Morning all... I know it seems like this here blog has turned into "The Martial Arts Book Review"; I'm currently finding it difficult to put aside time for more original writing. I promise that I'll put aside some time to do some non-bookish writing soon.
Anyway, my latest foray into the realm of MA literature has been Secrets Of The Samurai: A Survey Of The Martial Arts Of Feudal Japan1 by Oscar Ratti and Adele Westbrook. I'm usually wary of anything with the word "secret" in the title, seeing as how such volumes are usually woo-filled, but such is not the case here. Secrets is a broad, scholarly survey of the martial arts of Japan's feudal period with a particular focus on the practices associated with the military class of the Tokugawa shogunate (1600 - 1867).
One of the problems that survey authors face is the tension between breadth and depth, keeping the scope appropriately wide while avoiding bloat and making the work interesting. Ratti and Westbrook have navigated that tension well; there were very few places where I found myself thinking that they needed to either excise material or include more. I could have done without the multi-page, piece-by-piece description of samurai armor, and would have liked more explanation of abdominal breathing (more on that later), but apart from those minor issues the book strikes an excellent balance in terms of amount of material and level of detail.
The first of Secrets' three sections deals with the martial culture of the time period in question. While, true to the title, the material presented focuses specifically on the samurai or bushi, the military class of feudal Japan, Ratti and Westbrook acknowlege that it's impossible to provide a substantive treatment of the subject without also discussing the larger society into which the bushi were embedded. This discussion, I think, is the most valuable part of the book at a whole.
There's a tendency in contemporary practice to see historic East Asia as a semi-mythical place populated by wise monks and valiant warriors; a benevolent fiction, perhaps, but one that represents a substantial impediment to understanding the development of East Asian martial arts. East Asia was not monolithic; Japanese culture was entirely different from that of China or Korea. Nor was MA practice limited to the bushi; various arts, both indigenous and imported, were practiced by most social classes. The continuous exchange of ideas across borders and class boundaries played an important role in shaping of East Asian MA as a whole.
An important corollary to the above is that the development of East Asian martial arts is transparent to historical investigation. Though the various schools liked to proclaim their unique origins, often complete with tales of noble founders inspired by ancient and forgotten wisdom, the truth of the matter is that they were all part of a thousand-year research program. They owe their existence to generations of practitioners all striving to answer the same question: Which techniques are going to save my ass when push comes to shove? This seems to have been doubly-true in the case of Japan; the bushi were highly, perhaps even obsessively, pragmatic, and largely uninterested in anything which didn't have immediate, practical application. Which is somewhat at odds with how we, their eventual heirs, do things now; how'd we get here from there?
Secrets provides an answer by way of an examination of the differences between jutsu and do. As noted above the bushi were historically interested in jutsu i.e. practical techniques; the practice of martial arts as an integrative discipline, as a do, was generally limited to the small group of elites at the top of the samurai hierarchy. Then came the Tokugawa shogunate; in the enforced peace that followed the bushi were no longer driven in their studies by the need to protect themselves on a day-to-day basis. As a consequence the various jutsu became stagnant, formalized, and suffered a relative decline in overall quality.
The modern era saw, for a variety of reasons which Ratti and Westbrook discuss at some length, a renewed national interest in the martial arts. From the ashes of the jutsu arose a variety of integrative disciplines which are familiar to us today: kendo from kenjutsu, aikido from aikijutsu, and so on. These do were more suited fo the realities of modern existence, focused equally on the development of moral/ethical persons as on the practicalities of self-defense. An important takeaway from the story is that the martials arts are fluid; contemporary practice is not necessarily better or worse, but it is significantly different than what came before.
The second section of Secrets focuses on the exoteric aspects of the martial arts, giving brief descriptions of the various jutsu of the era. It doesn't have anything terribly insightful to say about them, but it does provide a convenient overview whereby you might wrap your head around the sheer diversity of Japanese practice. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of the origins of some of the more esoteric weapons, since its hard to find good information on the subject in general. They explain, for example, that the sai is a highly specialized type of jitte. That's blindingly obvious in hindsight, but I'd never made the connection. Or what about the pipe; how did a smoking implement get turned into a weapon? It turns out that non-bushi were often forbidden to carry weapons and so developed means of self-defense based on dual-use items such as farm implement, walking sticks, and long, heavily-reinforced pipes. Interesting stuff.
The final section of the book discusses esoteric practice, that portion of the martial arts which happens largely in the mind. Ratti and Westbrook compare the totality of martial practice to an iceberg; the external factors are the portion that's visible above the surface, while the internal factors are the much larger portion which lurks beneath. It's an apt comparison; physical prowess is only part of what is needed to become a successful martial artist, as anyone who has done any sort of competative sparring will undoubtedly tell you. Even if you're physically fit and technically competent you can still get hung-up on the mental aspects of competition; if you suffer from anxiety or anger it generally ends up impairing your performance.
I found this section to be unsatisfying in the end. They spend a lot of time talking about the hara (aka tanden or dan tien), a concept which you run into over and over when reading about the martial arts. But, like essentially every other work I've read on the subject, they don't really try to tease apart what seems to be a complex, compound idea. hara has a physical component, a mental component and, depending on who you ask, a metaphysical component. But these ontologically distinct aspects of hara tend to get muddled together, which makes it very difficult to take away anything concrete from the discussion. Even the physical component gets short shrift though, being fairly concrete, it shouldn't be difficult to explain. I've being practicing the martial arts for almost a decade and I still don't have a good feel for what "abdominal breathing" actually it. Ratti and Westbrook mention the practice a number of times, but never get down to the nitty-gritty of explaining what it actually is and how it works. Like I said earlier, I'd happy trade the exhaustive discussion of armor for a few pages of analysis.
The above criticism should, perhaps, be taken with a grain of salt. The discussion of internal factors is more balanced, comprehensive, and comprehensible than any other I've run across2; I'm more disappointed by the thought of what could have been. The discussion of strategic principles in chapter 7 comes very close to presenting the outlines of a unified theory of martial technique. In judo you "push when pulled" and in aikido you "enter when pulled"... why do both of those approaches work? Why why why why why? They've even got a chart comparing the principles of judo and aikido3 but then they don't do anything with it. Snarl...
Anyhow, those complaints aside, Secrets is definitely a worthwhile read.
1 I actually have the paperback version publisher in 1991.
2 Compare, for example, with the treatment of similar topics in The Bohhisattva Warriros, which goes from esoteric to inscrutable to incomprehensible in a matter of pages.
3 Chart 18, p. 438 in my copy.
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