cloudz wrote:origami_itto wrote:Bro, I am a mason raised in a lodge with druids, catholics, jews, pagans, thelemites, and assorted hermeticists. I've studied this stuff. I get it.
I don't LARP, and I am definitely insulted when any of my activities are described as such. The closest I've come is the SCA and the whole reenactment thing was just something I tolerated to get to hit people in the head with sticks.
I train by doing exercises. My role is student. I'm american. i wear sweats and dri-weave. There is no part of my practice that is role playing or pretending. I've used the skills I've gained professionally and personally to defend myself and others from direct threat of bodily harm.
now contrast that to this ninja bullshit...
Ninjutsu was if anything a military discipline involving strategy, spying, unconventional tactics that shinobi, who would run away from actual fighting whenever possible, and would backstab and ambush and use long range weapons when not possible to avoid it, studied and used in order to conduct clandestine operations for their feudal lords.
Any martial art associated with a shinobi would be ancillary to that military training. There is no martial art called ninjutsu with any historical credibility.
So when you say you're a ninja, you tell me you're LARPing. You're training in geurilla warfare, spying, and assassination, and maybe some jujutsu and karate, or you're just doing some shit some dude made up by blending jujutsu and karate and branded as Ninja to part you from your coin. In either case, 99% of it is just pretending.
Ok, no worries, i perfectly understand the ninjutsu issues.
The empty hand martial art is Taijutsu by the way. The term Ninjutsu was never used, but again it doesn't bother me. It was what it was, it's behind me now. I think it was 2006, so I last trained at that school more than 16 years ago. I mostly did TCC, some Japanese sword and Aikido. But I take your point the teacher may well have cobbled things together. I wouldn't call it bullshit, but you are welcome to your opinion!
The reason we are even talking about it is that I see parallels, but if you don't think so, we can drop it. But I think they have faced similar accusations as Hatsumi has for example.
We never "Larped" in the sense you are talking about, but we have picked up this term in different contexts, so I get why you may see it that way.
around maybe 15-17 years ago on forums the term was used for any training that simply did not involve sparring or resistence.
Rightly or wrongly that's how i have learnt to use it and think of it.
I've never run around a dark forest with Black Camo!
We just see the term differently. When I see Judo guys drilling a technique i seem the same method. The other guy is allowing the technique. It's how you learn technique.
when you learnt a throw or a lock, you didn't do it against resistance. You had a "dummy"; just so happens to be a human one following a role.
This is what i mean. Traditional arts more often than not using that one step technique training. Adding a few more steps perhaps here and there.
I have for example BJJ privates every week. we basically exercise, train techniques the same way as any other traditional art, then roll.
that's all i mean by it; it's really not my fault it has negative connotations for others. And further it really isn't necessary to impose them on anyone else. It's a choice to take it negatively or positively. Or alternatively I asked for a different term to training that isn't technically sparring, but is training techniques compliantly. I am more than happy to use a different one. But it changes nothing frankly.
With the whole training summation. i think we can all safely assume the person we are talking to has trained in similar ways. i mean how many ways are there really. You drill, you spar, you.... ?? create different situations. from fixed 'role play'/ TT.. towards freedoms.
The training those guys doing your LARP, training wise, they certainly aren't any worse off, that I can see. I hear it can get pretty rough.
LARPing is Live Action Role Playing. It's putting on a wizard costume and throwing tennis balls at a guy dressed like a warrior and screaming "Fireball".
Calling compliant training exercises LARPing is something that I remember the Bullshido guys doing as a way of showing disrespect for the methods.
So yeah, drills is a good term for it. We do drills. We aren't pretending to be other people. We aren't playing at being medieval assassins running through the night in black pajamas. We're training our bodies and minds.
wayne hansen wrote:He told me how good Hatsumi was but that he wasn’t a Ninja but was a high ranking black belt in many traditional Japanese martial arts
Ninja was just a marketing device to teach all the arts he learned under one banner
And you know, if he and the students are happy with that, more power to them. I just find it a bit dishonest because then you get these accountants and programmers running around thinking they're Ninja mystics... or the second coming of Yang Lu Chan.