The Art of Katana Wielding

Over a very long tenure in martial arts, I've concluded that most martial artists, almost universally, in fact, look for quote-unquote realism in their training. Why am I saying realism with bold, underlined, heavily emphasized air quotes, though? Well, what's funny about this quest for supposed realism is just how self-contradictory it is. Let me explain. If you've been in or around martial arts circles for any length of time, I'm willing to bet that you have witnessed a couple of things. First, you probably are aware of how invested the community is at outing cults and scam artists, which isn't a bad thing, necessarily, but it shows how valued our elusive realism is to people. Second, you have probably seen someone in the comments section somewhere bashing your martial art in particular. And no, I'm not just talking about the dead horses like Aikido or Wing Chun that people really like to kick in a bandwagon. I mean literally any martial art, I mean your martial art. It doesn't matter how good the reputation is or isn't, there will always be someone there to say that it doesn't work. Some of this might be classic contrarian trolling, this is the internet after all, but I've grown to believe that quite a few people actually believe in this kind of thing. They actually believe that your martial art doesn't work, even if it has a good reputation and is very well reviewed. And finally, you've probably seen a trend where in the search for our supposed realism, people get sucked into this spiral where sport rule sets have to get more and more vicious, include more and more techniques as legal, reduce safety equipment, and subtract rules. At the extreme end of this spiral is the so-called self-defense position, which styles itself around theories and possibly a few real experiences of an instructor, and he tends to have a very specific, very narrow view of what the so-called streets are and how hypothetical attackers will definitely absolutely behave. Obviously, I have my reservations on this position, but I'll talk about those later. What we have here, then, is a community that seems almost endlessly skeptical, perhaps even obsessively skeptical, of almost everything outside their own lived experience, yet at the same time, the community is generally seeking a kind of truth and authenticity, a supposed realism. It is a very strange paradigm because on one hand, the community likes to Yet on the other hand, it is very eager to criticize and attack anything without even really understanding what it is they're looking at, without any real experience with it personally, which again, seems to be the measuring stick that most people use. Despite the culture of martial artists seeming to skew towards rationality, it simultaneously seems to scoff at going off the beaten path. This contradiction isn't unique to martial arts, just for the record. A lot of science fields fall into this same trap. I'm just pointing out that for all our posturing about being skeptical rationalists, only experimenting within the culturally quote-unquote acceptable martial arts is a But this isn't really the contradiction that I was alluding to earlier, it's just a quirk of the community that isn't even really all that unique. Plenty of scholarly circles like to choose flawed stability that enables them to speak with expertise, rather than ask dangerous questions that might endanger the fabric of the field itself, and even, potentially, crucially, their positions of expertise within that field. Nobody wants to lose their job by asking too many questions. I'm going to try and not rant and rave about how academia is at the moment. No, the contradiction is that so many martial artists, new and old, are searching for the real stuff, and yet everyone seems to have a very different idea about what that is. For some people, authenticity comes from lineage, for example. My teacher learned from this guy, who learned from that guy, who learned from the son of the founder, who learned from his dad, or whatever. Now, personally, I think lineages are a little goofy because it doesn't take Sherlockian detective skills to poke holes in most lineages, or find caveats almost immediately. Not to mention, perfect transmission of techniques is unlikely across long periods of time, thanks to basic human error. But for some, the realism they are searching for isn't really about if they are doing technique number 12 the exact, precise same way as the founder. It's about being part of a greater tradition, and perhaps controversially, I'm going to say that's totally legitimate, even if it's not for me. I think for most people, though, what they mean when they talk about realism is really functionality. But this, too, is kind of janky when we get right down to it. What even is functionality? The sort of common theme that you see in popular discourse has to do with techniques working against resistance, which is fine, it's reasonable enough, but it still doesn't take our inquiry to its limits. What kind of resistance are we talking about here? Like, 60%? 100%? A grappling-only ruleset? MMA itself? All pretty legitimate thresholds, really. Yet, this is the hole so many martial artists fall down. They have this image in their heads that somewhere out there, an objective answer exists that can be relied upon in at least a majority of situations to function at full capacity. This leads people to seek out more and more open rulesets, often that are more and more brutal, which is why I think the consensus among many is that if we don't see it in MMA, it isn't a valid thing. Now, explaining why this is kind of a stupid whole thing is just another video altogether. But here, I'm just going to say that MMA isn't really this Darwinistic, survival-of-the-fittest, laboratory-of-technical-experimentation wet dream that many fans, commenters, and martial artists seem to have. In fact, despite being a pretty broad ruleset, MMA is still very regulated. You know who you're fighting in advance, typically. You have coaches, you can film study, you have a nutritionist, you know the characteristics of the arena, the setting, there are weight classes, and so on and so forth. Now, this leads people, dubiously, in my opinion, to look for so-called self-defense schools. That seems to be the next level up, because if you reject any rules altogether, obviously the streets is the place to go, and I'm using the streets here in quotes. This is one of those gray areas to me, because the premise, at least in a very generic sense, is correct. In a self-defense situation, there are indeed no rules. Having said that, I think designing a self-defense curriculum and then sustaining a school based on that curriculum is way, way harder than these folks would have you believe. By these folks, I mean the self-defense faction, whatever you want to call them. In my conception of realism, at least, a self-defense curriculum would have to be built on a body of research that really details how bad actors work, and the training would have to be specifically working to counter those research-based patterns. I think that research probably exists in criminology, but I don't think it's really been organized for a civilian self-defense program in any meaningful, comprehensive way. Most supposed self-defense schools are more about a teacher theorizing how a guy would react and then countering with a theory about how he'd dismantle him. In my opinion, a better pedagogy would be something like this. Research shows that most attacks in our area happen to women at dusk as they approach their vehicles in parking lots by male criminals, either looking to rob them or take them to a secondary location. Now, my statement here isn't sourced in any research at all, but based on my admittedly limited understanding of criminal psychology, this hypothetical research probably isn't too far off the mark. So then, what should training look like? Well, it should happen in between cars, in a narrow space, on pavement, in a low light setting, against men who play the role of trying to rob women or abduct them. Just like normal training, you'd build intensity and resistance, but this is the kind of specificity that I'm thinking of. And this, of course, is before we even factor in variables like potential weapons and firearms and stuff like that, multiple attackers, yadda yadda yadda, the whole gambit. My point being here that while there are no rules in a street situation, there are parameters. It's just that these people don't generally like to recognize that. I want to circle back around to my main point here, though. The martial arts community spends so much time hyperfixating on realism, but also quietly downplaying or even rejecting the fact that every martial context, without exception, has predictable parameters. And by context, I don't just mean grappling ruleset vs striking ruleset vs MMA ruleset, etc., although those are examples. I also mean training in the gym vs fending off an abduction in a parking lot. The reason these contexts matter is because our ethereal functionality is predicated on them. These are all very different situations and all equally real. Our abduction scenario aside, what I don't think most martial artists want to admit is that unless you're a marksman, all martial arts training is pretty contrived. That doesn't mean there aren't niche situations where you might need to beat up an attacker, but as I've pointed out in other videos, spending even a year of your time training for something that will statistically never occur in a first world country as long as you have a middle income is little, dare I say, irrational. No one wants to admit it, but I will do so for you here now. At the end of the day, we just play games. Yes, there are all these cool features that can be wrapped up in them, from intellectual and physical challenges to cultural experiences and even artistic creativity, but we play games. What a person defines as legitimate in the martial arts world, what they define as quote unquote real, is generally going to be contingent upon which contrivances they are willing to accept and or ignore. If you can accept that pure BJJ doesn't really deal with strikes and slams all that well and doesn't really know how to do takedowns at least at the time of posting, even if you just accept all these things unconsciously, then yeah, BJJ is going to feel like the realest ---- ever to you, but if you can't accept those things, then it's going to feel almost fake. What's funny about the martial arts community's quest for realism is that realism is actually really subjective in this space, it is not objective. They are on a quest to find the authentic, functional, truly real holy grail and missing the point that the grail is the quest itself. I hate to characterize martial arts training as the it's about the friends we made along the way meme, but yeah, it kind of is like that. To start to wind this down, I do want to briefly touch on where I think all of this comes from. It seems like there is this bandwagon opinion that martial arts are for fighting, and I would really love for people who hold this opinion to actually prove it. The thing is that I've been around the bend a bit, I've been to different countries and different cultures, and I know at least as many people who would look at you funny if you said their practice is for fighting. You could say that they're wrong, but they could say the same thing about you. Keep in mind that I say this as someone who does expect at least a kernel of martial applicability in his martial arts training. I don't expect every system to be perfect, in fact, I have very obvious sympathies and fascinations with plenty of systems that many would consider obsolete or even bullshido specifically because the answers there aren't clear and you often actually have to use your brain to tease them out. But at the same time, you won't find me arguing that styles with zero sparring are in a great place because I don't think that they are. The crux of what I'm saying here is that the community really needs to get over this martial arts are for fighting mentality. Personally, I see them like video games. There are some niche things that video games, particularly cooperative ones, can make you good at in so-called real-life situations, but for the most part, video games exist to be played. I find that martial artists have this very strange internal struggle where they spend all this time trying to learn to use a hammer, so they spend a lot of their energy looking for a nail that may or may not appear. Most of the time, we'd probably just be better off learning to enjoy swinging the hammer, even in the absence of nails. Now, I'm not blaming anyone for having this view. I had this view for probably 10 to 15 years of my own career. It's really only been since about 2015 to 2017 that I came around to this position and some of that has to do with the fact that, um, well, I'm towards the end of my prime, but not quite yet. I'm not quite that old, but I'm getting there. So maybe some of this is just getting on with your years, but I think people would do better to realize it earlier, or at least even just engage with the idea earlier, even if they don't find themselves completely buying into it while they're young. Anyway, to close, I want to circle all the way back to the title of this video. Reality-based martial arts are overrated when you're training them only because they are supposedly functional. The chase for authenticity and functionality is a third-rate pursuit next to the pursuit of something you enjoy solely because you enjoy it. If you think MMA is the coolest thing ever, then I'd happily encourage you to go for it. In the same breath, I'd advise you not to forget that it is still a game. A game with higher stakes, to be sure, but a game nonetheless. All these systems are. Meanwhile, if you're doing Wing Chun or Aikido or whatever, and even if you're not like me who would like to see changes in some of these arts, if you're happy and you are willing to accept the contrivances within the system, then go for it, man. Enjoy yourself. All martial arts have contrivances. It's just about parsing which ones you are willing to accept. Now, I am aware of some criticisms of my position here. I've brought up similar ideas in the past, and some people have rightfully pointed out that this really isn't all that marketable to people. On one hand, I totally agree. It's pretty tough to sell to people that you should do this thing because you'll enjoy the thing before they've even done the thing for themselves. It's really not all that sellable. This is especially true in a climate of marketing that is so heavily invested in selling people the idea that martial arts are the answer to feeling secure, safe, in control, and yada yada so on and so on. Which, they can technically offer these things, but I think the marketing push greatly overstates the reliability of these features in practice. On the flip side, I think it's a little weird that people need these reasons when things like water painting and cello classes exist, because most hobbyists in those circles are not endlessly debating about the necessity of a real-world application for their time investment. But I digress. More videos are coming on marketing and martial arts, and I'll get around to addressing some of these deeper issues better there. Alright, I think that covers everything from me for now. Content should be back on the menu now that I'm more or less set up here in Japan. I'm thankful for your patience and hopeful for your continued patience as I force myself back into a schedule, which kind of implies that I had one in the first place, which is totally not true, I just sort of post when I feel like I have something worth posting. At any rate, thank you so much for watching and so much for holding on during this transition period. If you're interested in a related concept to this video, I would highly recommend you head over to my Why Even Train martial arts video, which should be on the screen either now or very very soon. But at this point, I have a whole library of other content that explore ideas that are all very closely related and would really appreciate you doing some perusing while you're prepping dinner or going for a walk or whatever. Driving to training maybe. That is all from me for now. See you all very very soon. Peace.