adjusting to your environment (5)

I flew out of Tokyo as a typhoon hit the main island. My plane was delayed three hours, not too bad.

Practice started early the next morning in the Tao Ran Ting park as usual. It was raining heavily in Beijing. We usually practice outdoors but not in heavy rain. If it rains, we go inside the little tea restaurant, move some tables aside, and practice in there. But it was completely full that day. We walked across the park in the rain and found a hotel with an empty room (no easy feat in Beijing).

The space was very narrow, so all plans for ba gua zhang review / ba gua dao were set aside. Liu Laoshi ran me through several of the smaller Liu He Tang Lang Quan forms -- a little cramped but workable in the small space.

Though my intention was to focus on ba gua zhang this trip, I had also polished my mantis fist forms, and that was a good thing due to the sudden change in content.

We continued working on the tang lang forms the next day and, after reviewing all the others, I finally got started on the remaining form in the set, zhao mian deng 照面灯, whose namepiece motion bears striking similarity to a fall - back - and - attack motion found in several ba gua weapons forms. More on that later, as we get to the ba gua dao later in the trip...

The remaining days were marked by excellent practice in severe heat and humidity. The moisture finally broke one hour before my scheduled flight. Beijing AIrport was hastily shut down and we hapless travelers were marched back through immigration, customs, picked up our luggage and began the hours and hours of waiting in line, fending off line-jumpers, arranging flights the next day, fighting for a hotel room, giving up and sleeping in the airport and arriving one day late in Tokyo.

a tough day

Kind of a rough day today, but a good one.

The Liu Jing Ru seminar is going great – but already half over, too fast as usual. He comes to Tokyo for a short two weeks each year. I had been focusing on ba gua zhang and xing yi quan but last year opted for my first taste of tang lang quan and was quite pleased.

This year I chose tang lang quan for the first two days (Saturday and Sunday). Days 3 and 4 (Tues-Wed), being in the middle of the week, have much lower attendance. Running the circuit through all three groups runs Liu Laoshi ragged, so today and tomorrow are BGZ / XYQ only, no tang lang quan.

OK, back to the ba gua zhang for me. 9:30 AM – opening remarks are short, we have all already stretched, so we are ready to circle by about 9:32. He starts with the ba gua zhang group (the XYQ people are told to review for a bit). He calls me out in front of all and has me start circling. By 9:33 I knew it was going to be a long morning. He totally reworked me on just the first main palm, completely kicked and fixed my ass.

Sure, I had sped up my ba gua zhang review in recent days, but especially after a new blast of tang lang quan to get on top of….

Anyway I survived the morning and learned a lot and all that. We are in the middle of the 64 palms which, when being learned, seem like about 647 palms but who is counting.

Good and bad news after that – I have work in Beijing (the first international “combat games”) on Friday and Saturday, fly back to Tokyo on Sunday. If I am lucky and there are no traffic jams, I will make it back just in time for the goodbye dinner on Sunday. But I will miss the last two days’ training, pian pian.

Well, I have my network set up and will pick up the BGZ and TLQ (and, in other classes, will slowly get the XYQ) that I miss on the final weekend. So I will get there in the end, but I really wish I could spend the last two days here in Tokyo with Mr. L.

More to come on his visit. And I am edging closer to FINALLY finishing my interview with him which has gone on over five sessions so far in various cities and languages.

Enough of this – time for some late night circling.

Words That Hurt (1)

I have made a couple trips out to Kunming in Yunnan Province, China, to train in the Sha family style with my teacher here in Japan and a few other students/ teachers. Both trips were excellent in every way, with top-notch instruction from Sha Jun Jie (son of Sha Guo Zheng) and his wife Li Bin, among others.

On one trip I concentrated solely on the xing yi jian form (sword form for Xing Yi Quan) and made good progress.

On the next trip, I may have tried for too much, going for both a xing yi kicking form (形意连环腿) and a basic, 24-move tong bei quan (通背拳) form.

Let me explain – at my regular classes and on special occasions in Tokyo, I have been working on both the Sha family tai ji quan forms and two of the three tai ji jian forms for a few years. Initially, that was all I sought – my teacher here in Tokyo taught them, I learned them, nothing more to it.

But as I got deeper into the Sha family system – and especially after my 2007 visit to Kunming, when they had a massive celebration for the 105th anniversary of Sha Guo Zheng, I wanted to get more deeply into the Sha family style. They meld the three standard internal arts (tai ji quan, ba gua zhang, xing yi quan) with another art, tong bei quan.

And, in their family style, motions from each of these arts cross over into all the others. So, just by learning their tai ji quan forms, I had to learn the most basic elements of their tong bei, xing yi, and ba gua. So by learning more about these other arts, I could improve my Sha family tai ji.

It made sense to learn more about these other arts within their system. But I had already invested several years in learning the xing yi quan and ba gua zhang of my Tokyo teacher’s other teacher (one of them…), Liu Jing Ru. I didn’t want the interference of two systems of ba gua or xing yi, so I have largely avoided the Sha family forms in these arts. Xing yi jian and the xing yi kicking form are both exceptions, as there is nothing like them (so far, anyway) in the style taught by Liu Jing Ru. Thus no cross-over interference, no problem. And Tong Bei? Nothing like it in my repertoire thus far, no problem other than the division of time.

So there I was, getting intensive one-on-one instruction from the bosses themselves. The Venerable Tai Ji Ladies of Tokyo were off doing their tai ji thing, so I was getting a lot of attention. Xing Yi Lian Huan Tui was first and a lot of fun, great to finally do a lot of foot techniques in xing yi quan (which otherwise has very few foot techniques).

Then on into the 24-motion form of tong bei quan, also fun and informative, as some of its motions also appear in the Sha family tai ji forms. And there was my problem. One of those motions involves sinking into a cross-legged crouching position. The right palm stabs down across the left side of the body while the left palm guards up near the right ear. Then you rise and …

You rise and do one motion in Lian Huan Tui. And you rise and do a different motion in Tong Bei. (And still a different one in tai ji, though that was irrelevant at the time). So near the end of our visit, Sha Laoshi suddenly called on us to demonstrate what we had learned.

Damn, I really wanted just one more day, even one more hour to consolidate the just-finished form…the Venerable Tai Ji Ladies showed their new stuff and showed it well. I showed the Tong Bei form as it was the fresher of the two, and got stuck at just that motion described above, not yet having fully separated the two new forms.

“你忘了” were his only words. Ni wang le, you forgot it. Three short words and the look on his face - they cut like a knife. They were final, and I got little more attention on that visit.

I missed last year’s trip (finances) and may have only one more chance before relocating to the US. I know I will be going back to Kunming. And I don’t ever want to hear those words again.

(photo from 2007 Kunming trip, my Liu-influenced ba gua next to the big boss – or a photo of him)

My first xing yi quan practice was on May 29, 2002, coming up on seven years already. It was quite unexpected, really. I had begun tai ji quan classes with Mr. T back in Oct. 2001. Somewhere along the way I had read about xing yi quan somewhere and mentioned my interest after class one day. His response was positive, and not much longer afterward a couple of us went to a nearby park for an introduction to xing yi after our regular (indoor) tai ji quan class.

“A few minutes” turned into two hours and I was instantly hooked. We met intermittently through the summer, getting to know the 5 basic fists. It was a typical hot and sweaty summer in Tokyo and the mosquitoes were out in full force – but we barely noticed, having stepped foot into a new world. We started with 劈拳 piquan, and crossover interference from my karate was immediately apparent – I was slicing across and down diagonally (shuto uke). It took me ages to get the feeling of striking / pushing directly down the centerline. And it didn’t seem that I would ever be able to pull my reverse hand down in front of the dantian area below my navel – too many years of pulling to the side of the hip in Shotokan karate.

These outdoor park sessions blended into weekly sessions, 3 glorious hours on Monday mornings. They were sparsely attended – three was sometimes a crowd. All the better for we students, who moved past the five fists and into the twelve animals at last. But we worried about the teacher, spending so much time with us for so little money.

We occasionally slipped a bit of extra money into the payment envelope, or included train tickets to cover his transportation. It felt like the doors had been thrown open – an entire new art to explore, under expert guidance and in the best of conditions. But we also felt that we wanted to do something more for the teacher.

Somewhere along the way, an “official” xing yi class started in the hour before our Wednesday afternoon tai ji class, and it continues to this day. In fact, we just gave our first group xing yi quan exhibition in November, and a second in January.

Also along the way, those Monday mornings switched to Tuesdays and ba gua zhang became the focus – another unexpected but very welcome development. The ba gua got nefariously snuck in one Monday late in 2003, and has been a staple ever since.

Our teacher’s teacher, Liu Jing Ru Laoshi, has visited Japan every summer since 2006 for a special seminar, bringing us his xing yi and ba gua. In 2007, I made my first solo visit to Beijing to study with him.

Now these arts are at the core of my regular practice – something I never could have imagined before all this got started. I had no firm intention of starting either xing yi or ba gua – both arts seemed too far removed, something to get to someday in the future. But the future snuck up quite quickly.

(picture from Jindaiji Temple in Tokyo - curiously, the tiger and the dragon were the first two animal forms I learned)

rainy season (2)

I love listening to the rain at night, working out indoors in the humidity long into the night.

Now that this year’s rainy season has been officially declared over, it has rained all day today. And will rain tomorrow and the next day. Then a two-day sword seminar starts and I will be inside all day anyway.

Fine with me, as the three-day weekend gave me three days of working out in the sun (plus Friday night’s super-humid gong fu class with my daughter). Sensing that rain might follow, I spent extra time on weapons the next three days, and have pleasantly (?) sore arms to show for it. So tonight, with the rain, it will be the 64 hands of ba gua zhang in preparation for tomorrow’s class.

64 hands is quite unusual in that the techniques are performed moving in a straight line. There is plenty of characteristic ba gua circling, but the body is moving straight forward as a whole.

Created by Liu Jing Ru, he taught us this set last year on his annual visit to Japan. This year he is rumored to be bringing us the more commonly seen 64 palms. Not enough time, not enough time…

But this weekend had plenty of time. Hours of solo review and polishing, then a morning of much-needed iaido, a blast all the way through both seated and standing okuden forms, and on into a solid review of the paired kumi-dachi sets. The perfect, intensive review I needed, with both breadth and depth. I was on fire, moving well but not satisfied, looking for more. My head is still spinning, and not from the circles of ba gua zhang.

Less work than usual for the rest of the week means more of you know what. Truly glorious days are these….

hungry, thirsty, and gotta piss 5

I walked into the dojo, quite late because (A) work ran late, even after I had arranged in advance for it to finish early, just to get to the dojo earlier, and (B) there had been yet another train suicide and the trains were stalled and the train platforms impossibly crowded, and me with my bag-o-Okinawan-weapons.

N: “Hi Bryan, nice to see you. Are you free on the 29th?”

B: shit….loaded question….think fast….I think I know what’s coming…”Yes, I could be”.

N: “Good, there will be a test. You’ll need to do bo kihon and the tekko kata”.

B: “OK, I will be there”. Shit shit shit.

OK, we have focused rather exclusively on the bo-tai-bo and bo-tai-sai sets and I am getting familiar with both sides of each, if a bit by-the-numbers. I check again, just to be sure.

B: “So, only bo kihon (staff basics) and the tekko kata (knuckle-dusters, essentially)?”

N: “Hmmm, there might be one of the nunchaku kata as well.”

B: “OK, I ‘ll be ready.” I don’t want to push my luck by asking which one.

So it goes. Time to re-arrange the rest of the month, gear up for this chance.

It was another great practice, and I forgot all the problems. Hoping for those few extra minutes of practice, I had foregone toilet, dinner, and water. It took me straight back to last summer in Beijing, those glorious summer nights with Liu Jing Ru Laoshi.

I worked all day at the Olympics, dashed off as soon as I could, raced across that crazy and wonderful town and…sat down to relax with Liu Laoshi over tea in Tao Ran Ting park. Before scrutinizing my ba gua zhang or xing yi quan, he would critique my ability to snap a folding fan open and shut. Glorious and unforgettable nights. Go see the hungry, thirsty, gotta piss series in this blog, which started in Beijing.

Same story – how much will you give up for those few extra minutes of practice? And just like in Beijing, once I got moving tonight, I forgot all about having to piss, being hungry, needing a drink.

Yeah, I know, you should relax and slow down and all that. But sometimes we can forget the complaints and limitations of the body. And the relief is all the better once practice is done. No tea for me, thanks. I’ll take another cold beer. They taste so much better tonight.

kobudo and ba gua zhang

A good teacher friend was telling me about his kobudo system. What struck me was their open attitude toward practitioners from many disciplines – something which reminded me of the way the art of ba gua zhang began.

Kobudo, or Ryukyu Kobudo, is a system of weapons forms from the Okinawan Islands. The curriculum includes bo staff (the fundamental weapon of this group), nunchaku, tekkou (brass knuckles, basically), sai (pair of short metal weapons), tonfa/ tunfa (pair of short wooden weapons), kama (pair of scythes?), eku (oar or paddle), and the tinbe/rochin combination (turtle-shell shield and short thrusting weapon).

There is much cross-over with those training in Okinawan karate styles. Our teacher is of Shorin Ryu lineage in karate and naturally teaches both karate and kobudo. Some people start kobudo after years or decades of karate work; others follow the reverse pattern, and still others begin both nearly simultaneously.

People come in with deep experience in a different karate ryuha or school – they go through the same basics in kobudo as everyone, but have a tough time shaking old habits (i.e. spot the xxx-ryu guy with his extremely deep shiko-dachi stances: way too deep for us, but correct in his system).

Here is the point- people of all stripes are welcomed; it is inclusive. Of course everyone is expected to move nearer the “correct” style for our particular group – but there is also much understanding and respect for differences. This, to me, is especially refreshing after years in Japanese budo, which are extremely exclusive – things must typically be done exactly THIS way, or not at all, there is the door.

To maintain the tradition, there must be sameness and uniformity…to some extent. The answer, I suppose, lies in balance between faithful continuation of the tradition and realistic recognition of variation. Listening to my friend, I felt strongly that this group has an excellent sense of that balance.

Ba gua zhang (pa kua chang) was created well over 100 years ago and one person is recognized as the originator: Dong Hai Chuan (董海川). He had several main students – and each of them began ba gua having already trained for extended periods in other martial arts. And Dong taught each of them differently, according to the styles of motion already inherent in their bodies. Thus, several lines of ba gua zhang remain extant today, each still reflecting characteristics of the arts already mastered by those who later began ba gua zhang (xxx was a master of Shuai Jiao “wrestling” – his branch of BGZ has more grappling applications). They were actively encouraged to develop their own styles of BGZ while remaining true to its principles.

These two arts differ in the sense that (virtually) no one is encouraged to develop his / her own style of kobudo (then again, perhaps things were different as the roots of kobudo were developing. And there is certainly no single “founder” of kobudo). But the similarity in terms of openness or inclusiveness really struck me.

Much has been written about the many similarities between ba gua zhang and aikido, and there is supposition that aikido founder Ueshiba encountered/ studied ba gua zhang during his secretive years of travel in China (see posts at Dojo Rat in particular).

But this is the first time I have thought much about similarities between ba gua and kobudo. The physical motions bear no resemblance. Yet at a deep level, both serve as the same type of model for welcoming and encouraging practitioners while maintaining a good balance between adherence to tradition and acceptance of difference.

The photo shows two people, each demonstrating a different version of the same basic ba gua zhang posture. One is a master. One is obviously not. (from the 105th anniversary celebrations of Sha Guo Zheng's birth, in Kunming)

beijing leftovers (5): more Liu Laoshi pix

The bagua jian or straight sword is an extremely long weapon and people don't carry them around much. In August 2008, Liu Laoshi was teaching the jian form to his Greek student. Some days I saw him using the somewhat shorter taiji jian, and occasionally he improvised with a folding fan. I didn't get to see him using a bagua jian until September in Tokyo, and it was worth waiting for.
I was struck by a comment of his that the bagua jian is not used like other swords, in which the arms do most of the cutting work. Instead, the turning motions of the entire body move (drag?) the sword along the opponent's body. The idea is to maneuver the sword into the proper location, then letting my body motions - those characteristic twists and turns of ba gua zhang - do the work. There are very few hacking or slicing motions, though there are numerous thrusts and blocks.
Curiously, there are many parallel motions between this form and the yuan yang yue form he taught me last year. Yue are a pair of much smaller, multi-bladed and curved weapons completely different from the jian in appearance, yet they can be used with very similar motions, another lesson in the inter-connectedness of the empty-handed and weapons forms of ba gua zhang.

getting started (2)

Getting Started (I) (July 10, 2008)

I hit 40 this year and it has been rough in many ways. Over 12 years in Japan now, and the Last of the Budo Bums has gotten flabby as work has taken priority over practice for the first time. I can’t expect anyone’s sympathy, I know that, but it’s been rough entering the Real World. Even so, I still have ample time for practice and will now try to squeeze one more thing in, a long-rumored blog.

In late 1995 I came to Japan with the naïve and grandiose idea of spending 5-7 years in Japan studying Japanese language and martial arts, then going to China for 5-7 years of Chinese martial arts and language, then going back home to teach. Nearing 13 years in Japan at this point (minus a short year in China and many short trips over there) and none of the objectives fully realized…

The funny thing is that at about the 7-year mark in Japan, I began a marked shift toward things Chinese. Less practice of things Japanese, and more practice of things Chinese. And I have (for the second time, as many have reminded me) set a roughly-two-year limit for getting back to the States, making it about 7 and 8 years respectively. I haven’t quit things Japanese entirely, but I have significantly rearranged my training priorities.

This blog, then, will feature thoughts and ramblings about the practice of Chinese and Japanese martial arts. About a year ago I began thinking of doing a blog centered on “Pivotal Practices”, trying to capture those moments that mark and change the course of our training. I began jotting and scribbling, but didn’t get far. More recently, I have been pondering the concept of “A Year of Training”, slowly building 365 entries spanning more than 20 years of training. That is, you might get July 10, 2008, then something I wrote back on July 11, 1999, and then another from July 12, 1989, then another blast from the present, and so on.

Being somewhat technologically challenged (I still write real letters on occasion!), I am known as Analog Man among family, friends, and detractors alike. But recent events have conspired to give me access to a Mac blog guru to get me started and to hold my hand when I panic. And everybody I have talked to about this misguided blog idea tells me to go for it. So here we go…


Getting Started (II): Getting Unstuck (July 11, 2008, by 10 minutes)

I spend many Friday nights training and drinking in the Zaimusho Kendo Dojo, but tonight I was on my own. Once my daughter was asleep, I went out to my old pre-fatherhood stomping ground, a nearby open space which offers some measure of privacy while one dodges the occasional unscooped dog shit.

I had been itching to throw some punches all day. Maybe it is a product of doing too much gooey, lovey-dovey tai ji quan lately, or the result of watching too much acrobatic-jumpy wushu at Day One of the all-Japan Wushu/Taijiquan tournament today, but the urge has been growing to just get out and go after it. Solo routines are fine, but at some point I want nothing more than to get into the ring or onto the mat and get after it, two people seeing what happens when the punches and kicks really fly.

I have been very focused on my forms lately, so most of my practice has been solo. And heaven forbid that we practitioners of Chinese martial arts do any sparring. We might find out the hard way that the flashy does not hold up well against the simple and practical.

So tonight I changed the routine, went out for 30 minutes of punching and kicking. No partner, but it was still a valuable exercise. The sweat was flowing immediately, since it is still rainy season in this part of Japan and rain is rolling in later tonight. Yeah, I really beat the shit out of the tree who substituted for a sparring partner. And yeah, it felt good, long overdue.

Then I shifted into some brief standing practice (thanks M in Canada and Z in Tokyo) before starting a thorough ba gua zhang review session. Recently I have been focused on relatively high-level stuff – 八卦掌游身连环掌 bagua youshen lianhuan zhang (swimming body), 八卦子午鸳鸯钺 bagua ziwu yuanyang yue (pair of weird multi-bladed and multi-pointed Klingon-looking deer-horn weapons made of metal which I really love), 对练 duilian paired practice, etc.

But tonight I jumped straight into the years-old “simple” stuff which should have been automatic…and I got stuck. Simple lack of practice, and it stung. In particular, I got stuck on number six of 八大掌, the Eight Main Palms. In the middle of the sequence, there is a portion where one palm stabs upward while the other drives downward. In both Swimming Body and Yue, (and in the health building exercise) you go down into a full squat with flat feet, palms fully extended up and down. But you don’t do that in the Main Palms. And there I was, stuck.

I went through it from the start again and again, but kept getting stuck at the same place. As an English teacher over here, I have endlessly and glibly advised students how to get “unstuck” when all else is going well but they suddenly freeze up on one unknown or forgotten word and are unable to proceed. Try to use the opposite word, try to give an example, rephrase it…Now it was time to take my own advice.

Each of the Eight Main Palms can be done clockwise and counter-clockwise but they are typically done counter-clockwise first. Some years back I did a demo of the Eight Main Palms at a local tournament. Due to time constraints, I did number one to the left, number two to the right, three to the left, and so on. I wasn’t working as much then and had more time for incessant drilling.

So tonight I tried number six to the right, and bang, it came right out. Must be muscle memory from that period when I intensively drilled the even numbers to the right (clockwise). After that, I could instantly do it to the left as well, and was completely unstuck.

Going through the entire set of eight, I was surprised, embarrassed, and pleased to realize how many motions were directly connected to the higher level stuff I have been over-focused on. It is all one massive, unified set when seen and practiced in its entirety. And there is beautiful overlap between the weapons forms and the empty hands forms. All those connections had been waiting for me and were finally found in the humid night under a blurry moon.



Getting Started (III) – Rainy Season (July 12, 2008)

Rainy season affects practice in many ways here. You spend more time oiling and checking weapons like swords and sai. You have to do your weapons review indoors but you love the feel of the rain while going through empty hand forms outdoors. You sweat a lot more and do more laundry. And the laundry never seems to get dry, hanging indoors for days on end. Then there is a day of blistering sunlight and all the laundry goes outside. Even the sweat-soaked pungent kendo kote (hand protectors) can finally get dry (if not lose their odor) in the shade outdoors.

If you are lucky you don’t have work those days and can put in a couple hours in the sun. The first sweat is just from the heat, already dripping and splattering as you stretch. As you start to move, the drops begin to fly. After a while, you notice a growing heaviness in the air and a certain sluggishness in your motions. You aren’t tired yet – it is just the humidity climbing somewhere above 117%. Clouds are forming overhead and you know what is coming, but there is still far too much to review, just one or two more times through this section…

The clothes and equipment have to be brought back inside, still warm to the touch as the rain is falling. Maybe a final couple runs through a taiji quan routine outdoors, then indoors for water and a shower at last. And more laundry to be washed.