For me, one of the most surprising additions to a martial arts Dojo was the whiteboard.
This just happened; seemingly overnight.
For the first twenty years of my training in Wado karate under Japanese instructors, whiteboards (or chalk boards) were entirely absent and explanations of the verbal type, were extremely thin on the ground.
Yes, there were instructions and descriptions of shape and position (usually of the ‘wrong/right’ variety), as well as exhortations to do it faster or stronger, but beyond that, very little.
Then – out of nowhere, part way through a training session, we found ourselves being shepherded round a whiteboard and bewildered by diagrams, featuring badly drawn stick figures or footprints (I am an art teacher, of course I would notice these things). There were directional arrows and a forest of Japanese kanji, with hastily written concept names alongside. It all happened suddenly and was as if somebody had flipped a switch.
My unashamed use of the whiteboard at a course in Hungary.
Communication skills.
With the Japanese Sensei I suspect some of this came out of personal preferences and communication styles, or it was just a generational thing? Or both?
With Suzuki Sensei it was probably both.
Many years later I read a statement penned by Suzuki Sensei which went some way towards him explaining why he was scornful of the new-fangled whole ‘communication thing’, “Just do it!” was his mantra, long before Nike ever grabbed it as their tag line.
I can only speak for myself but I found these whiteboard sessions often filled in gaps and supplied a greater understanding of what we were doing. The downside might have been that the terminology of concepts for many seemed divorced from context, but, nevertheless were hoovered up eagerly by the Japanophiles who just loved this stuff. However, theories are no good on their own, you have to be able to incorporate them and embody the ideas into your training. Anything else is just cerebral fluff.
Another reason why it might have been ‘generational’.
My basic theory is that Japanese Sensei’s teaching styles may, in part, be influenced by more modern methods of learning and transferring knowledge, versus old-style learning. But there’s also something else going on.
The wider picture.
There’s always been a bit of a cultural divide going on between East Asian thinking and western thinking relating to the separation of the Mind and the Body. Westerners tend to draw clear distinctions between the two; but in the East, particularly with skills that tend to be physical in nature, the body is encouraged to almost develop its own wisdom, of equal or higher value than that of the mind, or a complete melding of Mind and Body to just be one entity.
Verbal transmission, or transmission by example.
A while ago I picked up on a theory put forward about how information is processed and communicated in the west and in the east.
One aspect of a very tightly woven cultural theory was that transmission in the west was more efficient than in the east, based upon the written tradition.
Put simply; in the west with only 26 individual written characters to make up the alphabet, we are able to put across complex ideas with no great technical obstacles, supercharged with the invention of the printing press and moveable type. Through the vehicle of this technology wisdom can be preserved and transmitted easily.
Move that idea across to China and Japan and you can immediately see the problem. In Japan you need to have memorised 1,200 characters in order to read a newspaper (there are estimated to be 50,000 characters in written Japanese). Transpose that to moveable type and it becomes a total nightmare. Although it has to be remembered that to some degree in China and Japan attempts were made to do such a thing in the 13th and 14th century but with only limited success, certainly nothing to match Johannes Gutenberg’s groundbreaking work in Europe around the year 1450.
For the Japanese in particular, this meant that it was extremely challenging to store accumulated knowledge in textbooks. So, other methods of passing down information and skills came to the fore. Here’s where the concept of transmission through the experience of body wisdom might begin to come into its own. Specifically for the physical skills.
The advantage of ‘feeling’ a technique.
In martial arts training sometimes you have to feel your Sensei’s technique to understand what he is doing. It is then theoretically possible for you to somehow mimic the technique and absorb it in a deeper, more meaningful way than just observing it (or having it explained to you verbally, or reading about it in written form).
Where this gains value is that basically it bypasses the intellect, the ‘feel’ becomes the teaching. It is my worry that westerners are programmed to be resistant to this form of learning, having an unconscious prejudice against the immediacy of direct body to body learning; somehow thinking that if it is not cogitated upon then it is of a lesser value.1
Potential flaws in this system.
It is not a perfect method, and it’s not immune to incomplete or patchy transmission. I will give several reasons for this:
1. Mass teaching – How on earth can so many students gain direct body to body contact? What you are left with is ‘monkey see, monkey do’. When I see photos of courses on social media with huge numbers in attendance, it is that thought that goes through my head.
2. Just not reading it right – Another problem is that the student experiences the feedback and misinterprets it, or only feels the external form and figures that’s all there is to it. Thus, the body copies the outward feel of what’s going on and misses the internal mechanisms of the technique.
3. The curse of all transmission – The nemesis of any school or tradition is dilution and the weakening of the brand, usually because of all of the above.
Instead of the Ryu evolving in an upwards spiral, it descends into a downward spiral which inevitably leads to oblivion.
Other ways that shed more light on how this method might work.
In the older tradition of Japanese martial arts an aspect that is not so common in Gendai Budo (modern martial arts) is that often the Sensei will take Uke for the student. This is said to be a very useful tactile teaching tool, in that the Sensei gets feedback through directly feeling the technique of the student, and the Sensei is also able to direct and control the physical challenge he can impose on the student, often making a verbal explanation completely unnecessary.
Another frequently used non-verbal teaching strategy, certainly used in my teaching and learning experience in the Dojo, is ‘Mitori Geiko’, to learn by watching. I have often seen where very keen students who are injured or otherwise unable to train, have turned up at the Dojo to make sure that they are not missing out on the messages that Sensei is trying to get across; they do this by closely observing what is going on. You might connect this to the ‘mirror neurons’, definition:
“Mirror neurons are one of the most important discoveries in the last decade of neuroscience. These are a variety of visuospatial neurons which indicate fundamentally about human social interaction. Essentially, mirror neurons respond to actions that we observe in others. The interesting part is that mirror neurons fire in the same way when we actually recreate that action ourselves”.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3510904/
This indeed sounds like a very interesting area to dig deeply into, especially as it applies to the martial arts.
In conclusion.
As an example of how we are still struggling with these issues, even in the wider aspects of our lives, I will cite an example from the field of education, where there was a recent trend to teach modes or methods of learning. As it turned out, teachers were rather too keen to bracket learners into the categories of ‘visual’, ‘auditory’, kinaesthetic’ and ‘read/write’ learners. This was discovered to be too simplistic and flawed; because the reality was that learners flipped easily between theses modes, often depending on the types of tasks they were engaged with.
To return to martial arts.
Many martial arts skills aim for a high level of competence, we’ve come a long way from the days of bashing each other over the head with tree branches.
Martial artists from the past who have developed phenomenally advanced psycho-physical abilities felt a need to create a legacy for their achievements, something that goes beyond the span of their own lifetime; thus the teaching problems outlined above become of paramount concern. If we are serious about this then we need to avoid dropping the ball.
As a final word. The mechanisms of human intelligence are the most complex structures that we will ever come into contact with. And we have to remind ourself that there it is, the whole thing, sitting right between our ears.
In various conversations I have had with Japanese Sensei of the older generation, it is very clear that back in the day, any thought of asking questions or expecting verbal explanation in a Japanese martial arts context was largely unthinkable. For them, martial arts doesn’t happen predominantly in your head.
Tim, what sort of art (visual, I mean) do or did you teach? I was an art major in college.