Skipping Shinsa

On June 11th 2006, many Japanese Taido black belts met in Ito, Shizuoka pre­fec­ture for the chance to be pro­moted to the next rank. The high-rank shinsa is held only once a year, and get­ting invited is the only way to test for 4dan or above in Japan. It’s also the only way to receive the ren­shi, kyoshi, and han­shi teach­ing cer­ti­fi­ca­tions, respec­tively for 4dan, 6dan, and 8dan instructors.

In 2005, two mem­bers of the Yokohama dojo passed 5dan and 6dan. At the time of this writ­ing, two of our instruc­tors are test­ing for 4dan and 7dan. I was also invited to attend the grad­ing, but I ter­mi­nated my application.

Why would I do such a thing?

First, I guess I should refer you to a few of my other arti­cles that have to do with mar­tial arts grad­ings and the belt/ranking sys­tem — check out this, this, and this. It should be pretty obvi­ous that I’m not enam­ored of the way these issues are cur­rently being han­dled in Japanese or American Taido. I’ve offered some ideas for improve­ment, but have yet to come up with what I believe to be a defin­i­tive solu­tion to the numer­ous prob­lems I’ve pointed out.

Nonetheless, if I’m going to be part of orga­ni­za­tions that employ a rank­ing sys­tem, I do want to con­tinue being pro­moted to higher and higher lev­els. I want to be care­ful to avoid giv­ing the impres­sion that I’m avoid­ing this shinsa to make some kind of polit­i­cal state­ment. Further, I don’t want to belit­tle any­one else’s grade in Taido. Though my deci­sion not to test did include con­sid­er­a­tions beyond my own per­sonal devel­op­ment, it was my own deci­sion, made in light of exam­in­ing my own values.

Let's start with those values:

  • My own devel­op­ment as a per­son and as a mar­tial artist
  • The devel­op­ment of my stu­dents as peo­ple and as mar­tial artists

I place the high­est pre­mium on my own devel­op­ment. This is a nat­ural thing to value, but I think many peo­ple over­look the obvi­ous when it comes to mak­ing big deci­sions. I like to think of myself as some­body who doesn’t mis­take the obvi­ous. I feel that my devel­op­ment as a per­son is the pri­mary con­cern of my life — the more I bet­ter myself, the bet­ter I can to any other thing I want to do. Just as Dr. Timothy Leary said that social intel­li­gence increase could be expo­nen­tial if pur­sued in earnest (because we would have smarter peo­ple study­ing ways to get even smarter), I believe that any improve­ment I make to myself improves my abil­i­ties to make other improve­ments to myself and any­thing else that needs improving.

That includes my stu­dents, which is not to sug­gest that I feel they are unde­vel­oped. But they obvi­ously would not engage in dif­fi­cult work for self-improvment unless they felt a real desire to make some sort of gain. Helping them achieve their own goals in Taido is almost as impor­tant to me as achiev­ing my own. This is because shar­ing some­thing you love is much more fun than doing it by your­self. I’m really hon­ored to have peo­ple choose me as one of their men­tors in their per­sonal devel­op­ment, and I have to take them into con­sid­er­a­tion in every choice I make.

Reasons to Test

Renshi Certification

Renshi in Taido equates to an instructor’s license. It used to be avail­able from 3dan, but now only 4dan or above qual­ify. We don’t use the ren­shi (or kyoshi or han­shi) des­ig­na­tion in America, partly because it was only a few years ago that we had more than one or two 4dan in our orga­ni­za­tion. In addi­tion, until Bryan and I opened up shop at Georgia Tech, nobody in the States taught out­side of the head­quar­ters school, mak­ing cer­ti­fi­ca­tion beyond ver­bal con­sent unnec­es­sary. Tom DeVenny and I are the only two instruc­tors in America who have ever received any kind of teach­ing cre­den­tial that extended beyond the door of the honbu dojo.

If I were to test for pro­mo­tion in Japan, I would have the option to reg­is­ter myself as ren­shi, and this would the­o­ret­i­cally give me autho­riza­tion to go any­where in the world and teach Taido. I would like to do this. In fact, test­ing for ren­shi was the orig­i­nal ratio­nale for even think­ing about shinsa. It was only a cou­ple of weeks ago that a few peo­ple told me that I may as well test for 5dan while I had the oppor­tu­nity. We don’t have any ren­shi in America. Uchida Sensei’s kyoshi is the only offi­cial teach­ing license in US Taido, so I fig­ured it might be cool if I were to obtain such cer­ti­fi­ca­tion as well.

Benefit to My Students

After all, boost­ing the head instruc­tor of a group has the poten­tial to boost all of the stu­dents in that group. Me hav­ing a higher rank and the ren­shi title might get my club some con­sid­er­a­tion in world Taido events. It would the­o­ret­i­cally earn me the bless­ing of Taido Honin to teach and test stu­dents. It may open a few doors for me in my attempts at Taido internationalization.

Multi-Color Belt

Sometimes, black is just a lit­tle bor­ing. Maybe this is why Uchida Sensei has shifted toward the giant block-font names and mul­ti­ple stripes on the black belts he gives out. I haven’t had more than one color on my belt (exclud­ing embroi­dery, and I absolutely refuse to wear a belt that has stripes on it) in almost fif­teen years. Outside of America, 5dan and above get to wear a fancy black/green belt that has both col­ors run­ning length­wise. They look pretty cool — or at least used to. Recently, Japan Taido is hav­ing some trou­ble with their uni­form sup­pli­ers, and the new belts (not to men­tion the hakama) look like crap. People often com­pli­ment me on my good-looking belt (which I had cus­tom made for myself), so maybe I should stick with that for now.

Novelty

I’ve never taken a grad­ing in Japan. It would have been some­thing inter­est­ing that I could have said I did.

I'm Good Enough

This is the most impor­tant rea­son. I’m very much good enough to be 5dan in Taido. I don’t always show this in the right ways to the right peo­ple, but I think this web­site offers a cer­tain amount of evi­dence that my pas­sion for and think­ing about Taido go at least a lit­tle beyond what most prac­ti­tion­ers exhibit.

Maybe I don’t always give the “cor­rect” answers about Taido the­ory, but it’s usu­ally not for lack of under­stand­ing. I do an aver­age of 15 hours per week of read­ing and research in fields related to Taido. I am involved in phys­i­cal explo­ration and prac­tice for at least a solid hour every sin­gle day. When I do some­thing that’s a lit­tle dif­fer­ent, there’s a rea­son. Taido is sup­posed to be evolv­ing, and I’m ded­i­cated to push­ing that enve­lope to the extremes. I think this is more impor­tant than play­ing it safe and copy­ing the Taido every­one else is doing.

I per­son­ally know a lot of ren­shi in Taido who are ter­ri­ble instruc­tors. I feel I should be offered every recog­ni­tion of my teach­ing efforts and skills in con­trast to those who are teach­ers in name, but not in action. I also know a lot of 5dan. Some of them are really good, and I would be hon­ored to be counted among them. Others of them are not very good at all, and I have just enough ego to admit that this both­ers me.

Setting an Example

Beyond the above, 4dan has some seri­ous kind of iner­tia. This seems to be true of all mar­tial arts. There seems to be some sort of almost grav­i­ta­tional force that holds mar­tial artists down to 4dan for extremely long peri­ods of time. Many instruc­tors just stop grad­ing at this point, even though they are actively teach­ing and prac­tic­ing. I can respect the rea­sons why they may wish to do this, because I too am extremely dis­il­lu­sioned with pol­i­tics that sur­round high-rank pro­mo­tions, but I’ve always looked at giv­ing up as a bit of a cop out. If more of us who actu­ally are qual­i­fied and actu­ally do prac­tice were to actively seek pro­mo­tion, it might do some­thing to change the sad state of the cur­rent rank­ing sys­tem for the better.

Reasons Not To Test

It's Silly Expensive

The test for any level above 3dan is almost $200 in Japan. That’s prob­a­bly con­sis­tent with what most mar­tial arts orga­ni­za­tions charge for advanced grad­ings, but there’s really no jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for that kind of price.

I’ve helped to arrange large events and track reg­is­tra­tions in American Taido for a very long time. Making some rough assump­tions about the trans­porta­tion costs of the exam­in­ers, the num­ber of peo­ple grad­ing, and the costs of the venue, I don’t see any rea­son why this grad­ing should cost any more than sixty or sev­enty American dol­lars. Karate rank­ing orga­ni­za­tions often cite the cost of “reg­is­ter­ing” ranks, but I could build a data­base for track­ing world­wide belt pro­mo­tions in about an hour, and my office has equip­ment that could repro­duce the cer­tifi­cates quite easily.

Actually, the fee was one of the rea­sons I con­sid­er­ing an attempt at 5dan. Since I am already 4dan, it seems ridicu­lous to pay that kind of money to test for 4dan again just so I could reg­is­ter for ren­shi. Speaking of ren­shi — that costs close to $300. For that price, I would want a half-day sem­i­nar on the­ory and meth­ods and some sort of printed mate­ri­als. I have attended hundred-dollar sem­i­nars and that have damn-near changed my life, but I’ve never paid $300 for a piece of paper before. Which brings me to my next point:

It's Just a Piece of Paper

Now some folks might dis­agree with me here. That’s fine. But I’m not try­ing to open a dojo in Japan, so a fancy cer­ti­fi­ca­tion in fancy kanji with a big red stamp does not do any­thing for me (and I can actu­ally read what all those squig­gles are sup­posed to mean).

The first time I thought about grad­ing in Japan, I was hav­ing a talk with Saito Sensei about some of the things I want to do in the future (specif­i­cally, open­ing more clubs in the States). He asked me if I was ren­shi, and I said “nope.” He told me that I should grade so I can teach, and I just took it at face value because I know that he likes me and wants to help me out. Thinking more deeply a few hours later, I real­ized what a strange rea­son that was to test. Especially con­sid­er­ing that I’ve been teach­ing inde­pen­dently for about ten years now. Certainly, my lack of ren­shi papers has not done any­thing to dimin­ish the qual­ity of my instruc­tion, as any­one famil­iar with the pro­gram at Tech can attest.

What Saito Sensei meant was that I would have the offi­cial cer­ti­fi­ca­tion from Taido Honin. Though I already have a nice cer­tifi­cate announc­ing my cre­den­tials to teach in America, I am not rec­og­nized by Taido Honin as a real instruc­tor. However, nobody in America rec­og­nizes Taido Honin as any­thing at all, so it’s not such a big deal (and I’m not writ­ing that to be snide — it’s just that they haven’t really done very much to make them­selves known in America). Even assum­ing some “moral” respon­si­bil­ity to be cer­ti­fied, do I really expect that I would receive any actual sup­port for my trou­bles? I have plenty of peo­ple who want to sup­port my Taido, so it’s really moot, but I seri­ously doubt that any­one from honin is going to be offer­ing me much help in the things I hope to accomplish.

Politics

The first issue that comes up is that, even though I was in Japan then, I wasn’t going to be for long. I’m still an American, and plan to do much of my Taido in America in the future. Everyone in Japan knows this, as does every­one in America. By cross-ranking I would be invit­ing all sorts of irrel­e­vant com­par­isons, ques­tions as to where my loy­alty lay (the answer: to myself and my stu­dents), and other stupidity.

Not to men­tion that there are a few peo­ple over here who don’t get along with my teacher very well. I would not like to be cre­at­ing a sit­u­a­tion in which they felt that I could be used as some sort of bar­gain­ing chip in nego­ti­a­tions with American Taido in the future. For that mat­ter, what do we need to nego­ti­ate about any­way? Why is rank­ing so fuck­ing polit­i­cal any­way? I don’t know, but most mar­tial artists who know any­thing will read­ily admit that any­thing above 4dan has very lit­tle to do with abil­ity and a lot to do with pol­i­tics. I work in the pub­lic school sys­tem, so I don’t need any more pol­i­tics when it comes to Taido.

Detriment to My Students

There’s the pos­si­bil­ity that my test­ing could have some neg­a­tive impacts on rela­tions between Japan Taido and American Taido. Since I have some great friends in Japan and oblig­a­tions to stu­dents in Atlanta, I don’t want to do any­thing that might make it dif­fi­cult for them to ben­e­fit from what I do. I don’t want to end up on anybody’s don’t-talk-to-this-guy list because I took some stu­pid test. I feel that my stu­dents have a lot to gain from my extended net­work of Taido con­tacts, so I want to work hard to main­tain and improve them.

If I fuck things up polit­i­cally in Japan, Uchida Sensei won’t have a lot of choice to have me as part of his orga­ni­za­tion — and that’s some­thing nei­ther of us wants. I can’t become a lia­bil­ity for him because it jeop­ar­dizes Taido for every­one in the States. Of course, I will always have the abil­ity to prac­tice and teach Taido, regard­less of what any­body else says, but I’d much pre­fer to do it in a way that ben­e­fits as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble. There is enough neg­a­tiv­ity in the world. If I can’t have my pro­mo­tion in a healthy and pos­i­tive way, I’m not inter­ested in testing.

Seeking Council

Man, I talked to a lot of peo­ple about this, and I was lean­ing toward test­ing until a cou­ple of days before the dead­line. Lots of Japanese black belts were behind me test­ing, includ­ing most of the guys who would have been eval­u­at­ing me. The orig­i­nal sug­ges­tion to go for 5dan came from some­one whose opin­ion I respect very much.

I sought advice from Negishi Sensei (as I often do about such mat­ters), and he told me pretty much what I could have expected: fig­ure out what’s best for you, and do that. He said I should con­sult Uchida Sensei (duh), but that I should make my own choice to do what’s best for myself, even if it meant going against Uchida. I thought about this.

When I called Uchida, he was refresh­ingly excited to hear from me, prob­a­bly because he had been plan­ning to test three of my stu­dents for shodan at the time. I told him that I needed some advice and explained the sit­u­a­tion, includ­ing the pros and cons I had deter­mined, as listed above (yes, even about the fancy belt). He told me to do what I wanted to do. He didn’t seem to have a prob­lem with the idea of me test­ing for 5dan (and he even men­tioned it before I got around to that part, which is actu­ally a very good sign…), and he seemed to think the ren­shi cer­ti­fi­ca­tion was viable. But he also warned me to remem­ber the polit­i­cal fac­tor, and told me to be sure that I was com­fort­able with the pos­si­ble con­se­quences that could arise if I were to test. I don’t mean any of this to sound as if it was deliv­ered in a threat-like man­ner — sen­sei gave the dis­tinct mes­sage that he would sup­port what­ever I chose do, but that I might want to think about how my stu­dents and friends might be affected as well. And I have to admit — that thought did sway my decision.

Soooooo...

Well, as I said at the begin­ning of the arti­cle, I didn’t test. I could have done so, and there would have been some pos­si­ble ben­e­fits, but there was a risk that I could cre­ate some seri­ous polit­i­cal ten­sion by grad­ing out­side of my own organization.

It’s really a shame that sit­u­a­tions like this arise, and I know some of my friends will argue that they only come up in Taido between Japan and America. Maybe they’re right, but I’m not so sure. What I know for a fact is that a big part of the polit­i­cal stuff is just ego crap that doesn’t inter­est me. Not at all. It didn’t in Japan, and it doesn’t in America either.

I still plan to some­day pass 5dan (and at least a cou­ple more lev­els after that) and pos­si­bly reg­is­ter an instructor’s rank, but nei­ther one is a big pri­or­ity to me at the moment. Especially since I don’t believe that the qual­i­fi­ca­tion cri­te­ria and exam­i­na­tion pro­ce­dures are indica­tive of the healthy and pos­i­tive recog­ni­tion of indi­vid­ual achieve­ments I would like to see replace the cur­rent belt/rank system.

So, in light of this expe­ri­ence, I will go back to the draw­ing board on my own solu­tions for a bet­ter sys­tem that will work for the high­est good of all in Taido. I hope that, in an easy and relaxed man­ner, we can begin to reor­ga­nize our art’s admin­is­tra­tion to respond fairly and appro­pri­ately to changes and shifts that meet the needs of all prac­ti­tion­ers. This, in lieu of the cur­rent hier­ar­chy (pyra­mid scheme) of senior author­ity being cen­tral­ized accord­ing to tra­di­tion in Japan, is one of my dreams for the future of Taido.

7 Responses to Skipping Shinsa
  1. Avid Taido Fan

    I am not sure if should con­grat­u­late you for reach­ing this decis­sion as I per­son­ally think that you should try for 4 dan. However, I do respect Your deci­sion. Just some thoughts though. Eventhough you have been teach­ing for a long time and prob­a­bly is very good at it, as Taido has a sys­tem for licen­ing(?) teach­ers (ren­shi, kyoshi and han­shi) why do most west­ern­ers make up their own sys­tem? I don’t say that the present sys­tem is the best, but build­ing a sys­tem that only bases on dan degrees dif­fers from the notion and under­stand­ing I have of japan­ese mar­tial arts in gen­eral and taido specif­i­cally. In Europe, as well as the US as you described it, the num­ber of ren­shi and kyoshi is very low. The result of this is that we don’t have enough exam­in­ers for keep­ing up the spread of Taido. I don’t say that we should have every­one get a title, but many peo­ple are like you and have prac­ticed for 15 to 20 years and still have no right to exam­ine stu­dents.
    I don’t think that ‘taido’ do ben­e­fit from peo­ple not tak­ing a test when they both have the expe­ri­ence and skills to do so. Moreover, tak­ing a test is (read should) not be equal to pass it, thus the mind to chal­lange one’s abil­i­ties is impor­tant for fur­ther devel­op­ment. I don’t believe that you actu­ally will be able to achieve a sim­i­lar chal­lange on your own.
    I just say ” go for it Andy, go for it!”.

  2. andy

    hon­estly, i wouldn’t have a prob­lem doing 4dan again except that it’s really expen­sive for a recog­ni­tion i feel i already have sur­passed. i’m near­ing the end of my tenure in japan, and i look at 50000 yen for shinsa and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and think “mov­ing expenses”. it is my inten­tion to test for ren­shi at some future point, but i will wait until i feel the time is right to take that test in con­nec­tion with a shot at 5dan.

    i like the idea of licens­ing teach­ers, but as i men­tioned in another com­ment, i don’t think it should be tied to rank. i’ve been teach­ing taido in var­i­ous capac­i­ties since i was 14 years old. i’ve also taught music, tutored sev­eral ace­demic sub­jects, and now teach at a pub­lic school. those fac­tors are not addressed by my belt level.

    the rea­son that west­ern­ers have had to cre­ate alter­nate rank­ing sys­tems is pre­cisely because the japan­ese sys­tem is based on a rank min­i­mum. the abil­ity to teach basic hokei is not reserved to 4dan and above, nor even to black belts. i have seen some green and brown belt stu­dents who are very good at teach­ing begin­ning stu­dents. given a usable cur­ricu­lum, i believe many 1kyu could suc­cess­fuly man­age and teach a club full of begin­ning stu­dents, pro­vided there is reg­u­lar super­vi­sion from a more-expert instructor.

    the fact that mar­tial arts have a cul­tural tra­di­tion in japan pro­vides an infra­struc­ture that we in the west do not have. it’s much eas­ier here for instruc­tors to find places to train, which makes it eas­ier to run a club. this allows them to keep train­ing, keep grad­ing, and keep improv­ing their cer­ti­fi­ca­tions. in japan, you don’t have to fly to japan to take an “offi­cial” shinsa. from every­where else in the world, you do, and that’s a dis­tinct dis­ad­van­tage. when you have a nat­ural dis­ad­van­tage, you look for ways to get around it. thus, every taido asso­ci­a­tion has a slightly dif­fer­ent system.

    i also know that there is a money issue. since the taido honin doesn’t seem to sup­port taido out­side of japan (and i mean sup­port, not show up at events), the stu­dents in other coun­tries won­der exactly why their rank cer­ti­fi­ca­tion costs so much. where does that money go? what do they get in return? i think that’s a major issue, in fact. money makes peo­ple start act­ing strange. in amer­ica, i know exactly where my money is going because i am often one of the peo­ple who helps decide how it is spent.

    how­ever, i do agree with you that we should seek to have more licensed instruc­tors and exam­in­ers in amer­ica, and since you men­tion it, in europe. i think that’s an excel­lent goal because it would allow us to expand more eas­ily. i also agree that taido suf­fers when peo­ple pass the oper­tu­nity to grade at the right time. i have one very good friend who has refused to move beyond 4dan for over 13 years now, despite everyone’s encour­age­ment to do so. i under­stand that it has lit­tle mean­ing to him, but i feel that he exem­pli­fies many of the qual­i­ties i like to see in an instruc­tor, so i feel he should grade. in the same way, i feel i should grade — just not right now.

    and amen to this: Moreover, tak­ing a test is (read should) not be equal to pass it, thus the mind to chal­lange one’s abil­i­ties is impor­tant for fur­ther development.

    i don’t want to pass if i suck. that’s one more rea­son not to test for 5dan yet. i haven’t passed my own 5dan test yet, so it would feel empty to me to pass an exter­nal one.

    I don’t believe that you actu­ally will be able to achieve a sim­i­lar chal­lange on your own.

    though it’s very dif­fi­cult to achieve this devel­op­ment in the absence of exter­nal mea­sure­ment, taido belt exams are not my only means of exter­nal mea­sure­ment. this sum­mer, three of my stu­dents will pass shodan. this is one goal i have been work­ing on for a very long time. next year, i am plan­ning to open two more uni­ver­sity taido clubs. that’s another goal i have. after accom­plish­ing these two things, the abil­ity to offi­cially grade stu­dents will become a much higher pri­or­ity to me.

    I just say ” go for it Andy, go for it!”.

    i thank you for that. rest assured that i am very much going for it. i’m quite pos­si­bly doing so in an odd way, but i’m going for it nonethe­less. i’m not skip­ping shinsa totally — i’m just skip­ping this one.

    again, thanks for the insight and encour­age­ment. i think what you’ve said here is impor­tant for any­one prac­tic­ing taido out­side of japan. i hope they’re read­ing closely…

  3. Avid Taido Fan

    Yes, the sys­tem in the west, based on var­i­ous fac­tors, is a very dif­fer­ent sys­tem from the Japanese. And, as you men­tioned, the money issue is a very impor­tant, yet del­i­cate, thing we have to over­come.
    At sev­eral times in life I have cho­sen to fol­low my heart instead of doing the ratio­nal thing, or fol­low­ing the stream as one might put it. However, being an “out­sider” (not being a mem­ber of the renshi/kyoshi/hanshi group) makes it very hard to cre­ate a fruit­ful con­ver­sa­tion with the peo­ple who actu­ally might be able to change things.

    I agree with you that the qual­ity of a teacher does not nec­es­sar­ily reflect his/her rank, and of course the oppo­site and it is very com­mon in the Japanese soci­ety that peo­ple with high ranks not nec­es­sar­ily are good teach­ers. Referees would be the same thing, I guess.
    I don’t have the solu­tion, but I think that we need to spec­ify what an instruc­tor (ren­shi) is sup­posed to be able to do. In Japan, as far as my knowl­edge reaches, there is no such edu­ca­tional sys­tem for taido, there was but it has not been updated recently. Other mar­tial arts might have that, but in gen­eral I guess it is not that com­mon at all. In the west, on the other hand, we tend to cre­ate cur­ricu­lums for what to achieve before reach­ing a cer­tain level and also we test our stu­dents, some­times maybe to a too far an extent. So the result is that we have a fairly large amount of black belts, often well qual­i­fied as teach­ers both when it comes to expe­ri­ence and knowl­edge to be ren­shis, and in Japan we have a large num­ber of ren­shis who have not got­ten a proper edu­ca­tion to be able to do high qual­i­ta­tive teach­ing.
    I don’t say that the level of black belts in the west is higher than the Japanese, as the Japanese have a lan­guage advan­tage which enables them to com­pre­hend vast infor­ma­tion about taido. And there are many very good instruc­tors out there too. However, when it comes to other dimen­sions of teach­ing, ped­a­gogy, 　phys­i­cal edu­ca­tion (how to warm up, stretch, build train­ing sched­ules, etc.) and sim­i­lar issues, the level of knowl­edge is not always as high among Japanese instruc­tors as it is among west­ern instruc­tors.
    My hope is that this change when inter-cultural com­mu­ni­ca­tion and exchange will increase and the pres­sure from out­side Japan will increase. So in order to get Your voice heard and rec­og­nized in Japan, thus enable a change, I think you will have to get your title. It doesn’t “license” you as a teacher, or even helps you become a bet­ter teacher maybe, but at least it gives you a proof that you are an accepted teacher of Taido in Japan and internationally.

  4. Taido Guy

    I have a cou­ple ques­tions and thoughts.…

    1) Who “tests” for these big pro­mo­tions? Some old Japanese guys who are try­ing to run Taido into the ground, while grasp­ing to keep con­trol of Taido by a thread?

    2) Why would any­one want such a pro­mo­tion from any­one other than Dr. Shukumine? I think the cer­tifi­cate is waste of a per­fect tree, which could have been a per­fectly good makiwara.

    3) Is hav­ing a bad shajo-geri (manji?) a requirement?

    4) Is per­form­ing exces­sive un-soku a phys­i­cal requirement?

    5) Does the phys­i­cal test require any­thing but Tengi or Tentai no Hokei?

    6) Is los­ing track of score dur­ing a WTC mactch part of the mem­o­riza­tion phase?

    7) Do you have to smoke 35 cig­a­rettes and drink 6 Liters of Whisky the night before?

    8) Are you allowed to kick and punch hard, or is that con­sid­ered a detriment?

    Andy, for­get about ShinSha, or Cha Cha Cha, or the dog and pony show.….you know what’s most important.….practicing, train­ing, teach­ing, train­ing, train­ing, cre­at­ing. Even Japanese know it doesn’t mean any­thing, its just an “enti­tle­ment”. Remember when you got your Sho-Dan????? Now that’s meaning!!!!!!!

  5. andy

    ok, then “taido guy” — i have some answers and some thoughts of my own…

    1) this time, some very good friends of mine were test­ing for big pro­mo­tions, as well as some folks i don’t know very well. while all of them are japan­ese, only a very few are over 35 years old. i don’t believe any of them are try­ing to run taido into the ground — of course i can only speak for those whom i know per­son­ally. since none of them cur­rently con­trol taido, i don’t feel that they are grasp­ing to keep con­trol of it.

    2) because taido shouldn’t die with shuku­mine. sure, we could just stop improv­ing, evolv­ing, and giv­ing each other recog­ni­tion, but i think we would all meet a very dis­ap­pointed saiko shi­han when we finally made it to taido heaven. i per­son­ally want “such a pro­mo­tion” from mits uchida. does that make my taido ille­git­i­mate? under­stand, i’m not inter­ested in fancy cer­tifi­cates to hang on my wall here, but i do have plenty of bet­ter things to do with my time than punch maki­wara. one of them is work­ing on devel­op­ing a more effec­tive cur­ricu­lum and eval­u­a­tion procedure.

    3) no. no, it isn’t. but if it were, i would be assured of a very high score.

    4) how much unsoku is exces­sive? i guess the nat­ural corol­lary would be “how lit­tle unsoku is ade­quate?” that’s kind of a case-by-case judge­ment to make. in this instance, we are spared such philo­soph­i­cal conun­dra, as no unsoku is required at all.

    5) the phys­i­cal test requires any one of the eigh­teen canon­i­cal taido hokei.

    6) since the high-rank shinsa is unre­lated to the judg­ing ranks, i wouldn’t imag­ine so. in any event, i don’t feel tour­na­ment judges should have to keep track of scores, as they should focus their com­plete atten­tion on watch­ing the matches and mak­ing good calls. there are court assis­tants assigned to keep track of points and warn­ings so the judges can con­cen­trate on per­form­ing their actual duties.

    7) usu­ally, the drink­ing comes after the test, but cig­a­rettes are almost a social require­ment for men in japan. you have to take account of your cul­tural bias when look­ing at the behav­ior of those in other coun­tries. japan is becom­ing more health con­scious all the time, but smok­ing remains pop­u­lar. how­ever, despite the remain­ing preva­lence of tobacco use, the aver­age japan­ese lives longer than the aver­age amer­i­can. in any event, most of the younger gen­er­a­tion of taidoka do not smoke, though most of them do engage in binge drinking.

    8) you are indeed allowed to punch and kick hard. these are only con­sid­ered a detri­ment if the can­di­date is attempt­ing to use power in lieu of finesse. since taido is about using sophis­ti­cated move­ments, some­times less power is desirable.

    i can for­get the cha cha, and i can for­get the dog and pony show. shinsa is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent to me. i can’t for­get shinsa because i’m not sat­is­fied with it. where you appear to be one of those peo­ple who enjoy ridi­cul­ing things you don’t like, i pre­fer to work on mak­ing improve­ments. though per­haps you were attempt­ing to be funny, your com­ments reveal more than a lit­tle bit­ter­ness. per­haps you would do well to read less talk, more rock.

    you say that prac­tic­ing, train­ing, teach­ing, and cre­at­ing are the most impor­tant things. i would argue that shinsa relates to each of these. in the inter­est of brevity, i’ll only dis­cuss teach­ing in this post. in most mod­ern con­cep­tions of ped­a­gogy, eval­u­a­tion is con­sid­ered extremely impor­tant. if we don’t test our stu­dents (and our teach­ers), we have no way of know­ing whether our meth­ods are effec­tive or not. since taido is a cumu­la­tive learn­ing process, there is a very real hier­ar­chy of knowl­edge, expe­ri­ence, under­stand­ing, and ass-kicking abil­ity. while i don’t believe the cur­rent rank­ing sys­tem aligns well with the actual hier­ar­chy, we can try to build a sys­tem that does.

    Even Japanese know it doesn’t mean any­thing, its just an “entitlement”.

    uhhh, yeah… i’ll refrain from giv­ing a ser­mon on “mean­ing” for now, but let’s be care­ful with our sweep­ing assump­tions and gen­er­al­iza­tions. many japan­ese peo­ple do think the shinsa means some­thing. some of them don’t think it means very much, but they want to make it mean more. i know a good many who are try­ing to make taido big­ger and bet­ter and have more mean­ing for more people.

    Remember when you got your Sho-Dan????? Now that’s meaning!!!!!!!

    ok — i can’t ignore your offen­sively exces­sive punc­tu­a­tion. you make a com­ment about exces­sive unsoku above and then use five ques­tion marks and seven excla­ma­tion marks for two sen­tences? i’d rather find out what too much unsoku looks like…

    nonethe­less, i do remem­ber my shodan test, and i do feel it was impor­tant. how­ever, to be totally hon­est, i was fif­teen then, so i can’t make any claims that i did any­thing spec­tac­u­lar. amer­i­can taido has come a long way since that time, and so have i. as a result, my shodan test is not the most mean­ing­ful event in my taido career. i think every­one cre­ates their own mean­ing for their expe­ri­ences, but i already wrote an arti­cle about this, so i’m not going to take it any fur­ther now.

  6. Taido Guy

    Andy,

    I think you took some of my state­ments per­son­ally, and responded a bit abra­sively. Your blog is inter­est­ing, and I wish more peo­ple would speak what’s on their mind openly as opposed to hav­ing either a “blue skies on a Sunday after­noon” view of Taido or “I’ll just accept get­ting hosed” view.

    –You and I both know that a select few black­belts are run­ning Taido into the ground now.
     – Makiwara is good prac­tice, and a lot of stu­dents should re-take it up because it trains your hands well when done right. Taido did not die with Shukumine at all…just don’t care for most of his replace­ments. There were much bet­ter folks IN Japan who I would gladly take a test from.
    –Unecessary unsoku use runs ram­pant now in many parts of the world, due to ridicu­lous rules that Dr. Shukumine never made/taught. Newer unsoku rules were made to fit the Japanese body and style of Jissen. Period.
    –Most Japanese would even admit that the focus on Tengi has spi­raled out of con­trol, to the point where out­siders look at Taido as gym­nas­tics. Its Not just my opin­ion, but many other mar­tial artists who have seen Taido tour­na­ments or videos tend to always have the same response. Its sad when a guy who doesn’t even punch on a flat plane or straight for that mat­ter can when a Hokei tour­na­ment at the high­est lev­els of com­pe­ti­tion.
    –Agreed, its not a Judges job to tally scores dur­ing a Jissen match. But it IS the head (chief) Judge’s respon­si­bil­ity to get the scores right through care­ful delib­er­a­tion when the final score is in question/confused. Not sup­posed to just make a quick deci­sion with­out con­sult­ing the other judge/and or scorer’s table.
    –I was try­ing to be funny on some other thoughts…oh well.
    –Finally, there are peo­ple who hold 4/5/6/7/8 degree blackbelts…and its a com­plete joke. Period. Because of some crazy crazy pro­mo­tions (or lack there of for many deserv­ing), the legit­i­macy of post SaikoShihan lead­er­ship is seri­ously ques­tion­able. I should also say there are some great higher degree black­belts too all over Europe and Japan, and are mov­ing Taido in the right direction.

  7. andy

    I think you took some of my state­ments per­son­ally, and responded a bit abra­sively. Your blog is inter­est­ing, and I wish more peo­ple would speak what’s on their mind openly as opposed to hav­ing either a “blue skies on a Sunday after­noon” view of Taido or “I’ll just accept get­ting hosed” view.

    and now let’s take a brief pause to remem­ber some of the pit­falls of text-based com­mu­ni­ca­tion… you are cor­rect, i took it per­son­ally, because i have some really good friends (go-out-and-hit-on-young-women-at-bars kind of friends) who also hap­pen to have high ranks in taido. i (and they) real­ize that there are some decid­edly awful “lead­ers” in the upper ech­e­lons of that taido hier­ar­chy. i also talk to some of those awful black belts and real­ize that they think they are doing things right. it’s hard to make a quick state­ment about that kind of stuff because we all have our strengths and weak­nesses (except me; i’m per­fect), and that’s exactly why we have orga­ni­za­tions and associations.

    any­way, i apol­o­gize for being abra­sive and thank you for clar­i­fy­ing your inten­tions. i under­stand that you we try­ing to be humor­ous, and in a dif­fer­ent mood, i may have found your post to be the fun­ni­est thing i had read since the last time i graded eng­lish exams. i really do appre­ci­ate good satire, but being as it’s almost absent from japan­ese cul­ture, per­haps i’ve lost my sense for it. besides that, you have to admit that there is a good share of “ironic” mask­ing going around these days when peo­ple have a sour-grapes reac­tion. any­way, i see where you are com­ing from now, and you bring up a cou­ple of inter­est­ing points that i’d like to address.

    re: some peo­ple run­ning taido into the ground
    not going to hap­pen. here’s the real­ity. these guys are too old to run taido into the ground, try as they may. we won’t let them.

    the truth is, the old guys are going to die. i don’t mean to be mor­bid, but they didn’t get to their cur­rent posi­tions by being the types of peo­ple to hand over the reigns or del­e­gate well. they will hold on to as much con­trol as they can until their cold, black hearts stop pump­ing, but then they will be gone, and we won’t have to deal with them any­more. granted, they have stu­dents, and they’ve been teach­ing these stu­dents that their way is the best way. some of the 30 — 50 set in japan has adopted the anti­quated and stu­pid ways of the “bad” teach­ers, but i’m not con­vinced that these peo­ple are totally sold on the dark side. let’s also not for­get that there are also some really great teach­ers who are doing won­der­ful things and try­ing to make taido the best it can be.

    over the past year espe­cially, i’ve been on a cam­paign of sorts, mak­ing as many friends as i can in taido. it’s been a lot of fun, and i’ve learned that there is hope for taido — even in japan. the guys who are a lit­tle younger and older than me in taido are pretty much all great peo­ple. yeah, there’s a cou­ple of nar­cis­sists and power-hungry wannabe tyrants, but they are the minor­ity. the future gen­er­a­tion of taido lead­ers is actu­ally very cool. i’ve been hang­ing out and get­ting to know them. we respect each other. we’re not going to let his­tor­i­cal pol­i­tics get in the way of our friend­ship and mutual love of taido. that’s a real com­mit­ment that we hope to expand by pro­mot­ing greater inter­na­tional exchange and friend­ship in our art.

    the other rel­e­vant con­sid­er­a­tion is that hier­ar­chies nat­u­rally sub­vert them­selves. the cor­po­rate model of busi­ness is find­ing this out more and more in amer­ica, and i think we’ll be see­ing more exam­ples in the mar­tial arts as more sites like 24fc, ktjw, and even taido/blog begin to pop up. as you said, peo­ple speak­ing their minds. read clue­train, and you’ll have an idea of what i mean by this. japan­ese taido got sucked into becom­ing a col­le­giate club­sport in order to build num­bers, and this has proven to be at odds with the stated objec­tives of out art. unfor­tu­nately, we haven’t have the means to hon­estly and earnestly pro­mote qual­ity taido. this is slowly but surely turn­ing around as the japan­ese col­lege ath­letes grad­u­ate and become mem­bers of soci­ety, and as non-japanese asso­ci­a­tions begin to com­mu­ni­cate more freely and cut the umbili­cus from japan taido.

    given the expec­ta­tion to do taido for at least 100 years, it’s easy for me to take this long per­spec­tive on things. while it may seem that taido is being muti­lated and destroyed right now, if enough of us who have higher inten­tions stick around, things will improve. the prob­lem in the past is that those who wanted to improve things couldn’t han­dle the pol­i­tics and gave up (i could give you a list). we’re get­ting to the point that we no longer have to quit taido when we have dif­fer­ent ideas.

    one other thing i want to briefly address is that you men­tion that the post-shukumine lead­er­ship is ques­tion­able. i couldn’t agree more, and many japan­ese taidoka are on our side as well. how­ever, i should point out that even shukumine’s lead­er­ship was ques­tion­able at times. one could look at gen­seiryu and get an idea of the kinds of messes he cre­ated there. shuku­mine played favorites and held out pro­mo­tions as car­rots on a stick at times. he was a bril­liant mar­tial artist, but per­haps not the great­est of man­agers. let’s not for­get that he grew up in pre-war japan and what that says about the ideas and atti­tudes that were instilled in him as a young man. keep in mind, i loved him and love what he had to say, but he also had flaws, made mis­takes, built ideas on false assump­tions and bad infor­ma­tion, had an ego, was very com­pet­i­tive, and was con­stantly being bom­barded with peo­ple call­ing him mas­ter and bow­ing and scrap­ing around him. just some things to consider.

    re: unsoku rules and other com­pe­ti­tion stuff
    ah, the ever-changing rules of jis­sen — a con­stant source of con­fu­sion and dis­il­lu­sion­ment for non-japanese stu­dents. yes, the japan­ese judges are con­stantly chang­ing the rules, and they tend to for­get to for­ward those memos out­side of their own bor­ders. that said, i think the rules regard­ing unsoku are almost nec­es­sary. actu­ally, they were designed to fix a few dis­tinct issues that arose with lower-level com­peti­tors. essen­tially, they are a patch (though we should really focus on solv­ing such prob­lems at their source — our meth­ods of teach­ing, prac­tice, and evaluation).

    what was hap­pen­ing is that peo­ple started get­ting black belts sooner than they had been. this isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing, but it results in peo­ple enter­ing com­pe­ti­tions with much less taido expe­ri­ence than before. these stu­dents were able to pass the tests to make shodan and above because those exam­i­na­tions con­sist of a multiple-choice quiz and a sin­gle hokei per­for­mance. young, ath­letic col­lege stu­dents could eas­ily focus on per­form­ing clean hokei and pass their shinsa. how­ever, they tend to be severely under­de­vel­oped in their abil­i­ties to apply taido as a budo. par­tic­u­larl, they have learned to mimic the forms, but don’t under­stand the sub­tleties of appli­ca­tion. this was most obvi­ous in their use of unsoku to con­trol dis­tance. just so i don’t sound as if i’m pick­ing on the japan­ese col­lege clubs, we in the states have also have prob­lems learn­ing to use unsoku with finesse instead of merely forc­ing our oppo­nents with strength (not that strength is bad — but it isn’t always the best answer).

    so some rules were changed and oth­ers were newly cre­ated to “encour­age” bet­ter unsoku. instead, they have made things worse because they require com­peti­tors to almost pan­tomime unsoku (what you call exces­sive unsoku) instead of sim­ply using the most effi­cient and effec­tive move­ment for the sit­u­a­tion. it actu­ally reminds me very much of when i had to take my dri­ving test over here: you can’t just look in the mir­ror — you have to turn your head and show that you are look­ing so the exam­iner can see it.

    and now, we have sim­i­lar things hap­pen­ing with unshin. of course, i shoudl be sure to point out that the genkaku (flip­ping around in the cor­ner) rule was shukumine’s idea. since it is so easy to dom­i­nate a phys­i­cal bound­ary with strength or size (and let’s not for­get that shuku­mine specif­i­cally intended for these to be non-factors in taido), he decided to make things more inter­est­ing by mak­ing the more-agressive player allow the cor­nered player to escape. in essence, genkaku was intended to make things fairer and encour­age the use of unshin. the lat­est evo­lu­tion of the rule allows con­tin­u­ous tech­niques to be used instead of unshin, which i think is a step in the right direc­tion as far as fair­ness is concerned.

    i have only attended one world cham­pi­onship in taido, and i don’t know specif­i­cally what inci­dent you refer to with the main judge screw­ing up the scores or mak­ing a hasty and incor­rect deci­sion. how­ever, it hap­pens. it hap­pens all the time, and that sucks. it hap­pens in amer­ica too. last year, at our 30th anniver­sary tour­na­ment, i was actu­ally embar­rassed by the judg­ing at a cou­ple of points. but that’s the nature of judg­ing com­pe­ti­tions — it’s sub­jec­tive, and the judges are set up as infal­li­ble, though they are every bit as human as the next guy.

    i know what you mean about about the focus on tengi and unshin. the rea­son it has been so blown out of pro­por­tion is that it was one of shukumine’s favorite ideas and one of the ones he was push­ing near the time of his death. i think it’s great fun and has a world of applic­a­bil­ity (and have even writ­ten a short arti­cle about it), but i hate how it is abused for its own sake.

    re: maki­wara
    i don’t do it; i don’t advise it. it can be great prac­tice if done right, but so few peo­ple do it right (and i’m talk­ing about peo­ple who have been hit­ting them for twenty years or more). there are bet­ter ways to learn punch­ing mechan­ics for most peo­ple, like hit­ting a heavy bag (which most peo­ple also do totally incor­rectly). as a musi­cian, have a pol­icy about doing things which could cause me to destroy any part of my hands. how­ever, under the right cir­cum­stances, i could prob­a­bly be per­suaded to teach cor­rect maki­wara train­ing to a select group of stu­dents. for most stu­dents though, the lure to prac­tice poorly is too strong when it comes to train­ing aids that pro­vide feed­back — they want to get feed­back that looks pos­i­tive more than they wish to actu­ally pre­fect their technique.

    I should also say there are some great higher degree black­belts too all over Europe and Japan, and are mov­ing Taido in the right direction.

    and that’s the rea­son to be opti­mistic. you prob­a­bly wouldn’t be too sur­prised to hear that stu­dents in japan (and else­where) express sim­i­lar con­cerns regard­ing amer­i­can taido. most of their argu­ments are quite sim­i­lar to the ones you present, but the focus is some­what shifted. i always tell them the same thing: be opti­mistic — there are good guys and bad guys, and con­trary to what dark hel­met says, the good guys do usu­ally win. bad guys have a bad habit of either giv­ing up or self-destructing.

    though i may get passed up for pro­mo­tion by lesser taidoka, i’m one of the good guys, and most of those lesser black belts have the good sense to real­ize it. despite my “low” rank, i often have 5th, 6th, and 7th degree black belts ask­ing me for infor­ma­tion, instruc­tion, or advice about taido. at first, this made me feel a lit­tle depressed, but then i under­stood that it’s actu­ally a huge upside that they know to seek appro­pri­ate coun­sel. i take it as a reminder that, as i get older and move up the ranks, i’ll never be immune to fal­la­cious logic and faulty the­ory. as much as i work to teach my stu­dents the things i’ve learned, i have to stay open to learn from them when i’m either wrong or just clue­less. if more of us hold that idea, then we will even­tu­ally out­num­ber those who are cre­at­ing a neg­a­tive vibe in taido. that will indeed move us all in a bet­ter direc­tion for the future.

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