Bottom Eleven

[Begin rant…]

Not to be neg­a­tive, but these things bug me. I have com­piled my list of the top eleven prob­lems with Taido as things cur­rently stand. This list is unique to me and rep­re­sents my per­sonal val­ues for what Taido is and should become. I can cope if peo­ple don’t agree, but mean­while, I’ll be work­ing on mov­ing things in a direc­tion that I feel is health­ier and more effec­tive all around. Maybe I can change a few minds, and maybe I’ll change my mind too as things go for­ward. For right now, here (not really in any kind of order) are what I see as the eleven biggest things hold­ing Taido back from its potential:

The Slogan: 21st Century Art of Self-Defense

Back in the 20^th cen­tury, “21^st cen­tury” sounded cool. But you know what? We are now in the 21^st cen­tury, and it just sounds dull.

Why don’t we get a new slo­gan. How about one that describes what Taido is all about, like “three-dimensional com­bat sport.” Notice I wrote “com­bat sport” instead of “art of self defense.” Anyone who has ever been in a fight will under­stand what I mean my this. If not, see num­ber eight below.

The Chicks

Please. Don’t even try to tell me that this is all that can be expected of women in Taido. I have seen women in other sports that would rip the heads off of most men. In Taido, women do not seem to get good at nearly the same rate as men. This is because we don’t teach them as well as we teach men.

I under­stand that there are phys­i­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences between the sexes. That’s fine. But look — all the women in the last all-Japan cham­pi­onship had ter­ri­ble maai in jis­sen. Why? There is no good rea­son for this. I can under­stand that women’s mus­cu­la­ture doesn’t sup­port explo­sive power, there­fore mak­ing it more dif­fi­cult for them to do nenchu and such, but there is absolutely no rea­son that they can’t learn how to use the seigyo and sotai prop­erly. None whatsoever.

Why don’t we teach girls real Taido? I think it has to do with cul­tural fac­tors, espe­cially the lin­ger­ing inequal­ity of the sexes in Japanese soci­ety. This is unac­cept­able. We should do bet­ter by our sis­ters, and teach them with every bit as much atten­tion and care as we do men.

The Attitude of Superiority over Other Arts

Up to about 2dan, a similarly-ranked Tae Kwon Do stu­dent will destroy a Taido stu­dent in a fight, if all other fac­tors are equal.

Taido is really cool, and at high lev­els of pro­fi­ciency, stu­dents learn to do things that most other styles don’t seem to teach openly. However, Taido tech­niques work best against Taido tech­niques. Taido stu­dents prac­tice “using” their tech­niques only against other Taido stu­dents, in a tightly con­trolled envi­ron­ment with rules that dis­al­low things like dri­ving in with straight attacks, grap­pling (except in America), or con­tact to any­where fun.

Taido has really cool the­ory, but it is pathetic train­ing for self-defense. Jissen is not “real com­bat.” It is a game, and like all games, it has a set of rules that deter­mine who wins. If the last cou­ple of all-Japan tour­na­ments are an indi­ca­tion of what high level Taido “fight­ing” looks like, I sin­cerely hope that no Taido cham­pi­ons ever make the mis­take of think­ing they can actu­ally fight.

So let’s just drop the idea that Taido is some kind of ulti­mate mar­tial art that will teach lit­tle guys to kick ass on big guys (this is true for Taido tour­na­ments only). In the­ory, Taido has a lot of aces up the prover­bial sleeve, but we don’t prac­tice any of those. Until we start teach­ing stu­dents how to use Taido as budo (as opposed to play­ing Taido as a sport), we need to just for­get about Taido’s “superiority.”

Japanese Monopoly

Taido is a mar­tial art that orig­i­nated in Japan. I do not believe that Taido’s founder aspired for Taido to remain a Japanese mar­tial art. Every time I heard him talk about it, he seemed to be of the opin­ion that Taido should be an inter­na­tional mar­tial art — a world mar­tial art. He said that Taido had “uni­ver­sal char­ac­ter.” Now it seems as if Taido stu­dents in other coun­tries are expected to adopt Japanese char­ac­ter in order to learn Taido. This is stupid.

Now, I’m not going to put all the blame for this on the Japanese. Oh no. I know first hand what kind of stu­pid pol­i­tics go on between the var­i­ous national Taido orga­ni­za­tions. There used to be a World Taido Federation that was going to over­see the devel­op­ment of Taido world­wide, but nobody could agree on who was in charge. So what do we have now? A gov­ern­ing body in Japan that con­trols all the infor­ma­tion and devel­op­ment, and sev­eral groups in other coun­tries that don’t want to be told how to do things.

In order to get the Japanese Taido group to give a damn about shar­ing infor­ma­tion or work­ing together on devel­op­ing the art, other coun­tries are going to have to agree to meet Japanese stan­dards on a vari­ety of issues. Part of the prob­lem though, is that these stan­dards are cul­tur­ally biased. They don’t work in other coun­tries. For exam­ple, Americans want to do Taido “American style,” but they want to be included in all the rein­deer games. Well, Japan is pay for play, and unless poor Rudolf learns the rules, he is des­tined to keep on loosing.

We need to agree on a mutu­ally accept­able rate of fig­u­ra­tive cur­rency con­ver­sion here. Easterners and Westerners have dif­fer­ent social val­ues, and as long as both con­sider the other one to be “wrong,” we will con­tinue to have friction.

Why can’t we just accept that we all have dif­fer­ent ideas, and agree to work together where we can and respect our dif­fer­ences at the same time? Is it ask­ing too much to hope that all the dif­fer­ent coun­tries prac­tic­ing Taido can play together like big boys and girls? So far, it has been.

Politics and Organizational Hierarchy

Part of the prob­lem here is the same as above, but there is more at play than gang rivalry.

I would like to see Taido run more col­lab­o­ra­tively. I haven’t worked out exactly what steps I think we should take to run our orga­ni­za­tion more effec­tively, but I am think­ing seri­ously about it. I will write more on this topic when I can make suggestions.

Training Methods

At best, our most advanced train­ing meth­ods are over thirty years old. That doesn’t even account for the fact that we don’t even use the most sophis­ti­cated meth­ods we claim to be famil­iar with very often. Even worse, we often do things that any qual­i­fied sports trainer would tell you are unhealthy and dan­ger­ous. Why does a “sci­en­tific mar­tial art” con­tinue to use pre­his­toric means of train­ing it practitioners?

In Taido Gairon, Shukumine says that Taido train­ing is more sophis­ti­cated than sports train­ing because it includes a means to con­cen­trate the breath­ing. Bullshit. He also says that sports train­ing is usu­ally not sci­en­tific. Is that some kind of joke? No offense to the guy who cre­ated my favorite mar­tial art, but I can only assume he was vastly mis­in­formed about sports train­ing (and a whole lot of other things that aren’t related to this point).

Sport is a high-dollar indus­try. Sports train­ing is essen­tial R&D to pro­fes­sional ath­letes and teams who make their liv­ings off of their phys­i­cal per­for­mances. One doesn’t sim­ply stum­ble onto being capa­ble of world-record phys­i­cal per­for­mance. No, sorry. Sports train­ing is very sci­en­tific and sophis­ti­cated, and we can learn a lot from the lit­er­a­ture that is avail­able on the sub­ject (much of which inci­den­tally per­tains to breath­ing and men­tal skills).

Our edu­ca­tional model should also be updated with cur­rent the­ory to pro­vide bet­ter results for our stu­dents. We cur­rently are rely­ing on the same method of instruc­tion that has been used in every other mar­tial art since the begin­ning of time. If you look at the num­ber of peo­ple who start Taido and the num­ber of peo­ple who get good at Taido, I think you will see that our track record for teach­ing is not very good. Let’s work on this.

Psuedo-Scientific Martial Sport

Keiraku? Are you kid­ding me?

No sci­en­tific exper­i­ment has ever found con­clu­sive evi­dence that any form of “body energy” such as keiraku or ki exists. If any­thing, sci­en­tists have been able to find the mech­a­nisms of phe­nom­ena for­merly asso­ci­ated with ki energy to func­tions of the ner­vous sys­tem. If Taido is sci­en­tific, we should choose to explain this stuff in a sci­en­tific idiom rather than some­thing that sounds as if it should be printed on a for­tune cookie. Some will ask what dif­fer­ence it makes as long as we have good results. I’ll tell you:

Suppose two men share a car. They can do this because one of them works at night and the other works dur­ing the day. Both of them drive the car and have no prob­lems get­ting to work every day (or night). One of these two men under­stands the con­cept of the inter­nal com­bus­tion engine. The other man believes that there are gasoline-drinking elves liv­ing under the hood of the car who spin the wheels by means of var­i­ous levers and pulleys.

Both men get to work. But one of them is stu­pid. Let’s not be the sec­ond man. He thinks he can make the car go faster by telling jokes to the elves and singing songs they like. The first man knows that he can improve the car’s off-the-line accel­er­a­tion by low­er­ing the gear ratio. He knows that keep­ing the parts of the fuel-delivery sys­tem clean will enhance over­all per­for­mance. He knows that pol­ish­ing the cylin­ders will reduce energy lost to fric­tion and increase the effi­ciency of power production.

Let’s get with the times and find bet­ter analo­gies for our bod­ies’ energy sys­tems. Through bet­ter under­stand­ing, we will be bet­ter equipped to improve our meth­ods of access­ing our poten­tial energy pro­duc­tion and efficiency.

Sport or Martial Art

Well, which is it? A mar­tial art is con­cerned with fight­ing. A fight includes absorp­tion and deliv­ery of force, pos­si­ble mul­ti­ple assailants, pos­si­ble weapons, esca­la­tion and deesca­la­tion, and a ton of other fac­tors that Taido prac­tice either neglects totally or glosses over. I’m not say­ing that the the­ory behind Taido doesn’t address these things, but the way Taido is prac­ticed does not. Taido is prac­ticed as a sport. We prac­tice game rules, not combat.

So we need to decide. And it’ll be hard to try and be both. We can’t prac­tice sport all day long and then say “but if it were a fight you would just hit harder.” That is total bull­shit. Practice is spe­cific. If you don’t prac­tice for fight­ing, you are not prac­tic­ing mar­tial art. Simple as that.

Nebulous Rules of Competition

If we go on and con­cede that Taido is not a mar­tial art but a sport, please, let’s set the rules and stick to them. Write them down and have every­one agree on them. Translate them into all the lan­guages of the coun­tries in which Taido is prac­ticed (and spend the money to have this pro­fes­sion­ally done). Retrain all of the ref­er­ees in the new rules. Test them. Teach the stu­dents the new rules. Test them. When we have com­pe­ti­tions, enforce the rules — all of them, all the time. Repeat this process every time any rule needs to be changed.

Codified Techniques

One legacy of our karate her­itage is the notion of kihon. Kihon is one of the things that keeps karate sta­tic. Why do we need that in an evolv­ing art? Answer: we don’t.

This sub­ject too is very rich (or at least, as pro­fes­sional edu­ca­tor, I am very inter­ested in such top­ics). As such, I won’t expound on it too much here, but rest assured, I would love to write much more in the way of sug­ges­tions for improv­ing this.

For now though, just think about it: we have five tech­niques (the sotai), two strate­gic meth­ods (unsoku and unshin), and three broad cat­e­gories of force deliv­ery (strik­ing, kick­ing, and grap­pling). Sentaizuki could have an infi­nite num­ber of pos­si­ble exe­cu­tions. So could ten­taigeri. So why do we limit our­selves to the “clas­sic” named tech­ni­cal vari­a­tions? Because that’s what every­one has always done. Stupid rea­son, right?

The Belt-Ranking System

This is use­less really, and also a con­tribut­ing fac­tor in the orga­ni­za­tional pol­i­tics that pre­vent real col­lab­o­ra­tion. This will also be the sub­ject of a more in-depth treat­ment at a later date. Just for the record though, I (among the high­est ranked group of American Taidoka, I have been very suc­cess­ful under the cur­rent sys­tem) think that the prac­tice of award­ing belt ranks in the mar­tial arts is bunk.

So there you have it. My Top 11 things that suck about Taido. I plan to revisit this list peri­od­i­cally and update/adjust as I see fit. I will also be writ­ing longer arti­cles about each point when the time and inspi­ra­tion strikes. Until that time, now you know what I really think, and if you are smart, you will agree (OK, just kid­ding about that last part).

[…End rant]

You may also wish to check out the con­verse of this list: the Top 11.