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| Practice at the Ichikukai Dojo, date unknown. Courtesy of http://ichikukai.com/eindex.html |
Another form of extreme training that I
remembered having come across many years ago was a form of misogi involving
continuous ringing of a bell. When I looked into it a bit further, I found that
this, too came to be adopted as an adjunct to martial training prior to WWII;
interestingly, it also has a connection to Yamaoka Tesshu, and seems closely
related to his thoughts on training.
This type of training is chiefly
represented by the Ichikukai dojo, which is still in existence, and is quite
widely known for the role it played in the martial development of Tohei Koichi,
the famous aikido master.
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| Ogura Tetsuju Courtesy of http://ichikukai.com/eindex.html |
Founded in 1922, by Ogura Tetsuju, a
student of Tesshu (he was known as Watanabe Isaburo while training under Tesshu),
Ichikukai teaches misogi and Zen. Ogura Tetsuju was a Zen priest, but the
misogi he practised came not from his days with Tesshu, but from a fellow Zen
practitioner, Mitamura Engyo (a scholar of literature). There was obviously
something in this additional practice that appealed to Tetsuju, and one cannot
help but thinking he found within it a corollary to the hard training he had
endured in his youth under Tesshu. Despite the fact that misogi is a Shinto
practice, there seems to have been no conflict between the simultaneous
practice of both disciplines.
The particular type of misogi that Ogura
taught, misogi no kokyu no ho,
appears very simple. It combines continuous loud chanting coordinated with the rigorous
ringing of a hand bell, all the while sitting in seiza. This requires the
regulation of the practitioner’s breathing and body movements. This might be
hard enough in itself, but the sessions at Ichikukai lasted for many hours a
day, for three or four days straight. (The practice, in a far less severe form,
has been incorporated into some Aikido dojos in the west).
Ogura introduced this to the university
students who came to study Zen at the temple where he was living, someway
outside Tokyo, with the challenge that this was practice not for the
faint-hearted. The students took to it with the kind of ferocious enthusiasm
common to young men and their previously failing rowing team quickly went on to
victory. So enamoured were they of this practice, that they persuaded Ogura to
relocate and open a dojo in Tokyo. This was what became the Ichikukai Dojo (the
1-9 society), so named because the original meetings were held on the 19th
of each month, or because the 19th was the anniversary of Yamaoka
Tesshu’s death (or perhaps both).
Of course, in the pre-war period, the
combination of hard training and the kudos of practicing under one of Yamaoka
Tesshu’s senior students, as well as the open nature of practices – one didn’t
have to be a regular member of the dojo to practice – made it an attractive
proposition for many serious martial arts students:
Sensei explained that misogi practice with
the suzu bell had been much, much harder at the dojo where he had trained, its
special session lasting for three continuous days, with students getting little
sleep and only a few raw vegetables for nutrition. In addition, misogi had been
carried out by the senior members of the dojo, some of whom were assigned to be
kagura, or assistants. The kagura stalked through the rows of seated bell ringers,
battering those who lost their rhythm with lengths of bamboo. At the end of
three days, Sensei recalled, his back was beaten to a bruised pulp, he could
hardly speak beyond a hoarse whisper from the hours of chanting, and he was
emotionally drained. But he described the gruelling episode as one in which he
had experienced a dramatic breakthrough in his own maturation as a bugeisha.
“Too tired just to use muscles, too
tired to think to keep rhythm. Body finished, then spirit takes over. In
misogi, you find spirit is stronger. It can take you farther then your mind or
your body. After misogi, I saw that just living on the physical level, the
mental level, that’s no good. Man, woman, we are meant to live on a spiritual
level.”
(Autumn
Lightning: Education of an American Samurai, D. Lowry)
There is some evidence to suggest that the
combination of the gung-ho attitude of the Tokyo University rowing club
students who originally encouraged Ogura to open the Ichikukai in Tokyo and the
influence of Zen changed the original practice to a fiercer, more outwardly
forceful one. Tohei Koichi mentions in his writings how he was told after the
war by an older generation practitioner of the Ichikukai that the way they
practiced had changed, and the use of the stick to encourage practitioners
certainly bears a similarity to Zen practices.
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| Inoue Masakane |
Mitamura’s misogi was, in fact, a religious
practice that came from the Misogi-kyo
of Inoue Masakane (1790-1849), a ‘new’ school of Shinto, that emphasised chanting
practices and breath control to achieve purification and connection with the
gods. It also included three day training sessions, including lengthy chanting
sessions, designed to lead to realisation of ‘true mind’ (makoto no kokoro) and gratitude to the kami (divine spirits). It
was also believed that chanting and breathing practices were effective for
dealing with personal problems and troubles, and that by aligning oneself with
the divine, such problems could be solved. Descriptions of breathing in Masakane’s
writing also supports Tohei Koichi’s viewpoint about the change in breathing
practices.
In fact, Masakane taught that the breathing
was a way to unite oneself with the gods[1], and that the
words of the chant were kotodama;
that is to say that they had particular power in and of themselves. This was
quite unlike the misogi carried out in the Ichikukai; it may be fair, given the
style in which it was practised to regard Ogura Tatsuju’s use of it as being an
extension of his Zen instruction, rather than a continuation of Masakane’s
original aims. Thus, despite its Shinto origins, it seems, in certain ways,
quite similar to the training of Yamaoka Tesshu and Yamada Jirokichi, aimed at
developing spirit, or mind, and divorced from its religious origins.
As noted previously, the ‘endurance’ style
of training seems to have arisen at a time when shinai sparring was becoming
the primary form of practice in swordsmanship. Martial artists seemed to have
felt a need for some kind of additional training to replicate the intensity of
life and death contests. These types of training were certainly intense, but
they were not a part of older traditions of swordsmanship, as far as I am
aware. Despite their appeal as ‘samurai’ style training, they were actually
‘post samurai’ for the most part; an attempt by martial artists to find further
meaning in the arts they were committed to, and thus a part of the new budo
disciplines, rather than the bugei they looked back to.
In the case of misogi, its popularity seems
to have been part of a broader search for martial abilities that were present
in some teachers (the founder of aikido, Ueshiba Morihei, for example) but
weren’t being clearly passed down to students, or abilities that had been
possessed by masters of the past but were lost to the present generation. (Yes,
it’s true that Tohei visited Ichikukai before training with Ueshiba, but the
subsequent adoption of misogi derived practices into his aikido teaching speaks
to their perceived relevance).
While I wouldn’t argue that such training
certainly required a fearsome intensity and commitment, and I am sure the men
who undertook such training were not to be trifled with, I view such practices
as somewhat removed from the training of bushi prior to the Meiji Period.
It is true that feats of incredible
endurance and intensity were performed during previous centuries, but to put
this into some kind of perspective, it
is interesting to note how these were viwed at the time.
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| Wasa Daihachiro engaged in his record breaking feat |
Perhaps no examples of martial endurance
were more remarkable than the toshiya
or feats of archery performed at Sansusangendo Temple in Kyoto. This temple features
a particularly long veranda which became the venue for some quite distinctive archery
contests. Although they consisted of various types, the endurance shooting is
perhaps the most impressive. The record for this, set by Wasa Daihachiro in
1688 was for 8,133 hits out of 13,065 arrows shot in a 24 hour period. Although
he took a break of several hours, and had to have blood let from his engorged
right hand when he resumed shooting, this averages out to 9 arrows a minute for
the entire period! Almost as impressive a record was set by 13 year old Noro
Masaaki, competing in the ‘junior’ competition, who shot 11,715 arrows in 12
hours.
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| A more recent example of toshiya courtesy of the Sanjusangendo site. |
However, Hinatsu Shigetaka, writing in the Honchō Bugei Shōden (1716), criticises the whole
phenomenon as emphasizing strength and stamina at the expense of skill, and not
being the true way of archery. Of course, looking at present day practices and
criticising them in comparison with the past is a common enough phenomenon, but
in this case, it is interesting to compare the views of a bushi writing in the
heyday of the samurai, when warfare was still a common occurrence, and the
bushi still viewed themselves primarily as fighting men.
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| Hojo Yasutoki from a woodblock print by Utagawa Yoshikazu |
Hōjō Yasutoki (1183-1242) served as both a general and a leading member of
the administration of his day (he was eventually to become regent); writing to
a relative he recommended making a minimum of three ‘dry shots’ (suhiki) when not at war or actively practising.
(He was, of course, addressing a fully trained bushi who had spent years
training in archery and fighting in battles.) This may seem a surprisingly
small number – certainly, it does not fit the image of men engaged in
relentless practice. But we should remember that the warriors of this era had not
only spent long hours developing their skills, but that they were also busy
people who did not have the time to spend all day in training for an indefinite
period.
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| Hojo Yasutoki from a woodblock print by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi |
He goes on to stress the importance of the
mental, not the physical element of practice.
“…Every
time he releases an arrow, he must think that this very arrow is the last one
and that, if it misses the target, in the absence of the second arrow, he will
be shot by his enemy or torn to pieces by an animal.”
This is particualrly interesting in that it
suggests that he covers both the mental and physical aspects of training, but
in a way very different from the model offered by the misogi practices detailed
above and the severe training described in the last post, in which repetition
was felt to the point of exhaustion was felt to be the way to achieve a mental
breakthrough.
[1] Practical Pursuits: Religion, Politics,
and Personal Cultivation in Nineteenth-Century
Japanese
Religions
Janine Anderson Sawada 2004, University of Hawaii
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