JOURNEY - on Mastering Ukemi Read online

  JOURNEY

  On Mastering

  Ukemi

  Also Available by

  Daniel Linden

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  (2004, 2010)

  FICTION

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  (2011)

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  (Release date 11/2011)

  JOURNEY

  On Mastering

  Ukemi

  By

  Daniel Linden

  JOURNEY - On Mastering Ukemi

  Daniel Linden

  Published by Basswood Press

  All Rights Reserved

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical., including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

  This is a work of fiction and no quotes may be attributed to any individual except the author.

  © 2011 Basswood Press

  For Laurie

  Part 1

  Prologue

  The doctor looked at me with apparent disapproval. I don’t know why, but I sometimes have that effect on people without meaning to. When he spoke he had an accent I could not identify, but he was probably from somewhere in northern Europe. I didn’t think it sounded Aussie or South African. He slipped the I.V. into my arm and then bent over to stare at my cheek. My face was so swollen that my eye was closed.

  “You have a fractured kidney and a slight concussion. You have been in a fight. Yes?”

  “Well, Doc, I wouldn’t really call it a fight. I pretty much stood there and they pretty much hit me. Is that being in a fight?”

  “I think so. Yes. How did you get here?”

  How did I get here? Was he kidding? There isn’t a road for a hundred miles in any direction.

  “I walked,” I said.

  Introduction

  Aikido is a unique martial art. It requires that two individuals train together to a mutual end. One person cannot train at aikido alone.

  In other martial arts, Judo, Karate, or Kung Fu, for example, one person can train at kata or in practice kumite (fighting) along with another, but in all of these arts it is the point of the training to win the encounter. Each individual tries to overcome the other.

  Not so in aikido. In aikido there is an uke and a nage. These are roles that are played and shared by the people who train at this esoteric art. The uke attacks and the nage defends. In Japanese, uke means ‘one who receives’. So in aikido the person playing the role of uke attacks the person playing the role of nage and then receives the results of the attack, whether it’s a throw or a pin or an atemi (strike).

  It could be argued that mastership in ukemi is tantamount to aikido mastership, but it is not. One can be said to have done aikido, for example, when one successfully defends oneself from an attacker. If the attack takes place outside of a convenience store late at night, and the attacker is just another street hoodlum, he is probably incapacitated in some way and you (who have done aikido) have achieved a resolution. That attacker cannot be said to have done aikido or to have taken ukemi. At best he fell down.

  Ukemi is a part of the ‘practice’ of aikido, but it is not aikido. It is a necessary part of the learning process, but it is not aikido. It is a requirement for mastership, the requirement that one masters the art of ukemi, but it is not aikido. Each role is unique and necessary. One can no more have a marriage with only one person than train at aikido with only one person. Traditionally (new ideas notwithstanding), a marriage requires a man and a woman – a husband and wife that is - to be a marriage. Aikido requires an uke and a nage.

  Ukemi is the art of falling down and getting up again. Ukemi is the art of listening with the body. Ukemi is the art of attacking from the heart, to the heart. Ukemi is attacking relentlessly until one is engaged or disengaged. I believe it is an art in itself, albeit one that no one will ever claim or truly master. However, only the best at ukemi ever claim true mastership in aikido.

  ***

  There is a perfect image for me. It is the journey from beginner to master. In that image I see a person walking down a path and the path stretches to the horizon. The seeker walks, climbing hills and then descending into valleys, through forests, across streams and rivers, over bridges and through harsh dry desert. He becomes weary, but regains his strength in equal measure. He moves relentlessly and falters repeatedly, but on he walks, going past the end of the road and then beyond the end of the trail and then into the wild. He bushwhacks his way into the unknown until he finally begins to climb the highest mountain. He knows peril and cold and unspeakable hardship, but continues until one day he experiences grace.

  After that everything is different. He begins to breathe easier even though the trail still climbs. He passes people along the way and though they have never met, he recognizes them. He begins to have fun and the fun becomes the joy of being alive in a great adventure. One day he stands on the summit rejoicing in his accomplishment, and then realizes that far off in another cordillera there is another higher mountain and he still has a long way to go.

  This does not deter him, because he has matured and realizes that all life is a journey that we must continue to travel until we die. Or worse, we give up and continue in the shadow of what it is to exist, but not to live.

  This is my image. The journey, the passions of living and of mastership are all part of the same poem that we continue to write all the days of our lives. These things are as entwined as they are eternal.

  Train hard, and good trekking.

  Chapter 1

  1972

  The first punch almost broke my nose. I could hear the buzz and smell the musty odor of a hard strike to the face. Tears welled unbidden to my eyes. Struggling to my feet I launched another attack at the small man in front of me and again he struck then simply disappeared. This time I jerked my head back away from his fist and took the fastest ukemi of my life and was rewarded with a crushing fall to the mat, but no pain in my face. I had escaped.

  Once more I stood and Akira Tohei Sensei turned to address the assembled aikidoka who were training in Lake Geneva for a summer seminar. Not sure what was expected of me, I stood dumbly waiting for a sign. At the edge of the mat one of my school’s senior students was motioning for me to get down. I nodded at him and went to my knees. Tohei Sensei (teacher) finished speaking then motioned for me to attack and I again launched my best tsuki at his face. Again he seemed to disappear, but the crushing hand to the side of my head told me that once again I had failed to react sufficiently to avoid the blow.

  With a disgusted gesture he motioned me back to the sitting crowd of students and called to a more experienced uke. I had been dismissed for my incompetence. With shame burning across my face, the two strikes faded away into nothingness. The bruises only lasted a couple weeks, but I still remember how humiliated I felt at that moment forty years later.

  Ukemi is the art of attacking and then avoiding being hurt (arms or wrists broken, being thrown to the mat or being struck) by a person doing aikido. This is so difficult to explain that I will seem to contradict myself over and over while I discuss this aspect of aikido. However, it all makes sense once you grasp that it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the instruction. You finally understand that it has nothing to do with falling down (other than the physical fact) and everything to do with communication. Yes, it’s a people thing.

  As a young Viet Nam veteran I did not understand ukemi at all when I began ai
kido and regret all the trouble I made for those poor partners who tried to practice with me. For me it was about winning. I did not want my partner to succeed in making me go to the mat and my sensei was most insistent that I should do so. I wouldn’t let him take me to the mat without a struggle and so after nearly five years of hard training had never been allowed to test for even the lowest rank.

  Ukemi is what I should have been taught, but back then one did not ask questions of this sensei and most of the other students I trained with were able to grasp this concept. I did a nice irimi nage with one of the senior students after a couple years of training and when he reacted with his feet high in the air and a rush to strike the mat in a hard break fall I suddenly understood the basic concept. It came slowly for me but by the time another Sensei arrived in the United States I was pretty good at it. Not good enough for Tohei Sensei who had never again called me for uke, but as I decided to move to Florida and train with the newly arrived teacher, I was damned determined that I would be good enough for him

  Chapter 2

  Present

  Christian punched fast and hard. I reacted slowly, and gently raised my left hand as he breezed into my center. His face met my raised hand and his head snapped back, feet flying forward and the first thing down on the mat was his shoulder, followed by his neck, back and then all the rest of him. It was brutal.

  “Christian, are you okay?” I bent over and asked.

  He shook his head to clear it and I could see that his neck was not hurt, my first concern. His eyes crossed and uncrossed and then he jumped up to his feet.

  “Yes, Sensei, I’m fine, no problem.” Then he took a fighting stance and prepared to strike again. I stared at him a moment and shook my head in wonder at all that youthful energy. If that had been me, I’d have gone inside and gone to bed for a week.

  I turned to the class and began to speak. He immediately dropped to one knee and waited for me to motion that he should return to the attack. Life moves in circles, ever expanding. Once I was a student, now I am the master. Once he was a child, and now a formidable man waited before me. Time passes.

  “Did anyone notice what went wrong with Christian’s ukemi?” I asked the group kneeling before me on the mat. A senior black belt student smiled and said, “He gave up the attack because you didn’t seem to respond to it.”

  “Yes Erik, that’s pretty good.” I pointed at Christian and looked to make sure that he was not suffering any effects from the impact he had taken. His face was bright red, but he seemed fine.

  “Christian didn’t get the reaction he expected from the punch, so he was unprepared to deal with my reaction – which was pretty nominal. When he realized that I was actually entering – attacking – him, he was too late to be able to get out of the way. He got hit pretty hard. Christian, I apologize. I should have had better control. I didn’t mean to hit you. If I had intended to hit you I would have done it harder.”

  This got a big laugh; everyone in my school has been hit from time to time.

  I continued. “So I want to make sure you understand that I am responsible for my actions and if I intend to strike you in order to teach you something, I will. But to strike you accidentally is something that I am obliged to apologize for. It means I was careless and a warrior is not careless.” I bowed to him and he bowed back.

  I really wanted to make a smart remark along with this apology, something funny, because that’s my nature, but when you train people in arts that can kill, you have to keep up some kind of appearances.

  It’s good to understand your nature. If you ever learn to keep your mouth shut at inappropriate times that understanding can keep you out of trouble. If you ever manage to learn, that is. I think it was Larry King who once said, “I never learned a damn thing while I was talking…” Even a fish would stay out of trouble if it just kept its mouth shut.

  ***

  I run a martial art school that is called Shoshin Aikido Dojo. It is situated on about 65,000 square feet of land covered in bamboo, orchids, and orange, lemon and cumquat trees. There are many varieties of ginger, impatiens, and other flowering plants, tress, and bushes. There are grape vines that produce big, delicious grapes in the early summer and a garden that grows sweet potato and collards almost year around. We have a nice situation. The dojo sits behind my home and next to a luthiery studio where I build mandolins, violins and guitars from wood harvested from my land in the great northern state of Maine.

  The wind was blowing cool, humid air through the open screens of the dojo when class resumed. The aikidoka (aikido students) formed into pairs and began to practice the techniques that I taught. First, one student (uke) would attack nage and be pinned or thrown. He would repeat this four times and then it would be repeated as they changed roles. The two parts - uke and nage - mean different things to different instructors. Oddly, there doesn’t seem to be much consensus about it.

  Oh, I don’t mean the details. That’s pretty apparent. One person attacks the other and is either pinned or escapes into a roll. Sometimes players will switch roles during the play, counter a move and attempt a move of their own, but for the most part it is fairly straightforward. No, I’m talking about the ideas behind the ideas. That’s what this story is about. I have been thinking long and hard about the far bigger picture and it seems to me that very few bother to think beyond the point of a break fall.

  I watched Christian attack Erik and he seemed a bit distracted, but his falls were clean and precise. He even seemed to be pushing Erik a bit, which is rare and not always the smart thing to do. Erik is my chief instructor among the black belts who train under me. He can be a fierce practitioner and is enormously strong and talented. But tonight he seemed content to let Christian gain some small ground on him and train at Christian’s intensity level. I moved over to where they were throwing each other about. I watched until Christian stepped off the mat to get a drink of water.

  “Erik, is Christian okay?”

  “I guess so,” he replied. “He isn’t hurt if that’s what you mean. But he does seem to be a little puny, if you get my meaning.”

  “Yeah, I do. Tell him I want to see him after class up at the house, if you don’t mind.”

  “Yes, Sensei,” he said, and went back to train some more.

  The breeze was coming a bit stronger now and I could smell ozone in the air. The ceramic bells, trees and towering stands of bamboo were singing and there was a steady rattle of debris on the tin roof of the dojo. My dogs were wandering around restlessly outside the screen door and the sky rapidly grew dark. The first drops of rain hit the tin roof as I clapped my hands to halt training. Everyone went over to the side of the mat to sit and watch the next demonstration. I again called Christian to be my uke and motioned for the attack I wanted.

  He struck over and over and I demonstrated the technique that I thought would be a logical continuation of the previous one. I wanted to explain how moving the hips to place the nexus, or joining of energies, into the center established the center, but the rain was so strong that I could not make myself heard. I looked at everyone and shrugged, pointed to the ceiling rafters and shrugged again, then motioned for them to train. The sudden, total humidity was like a blanket and at the same time the temperature seemed to fall a bit to compensate. That’s Florida.

  ***

  Celine stuck her head in the door and asked if she could come in. She is a lovely young woman who had started her training with my friend Mustafa Aygun in Turkey. She now trains here with us at Shoshin Dojo.

  “Hi,” I said. “What’s up? Want a coke? A beer?”

  “No. No thank you, sensei. I just wanted to know how I am doing; how I am fitting in. Sometimes I feel that some of the others would rather not train with me.”

  I couldn’t really imagine that. I’d been young once and she was very attractive. “Who, specifically, if you don’t mind telling me?”

  “Oh, Sensei, I’d rather not say, please.”

  I motioned for her to
sit down. She shrugged off her back pack and shook her hair loose. .

  “Well, okay.” I said. “You are fitting in very well. Remember that Mustafa Sensei and I are really very different. I am over six feet tall and heavy. Mustafa is shorter and comparatively thin. We have different aikido. We have different techniques that appeal to us. He is young and strong and fast. I am getting old and am not so athletic anymore. All these things combine to give our aikido different looks.

  “O’Sensei looked much different when he was younger than when he grew older. It’s quite natural. And you have learned from Mustafa. So you are not familiar with the way we train or the things that I teach, but Celine, it’s still aikido. You’re doing very well.”

  “Okay. Thank you. I think I am having trouble getting used to the mat. We have a much softer mat in Turkey where I trained.”

  I had noticed that she took slow and tentative ukemi. “Well, now that you mention it, your ukemi is much softer than I prefer.”

  “Please?”

  “See, a really large part.., or maybe all of a person’s training for a lot of years is not aikido at all. For many years you just train muscle memory. Uke attacks and is very cooperative while nage figures out what he has been taught and learns how to do it. You repeat the motion over and over and finally you learn how to do kote gaishe, the wrist twist. Or you study ikkyo, a rotating arm bar. But you have to take the time to do it over and over until you can do it anytime. This is training muscle memory. It is not aikido.