Shorinji Kempo includes a set of houki (traditional weapon) techniques, covering the shakujo, nyoi and dokko-sho, known collectively as kongo den (金剛伝). Shorinji Kempo's shakujo techniques were heavily developed by the late Ueda Sensei, one of So Doshin's earliest students. Having lost an arm in a munitions accident following World War 2, Ueda Sensei was given the shakujo as a particular area of study by So Doshin; being told that since he had only one arm, he better learn to use a weapon to better defend himself. Much of the early teaching and practice for Ueda Sensei was in secret as So Doshin didn't want his other students to be jealous or feel overlooked.¹⁰

My stay in China had lasted nearly 30 years. During that stay, I experienced the wonderful wisdom and way of life of the Chinese people. Regardless of the state of politics, Chinese people had a strong will to help each other and were thoroughly acting as such among themselves. Unfortunately such an attitude was missing from the Japanese. I started my activity to create that spirit among isolated Japanese. However, when somebody with power is behaving violently to get their own way, you cannot do anything about them just by urging justice without you yourself also being strong.

Thus, initially, I tried to make everyone to be tougher. Shorinji Kempo began, in fact, when I invited people by saying, "Why don't you come as I will teach you how to fight." My grandfather was a samurai who had mastered kendo during the end of the Meiji period. He gave me me a thorough martial arts training. He beat me up while saying: "Don't think of me as your grandfather. Come to me as if I were an enemy of your parents!" He also said, "As long as you pursue martial arts, you must win!" I believe the result of such a method of training in martial arts is one of the reasons for making Japanese so isolated. The martial arts I learned in China were not like that. To spread those martial arts and to seek the happiness of Japanese people through united groups of Japanese people, I began to teach Shorinji Kempo.

Thirty years ago, that was merely a single seed. However, over a short period of thirty years, over 2,000 branches have been established in Japan as well as branches in a dozen other countries. I am proud and pleased that young people are voluntarily growing who can sacrifice themselves for justice and who have consideration for their own home country. I believe that to make Japan better, the Japanese people themselves must do so. It is easy to talk about global peace in mere words alone. However, in order to realize that global peace, the only thing we can do is to increase the number of people who can serve the world's happiness with half of their efforts while considering themselves with the other half, which is our motto.

I was shocked to read a certain article in the newspaper this morning. A person said to be an influential figure in the financial world commented that Japan cannot recover unless it makes much more money to the extent of tens of billions of yen through wars, despite the fact that we are already having trouble with excessive imbalances made from trading in black figures. Such a comment is outrageous. War is the cruelest act imaginable. Reducing the numbers of Japanese who are willing to make money only for themselves over the sacrifice of others is the main purpose of Shorinji Kempo.

I did not decide to begin unarmed martial arts or to cultivate you in the era of the atomic bomb or sub-machine gun that can shoot 2,000 rounds per minute. I believe that cooperation and harmony, or the true spirit of harmony, is the way to generate peace. Because of that reason, I believe that we should not cultivate Japanese who expect wars and think about becoming rich over the sacrifice of other ethnic peoples or others in future as well. I sincerely wish for you to remain as kenshi who can stand up against all the injustice of the world endorsed by strength to seek true peace and protect justice. More than anybody else, I am really pleased with all the congratulations I received from so many of you and for having gathered her to day to celebrate the 30th anniversary. Thank you very much indeed. I hope my humble words can express my gratitude.

Perseverance is not a passive idea. It doesn’t mean weathering or suffering through negative events happening to you or around you. Perseverance is active, it's striving, pushing through oppression, a burden, or unpleasant experience, towards a better resolution. It can also mean actively challenging or seeking change. To persevere is to work to improve the situation, despite resistance to that change.

In the same way that perseverance isn’t passive, it also isn’t directionless. It’s towards something, a maintaining of purpose despite obstacles. Simply surviving or abiding is not perseverance.

Tl;dr, training is how we condition ourselves for a real self-defence situation, and if you allow yourself to give up in training, that's what you'll condition yourself to do for real. The goal of effective training needs to be building up resilience, as well as skill.
​
In our world of instant gratification, it’s easy to give up when something gets difficult, to move on to the next “fun” thing. But in the end that results in only superficial experiences. You lose out on the real deep enjoyment and meaningful satisfaction that comes from losing yourself in an activity; pushing through the barrier of “trying” to the experience of “doing” that we sometimes call flow, or being in the zone, and that defines an activity (in the Japanese mindset) as a do. The catch is, that deeper engagement can only come through extensive practice, to the point where movements and actions become internalised enough that they become like a direct extension of your will. And that’s where the hard bit, the perseverance, comes in!

It’s not easy to start something new, and learning new motor skills can be especially difficult and frustrating, at least for a lot of people (to all the ‘naturals’ out there, one of which I am not: I hate you all! jk). When you first try something new, the excitement of the new experience can eclipse the fact that the movements are unfamiliar and difficult to coordinate; you don’t care because it’s a cool new experience for a short while. But as that initial excitement fades over the first few weeks, and is replaced by something that’s complicated and awkward, and a body that doesn’t do what you are telling it to do, it can of course get frustrating. I’ve seen scores of beginners come along, have a great time and (slightly frustratingly) pick things up super quickly, only to see them not come back, or drop out after 2, 3 or 4 lessons. But those first few weeks are exactly the time to make that commitment to yourself to power through, because trust me, at some point it will click, and then that’s where the real fun starts!
​
It’s also why, as a teacher, it’s a continuous juggling act for me to find the right balance between challenge and accessibility: too much one way and everyone will get frustrated and quit, too much the other way and everyone will get bored and quit. At least that’s how it seems to me some days :-)

In a real fight, you can never stop, not until the assailant is subdued or discouraged. Stopping means being beaten, injured or possibly killed.

That's not to say one should go out looking for fights, or seeking to beat people or win all the time. It's always better to try to de-escalate rather than fight. Better still, to not be in the situation where you need to defend yourself in the first place. As Rory Miller says his excellent book Meditations on Violence (which every martial artist should read by the way), "It’s better to avoid than to run; better to run than to de-escalate; better to de-escalate than to fight; better to fight than to die."

Fighting is the last resort, when all your other options have failed. But if it comes to that, you'd better be prepared to finish things swiftly and decisively. 

​A healthy amount of challenge is necessary to stay motivated, and after doing anything for a period of time, naturally you’ll get better at it and it will become easier (and thus less challenging). Skill competency, challenge and motivation are all linked.

Consider in a new job (or a new role within your current job). Starting out, although you may have transferable skills and general competencies, it’s inevitable you will be relatively unskilled at the specifics of the new role. For most people, this will place them outside of their comfort zones, and their effectiveness in the role will be relatively low. This of course can be demotivating, and you must work hard, persevere, to ‘skill up’ in the new role and become effective. As you become more familiar with the role and more skilled in executing it, you reach a point that can be considered as ‘peak effectiveness’.

Think of it like cresting the hill after a long struggle upwards. You’re in the sweet spot: you know what you’re doing, you know your way around the internal teams and processes, and you can get stuff done relatively easily. It’s the same in any new endeavour that requires the development of skills, and of course is applicable to the study of martial arts too. It’s that point where, after 6, 12, 24 months of study you start to feel that you have the hang of it and you can apply your techniques on most people without trying too hard.

The problem is that if you allow yourself to continue in what I will call the plateau of complacency, staying in the comfort zone where it’s nice and easy, motivation starts to wane. Things start to feel repetitive, and slowly they drag you down. Different people have different tolerance levels to this, which can also change over time, and it’s important to learn where yours lies. But its why, for example people tend to change jobs every couple of years early in their careers, or drift out of a martial art after a year (or after getting their first few belts). It’s by no means a “millennial” thing either – Funakoshi observed exactly the same thing in the early days of taking karate mainstream. His advice: take your time, focus on your own progression, but above all, keep pushing.

Recognising when you’re hitting the plateau, and catching it before the downward spiral is an important life lesson to learn. When it happens, take that as the sign to go find a new challenge: talk to your boss, seek out a new role at work; talk to your sensei and take on more responsibility or a new aspect of training. Because once you hit that downward slope it can be difficult to get out of it. I know people that have taken 5, 10, 30 years to come back kempo after drifting out. The good thing is some of them finally came back, but I’m sure it took a lot of effort for them!

One final thing I'd like to say, is that while perseverance is important, finding balance is even more so. Sometimes we talk (joke) about the work / life / kempo balance, but burnout is a real thing and I've seen it happen to some great students and instuctors. Use those times when you're really feeling excited and energised to focus your training. When you're young, and don't have lots of of demands on your time, train a lot! But also take the time out to rest, to chill, to catch up with those friends you missed last week because you were training ;-) Look out for the warning signs of burnout - when training starts to drag or become a chore, starts to take over your life - and make sure you take time to rebalance the other priorities in your life too (whatever they may be). Remember that it's ok to scale things back a bit. Slow and steady wins the race as they say. Perseverance is active, it's taking control of a situation and making the necessary changes to see through your end goal. If the training itself becomes a burden, then change things up a bit. Or start a dojo...!

And on that bombshell, I leave you with this advice:

There are 14 official ‘empty hand’ kata in Shorinji kempo. There are also several unique kata for shakujo, nyoi and dokko (totaling 16 more, that I know of!), and which are a subject for a future post!

​Several of the kata are direct single form (tanen) versions of full pair-form techniques (hokei). Ryuoken dai ichi (1) is the single-form of the basic technique kote nuki (ryuoken 2 and 3 are single-form versions of yori nuki, and ryote yori nuki respectively); byakurenken dai ichi is single-form tsubame gaeshi. To emphasise this difference, the forms are often referred to collectively by a different name in Shorinji kempo: tanen kihon hokei (single form basic techniques).

Before martial arts like karate gained mainstream popularity, masters would often only have a small number of students and competition was fierce. The essence of the family style was a closely guarded secret and only passed down to the master’s top student or successor. To protect these secrets (and also to make it easier to pass them down), they were “encoded” as sequences of movements, containing only the offensive or defensive halves of techniques, and often stylised to disguise their true action. The counterpart to each movement, forming the full technique, would only be known to those in the inner circle: those who would understand the essence of that specific style and could “interpret” each movement into its full technique. Thus even if the sequence was discovered or copied, it would be meaningless without knowledge of the counterparts of each movement. This is what often gets described as 'traditional kata'.

Over time, you can imagine how these stylised movements would take on almost mystical qualities, especially as knowledge of the counterpart movements was lost. And of course, wherever anything becomes more stylised and esoteric, it becomes one step further removed from practicality.

One of the key changes Gichin Funakoshi made following his introduction of karate into the mainstream, was to simplify the way kata was taught (especially at earlier levels) in order to make it more accessible.
Where students would traditionally study one kata for many years before proceeding to the next, and maybe in their lifetime only mastering a small number, this was quickly frustrating for the young university students who took to karate. Thus Funakoshi reformulated several of the kata, simplifying them and splitting them into different levels, allowing students to feel a quicker sense of progress and to make them easier to learn. Arguably this is one of the factors that led to the rapid popularisation of karate (and Japanese martial arts in general).
​
In Shorinji kempo, Doshin So took this a step further and introduced kata comprising a much reduced number of movements, and a more direct connection to base techniques (with a few exceptions).

Martial artist and historian Kiyoshi Arakaki makes an interesting distinction between these traditional kata and more modern, direct applications. In fact, he identifies three fundamentally different types of kata:

• Ultimate (or basic) kata: these embody the essence of a particular style or lineage, and are what i’ve described above as “traditional kata”.
• Practice kata: repeating the same or similar movements many times within the kata to form an effective drill for the student
• Application kata: comprising clear offensive and defensive movements. Shorinji kempo kata fall into this category.

Being a Japanese art, we of course have our formalities: body position and how you stand or sit is important (called stances), and we also have Japanese words for a bunch of things. At our East London class, while I aim to keep things fairly informal, what we're learning has the potential to cause injury, and so a degree of etiquette and respect for your teacher, practice partner and the training space is important. But don't worry, you'll pick these up as you go.

Shorinji kempo is a very broad system, but is focused on practical and effective self defence techniques. The system relies on an understanding of weak points, balance control, and body mechanics to allow even a smaller or weaker person to overcome a much stronger or larger opponent. You will learn defences against strikes (punches and kicks), grabs (for example to the arms, body or clothing), how to break your fall (rolls), as well as some elements of restorative massage (including resuscitation at higher levels), and we practice meditation every class.

Weapons aren't a major focus, but we will occasionally practice defence against certain weapons, and at senior levels we teach techniques with short and long staffs.

Of course the best way to find out more about Shorinji kempo is to come along and try it out, every Wednesday 7.30-9.30pm and Saturday 12-1.30pm, Qmotion, Stepney Green / Mile End. Sign up for your free trial class today.