Is Budo Relevant Today?

Over at The Budo Bum, the author gives his opinion on the question of whether Budo study is still relevant in our modern society. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

How can budo be relevant in the 21st century, especially koryu budo, those arts established before 1868? It’s not as if anyone is training for combat with swords and spears. Close combat now is rifles and grenades, with drones quickly making even those look a bit out of date. What’s the point of training with archaic weapons, besides acting out fantasies of being samurai?

Each generation of students is responsible for understanding how their art is relevant to the world they live in. My teachers did it in their time. I did it. Now it is my students’ time. No one can do it for them.

Koryu budo training hasn’t changed substantially in hundreds of years. Through the practice of carefully developed kata, students learn and master structure, movement, timing, spacing, techniques, and refine their mental abilities so they can move and act calmly and smoothly even under extreme pressure. People throw criticism at the training method because it doesn’t emphasize competition. I’ve written critiques of competition in budo before. I won’t repeat them here. Informal sparring was always part of koryu training, even if it was almost never considered important enough to codify.

Sparring doesn’t make budo relevant. Knowing how to punch, kick, throw, choke, hit with sticks, and cut with a sword aren’t particularly relevant skills in 21st century industrialized societies. I don’t know about anyone else, but I can’t think of many lifestyles where you might expect to need those skills. We’re not all going to be police officers, bouncers, or soldiers. What makes koryu budo relevant is all the stuff that made it attractive to samurai during the 250 years of the peace enforced by the Tokugawa Shoguns. It’s not techniques that win in conflict, it’s all the other stuff. The Taisha Ryu masterwork, Kaichu, found in Unravelling The Cords - The Instructions of a Master in the Tradition of Taisha-Ryu says a little about techniques, and a lot about the mind. Takuan Soho’s The Unfettered Mind has nothing to say about technique at all, and yet it has been prized by the swordsmen of Yagyu Shinkage Ryu for four centuries.

So how do you make koryu budo ryu that are hundreds of years old relevant in the 21st century? The difficult part is learning koryu budo. Making it relevant is the easy part. No, we don’t fight in the streets with swords and spears and staves and naginata. We still fight though. Conflict is inherent in life, and the conflict we are most likely to encounter is the same kind of conflict that samurai throughout the Edo Period in Japan were most likely to encounter: social conflict. The Edo Period was more than 250 years of peace in Japan. Close combat skills were not in high demand. The mental skills and strengths that good budo training develops were though; and are just as useful when people aren’t physically attacking you as they are when your opponent is trying to physically demolish you.

Budo training is not just technical. My budo training turned out to be useful in all sorts of places I didn’t expect. It helped make me a better negotiator in business. In the dojo people regularly try to throw me to the ground, choke me unconscious, or beat me with sticks. Sometimes they succeed. People I deal with in business relationships get upset, yell, pound the table, and get right up in my face, all in an effort to intimidate and bully me. After getting used to real physical consequences in the dojo, people who get upset and emotional in meetings come off like a 2-year-old having a tantrum. It is sound and fury, signifying nothing. I wait for them to get tired, and then we do it my way.