04 July 2005 Letter from Japan

Hello Everyone

Since I got back to Japan from Europe I have done some fantastic lessons with Sensei. We are now doing the middle level of the gyokoryu.

What I understood from training the other night was that many of the techniques were done with the feeling of wind. As the opponent attacks he pushes you and you envelop his moves, accepting them, and at the moment of contact you are pushed around his moves. Sensei explained that if you have a house and the doors are open or there are other openings, for example windows or cracks in the building, then this is were the wind can come in and if there is a draft then this is where the draft will enter - anywhere there is an opening. So you become the draft and as he attacks you move like the wind and become a draft that is NATRUALLY drawn to the openings in his movement and this is where you attack. It really painted a fantastic picture in my head of how he was moving so easily around the opponent and finding the weaknesses in their attacks.

When Sensei moves you really struggle to see what he is doing and I am very fortunate that he uses me quite often to do the demonstration on. This gives me a great chance to feel what he is doing. Sensei’s taijutsu leaves you feeling confused because you know you have just been killed but you are not really sure how it happened. You don’t even feel anything until you are killed and then it’s too late. When he gave us that mental picture of a draft of wind sneaking into a house I understood this feeling a bit more.

Sensei is also talking a lot about magnetism and how the polarities of magnetism work within the techniques that we are doing. He explained that by changing the polarities at a given time you can use this to your advantage and slide the opponent past you without even contacting them !!!! It’s fantastic to see and experience these teachings from Sensei, but it is very difficult to put into words what it is really like.

I have included some pictures from the last few days of training in Japan and also some paintings that Sensei has done for me. These are presents for my friends Pino Durante in Limburg, Germany, and David Holt in Budapest, Hungary. They both took very good care of me while doing seminars for them recently and I orgnised these from Sensei as a thankyou for that. Pino has recently opened a new dojo in Limburg Germany, and David has a great group of people in Budapest.

I am also making good progress in the live video streaming of training from the Bujinkan mansion (my apartment in Japan). We have done the first successful test tonight of the new system which we hope to make available to dojos around the world by August. On Wednesday night Noguchi sensei will be teaching again from my apartment to my dojo in Adelaide, South Australia, and if all goes well we should be able to make this available to the rest of the world by August.

I hope my thoughts are helpful to you and I hope that this email finds you well. Sensei said at training during the break the other night that sometimes when you follow the real path of the martial arts it’s a lonely place but that the goal is to find the other true martial artists and with them have good times together. This is the real meaning of buyu, and I am very happy to say that I am finding this to be true.

Hope to hear from you soon.