Mits Uchida

Note: Some peo­ple didn’t under­stand this arti­cle the first time around and took parts of it as an attack on my teacher — a man whom I greatly admire. I have attempted to abate this some­what by nar­row­ing the focus of this arti­cle and deal­ing with tan­gen­tial issues in sep­a­rate posts. Some of the con­tent orig­i­nally included here has been moved, but I have not sig­nif­i­cantly altered my gen­eral tone or mes­sage. Please under­stand that my humor is extremely dry. There is no venom here; just an hon­est look at a man few peo­ple really understand.

Mits Uchida is the founder and head instruc­tor of the “United States Taido Association.” Much has been made over my appar­ent falling out with him (due in large part to mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions of the first incar­na­tion of this arti­cle), but I main­tain that this is entirely one-sided. Though I can­not sup­port cer­tain aspects of the way he runs his busi­ness, I have a deep respect for his abil­i­ties, tal­ents, and accomplishments.

This is par for the course in my rela­tion­ship with a man who is in many ways para­dox­i­cal. Under his tough exte­rior, he is kind and com­pas­sion­ate. Though he some­times finds it hard to rec­og­nize the con­tri­bu­tions of oth­ers, he cares deeply for each of his stu­dents. Despite his cur­rent dis­dain for me, he has repeat­edly placed me in a lead­er­ship posi­tion in his orga­ni­za­tion. Sometimes, he can be pretty dif­fi­cult to understand.

Saint or Sinner?

Some peo­ple don’t like my teacher very much. Some say that his Taido is either incom­plete or inac­cu­rate. Some say that he is cocky, ego­tis­ti­cal, or self­ish. Many appear jeal­ous that his per­son­al­ity and Taido knowl­edge are mak­ing him good money. I feel the osten­si­ble con­cerns regard­ing legit­i­macy are sim­ple pol­i­tics. Even those crit­ics who believe them­selves to be work­ing for the greater good in Taido have prob­a­bly felt some per­sonal resent­ment towards Uchida at some time or other. One inter­est­ing thing I’ve noticed is that most of the peo­ple I’ve heard mak­ing dis­parag­ing remarks about Mits Uchida have sel­dom had a per­sonal con­ver­sa­tion with him.

On the other side of the coin, I see some peo­ple gen­u­flect to him as if he were some sort of deity or vas­sal lord (a sit­u­a­tion he enjoys and some­what encour­ages). This group includes the usual col­lec­tion of yes-men (rather, ossu–men) and syco­phants that tend to form around charis­matic and impres­sive peo­ple. There are also a few true-belivers who really feel that Uchida-Taido is the best mar­tial art on the planet. My biggest dis­agree­ment with them is the notion that my teacher’s ver­sion of Taido rep­re­sents the apex of mar­tial the­ory and appli­ca­tion; I believe it’s pos­si­ble to make Taido even better.

At one point, both above-mentioned camps (detrac­tors and sup­port­ers) had been actively attempt­ing to recruit me. I found it inter­est­ing that peo­ple spent their effort try­ing to edu­cate me about Mits Uchida. It was damn-near hilar­i­ous, in fact, because I’ve known the man for most of my life.

Some peo­ple have known him much longer, but few of them spent hours and hours in his pres­ence every week, as I did from age 7 to 25. With the excep­tion of his own chil­dren, very few peo­ple have received nearly as much of his inter­fer­ence and inter­ven­tion as I have. I stud­ied under him in Taido for a long time.

Beyond that, I have stud­ied him — the way he teaches, the way he runs his busi­ness, the way he thinks, and why. He’s been a role model to me in many ways. I am some­thing of an Uchida expert, and in the course of becom­ing such, I have dis­cov­ered things I love and hate about the man I still call “Sensei.”

As far as Taido goes, Mits Uchida is the hardest-working man in show busi­ness. He’s full-time, all the time, and when I used to call the honbu dojo from Japan in the mid­dle of the night, he answered. He’s given me a lot of good advice through the years, and he’s done gen­uinely nice things for me — even when nobody else was around to see it.

He has his rea­sons for doing what he does and how. It’s not my habit to make apolo­gies on another’s behalf, nor to sug­gest that another should be apolo­getic. I know of my Sensei only what my own expe­ri­ence has shown me, and this includes actions and ten­den­cies bet­ter and worse than any­thing I have heard from oth­ers. It’s on this expe­ri­ence that I base my beliefs, some of which will be revealed below.

From the Beginning

A few months past my sev­enth birth­day, and a few weeks into the sec­ond grade, my father took me to enroll in classes at the orig­i­nal Taido dojo, on Buford Highway in Doraville. We talked with Uchida for a while, and then my father signed some papers. A cou­ple of days later, I had my first class. I remem­ber Sensei taught me fudozuki and left me alone for a few min­utes to prac­tice. I punched and punched and punched for what seemed like for­ever, and then Sensei returned and told me I was doing it all wrong.

I think a lot of peo­ple in American Taido had a sim­i­lar first expe­ri­ence. Probably owing to his karate back­ground, Uchida was always a stick­ler for kihon. The pat­tern I remem­ber from my white-belt period cen­tered on doing lots of rep­e­ti­tions until we got some­thing right. At that time, children’s classes were a full hour, and at the end, we would all line up and “test” in front of Sensei one by one. Back then, we would often fail and have to try again. As the school grew and other stu­dents became black belts and instruc­tors, it was less and less likely to have Uchida teach us for an entire class, but he would always appear at the end to test us. Earning his approval was the most impor­tant part of practice.

After a few years, we had built up a large group of advanced chil­dren, so Sensei started a spe­cial class for us — “Top Gun.” Top-Gun was a half-hour longer than the reg­u­lar classes and included instruc­tion in Taido the­ory and lots of jis­sen prac­tice. For the first cou­ple of years, Uchida made a pri­or­ity to always teach this class per­son­ally. We loved him, and we were pretty sure he loved us back. Every week, he filled us up with all kinds of infor­ma­tion about Taido. Some of the arti­cles on this web­site are based on notes I took as a twelve-year-old in this Top-Gun class. No shit.

Looking back through the years, I’ve always been impressed by the absolute pre­ci­sion of sensei’s move­ment. He’s always been so strong and tough. I even remem­ber being some­what afraid of him at times. Even as he’s got­ten older, none of that strength and pre­ci­sion seems to sub­side. It’s almost funny some­times that he can go for months with­out appear­ing to prac­tice at all, and then out of nowhere, he’ll do some small thing that is just absolutely astound­ing to watch. I’ve come to the point where I can say I have some pretty strong tech­niques, but Sensei’s kicks amaze me still.

It’s that power to amaze which he seems to have really cul­ti­vated to an art form. Never con­tent to keep up with oth­ers, Sensei loves to dream big. He’s not really what you would call well-rounded — there are lots of peaks and val­leys with him. He likes to pick a few things that he can mas­ter and then work at mak­ing sure that nobody can come close to touch­ing him. He’s never afraid of fail­ure because he knows how to ensure suc­cess. Sensei once told me that, dur­ing his uni­ver­sity days when he had to com­pete with senior stu­dents to get noticed, he would some­times inten­tion­ally screw up to catch Shukumine’s attention.

Some Real-Life Lessons

All of that pre­ci­sion and strength notwith­stand­ing, Sensei is a sweetie. If you ever spend much time in his pres­ence, one of the first things you’re likely to notice is that he has a great smile, and he likes to use it. Speaking as some­one at whom he is some­times not-too-pleased, I have yet to spend more than a cou­ple of hours around him and not see it. Even when he’s pissed, he still man­ages to feel joy in what he does and see the humor in things. He even laughs at him­self being pissed. How can you not like that?

In fact, one of the great­est lessons I’ve learned form watch­ing Uchida has very lit­tle to do with how to kick or punch, or espe­cially flip (because let’s face it, he was never very good at tengi). It’s how to use charisma. If any­one I know can turn up the charm to win peo­ple over, it’s Mits Uchida — the man prac­ti­cally sweats charm.

I’ve tried hard (with vary­ing degrees of suc­cess) to learn how to make peo­ple love me the way they love him. Sometimes, I’d be teach­ing English to a group of usu­ally quiet and bored-looking junior high school stu­dents, and I’d notice that they’re all look­ing at me intently with big eyes and bright faces, and I’d think to myself “don’t let go of what you’re doing now — you’ve got them! They’ll learn now!” and then it passed and I felt as if I was talk­ing to the wall again.

The abil­ity to use per­son­al­ity to reach peo­ple is impor­tant in busi­ness, which is no doubt where Sensei per­fected his skills, but it’s also vital in edu­ca­tion. I con­sider myself a teaching/mentoring type of per­son, and as a school­teacher, Taido instruc­tor, and fake big brother, I’m con­stantly work­ing to “reach out and touch some­one.” My per­son­al­ity clashes with some peo­ple, but it also makes my teach­ing style unique, and this ulti­mately leads to stronger rela­tion­ships with my stu­dents and more effec­tive prac­tices. I learned this entirely by watch­ing my teacher.

The art of win­ning peo­ple over is about more than sim­ply per­suad­ing peo­ple to sup­port you — it’s about cre­at­ing rela­tion­ships. Relationships work both ways — to lift each other up mutu­ally, as broth­ers and sis­ters. While I’ll admit that I some­times find it incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to coop­er­ate with Uchida, the give-and-take method has always been inher­ent my inter­ac­tion with him. I’ve cer­tainly found this process to lead me to greater accom­plish­ments, and I’ve made con­tri­bu­tions to var­i­ous things in which he takes pride. I guess we’re coop­er­at­ing after all.

I could also write about the take-no-shit-from-nobody atti­tude he’s taught me to employ when nec­es­sary (but he hates it when I use it on him). Or the fact that he has helped demon­strate to me that it’s OK to be paid for doing some­thing you love — that your career doesn’t have to be work. Or the gen­eros­ity he’s shown in help­ing me find ways to get by when I didn’t have much money to spend in col­lege. Or, or, or… I could prob­a­bly write a book about the things I’ve learned from my sen­sei, but you prob­a­bly wouldn’t be inter­ested in much of that…

“How much does he really know?”

OK, so after gush­ing about how much I’ve learned form Uchida inside and out­side the dojo, I’m going to totally change my approach and put forth an inter­est­ing ques­tion that I never thought to ask myself until very recently. Primarily, I want to ask “Just how much does Mits Uchida really know about Taido?”

I guess I should pref­ace this by say­ing that this notion was first brought to my mind in a con­ver­sa­tion I had with another Taido instruc­tor in early 2006. In essence, that instruc­tor said some­thing to the effect I would be return­ing to America know­ing more about how Taido is cur­rently prac­ticed than any other American Taidoka. In this case, the con­text and word­ing aren’t very impor­tant. The mes­sage was: you now know more than your teacher.

One the one hand, I had just never really con­sid­ered that I would ever amass more Taido knowl­edge than Sensei (though he’s always told me that I even­tu­ally should sur­pass him — in fact he used to be very explicit in stat­ing that it was my job to be bet­ter than him). Part of me thought “Well, yeah, I guess that’s pos­si­ble. After all I know many more of the hokei and am more famil­iar with the cur­rent ver­sions of the tech­nique and judg­ing meth­ods, etc, etc” Yet another cor­ner of my mind just said “Huh?” And I sat there, stu­pid, not know­ing how to respond (and any­one who knows me real­izes the true rar­ity of me being at a loss for words).

Now that I’ve had some time to con­sider this instructor’s remark, I think I can decode it a lit­tle bet­ter. Firstly, I want to point out some of the fac­tors that may fuel such an argu­ment. Let’s start with Uchida’s days as a Taido student.

Looking at the Taido time­line, we can clearly see that my teacher spent only a short time study­ing Taido under an instruc­tor. He joined the Taido club at what later became Tokyo International University (already hav­ing earned a karate black belt) in 1968. In 1970, he took a schol­ar­ship to Williamette University in Oregon. That’s only two years. After grad­u­at­ing American col­lege (not Williamette, but Dana, in Nebraska), he returned to Japan and took one more year to earn an eco­nom­ics degree and Shukumine’s bless­ing to teach Taido in the States. So let’s call that three years of for­mal Taido instruction.

Now that’s not very long, and I’ve heard a few folks claim that this dimin­ishes Sensei’s level some­what. These peo­ple obvi­ously don’t know Mits Uchida very well. I have never met any­one who is as focussed, dri­ven, or achievement-oriented. When Uchida decides to do some­thing, it hap­pens. Simple as that. I’ve seen him work­out (not in class — his real work­outs) and can attest that he holds him­self to some seri­ously high stan­dards. When 20-year old Mits came to America with three years of for­mal Taido instruc­tion behind him, he had the goal to be the best Taido teacher in the world. I’m not com­fort­able with superla­tives, but he is damn good.

As for not know­ing some of the hokei — well of course. Most of the hokei in Taido had not been cre­ated when Sensei was a stu­dent, and some of them were done in dif­fer­ent forms. In recent years, American Taido has begun to incor­po­rate the –in hokei into the cur­ricu­lum. I have taught jin­sei to a few stu­dents, and may some­day teach the remain­ing –sei and –mei hokei. It’s not nec­es­sary for Sensei to be a hokei ency­clo­pe­dia. Part of the rea­son for hav­ing a team is that we can each fill in the gaps in each oth­ers’ knowledge.

When I tested for 4dan, I per­formed a hokei that Sensei did not know very well. He had learned it but never really prac­ticed it. However, he would have been able to tell if I had screwed it up. Genius math­e­mati­cians don’t need to mem­o­rize for­mu­las — they under­stand the prin­ci­ples that make them work and apply them. I feel the same goes for mas­ter mar­tial artists, and Uchida is one. He under­stands the prin­ci­ples on a level that very few instruc­tors can match.

Still don’t believe he’s that big of a Taido expert? You don’t have to. His sta­tus was clearly con­ferred by the Boss (not Springsteen, Shukumine). The way I see it is this: if Shukumine thought that Mits Uchida had the knowl­edge and skills of a Taido 7dan, then who the hell am I to argue? Nobody. While I may dis­agree with Shukumine’s the­o­ries on cer­tain details, I’ve not achieved a level of ego­tism at which I feel I under­stand what con­sti­tutes Taido abil­ity bet­ter than it’s creator.

So how much does he know? Quite a bit. Sensei once laughed off his lim­ited hokei knowl­edge, say­ing “How many hokei do you need, any­way?” (The answer depends on how you arrange your cur­ricu­lum. In a kihon-based school like the American HQ, you really don’t need so many forms). Sensei’s done the work, and he knows plenty of stuff that you can’t learn by just watch­ing a cou­ple of videos. There’s a lot he doesn’t know, but what he does know is gold.

Do I know more than my sen­sei? About some things, yeah. I’m a nerd, so I know a lot of stuff about a lot of things, but these are mostly things he doesn’t need to know. Anyway, I’m still learn­ing from him all the time. So I guess we both know more — it just depends on the topic.

Grinding seeds

One thing Uchida has always made clear to most of his stu­dents through the years is that he basi­cally requires a cer­tain amount of ass-kissing. He has expressed this in dif­fer­ent ways at dif­fer­ent times, but there has always been a sense that the pri­mary objec­tive of stu­dents should be to win Sensei’s approval rather than meet­ing any par­tic­u­lar per­sonal goals. I vividly remem­ber one Top-Gun class lec­ture in which he explained to us that in Japan, kiss­ing up to some­one was given a euphemistic ges­ture resem­bling grind­ing sesame seeds in a bowl. This is a ges­ture I’ve seen him make sug­ges­tively many times.

Many mar­tial artists in var­i­ous styles lament the preva­lence of pol­i­tics in an activ­ity that should by all rights be free of petty jeal­ousies and such. But after all, mar­tial arts are based in com­pe­ti­tion, and there will always be those who, fail­ing to make the grade in one area or another, will attempt to make up for it by mak­ing oth­ers look smaller. Uchida’s love of flat­tery invites pol­i­tics at a fun­da­men­tal level. In fact, this is a clas­sic Japanese trait and is per­va­sive in “tra­di­tional” mar­tial arts schools.

Perhaps all of this helps explain why so few peo­ple man­age to remain active in Uchida’s orga­ni­za­tion for longer than a cer­tain amount of time. Knowing my own ten­dency towards being opin­ion­ated, I used to worry about my future in Taido. American Taido has had a lot of full-time instruc­tors in its 30+ year his­tory, and very few of them are still on speak­ing terms with Uchida. To date, no American black belt has ever spent any sig­nif­i­cant time train­ing Taido in Japan and returned home to any sort of wel­come at the American headquarters.

Sensei’s single-mindedness causes fric­tion when oth­ers dis­agree with his vision (or form any visions of their own). Honestly, he doesn’t have the great­est track record when it comes to deal­ing with con­flict­ing opin­ions. In fact, the word “tyran­ni­cal” comes to mind when I focus on the neg­a­tive, but I know he doesn’t see it that way.

Sole Proprietorship

To my teacher, main­tain­ing con­trol is pri­mary. This is because he sees it as the only way to main­tain qual­ity — and the qual­ity of Taido stu­dents is on aver­age very com­pet­i­tive with stu­dents of other tra­di­tional mar­tial arts. Some stu­dents even achieve great skill on a more objec­tive level. For Uchida, this is con­fir­ma­tion of his suc­cess. My chief argu­ment with him is that suc­cess­ful does not equal opti­mal. I feel that Taido could be more suc­cess­ful if we adjusted our meth­ods in cer­tain ways. Sensei doesn’t like peo­ple to talk about adjust­ing the way he does things.

For quite a while, a few years ago, the US Taido home­page was “under con­struc­tion.” It sat there for over two years with a pic­ture of Uchida, a phone num­ber, and the words “com­ing soon.” I’ve come to believe that this was the most accu­rate pos­si­ble rep­re­sen­ta­tion of American Taido. In American Taido, there is only one man who is allowed to make deci­sions, and that man is Mits Uchida. He’s said repeat­edly that his orga­ni­za­tion is not a democ­racy, and he car­ries the bur­den of being the one man in charge every day.

Though all of the lit­er­a­ture on man­ag­ing orga­ni­za­tions swears that del­e­gat­ing respon­si­bil­ity is a major key to suc­cess, American Taido lives or dies on the strength of Mits Uchida. He does del­e­gate the respon­si­bil­ity for teach­ing cer­tain classes and per­form­ing cer­tain tasks to oth­ers for short peri­ods, but the one thing he very sel­dom del­e­gates is author­ity. He doesn’t ever appear to rest.

But that’s what makes him who he is, and it’s a large part of what makes his school what it is. Every day, Sensei is there, doing what he does, the way he does it. In many ways, it’s inspir­ing to see the man still per­son­ally direct­ing every aspect of his school. I know that he’ll con­tinue to do so until he is no longer capable.