommendations, Tengu.
Thanks for the recommendations! Understanding enough context to evaluate an author's credibility makes such a difference in research.
I've been working on my martial arts thesis for my Karate 3rd dan, and this directly addresses my biggest issues in my own research- finding good, credible, relatively contemporary sources so that I'm not just gassing on about, as you said, "what some higher rank guy said."
Yeah, it can be tough to find those sources in fairness. Academia doesn't take the martial arts too seriously, unfortuantely (a rant for another time). There are some pretty decent popular historians out there as well, but sometimes they fall into pretty amateurish logic traps by academic standards. Yet, you're still kind of stuck reading them because they are what is out there.
In my hypothetical dojo of the future, I definitely want a room for a library. Hopefully that would solve the source issue, at least in-house.
That hypothetical future dojo wouldn't happen to be anywhere near Ohio, would it? Asking for a friend... 😊
I agree 1000% about context - I also think a lot of UA-camrs also only see everything from an American/western point of view and refuse to see outside of it. A perfect example is Aikido - westerners hate it because it’s not effective and the partner is compliant. THAT’S THE POINT - but westerners can’t comprehend training in a martial art and not be interested in “self defense” and/or competition.
On a side note - I believe people need to rethink the concept of martial arts. Martial arts as we know really started with jigoro kano - what was practiced before in actual war (real kobudo) was something completely different than martial arts and required a holistic approach to molding a warrior (we still do this today, think basic training - you are broken down, eat/sleep/breath the training environment and you are rebuilt from civilian to soldier. You can’t train an actual warrior the way you train a martial artist, only training twice a week lol). Judo was inspired by these martial systems of combat, the techniques come from it, but has no direct connection to it.
(Oh, you covered the last point in the video lol).
As someone who trains 7 days a week and helps coach... I disagree.
You can train a warrior over long periods of time just fine. Ive seen it over and over again... I've seen people come 2 times a week to training and build confidence, build stamina, and build dog.
@@jamesmcjamesington631 by warrior - I mean soldier. training a soldier is more than learning techniques, it requires a person to be immersed in the training environment, stress inoculation, training in team skills, discipline, etc. Unless you have infinite money, you can’t recreate that in a civilian context. Your training might be great, but i guarantee your training is not military training levels of difficulty - Nor is it 100% immersive.
That’s why no matter how much you train in a ryuha - you can never be a Samurai. The techniques learned are only a small part of the overall training system and even a lot of the combat techniques cannot be trained properly in a civilian context.
This applies to the samurai, knights or a Green Beret/Navy SEAL of today, etc. Just because you can shoot a gun accurately, and go through some shooting drills Ranger’s do, doesn’t mean you’re a Ranger. If you want to be an actual warrior/soldier - join the Army. They need people right now.
Your summary is yet another masterpiece regarding the true purpose of martial arts in daily life. I have generally suggested to many of my colleagues that a martial art must be sufficiently functional to keep you safe in 'reasonable' circumstances. If it fails at step one, find another or take up ballet. But the second and most important aspect of martial arts is community, or tribe. Because of martial arts I travelled abroad, for better or worse found my life partner (kidding, she's an awesome pain in the a**e), have children, have a community of people with whom I enjoy associating with, and have made life long friends. I have had many potential students come through my doors seeking the 'the best' system, or simply comparing what we do to to BJJ or MMA, and I have amazing stories of how the process transformed the person (quite distinct from fighting ability). I remember one guy that came in and trained with us for a couple of months who approached me and asked, your techniques work well at my BJJ school but when I'm sparing a purple belt or above they don' t work anymore, why? I didn't have it in me to explain that a purple belt is 7 - 10 years of training vs the 2 months of training he had received and empirically it sounded like he was ahead of the pack by a significant distance. Needless to say he left the next class, claiming that BJJ was superior. I have another long term friend and student that works in law enforcement that practices nearly daily in real world settings. He is getting older now (late 50s), and after I closed my school he went of and did MMA, combat systems, BJJ, and every other fad you can think of seeking the perfect system. He called me just last month (I live in a different country), was stunned that there was no such thing as a perfect system, and that the fads are just that, fads, that aren't offering anything more or less than anyone else in truth, save the stroking of the ego and homes for angry young men. He discovered that there is no hidden secret to be found. He asked when I was returning so he could get his community back and seek the cultural aspects that we always stuck to, and to seek the deeper lessons that martial arts can offer (like the lesson that just like martial arts, life is hard, sometimes confusing, and regularly catches you off guard, just accept it and continue on anyway). You are clearly an expert in history and research, so I set you this challenge, how do you package your thoughts into a marketable strategy? MMA has destroyed the very fabric of the traditional martial arts community, with BJJ leading that charge. Granted, the is some good in calling the 'bullshido' or 'mc-dojo' schools, but there are a lot of schools out there that used to have a genuine positive impact on the broader community, which no longer attract students. Can you think of a way to help these schools get the broader message out?
Your experience seems to mirror mine (almost to an eerie degree, I also met my wife and travelled abroad through the martial arts!)
As for your challenge… yeah, that really *is* the question, isn’t it. Regrettably, I haven’t landed on the answer quite yet. I think these are tough times to market abstract and foreign things to an American audience.
As you point out, people are looking for silver bullets where none are to be found. Beyond that, I think curiosity for things outside of personal experience seem to be at an all time low.
While I’d be the first to admit that my current approach needs improved upon, my first step is just education. Thematically, I try to push back against these ideas of a “perfect system” or “get-good-fast” shortcuts.
Long term, though, I think there are only two ways to be sustainable financially in martial arts: government support or capturing popular imagination. For obvious reasons, we can’t really rely on the former.
Capturing popular imagination is also difficult, though. I think people need an easily understandable format and a kind of “popular myth.” BJJ is a great example. You see it in MMA and it’s got an “origin myth” in the events of UFC1/2.
The difficulty for some of these arts outside of the western dialogue is that the benefits are often subtle and take time to mature. Culturally, people are now primed to compare everything to MMA and only chase the carrot that is right in front of them.
So, in lieu of a better answer, I think step one has to be criticism of popular culture as it exists, backed by education. I feel this is overall inadequate and also too slow. I recognize the need for a better solution, but I definitely need to devote more time to thinking on the issue.
This would be an excellent topic for a future video, though. Thank you for the thoughtful comment and your continued support.
@@TenguMartialArts If you interested in doing a controversial topic, how about the history of Ninjutsu and possibly the various ryu? I studied Bujinkan as a kid and one of my friends moved to Japan, became a master, then abruptly left (quite famously too apparently). I never understood what happened but I did catch up with him in Japan a while back and he'd moved to another system, but I never found out why... Same story, he lives there, works as a translator, married, kids etc. It's a fun topic but oh man, I don't think some would like the dodgy reality :P
3:55 Theatre arts? Like Noh plays? If those tie back to martial arts, that would be most interesting. 🤔
There is a book called “Possible Origins” by Scott Park Phillips that deals with this idea in the Chinese martial arts space. I think that a lot of what he talks about has some crossover with Japan.
I don’t know of any volume that covers this explicitly for the Japanese sphere. I did have many, many conversations about it with my mentors while in grad school, though. The theory I subscribe to, personally, is that a lot of the terminology between theater arts and martial arts were homogenized because samurai were expected to be competent at both. It’s possible this also happened technically on some level with physical movements, but without a deep dive into primary sources, it’s only speculation. Basically, it might have been a way to streamline tutelage to samurai clients…
A decent case example, however, is that the Noh theater’s stance (kamae) is virtually the same as Aikido’s. Coincidence? Who can say without more research, but it’s something to keep in mind.
If the theory I just referenced is true, there are other questions that get raised, too. Namely, which came first? Did theater arts inspire martial arts or the other way around? The answer is probably that it was reciprocal, but again, parsing out watch’s contributions would be an academically laborious undertaking.
@@TenguMartialArts Tangentially, I once saw a video of a play of the story of Yoshitsune that featured a little routine with a Naginata that was quite similar to a Chinese Guan Dao form.
@@GermanSausagesAreTheWurstThat is interesting. I’m tragically understudied in the theater department and should brush up soon
Thanks Tengu. I feel very seen as a reader in your audience.
I'm not sure how much I buy the "not from the battlefield" theory. I practice ko-ryu and a large part of curriculum is spear and naginata. I do understand that monks practiced with these weapons in peace time and people would use them in duels (and this is even represented in modern fiction), but the utility and adoption of them for civilian violence seems.. unconvincing. Grappling techniques follow naturally from weapons, even spears.
I'm not even particularly attached to the battlefield origin, considering I think training battlefield tactics in the modern era is kind of stupid. Maybe I should actually read the article/book you recommended though :)
The Koryu are especially resistant to the idea given they've been employing the idea the longest in my experience. The concept of "for warfare" is just especially central to to the Koryu these days as they attempt to differentiate themselves from the gendai budo.
My synopsis is no replacement for the actual article, but the long and short of it is as follows:
1.) An overwhelming percentage of battlefield deaths were caused by projectiles (spears came in second, I'll return to that in a second).
2.) The ryuha weren't active in such numbers to be militarily useful
3.) Combat formations basically make many koryu techniques questionable given if you broke formation on the battlefield, it often meant you were in the process of losing
There is more that goes into this, of course. In particular, disorganized skirmishes seem to be the only real environment where armored grappling might take place, but even then, we run into the issue of the participants just getting speared as easy targets by other soldiers. The thesis that complex grappling systems arose out of group combat just doesn't hold much water. It sort of assumes that everyone just engaged in 1v1's, which was believed to be the case in Pre-WWII Japan, but has long since been debunked.
What I will say, however, is that spears were definitely more of a battlfield weapon than swords. Japanese warfare at the time was basically dominated by pike squares, archery, and rudimentary firearms. There were other units like calvary, of course, but what I just mentioned were the backbone of armies. It isn't that swordsmanship or grappling never happened in these settings, but just by raw archeological forensics and army loadouts, its dubious that such a statsitically small number of cases became the comparatively complex systems found in Koryu. Again, Friday doesn't really offer a counter origin theory in his article, but personally, I think most of these schools were being built out primarily by duel experience--almost every founder was doing Musha Shugyo. It's not impossible some military drilling and battlefield tactics found their way into the schools, but I personally don't think they were all that foundational.
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