I call Chris a visionary. He looks at information technology that to most of us is arcane abstract futuristic speculation and then he shows me exactly what I as An-shu need to be doing as a communicator of our martial ideals right now and into the future. Turns out it is not abstract. It is not futuristic. It is indeed here today.

How do we become visionary? A visionary has a sense of what will be in demand tomorrow long before most others even recognize what is coming into fashion today. A visionary can look forward into the future and see what will be of great importance and need at some time yet to come, and at the same time, look at the present and see those currently overlooked or under-appreciated ideas, technologies, resources, and people that will someday provide the perfect key elements for effectively meeting those future challenges.

Vision can produce results from different approaches. One can be so familiar with a technology that new possibilities are discovered or recognized as the culture changes around the former vision of the use of the technology. Old dog learns new tricks.

On the other hand, one can be so immersed in the search for a solution to a given problem that new discoveries result from seeing the problem with fresh new vision. New tricks require new dog.

To-Shin Do, our martial art based on the techniques, principles, strategies, and spirit of ancient Japanese ninjutsu brought forward in a form highly relevant for 21st Century western culture, has been called visionary. I have been called a visionary. What does this mean, really?

In truth, the visionary martial art of To-Shin Do came about as an accidental result of my discontent with the state of martial arts training in the early 1970s, when cutting edge breakthroughs were knockout matches in a ring and stylized karate kata solo patterns performed to music soundtracks. Meanwhile, I was futilely seeking noble rescuer-protector warrior training. The ninja secret agents of a 1960s James Bond novel were my heroes. Most of my ’70s peers just snickered at me. Many openly guffawed when they heard I was off to Japan to find the ninja. I was not seen as a visionary. They thought I was crazy.

Then came the 1980s and Western politics and economy and social dynamics moved restlessly towards personal responsibility, personal potential, and personal preparation taking on a new glow following the confusing convolutions of the 1960s and ’70s. The legendary ninja – self contained general and commando, warrior and philosopher, anonymous shielder of the community who acted from protector compassion as opposed to champion ego – seemed to be a perfect hero in an age that promoted personal accountability.

What my buddies mocked in the polyester and big hair ’70s became the martial art icon impossible to top in the 1980s. Martial arts magazines could not print enough cover stories about the one American qualified by experience to speak of the ninja night warrior, moving silently in the darkness righting the wrongs of a cold and mechanistic set of world conditions. 

All this changed radically in the early 2000s. Self-directed masked warriors striking in stealth at large popular winners from a morality steeped in murderous violence against all outside their order were no longer ninja movie heroes. They were now zealot terrorists from a culture that hated ours to death. We were horrified, enraged, and infuriatingly helpless as these phantom warriors caused incalculable damage to our ways of life. Western financial stability and freedom of travel went into a tailspin, black-masked killers gloated and jeered us from internet video clips, and all our might was powerless to stop them. 

Predictably, the new martial icon of the 2000s became the lone MMA athlete stepping into the cage of rage to fight another man in a straightforward contest of brute strength and ability to tolerate pain. Nothing ambiguous. Nothing surprising. No way for a sneaky one to overtake a bigger one. Might makes right in the cage, and we in the West desperately eat that up right now. In celebrating the cage we grasp for what looks like control in a grotesquely chaotic world. We call it “no holds barred” but of course holds are barred and we wish with all our hearts that the bigger wars were like this too. The big guy with the superior fire power and the best technique and the righteous alpha male anger should win. In a black and white world, he would win, and he would be us.

What’s my vision of the martial arts once we get through the current financial, social, and political doldrums that cause us to desire pure escapism? When the cage has become too much a commercial entertainment product and the hype bloats to the point where the edge becomes a cliche and young people grow restless just watching while a select few pros participate, we will move on to real mixed martial arts. Grappling and punching and kicking and locks and chokes and pragmatism over stylization – the powerful reality that we call MMA or mixed martial arts today – will expand to include training for uneven 2 against 1 confrontations, sneaky weapons appearing in the fight, terrain and environment considerations, psychology and staging complexities, and the truth that sometimes the good guy who must win is not the biggest, baddest, and most furious. Add to that some training in how to develop vibrant personal health, how to realize a spiritual peace based on unity with a unified universe, and how to cultivate the heroic attitude of being big enough to protect others – a philosophy that feels so rich and good once you have tasted even a little bit of it – and we will be at the pinnacle of true mixed martial arts.

That is my vision of the future. Of course it is no surprise that I am clearly describing our ninja martial art we have been teaching in America since 1980. As To-Shin Do we can once again be the ones to help others see that there is a discipline where people can learn to retake control over their lives and learn to rely on themselves and the visionary community they come together to form in this increasingly fragmented world. Such a vision is what we need in the martial arts next. I’m betting my entire future career on that vision. Let’s watch and see.

On the other hand, the training hall experience was something totally different from what I had known in the 1970s and 1980s when I was training as an apprentice with Hatsumi Sensei. When I left Japan to return to American residency in the early 1980s, a typical training class was about 12 people, with 18 at most. Once my books and magazine articles about Hatsumi Sensei’s art had captivated the martial arts world’s imagination by the mid-1980s, foreign students began pouring into Japan seeking the experience I had found.

On this rainy Sunday in April, the small Hombu Dojo building of Masaaki Hatsumi was more than packed with easily 60 to 70 people from all over the globe. Of course this kind of crowd makes real training impossible for the students who work to imitate Hatsumi Sensei in the shoulder-to-shoulder and butt-to-butt crowd, but amazingly enough, no one seems to complain. Indeed, the real focus and seemingly the whole point of the 2 hours in the Hombu seems to be watching Hatsumi Sensei perform.

Instruction consisted of Masaaki Hatsumi creating technique after technique on the fly, with the crowd of students looking on from tightly packed rings around the center of the dojo. Sometimes Hatsumi Sensei would explain what he was doing, as though the students would be able to discern the details after only one quick demonstration. Other times, Hatsumi Sensei would clearly avoid the real key to what he had done, and explain at great detail some minor point that may or may not have had any real effect on the technique’s outcome. I watched carefully to see if the students could tell which was the key advice and which was the decoy tossed out to confuse or distract them. After several minutes of creative demonstration, Hatsumi Sensei would call out the command, “Play”, and the students would dutifully try to imitate what the headmaster had done.

I used to think that this form of tricky teaching was something unique to Hatsumi Sensei, something only he did as a way of seeing which students were the sharp ones and which were the dull. Actually, it turns out to be very much a Japanese cultural norm in closely-held traditional technique systems handed down from master to student. Isshisoden – transmission from one master to one true student – is an undeniable Japanese cultural artifact, wherein one student sharp enough to perceive and steal away the master’s secrets gets the goods, and all of the rest are relegated to getting whatever small benefit they might while serving as training dummies and bill-payers to facilitate the exclusive transmission process. It is obviously up to Masaaki Hatsumi as the headmaster of his nine ryu-ha to pick the most appropriate way of handing on his legacy. It is important to note, however, why I needed to change the teaching method I experienced in Japan if our To-Shin Do were to become a useful endeavor in the lives of our Western students.

A few Japanese students were in attendance, but the vast majority of people training in the Bujinkan Hombu these days are foreigners in Japan. I asked my friend Toshiro Nagato, with whom I used to co-teach ninja taijutsu at the Minato-ku Sports Center in Tokyo in the late 1970s, where all the Japanese were. He smiled and said that the plan was to have more Japanese from now on, now that the huge number of foreigners had made the training look more attractive or valuable to the Japanese. I smiled back in response to this same line that I have heard for so many years, and commented that with Hatsumi Sensei’s emphasis on free creative movement and seeming disdain for rigid formal technique with clearly defined forms, many (most?) Japanese would be uncomfortable in such a training environment. Nagato-san agreed unhesitatingly, acknowledging the key reason why so few Japanese can identify with Hatsumi Sensei’s approach.

Masaaki Hatsumi’s techniques for the day were based on working with skillful timing and body placement in a confusing relationship with what an attacker might expect. Effortless, even seemingly moving in slow motion, Hatsumi Sensei more allowed his attackers to find themselves in ineffectual positions than made them fail. As always, he constantly smiled and laughed all through his instruction demonstrations, and seemed to be enjoying what he was doing. He would call out a person to be his uke, throw them around and tie them up, and then command the audience to give it a try for a minute or two before taking center stage again. He did not interact or work with students at all during the momentary “play” sessions. It was up to the students to get it themselves. Standing at the edge of the crowd as the students struggled to duplicate his unique movements, Hatsumi Sensei reminded Rumiko and me of how he has never claimed to enjoy teaching, and much prefers performing. Like a rock star on stage before a crowd of adoring fans, he seems very much in his element now.

At the end of the class, several participants were given the sword test for 5th Degree Bujinkan rank. The Bujinkan is so big now that of course Sensei himself does not know the students who now come to Japan for their 5th Degree, so the test is no longer a matter of verifying connection with Hatsumi Sensei as it once was explained to me in the 1970s. Nonetheless, I was a bit surprised (well, OK, I’d heard the rumors…) to see that Hatsumi Sensei no longer administers the test himself, and instead has senior students – Japanese and foreigners alike – swing the sword down at the waiting heads where he once was the sole administrator. To me, this was a major significant change in program and procedure, but after all the years and all the changes, I have become more and more used to the admonition, Ban-pen Fu-kyo – “After ten thousand changes, no surprise.”

After training, Hatsumi Sensei invited Rumiko and me to lunch with him and Toshiro Nagato and Isamu Shiraishi. Hatsumi Sensei spoke of his vision of where he is now in his life of 75 years so far. Sensei gave Rumiko and me some suggestions for our own training and teaching work in the West, to be put into motion and slowly allowed to become evident over time. Stay tuned to our programs, DVDs, and new books to see Hatsumi Sensei’s advice in action.

Instruction consisted of absolutely wordless demonstration of multiple movement techniques, and then the students stood up and tried to imitate what the headmaster had done. This form of teaching is very much the Japanese cultural norm, and is found in all areas of cultural training as well – karate, kendo, flower arranging, bamboo flute. The wordless “watching only” educational standard of Japan was one of the first things that we had to change when I decided to make our own To-Shin martial art something valuable for more Western students. Practitioners of our martial art know that we teach with a method of engaging the student with simultaneous word, sight, and action. This is of course not a criticism of the Japanese Aikido teaching method – it is obviously appropriate for Japanese students used to such things – but merely an observation as to why we needed to westernize teaching if To-Shin Do were to become an important influence in the Western world.

Moriteru Ueshiba moved about the dojo trading techniques with the students, conversing and perhaps giving suggestions to them as they trained. He smiled a lot and seemed to be enjoying what he was doing. These informal training moments gave me a chance to watch how Doshu created the effects he did. I could see the subtlety of his technique, and how he led his attacker by pressing him in a specific direction in order to create a natural reactive resistance that Doshu then captured to take down the uke effortlessly.

I was highly impressed with the logic of Doshu’s technique and why it worked. If your enemy pushes you down, the conventional immediate response is to resist up, because we instinctively resist doing what our enemy seems to want us to do. Therefore, if I press down on my attacker’s shoulder, I can usually count on him to push back instinctively, if only for a moment, and I can use the adversary’s energy and momentum to defeat him. This logic of knowing how an aggressor’s mind works is what I teach as advanced To-Shin Do, and likewise seems to be the logic behind Moriteru Ueshiba’s Aikido. Impressive.

It was clear to me that many of the students did not grasp the logic of body and emotion that made Doshu Ueshiba’s techniques so remarkable. Many did a good job of imitating the movements, and a few were admirable in their skill, but most were clearly beneath the material and could have used some helpful instruction (or so my Western educational bias sees it…).

Please note that this observation of the students’ inability to grasp the genius of the headmaster is strictly an observation, and not intended to be a criticism at all. Indeed, a high level martial artist visitor to one of my own classes might say the same thing about many of my own students who are struggling to keep up.

Why go to another martial art master’s class on a day when my own teacher was not teaching? I hope the obvious value of intelligence gathering would not need to be explained to people who are studying a martial art founded on roots from the historical ninja families of Japan. We can never know too much about the area of expertise that we have claimed as our life work.