I've been binging on YT self-defense videos lately. I get into this phase it seems once every few years. Anyway, there's lots of "bullshido" out there and it's made me think that it's worthwhile to jot down some basic thoughts regarding unarmed self-defense.
In the post-UFC era, there's a new martial arts myth that has become widespread and it is this: traditional martial arts are useless and the only way to learn practical self-defense is to join an MMA gym. Now, there's no denying that many of the traditional martial arts had become (and still are, in many ways) loaded under pointless and useless "forms", the stuff that Bruce Lee often decried. But the counter-point to this true observation is that (a) it's not completely true of virtually any traditional martial art (there are real insights in most of them) and (b) there are martial arts that have retained an almost completely practical orientation -- two obvious examples are traditional boxing and Judo, just to name two that should be fairly uncontroversial.
Part of the problem is that we often don't apply reasonable criteria when evaluating a martial art. The traditional Japanese martial arts are an excellent case-study because they have this enormous corpus of obviously practical and effective techniques, but often mixed with inexplicably elaborate and "flowery" motions and kata. Why are they so weird, why can't they just, you know, stand up and
fight, like men? As with all such questions, the truth is usually subtler than any answer that can be given in the 5-10 second average attention span of the American TV watcher.
As an external observer, one of the most infuriating martial arts to me is Aikido. I desperately want to love this martial art. It's so beautiful. Its practical applications are obvious... it shares in common almost all of the traditional jiu-jutsu throws you will find in the Judo canon. Of course, a given throwing technique in Judo will be much sharper, tighter, and more athletic than its counterpart in Aikido practice. This is a result of the pedagogical differences between Judo and Aikido. In Judo, techniques are canonized and perfected through kata but students learn to apply them realistically in more-or-less "all-out" sparring sessions (randori). Aikido also has randori but it is a "black-tie affair" compared to Judo's intense scrapping sessions that share more in common with a round of boxing sparring than with the dance-like movements of Aikido.
Notably, both of these arts trace their roots back to traditional Japanese martial arts. I am not a historian of Japanese martial arts (or any other tradition of martial arts) but I do understand that the Samurai were the primary "consumers" of martial training in Samurai-era Japan. The Samurai bear more than a passing resemblance to the medieval knights of feudal Europe who were, of course, a professional military class. A common misconception is that there are no European martial arts. This is a silly popular American notion that arose in the post-TV martial arts movies era. Asian martial arts evolved a certain kind of "flourish" that, perhaps, is not present as much in the European styles of fighting (whether armed or unarmed). But that's not the result of any lack of sophistication in fighting arts, it's the result of very practical factors. A cannon with a harder barrel could fire a projectile at higher velocity and demolish thicker castle walls. Arms market investment in Europe was driven less by how much more effective the common fighter could be made than by advancements in materials science and other technological factors that would result in victory at the points where victory mattered most. By contrast, in Japan, the pace of technological advancement in the Samurai era was much slower than in Europe during its feudal era. Investment in making better fighting
men, therefore, made a lot more sense.
And this insight, I think, solves part of the mystery of the sometimes highly floral nature of certain Asian martial arts as against their European counterparts which seem stolid and grossly understated by comparison. Did the Europeans have punches? Kicks? Basic throws/sweeps? Chokes? Locks? Yes to all of these, and they elaborately developed the arts of unarmed techniques, especially for dealing with the problems of disarms, avoiding disarms and recovering from accidental disarms (there are even colored medieval picture-books illustrating various moves that were in practice at the time... very practical and effective stuff!) But if they were so good at this stuff, why didn't it turn into an artsy-art as it did in Asia? The answer (IMO)?
Marketing and advertising.
One of the reasons I find Aikido (and/or Wing Chun) so irresistibly fascinating from the armchair is that it's just beautiful. It's like dancing... but where the other guy gets his arm broken in the end. Amazing to watch. But why did these arts become so visually appealing in the first place? Well, think about this from the point-of-view of a flourishing market for combat training for the Samurai class. You not only had to be effective, you also needed to pay the light bill (candle bill? lantern bill?). One way to do that was through competitions (which were more like showdowns, in those days, than like sports) and the other way to do that was through walk-ins. You know the old joke that starts, "A Samurai walks into a dojo..." ... actually, I don't know any joke that starts like that, but you get the picture. If your training was visually appealing, there's a good chance you would attract walk-ins to join and learn. Being a competitive market, these effective
marketing techniques would tend to spread, as well as the effective combat techniques.
But this still doesn't quite get us all the way to explaining why Europeans -- who also had a flourishing market in combat training to the nobility and their fighters -- don't have the Asian "flourish" in their martial arts. The second puzzle piece -- once again, IMO -- is the difference in the European and Asian views of the human body. For most Europeans in the Christian era (until the development of modern medicine), the body was this terrifying blob of mystery and weakness, prone to sudden failure without explanation or cause. Some Europeans rarely, if ever, practiced basic hygiene or bathing during these times. The Asian view of the body, however, was much more advanced in that era. Eastern medicine was certainly not as capable as modern Western medicine, but it was light-years more advanced than Western medicine at that time. The body was viewed as a wholesome and integral part of the self, not as "the enemy of the Spirit", "the playground of the Devil" and so on, as devout European Catholics would tend to view "the flesh." Thus, adding flourish to a martial art would have tended to act as the
opposite of good advertising in that era, in Europe. It would have been seen as childish or silly. In fact, the only place that a European would likely have had any exposure to Eastern style of fighting would have been in the traveling circus / carnival. Foreign stunt performers capable of bizarre feats (such as flips, high kicks, and so on) were featured in such shows precisely because they were for entertainment value only. Perhaps the single best illustration of this conflict is the scene from
Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indiana Jones watches as a Muslim swordsman flashes his scimitar this way and that way. After a brief pause, Indiana draws his pistol and fires, instantly killing the swordsman. Silly flourish versus practical combat.
Returning to the disdain that is heaped on traditional martial arts by many a smug YouTube MMA commentator (instructor?), the question is whether this difference between European
style and Asian
style in martial arts is really so irreconcilable as it might seem at first blush. I think the answer is that martial arts must be understood in the
context of their origins and this means that you really do have to understand the "tradition" aspect in order to really understand the "martial" aspect of these arts. Mindless rote is, of course, always just mindless rote. But I think a lot of people misinterpret their own lack of understanding of an art they have tried as a flaw in the art itself. I think there is some bullshido in Aikido (at least, certain strains/schools). But if you think Aikido is
only bullshido, well, you're ignorant, arrogant or both. You're stuck in a certain
mindset regarding the body. It seems to you that body motions are all "obvious" and you confuse refinement with "useless flourish." The key to understanding Aikido or even Judo, to some extent, is to realize that they originate from a jiu-jutsu that was practiced in a market for combat training sold to the Samurai class between competing instructors and schools. Bullshido was weeded out in the way that the market weeds out any kind of bull$#@! ... the instructors selling snake-oil were eventually recognized as frauds and went bankrupt. It is from
this corpus that both Aikido and Judo draw, both arts being simplifications of the old jiu-jutsu for a new era, an era where the katana was no longer the premier weapon.
Here, finally, we find the unification of all things into one: the sword. Applied European fighting arts
all centered around the use of the sword, just as the Japanese martial arts did. The solution to being unarmed, in either case, was to become armed. Either get a sword or other weapon from a compatriot or manually disarm an enemy in the worst-case. But the condition of not having a sword was not something that was elaborately studied because... that's ridiculous[1]. That would be like a special forces unit training for months for the situation of being in the battlefield and having no weapons available. Sure, they do train a
little for these kinds of situations but it's more of a survival exercise than it is primary battle training. The fact is, the probability that a SOF operator will have a weapon in hand during any live engagement with the enemy is approximately 100%. Avoiding disarms or recovering from accidental disarms, however, is heavily trained, just as Europeans have been training for centuries.
When you look at the old jiu-jutsu from which both Aikido and Judo derive, you will find that
all of the techniques derive from battlefield scenarios involving the katana. Some of the techniques were concerned with how to handle disarms or how to perform disarms. Some of them had to do with how to efficiently finish multiple attackers, a situation that
really would have been common on the battlefield. For example, the ability to perform an effective
Kosoto Gari was not just some kind of showy-flashy kung fu suitable only for carnival acts, it was vital to handling CQB at knife-range (a long weapon like a katana is ineffective once the attacker gets too close). But Kosoto Gari has been taught (though not by that name, usually called a "foot sweep") in European martial arts going back at least to the Roman times. In fact, all the main techniques in Judo can be found in one form or another in historical European martial arts, such as pancrase or even wrestling.
Once again, the difference between East and West is not due to the practical applications; in both cases, the practical application is virtually identical since practical outcomes are checked by the laws of physics and the merciless selection process of battlefield success/loss. Rather, the difference is in the view of the body. And I think this is where Westerners still have a tremendous amount to learn from their Eastern counterparts. The revolution in unarmed, all-force fighting (vale tudo) instigated by Brazilian Jiu-Jutsu[2] through the auspices of the UFC has resulted in a great advancement in the practice of unarmed combat. But we still have a lot to learn. The human body is a marvel of physics and deeply understanding how it works is a lifelong journey for anyone who cares to embark on it. Unarmed combat instruction and combat sports will always be somewhat romanticized and freakish due to the artificial constraints created by the contradiction of fighting while trying not to injure each other too much. But I think it still has great social value (and individual value). We are standing on the shoulders of giants and, if we try, we can see a bright future ahead.
[1] - The subject of underground development of unarmed combat / improvised arms under conditions of colonization and oppression is another topic for another time...
[2] - Little known fact: BJJ is actually a descendant of Judo. From Wiki: "Brazilian jiu-jitsu was developed from Kodokan judo ground fighting (newaza) fundamentals that were taught by a number of Japanese individuals including Takeo Yano, Mitsuyo Maeda, Soshihiro Satake, and Isao Okano. Brazilian jiu-jitsu eventually came to be its own defined combat sport through the innovations, practices, and adaptation of judo." Maeda was a direct student of Jigoro Kano.
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Originally Posted by Anti Federalist
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