snail's pace

In recent practices, the theme seems to be slow advancement.

Tonight’s class in Sha Family sword (沙式太极剑), I was hoping for a surge forward in the (first) two-person paired form. Instead, we got a (good and needed) review of the (second) 36-motion tai ji jian form, including four repetitions in all directions, which really messed with the mind if you let it, or didn’t mess with the mind if you didn’t let it. Do you know what I mean?

After basics, 36-form practice, and breaks, there was precious little time left for the two-person form we are learning. We reviewed the first several motions several times and learned a grand total of one new motion in the last three minutes of class. No complaints, mind you – every minute of class is valuable, and I appreciate the review.

Last Sunday, we had a special 5-hour class focusing on mantis fist or tang lang quan. It’s a small and experienced group and my only real chance to review the forms of Six Harmonies Mantis Fist (六合螳螂拳) as taught by Liu Jing Ru Laoshi.

My daughter was not satisfied with four hours of Daddy Time all morning, so I took her to the afternoon Mantis class. She was pretty good (as much as can be expected of a 7-year-old) and ran through the Long Fist Staff form (长拳棍术) with me a few times, but wouldn’t run through any of the empty-hand routines in front of others with me.

Between intervals of playing and practicing with my daughter, I reviewed Duan Chui 短捶 pretty well and reviewed the first 1/3 or so of shuang feng 双封 from last month. We drilled that many times and then learned a grand total of one new motion.

I suppose this theme applies to last week (or has it been two weeks ago already??) when Akamine Sensei came to Tokyo from Okinawa for a weekend seminar in Ryukyu Kobudo. Actually there was no advancement into new techniques for me, only pushing deeper into the already-practiced forms. It was enough, and yet I still felt a hunger, watching as others reviewed forms which I have been through but don’t know well.

So these are days of slow advancement and much consolidation for me, both satisfying and slightly frustrating at the same time. Anyway, I will strengthen my foundations and get ready for there will certainly be great blasts of advancement in the future.

(photo of a snail found by my daughter at the tang lang quan practice space)

no yue

Another tournament today, the last of the autumn 2009 –spring 2010 season.

My daughter did pretty well in chang quan or long fist – she was suddenly paired with another girl slightly older / more experienced than her. On the one hand, our teacher scolded her for watching the competition too much while performing. But on the other, I think it was good for her, it lit her fire a little bit. The other girl was right in front of her and an instant quicker on each motion.

I took third in the weapons division, without a weapon. The pudao guy was shithot and took first and deserved it. The double-swords woman was also shithot and took second place and deserved it. Kudos to them both – I don’t think I could have beaten them even with my yue.

The authorities stuck a magnet on my yuan yang yue just before my turn and, well, the magnet stuck. They are indeed made of steel. Hurried consultation, verdict – can’t use the steel weapons, but you can perform the routine empty-handed. Alright, I’ll go.

I really hate aluminum weapons and geranium (?) weapons. They are light and flappy and snappy and meaningless (I’m gonna catch some crap for this post but you can imagine the couple words that spring to mind, the second being “it”).

Japan is a weird country. I can walk around for years with a shinken “live” sword which could actually cut people ridiculously easily. But hey, I am an iaido guy, so it is OK. But steel swords from China are completely banned here (I have had one or three confiscated in the airport and had them unconfiscated later). I have had my outdoor practice interrupted and my (Chinese) sword photographed by the police for no apparent reason. You could cut someone with it but it would take a lot more work effort and skill than cutting someone with a shinken blade.

I would pick a standard kitchen knife (yes, steel) over an unsharpened Chinese swords in many situations. Yuan yang yue are basically unknown to Japanese authorities but the word is out: no steel weapons in tournaments. Why steel weapons have been singled out, I have no idea.

I can’t complain – apparently there are many US states where I can’t use my nunchaku, tekko, or other weapons, the same weapons I train with regularly indoors and out over here. I’ll deal with that problem in the future. I have no plans, by the way, to own a handgun. I'm not sure about kama (sickle) here in Japan - the blades are steel, but they are commonly used in gardening. But I have been more careful about practicing outdoors with kama lately. Then there are the sai.....

Anyway I will search the fine print in tournament applications more carefully in the future.

Photo Explanation - my feeling as someone approached with a magnet....

And third place is not so bad, for doing a form with imaginary weapons against an imaginary opponent.

xing yi quan form of (last) month: horse

My ideal is to know the forms I study well enough to be able to perform any of them if asked, no preparation and no hesitation. Yeah, that and being able to actually use the applications in appropriate circumstances.

I found out how far I was from that goal on Sunday. Very nice practice, four hours of nothing but Six Harmonies Praying Mantis Fist – review of the familiar and a plunge into a new form, shuang feng (双封). Good review, good consolidation.

Then somewhere near the end of the day, someone asked about a motion from the horse form, 马形, from xing yi quan. I started…and stopped, unsure of a couple motions. A bit earlier, I had whipped out the swallow form (燕形) on demand and was glad I had been reviewing that lately. But the horse…the horse…

So I got out my notes on paper, walked through the form once and got it. Satisfying in one sense, that it came back automatically. And very dissatisfying in another sense – it was obviously nowhere near second nature. Working on the new stuff is always fun, but it is time to go back and double-check everything.

xing yi quan form of the month: swallow (2)

Following up on the previous post (and falling behind on this monthly focus thing). Astute observers will note that while it is, in fact May 1 over here in Japan, it is still April 30 over in my home country, so I can just sneak this one in.

Yan Xing, the swallow. The key point I get is rapid rising and falling combined with opening and closing – spreading the arms and the chest, then bringing them together again. This ties in with the expansion and contraction of the chest which popped up in other classes last week.

Liu Jing Ru Laoshi’s 2009 Tokyo visit brought a few more changes to the form but the core of course remains the same. The opening orientation has changed 90 degrees, now facing the front to begin, followed by a 180 turn, instead of the prior 90 degree turn. Small matters, really.

Each year when he visits Tokyo, Liu Laoshi tells us that the _____ form is his favorite, and it is of course a different one every year. In 2007, the swallow had to share that honor with the snake. I have to be honest – the swallow form didn’t appeal strongly to me when I first started working on it, but it has grown on me. It emphasizes principles of quick and effective motion rather than drilling directly obvious combative techniques.

Last winter I was practicing this form outdoors and the sun’s position (oops, that would be the earth’s position) had shifted enough to display my shadow on the opposite wall. For the first time I could actually “see” the wings opening and closing, the swallow swooping down across the water.

OK, the next time I single-handedly dispatch five ruffians who have surrounded me, I probably won’t be standing on one leg with my arms spread high and low, as in one motion in this form. But the quick upper-lower combination strikes that this form emphasizes might just come in handy.

Anyway, I will be putting some more polish on this one tonight, then start shifting into the next month’s main animal.

A horse is a horse, of course...

…unless it is jumping over a river.

There is a move in the 32-motion tai ji jian (sword) form called 跳步平刺, or tiao bu ping ci. A rough word-for-word translation might be “jumping stance horizontal thrust”.

That describes the motion pretty well – after surging forward, you lift off one foot and take a small jump, land in a preparatory position, and thrust forward. With a horizontal blade.

Another, older name for the motion is 野马跳涧, or ye ma tiao jian: experienced tai ji people will recall our old friend, 野马分鬃, (ye ma fen zong), part the wild horse’s mane. Indeed, the motion in the jian form features a wild horse, this one jumping over / across a river in a valley.

Suddenly we get a much more powerful image of the horse leaping, making distance – and landing gracefully, blending into the next motion smoothly.

A similar motion appears in many tai ji sword forms. In the Sha family style 24-motion sword form, it is called 虎包头 (hu bao tou = tiger shakes its head??). Another similar motion appears in the Sha family’s 36-motion sword form, actually composed of two bits, 退步勒马 (tuibu lema, step back and tame the horse / control the bit in its mouth) and 灵猫扑鼠 (ling mao pu shu = swift cat grabbing a mouse, a reference to nimble footwork?).

Returning to more commonly seen sword forms, we have the 42-motion competition form – the same move also called tiao bu ping ci.

So what’s in a name? I am definitely not a fan of the kung fu flicks where fighters call out flowery names of overblown techniques before attacking. But hearing about the older, more descriptive name of the motion in question last night – and hearing my teacher lightly chastise a Japanese student for not contemplating the meaning to be found in the written characters – made me think of Liu Jing Ru Laoshi.

He put together some of the forms we practice in his line today. For both these and other, older forms, he attached names, usually descriptive in a suggestive way rather than mere descriptions of physical techniques. That is, “open the window and gaze at the moon” rather than “grab the guy’s arm and pull it across to the right with both hands, then unwind that energy to smack his ____”. They are both saying the same thing, just with different words.

Many of these old forms had no names for the motions in the old days. “Do this. No, like that. Faster. Then do that.”

I’ll take the newer, more suggestive names. Too poetic for some people, maybe, (what the hell? I punch him before he punches me. Who needs all these tigers and moon-gazing?). But we can find hints and suggestions in names like these, and I’ll take every hint I can get. “Jump stance horizontal thrust” doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination.

mantis fist

“That doesn’t look like a mantis at all” went one of the comments on youtube video of Liu JingRu Laoshi demonstrating one of the forms of Six Harmonies Mantis Fist (六合螳螂拳).

I’d never thought about it that way before. Liu Laoshi told us it was a mantis form, we learned it, we do it, nothing more to it. True, he is most famous for his ba gua zhang, and secondly his xing yi quan, but Liu Laoshi’s third art is Six Harmonies Mantis. (See the cover of the Taiwan edition of his book, far more exciting than the cover of my mainland edition). So as far as I am concerned, he is the boss, at least in our particular line.

I am stilllllll working on an interview with him. It has been an endless project , with the actual interviews conducted once in Beijing and twice in Tokyo, then the endless translating and writing.

Somewhere in there I asked him about Liu He Tang Lang Quan, the particular branch he teaches. We were learning two of the eight forms that week in Tokyo. One of them (藏花 or cang hua) is much shorter and not, at first glance, obviously mantis-like. By that I mean no motions obviously trying to “look like” a mantis, as we often see in tournaments and exhibitions. (Then again, in application, it becomes very mantis-like, at least to my eyes.)

The other form we learned, 短捶 or duan chui, is much longer and has a few motions which more closely resemble those of a mantis. That, and the fact that it appears first in his book, led me to think it was a core form of the liu he tang lang quan syllabus.

Yet according to Liu, duan chui was not originally part of the liu he tang lang quan syllabus. It was originally called duan chui quan (短捶拳) and was a family art. Someone in that family (林世春) mastered both arts and passed them down together. We can only speculate how much each art may have influenced the forms of the other.

Anyway, these forms have come down to us and I am doing my best to see them with mantis eyes and to do them with a mantis body.

The things I wake up to...

Springtime in Japan. Work late, drink late, wake up early….and get a blast from the past in real time. Wake up, check email before breakfast...

My friend and one-time karate nemesis unearthed ancient video from our university karate days and transferred it to DVD. Being technological dinosaurs, neither of us uses Twitter or Tweeter or whatever. So he sent me live emails while viewing ---

“I just watched you NOT break some boards. I had a bunch of old video of us “back in the day” put onto DVD, it’s great! We were not bad. You could not break two boards and smashed T’s fingers but who was looking, oh yea, the camera was.”

“Now you just lost a match in Denver cuz you punched him in the face. That’s a no-no.”

Naturally I recall neither of these events and my brain is filled only with images of my elbow going (change that: smashing effortlessly) through 3 boards (maybe it was 4?) at a different testing.

Cue the Metallica song about memory.