Below is an excerpt from an interesting article that appeared at Ellis Amdur's excellent Kogen Budo blog, describing Chinese influences on some specific Japanese martial arts. The full post may be read here. You'll have to follow the link to the article to see the videos.
I am prompted to revisit this topic after viewing this video of Tada
Hiroshi, a remarkable 94 year old aikido instructor. For those who like
order, you are in trouble. I will live up to my promise of ‘casual’ –
this will go all over the place. I’ve got no final point to arrive
at–this essay is more like a jazz improv on a basic theme, the latter of which might have been insipid to begin with.
Tada explicitly states that the idea of using this as a training tool
came to him when he found this (or a similar) length of wood in his
garden, a scrap left over from his gardener trimming posts to prop up
trees. He doesn’t reference any other inspiration. Clearly, he is using
it to contribute to the away he does aikido, yet one more training tool.
If we just look at the bang, the Chinese name for the thick
short-stick training tool, it would be easy to claim that Tada Hiroshi
obviously derived his training implement from traditional Chinese
practice. Even if this is true, Tada is clearly doing something very
different from Feng Zhiqiang and Chen Yu. The latter two men clearly
show exemplars of 六合 (Six Coordinations): the first three being a
balancing of forces throughout the body (wrist & ankle, elbow &
knee, hips and shoulders) and the latter being jin (intent-driven, whole body coordinated movement, utilizing gravity & ground forces), qi
(a method of expressing power through the use of trained connective
tissue and no rigid, localized tension in the muscles, cultivated
through specific exercises that incorporate the breath) and tanden (the use of the midsection of the body – not “one point”
– to distribute the force of the body through the limbs in perfect
measure – imagine the tanden as the head of a “quintipus” – with the
arms of this imaginary beast extending through the four limbs and the
head). This way of using the body is sometimes referred to as
Heaven-Earth-Man, although this term is also used to describe a myriad
of other ideas. At any rate, if this subject is of interest,
particularly regarding its relevance to Japanese martial arts, then,
(ahem), I have a book for you. (with translation in French and a new versions in German and Portuguese pending in 2025).
Tada is doing something different. Quite admirable, but different.
Tada has always been an athlete, with a body that, even as a young man,
reminds one of whalebone: flexibly stiff is the best I can describe it.
He is known to have run for miles, and done thousands of suburi with a bokuto, and rigorous chanting/breathing exercises in the Ichiukai, a spartan method of training that combined misogi no kokyū-hō
(a Shintō-derived chanting practice) and Zen-style meditation. Its main
focus seems to be overcoming human frailty and lack of will: the spirit
dominates the body. Tada also trained in Nakamura Tempu’s Shin Shin Toitsu. Nakamura
was a bigger-than-life character, with more than a bit of Baron
Münchhausen in his personality. The dubious aspects of his own
autobiography aside, he was one of the first to bring concepts of yoga
to Japan, before orthodox systems were accessible, and he developed a
very effective method of breathing for health that influenced the famous
aikidō instructor, Tohei Koichi as well as Tada Hiroshi. A comparison
of the way Tohei and Tada moved, however, will quickly show that they
incorporated the lessons of Nakamura and the Ichiukai (which Tohei also
studied) in quite different ways.
Tohei had the ability to relax his massive body so that, in essence, it
was as if, at every moment in a technique the point of contact on his
partner received him as if a large sack of potatoes dropped onto that
locale. Tada is, exactly like he does with the “neri-bō,” twisting his
limbs and twisting you. I never took ukemi from Tohei, but I did from
several of his leading followers. And I did take a fair amount of ukemi
from Tada, and I can testify from personal experience that my
descriptions in this paragraph are accurate. Tohei scratched the surface
of what I described earlier as Six Coordinations – in particular, his
development of certain aspects of qi (ki in Japanese); Tada used the same methodology to become a magnificent athlete, still moving very well at the age of 94.
As I described in several chapters in Hidden In Plain Sight,
the influence of Chinese martial arts principles upon the 17th century
development of Japanese arts is undeniable. I won’t rewrite that history
here, but suffice it to say that those principles became embedded in
Japanese martial systems. However, no Chinese system of martial arts was
transmitted, and the principles that were received (in partial
fashion), were then adapted to the needs of various Japanese martial
arts. The best metaphor is that the original teachings, such as they
were, were digested and “in-corporated,” becoming something quite
different from the original as the centuries passed. By the 19th
century, there was lip-service paid within some Japanese arts of Chinese
influence, but for the most part, no one could delineate exactly what
was passed on. [The major exception was Akiyama Yoshin-ryū), which preserved a set of training exercises, called nairiki no gyō (“internal power exercises”) that they explicitly assert were derived from Chinese training methods].
At the inception of the 20th century, the Japanese were largely ignorant of Chinese martial arts (not military arts,
per se – remember, the Chinese and Japanese went to war in 1895, and
there were any number of subsequent skirmishes before full-scale war
again broke out with the Japanese attack first in Manchuria and then
China itself in the 1930’s. During hand-to-hand combat, Japanese troops certainly got the experience of facing Chinese “big knife” sabres].
Kano Jigoro, the founder of jūdō, in one essay, wrote that the main
distinguishing factor between the two countries’ martial arts is that
Japanese martial arts focused on two-person training, whereas Chinese
martial arts were almost exclusively solo training. It is unclear to me
(or anyone) if Kano knew more, and he was trying to brush aside Chinese
martial arts as being insignificant, or if his knowledge at the time was
this sketchy. At any rate, some knowledge of Chinese arts seeped into
Japan. According to Andrea Falk, in Li Tianji’s, The Skill of Xingyiquan,
“In 1914, a teacher from his (Li Cunyi) associate, Hao Enguang, was the
first to introduce xingyi boxing abroad, into Japan.” [So many
questions!!!: Did he just do a demonstration as part of some kind of
cultural exchange, or did he have students? Wouldn’t it be a delightful
twist of history were we able to find a guest list with some significant
Japanese martial artists among his students, who then “stole his
technique!”].
The diffusion of information about Chinese martial arts into Japan
was patchy. Ueshiba Morihei, the famous teacher of aikidō, deeply
resented his students practicing jūdō after hours, and yelled that them
to stop practicing Shina martial arts. [A couple of layers here
– he’s actually referring to the fact that jūdō is derived from
Yoshin-ryū and Kitō-ryū, the two jūjutsu systems that most prominently
have accounts of Chinese principles incorporated at their origin.
Furthermore, Ueshiba, an arch nationalist, used a racist term (there is
no argument about this) to refer to China]. Nonetheless, Ueshiba had
some contact with Chinese martial arts: In 1936, he visited Takeda
Hiroshi in Beijing, Takeda being a well-known Japanese student of tongbeiquan and he is known to have seen some Chinese martial arts during his visits to the colonialist Japanese-run Kenkoku University in the early 1940’s. [NOTE:
rather than revive a dead-horse to flog yet again, these visits
occurred several decades after Ueshiba had studied Daitō-ryū and
consolidated his own version of that martial art, and there is not one scintilla of evidence of any change Ueshiba made in his methodology due to his visits to China].
Sawai Ken’ichi studied tachengquan (AKA Yiquan) in Beijing and
brought back his adapted version of this art after the end of World War
II. [NOTE: He shared the same instructor, Wang Xiangzhai, as Wang Shujin
(to be discussed below). Wang was far more well-rounded, having
achieved expertise in xingyiquan, baguazhang and the Nanjing Synthesis
form of taijiquan. Both Sawai and Wang taught students on the ground of
Meiji Shrine at roughly the same time, and friends of mine, who studied
with Wang, said that Sawai would occasionally wander over and berate
Wang for wasting time on “all that flowery crap; you should just do
Yiquan,” and Wang would laugh and continue doing things as he chose.]
