January '24 - The Myth of Distraction

One of the many references I have for the other art I practise, Aikido, is subscription material from Senshin Centre. David Valadez recently posted how atemi or striking in Aikido is often understood as a distraction. It is taught as a way to prevent the opponent from entering or to gain control of their balance while setting up for a lock or throw. He then states that if distraction is what one is after, there is no greater distraction than the suffering of serious bodily injury and one should learn how to strike properly.

It is often written that shuriken are also items for distraction rather than the one hit kill seen in old ninja movies. When viewed as part of kenjutsu, they distract the opponent to created an entry for attach with the sword or to make space for retreat.

Being a martial art, shurikenjutsu is practised with a more serious nature than target based sports. In a martial context the primary target is the opponent's face. When you see how deep the shuriken can penetrate into the target used for training it suggests that like unarmed strikes solid enough to cause serious bodily injury, in real application shurikenjutsu would also be one hell of a distraction.

Aspects of the various tools used in MSR training can conceivably translate across to other objects in a self defense situation. But pegging someone in the face with the sharp end of a six inch nail is above and beyond any situation of self defense in the legal sense and that makes the art at least in its pure form martially impractical. Friends training in other tradition Japanese weapons arts have said the same to me about what they do and this is a common perspective of the mature practitioner.

Like with many martial arts physical and mental skills are developed that transfer in secondary ways to self defense but the primary reasons to train fall back to enjoyment and self improvement. Much more than just exercise or mindfulness, practise of the practice becomes aligned with the common understanding of Budo and everything it does for the modern student. Those physical and mental skills are valuable in many aspects of daily life in all sorts of ways.

Besides all that, throwing stuff is a lot of fun too.

So bonus ten points for anyone who can relate the picture of the kanji 真打 "shin da" with a set of MSR shuriken still wrapped up in the packaging paper, along with the content of the post......

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