Tuesday hugues

Our friend and colleague jûgodan Hughes was awarded the gold medal of the Bujinkan last Tuesday at the Ayase Budôkan.

The Bujinkan gold medal is an award given by Hatsumi sensei to students of quality. In the past it was often awarded for organizing a taikai; today it is a way for sensei to thank his most committed students for their hard work and improvement and is often given to the jûgodan.

With mine received last century ( ), this is the third medal awarded by Sensei to a Frenchman.  Four other received the gold medal on the same day, including my friend Darren (the Australian Bruno).

Congratulations and thank you Hugues to deserve it!

Omedetô!

golden ratio

(version Française)

The last post on “3=5” generated a lot of comments towards the possible misinterpretation of numerology. Two friends added their comments, Jan from Belgium on this blog and Jean, one of my students committed a nice text on his dôjô blog (in French).

Their general idea is that: “you can say anything with numbers and find esoteric significations for everything”. The same idea is very well demonstrated by Umberto Eco in his book: “Foucault’s pendulum” where three friends play with numbers to prove that some Machiavellian plan to rule the world is going on.

But to illustrate that, read the following:

• I am getting close to being 51 years old. To this day I lived exactly a total of 18,608 days,
• My size is 175,5 cm,
• I trained martial arts more than 40 years (exactly 40.309 years),
• I discovered the bujinkan after turning 25,exactly at the age of 25.220.

When I add 40.309 + 25.220 I find: 65.529, I multiply this by my size in cm 65.529 x 175.5 the result is 11500.3395.

Now when I divide the number of days I have been living by this result i.e. 18608 / 11500.3395  the new result I find is the golden ratio of 1.61803 famous in geometry and esoterism!  After all maybe am I the reincarnation of the emperor Jimmu (神武天皇)?
(more on the golden ratio HERE).

My point when I wrote the “3=5″ was simply to help the bujinkan practitioner to solve an apparent contradiction in the names of the techniques used daily in our classes. But remember that sensei is often playing with numerology.

As always with him this is not WYSIWYG but WYSIRWYG (what you see is rarely what you get).

Kyojitsu tenkan hô 虚実転換法

Here is the picture of the 4 calligraphies by sôke when he decided to change the name into Yûro Shi Tennô Taikai.

Each one bears the new name and the name of the beholder. Here from left to right: Arnaud, Pedro, Sven, Peter. Painted by Hatsumi sensei in August 2009.

I was surprised when he called me and did the four calligraphies in front of me. Good memory!

 Tachi has various meanings depending on the writing:

Think about it when listening to sensei…

(www.kanjidict.stc.cx)

Today Noguchi sensei did the first morning class and he taught us parts of the koto ryû. Then it was the regular class with sôke but as he had some obligations, I was honoured by Noguchi sensei to begin the teaching.

This is not the first time it happens to me on Sundays but I always find it strange when it happens.  When I remember my first classes here in Japan more than 20 years ago (no Honbu dôjô at that time) I  measure the long path I have been following since then. Back then, I would never have suspected that the young man I was then, would learn so much on how to become a true human being. What Hatsumi sensei is teaching in his budô is not a set of old fighting techniques but really a way of Life that transforms you more than you think. As he said yesterday night we have to behave as members of the samurai class, the upper layer of the Japanese feudal society.

Our actions should be guided by the code of chivalry. Today during the calligraphy session, I asked him to write “chivalry” and I got “shinobi” … I don’t think he made a mistake. He is teaching us through mysterious ways.

During the break, he told me that we (jûgodan) have to follow him and walk by his side as long as we can and do what he asks  instead of thinking too much by ourselves.

Being a sensei he is guiding us as far as possible, and the closer we are to him the further we can go. This is, he said, what he did with Takamatsu sensei.

I updated the website. I’m sorry that all the new news from Budoshop’s new releases occupy the first pages, it is because the post dates all was today on the feed (this is a BUG !). From now on the newest articles should show up in order.

I have also noted that the SuperfeedEN had a lot of double (tripple even) postings, this should be fixed now. If you subscribe to both http://bujinkan.me/feed/ and http://feeds.feedburner.com/SuperfeedEN rss feeds you will get double postings. First one is less, the SuperfeedEN also includes Kutaki, Bujinkan Youtube videos (be warned) and more…

If you can’t see the video clip above, turn off your adblocker, and allow flash. Find more videos like this on Budoshop

Click on the button on the right side to pay and download this movie. Payment of $8.99 is through PayPal and download is done from Payloadz. You will get instructions after you pay how to download this movie.

Buy this DVD at Budoshop.se

Shortly after his second Japan trip this year training with Soke and the Shihan, he held this seminar. This video contains Taijutsu techniques with variations including the Hanbo (short staff). Also Hanbojutsu basics with Taijutsu applications. You can see how similar the Taijutsu techniques can be done with a weapon, and how easy it is to do a weapon technique without a weapon.

This movie was filmed June 27′th in 2009 at Kaigozan Dojo. This training was taught by Mats Hjelm, Bujinkan Shihan Kugyo Happobiken.

NOTE! The instructions is in Swedish, but there is not so much talk but more action.

This is a movie file optimized for iPod and iPhone and any other device that can handle standard H.264 videos. Import the file to iTunes and sync it to your iPod or iPhone.

On a Windows PC you can watch it in iTunes or Quicktime player (these programs is available for free on apple.com. VLC is another good program that can play these files.

480 x 272 pixels
H.264, AAC
Bitrate 942
70 minutes
450 Megabytes
Chapter markers

Click on the button on the right side to pay and download this movie. Payment of $8.99 is through PayPal and download is done from Payloadz. You will get instructions after you pay how to download this movie.

Sorry for not posting anything for a while. The trainings here in Japan is great, at least for those who have been training for a while. For beginners it might be hard and difficult. It is not said right out but I guess it’s expected that you know the basics well before you come to training in japan. There is plenty of good teachers everywhere, somewhere around 150 “true” master instructors in Bujinkan Dojo. You don’t need to go to Japan for good basic training if you are under 4′th dan!

Soke says that it is time for us to throw away the basics. He said we should throw away Sanshin no kata, Kihonhappo and everything else we know at the moment. This reminds me of a famous story about a zen master, I will quote the story from memory (so please don’t take it literally)…

Once an experienced samurai visited a zen master and said that he knew everything about the martial arts, but he have not yet reached enlightenment. So he is coming here for advice about how to reach it. The zen master offered him to sit down and have a cup of tea and talk about this. He put a cup on the table and started to pour into the cup. The cup was filled but the master kept pouring. The samurai said, can’t you see that the cup is already full?
The master said yes, and it is the same about you! You have to empty the cup (mind) before you can fill more into the cup. The samurai understood and later on finally reached enlightenment.

This is the meaning of 器 UTSUWA. It can mean a bowl, vessel or container. But it can also mean ability, capacity or caliber. When you have learnt all the basics and all the techniques there is the cup will be full. In order to pass beyond this stage you need to empty the 器. See other posts about the theme of this year and 才能魂器 (sainou kon ki / sainou tamashi utsuwa).

Everytime you go to training you should throw away everything you know, “empty the cup”. Then eagerly try to take everything in like a sponge with a playful and artistic kind of mind. This is the 極意 GOKUI essential point passed on through many generations in Gyokko-ryu that we study in Bujinkan Dojo. Keep the mind of a three year old kid that want to learn everything. Even if you think you know everything (see my previous essay) throw it away. The one who gives away everything has it all.

Keep this in mind when training. Also keep in mind that there is 20 years of 面 omote-training and then 20 years of 裏 ura-training. I might come to this in a later post.

The theme of this year is the rope. The rope can be used to describe many things…

The rope is flexible, it has no static form. It change form depending on circumstances. We should strive to be the same in our Taijutsu.

The rope can tie your weapons together, it can hold things together. When you use the rope for tying things together you should make the knot very easy to release, in a way that you quickly can release everything and free the rope. In Taijutsu, use the same principle. You can tie the opponent up, but you should be able to quickly get free. For example the ever so popular jujidori armlock from judo and MMA cage fighting is not it.

The rope can be used as a net, or linked to many things. Like the synapses in your brain, or cables between the internet routers. If you need to use a weapon in Taijutsu you know how to get it and use it without thinking. Because you already made a whole system where everything is the same. You don’t need to think because everything is already linked by the synapses.

Also you can psychologically tie up your opponent in Taijutsu as if you really had a rope in your hands. If you belive it strongly, do it as if you had an invisible rope. The opponent might feel trapped and confused… maybe!

then you can spend more time on training, I will explain it further down.

If you subscribe to our RSS Feeds, please change them to the following feed instead. You gain a lot more features, you can mark, share, e-mail and more, and it looks better to.
http://feedproxy.google.com/SuperfeedEN (English version)
http://feedproxy.google.com/SuperfeedSE (Swedish version)

Some of you might wonder what this RSS/Syndication and stuff means. Well read on…

Do you recognize yourself?
You are interested in Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu (I assume that since you you found this message), and spend quite a lot of time on internet going to different web sites searching for new postings. Some web sites is difficult to find the newest postings, you have to log in and after one or many clicks you find something you think you haven’t read, maybe you already read it? It is very easy to miss something interesting, because the lack of features on the web site (search function for example), or because the interesting stuff was posted on a website you don’t know about. Maybe this is why you google for new web sites. Maybe you stopped doing this because it takes too much time.

Well this is the old way, there is a much better way, it is called RSS (Really Simple Syndication), to put it simple is like subscribing to one or many newspapers. What you need is something that can read feeds (the news papers). I personally have a Google account and use the Google Reader. With that I can access all my feeds from any computer and phone (see the screen dumps below). I’m not bound to one computer to do this.

How it looks on my computer

on the iPhone

There is many other ways to do it, there is many different readers (Aggregators), I like the google one because I’m not dependent of which computer or device I must use. I can use any device with an internet connection and log in to my account (I mostly use the iPhone on the bus, subway or any time I chose). As you can see on the screen dumps I subscribe to several other feeds to. I only to go to the web site if the content I read interest me enough.

Note 1. It is completely up to the web master of the original feed if the content is web optimized (text formatting, pictures etc), and if the whole article can be read. We can only forward what we get, so don’t complain to us because you can only read the first five words on the Kutaki channel. Just click on the header link to go to the original web site if it interest you.

Note 2. We took the freedom to add small google ads at the bottom of each post. You will hardly notice them after a while. If you click on them you are sponsoring our web sites and work.

Note 3. In the subject header the [brackets] indicate what web site it originates from, our script remove the “www” and takes the first twelve or so characters up until the first “.”, when you opened the post the subject is always linked to the original posting.

My shared items

When I find something I think is good, I click “share” on my reader, then it will be posted here. You can also subscribe to my picks, articles that I have read and I think is good.
Note that there will be a lot of unrelated stuff (not only Bujinkan).