a lesson learned living in the dojo - m. croes

March 25, 2013

When I was asked to write a blog post for the dojo it immediately sparked a sense of anxiety. I’m not much of a writer and prefer doing things of a more tactile and physical nature, e.g. cleaning. So as I started this I began thinking about why I feel a sense of anxiety around this kind of task; what impact does it have on my training ? This points to a larger question that I’ve been thinking about: how to apply what I learned living in the dojo to my everyday life.

The specific topic I was asked to write about was the month I spent living at the dojo. Living there is unlike any experience I’ve had. You start your day at 6:00 a.m. and the first thing you do, before brushing your teeth or putting away your futon, is to light incense and change the Kamidana (Shinto shrine) offerings. You then train Aikido or weapons for an hour, do zazen or misogi, eat breakfast, clean, train at noon class, clean, prepare dinner, train for two more evening classes, clean, get dinner ready, clean up and then hopefully sleep a few hours. The simple list of activities can’t do justice to the kind of life it is. It is something that must be experienced firsthand to understand the personal impact. I can tell you what it did for me. It showed me what is possible when you feel worn down and it taught me to begin letting go, to release some of my obsessiveness. It also brought me closer to seeing within myself how quickly I can give up on something if it becomes difficult or uncomfortable.

At the dojo, you train harder than you think you will. No matter what you prepare for, you won't be truly ready for what you are confronted with. The pain, the discomfort of sleeping on futons on the floor, the emotions that begin to surface. Everything that you can hide behind outside the dojo slowly gets stripped away and you are left to embrace your faults and strengths. You begin to learn from them and hopefully make adjustments that improve you in aikido and in life. Learning this is made easier by the warmth of the people at the dojo and it gives me a sense of calm and centeredness in my life… sometimes. It's a work in progress.

While living in the dojo I also had to work in the mornings at my job in New Jersey. In the beginning there was a sense of relief after such hard training to go to work and get what I perceived as "a break." But as my time progressed I found that work simply became a distraction from what was really important to me – training. And the process began to affect me both physically and emotionally.

In a way I came to appreciate the sheer exhaustion of living there because there was no energy left for much of anything. Every day - on the mat and off - I have anxiety about doing things correctly or accomplishing things. I get frustrated when I attempt even simple movements: left foot here, right there, and then I go to do it and find myself with my feet switched or slouching or hunching my shoulders. That's not to mention being able to do something correctly one day and then not the next. But in my time living in the dojo the anxiety lessened and I was able to do more of what frightens and frustrates me. I had to let go of something. It would have been impossible to function otherwise. In Aikido and in life one has to let go of attachments and desires in order to move on and to improve. The letting go of tension, anger, fear all have to happen. Part of improving - we’ve all heard - is becoming “relaxed with tension"; how to accomplish that has been something I have been asking myself for some time. When I find the answer I’ll post it. If you told me two years ago that cleaning and training in a martial art could teach me about letting go and becoming more relaxed I wouldn’t have believed you. When I first started to train I would look for excuses to not go to the dojo or to not stay as long because of some fear or anxiety. Now, I look for excuses to be there longer or to stay for that extra class that I don’t really want to do. I still have ups and downs and there are times when I don’t want to go, when laziness or emotions win out. It is a work in progress. But I am definitely taking the advice I was given by Sensei when I stopped sleeping at the dojo… “keep going." -Michael Croes

quote from master takeda mokurai for reflection

February 20, 2013

"They say that if you practice Zen, you will be calm. Some misunderstand these words because they are attached to the literal sense of the word 'calm.' They think they will be completely unaffected even when struck by a thunderbolt. But this is not true. The subtle meaning of Zen lies in spontaneous response. If thunder peals, we peal, too; if an earthquake comes to shake us, we ourselves shake with it. It is childish to say that those who practice Zen will never care nor fuss about anything." -from Zen no Katsatsu

essay from sensei r. heins, northwest michigan aikikai

December 20, 2012

An experience during a recent visit to Tokyo got me thinking about the meaning and implications of the sempai–kohai relationship. I had arranged to meet up with a group of old acquaintances from another aikido organization for drinks—people I hadn’t seen in several years. We hadn’t trained together at Hombu yet—I was meeting them after practice that day. When I got to the bar, one of them, a woman I had met only once before, didn’t shake my hand or give me an American-style hug like everyone else had, but instead stood in front of me and bowed and said, “Good to see you, sempai.” For reasons I didn’t understand at the time, I found this intensely irritating and avoided her for the rest of the evening.

I later felt sorry for being so rude, and spent some time trying to figure out what had bothered me so much about this interaction. Part of it was the unnatural formality of her greeting; I felt like snapping at her, “I’m not Japanese, for god’s sake!” It generally strikes me as false when Westerners adopt Japanese manners with each other, especially outside of a dojo context. But after more thought, I realized that my reaction stemmed from the implications of her using the term “sempai” to address me. She and I are not in the same organization, much less the same dojo; we had not trained together. But she addressed me as “sempai,” which to me implies a close relationship with the other person and contains a heavy burden of mutual obligation.

The best way I can describe a sempai’s role in English is the idea of “taking someone under your wing”; there is an implied reciprocal responsibility between sempai and kohai. Personally speaking, there are few people I would consider my sempai in this sense. Robert Savoca is one of them—if I were speaking to him in front of a group of senior Japanese teachers, or talking about him to one of them, I might refer to him as “Savoca sempai.” He has gone out of his way to support my training and my development as an aikidoist, and he has always been willing to offer counsel about technical matters or some problem or roadblock in my training. Reciprocally, to the best of my ability I try to take care of him if there is anything that I can do that his own students cannot. There is a deep friendship between us as well, of course, so our actions toward each other are not mere rote based on rank; they have developed naturally over time. That said, under normal circumstances I use his given name; I don’t address him as “Savoca sempai.” If I called him that, it would put a kind of barrier of formality between us. When I talk about him with his own students, I generally refer to him as “Savoca sensei.”

The Japanese terms “sempai,” “kohai,” and “dohai” may be misunderstood in Western dojos, if they are used at all; likewise, cultural concepts of seniority can be misinterpreted. Literally speaking, “sempai” means “earlier/previous member [of a group]”; “kohai” means “later member”; and “dohai”—used far less often—means “equal member,” and refers to someone who joined the dojo at the same time as oneself. Based on my experiences in Japan, I would say it’s not terribly common outside the university milieu to address a person as “sempai” directly. But both in and out of martial-arts situations, sempai/kohai/dohai are generally used to describe one’s relationship with another person to a third party, e.g. “Charlie is my sempai; he was third kyu when I joined the dojo.” Or “Alice is my kohai; she started working at this company three years after I did.” “James and I are dohai; we entered university at the same time.” In a martial-arts context, the use of these terms depends heavily on circumstances and the culture of the dojo itself. But it’s important to understand that they relate to relationships within a given group, and that certain expectations and obligations are attached to them.

When I first came to Hombu in 2004, I was yondan in rank, and was a certified shidoin within Birankai. When I began practicing at the dojo, however, I was told in no uncertain terms that I was junior (kohai, if you like) to everyone in the dojo who had joined before me, regardless of their rank. It didn’t take much time for me to understand why this made sense. I didn’t know the routines at the dojo—how the cleaning was done, how one lined up for class, how this instructor or that expected people to do shomenuchi ikkyo—so it made sense that I was supposed look to more experienced people to help me learn these things. If there was no one around but a fifth-kyu white belt, I would ask that person for guidance.

In my seven years at Hombu dojo, no one ever called me “sempai,” and I never addressed anyone else that way, either. The term is used a lot in the context of university sports clubs, where there is a keen awareness of seniority; perhaps this is where some Westerners picked it up. Students in clubs are expected to address their seniors as “sempai” and look to them for guidance and direction. This is to some extent a way of training them for the Japanese corporate world, which is far more hierarchical than the Western business milieu. It is also a way to keep the dynamics of a university club, whose members naturally turn over at a rapid rate, at a consistent level. Outside the university context, however, the use of “sempai” and “kohai” are far more varied. Some dojos may encourage their students to address seniors as “sempai”; others will not. (One never addresses a junior as “kohai”; to point so directly to their inferior status would be rude.) To describe the sempai–kohai relationship in more general terms, I would say that a sempai—that is, a senior dojo member—is expected to show leadership, demonstrate proper form and correct etiquette, and help newer members understand how things go around the dojo, from what the expected stance is for striking shomen to how to clean the toilets. Some people assume that when they reach “sempai” status, they no longer need to do mundane tasks like dusting, or even folding their own hakama. This is not what I experienced in Japan. Regardless of rank, everyone was expected to shoulder their responsibilities; if someone was not cleaning, it was assumed that they had other duties to attend to, not that they were exempt from it. And everyone at Hombu folds their own hakama. Kohai, for their part, generally sought out sempai for practice, watched them for clues about how to behave, and tried to be the first to take care of “easy” dojo responsibilities like cleaning the mat and other shared areas.

In America, I have seen some things that I consider odd or even harmful regarding seniority in a dojo in general, often under the rubric of “sempai/kohai.” The anecdote at the beginning of this essay shows how these terms, if applied thoughtlessly, can create barriers. Or a dan-ranked student may join a new dojo and expect to be given teaching responsibility simply because their rank is higher than other members’. Or an instructor hands over teaching responsibility without taking the time to confirm that the dan-ranked new member executes techniques in a way that is consistent with the practice at that dojo. The entire dynamic of a dojo can be affected by these kinds of decisions. Naturally, it is always up to a chief instructor to assign teaching responsibility, and her decision must be unequivocally respected. In general, though, my feeling is that the person who has been training at the dojo longest should be deferred to by everyone. If you are a guest in a dojo, it is likewise a good idea to take ukemi first when you are training, so you can feel how a technique is done in that dojo.

Obviously, this is not a black-and-white matter, and the idea of “senior” vs. “junior” is heavily context-dependent. A student who joined in 2002 and has trained once a week since then will naturally have a poorer understanding of their teacher’s aikido than one who joined in 2003 but practices five days a week. In such cases, seniority in rank becomes an appropriate yardstick. And at regional seminars and other events where all participants are more or less equal in “membership,” rank would be a much more relevant determinant of the senior/junior role. Complicating matters further is the fact that rank is sometimes conferred for reasons other than technical ability.

In the final analysis, it seems to me that the best policy to adopt is one of flexibility, based on the understanding that your role as senior (or junior) is always relative, and will shift according to context. Regardless of rank, you should take care to fulfill your responsibilities as they present themselves, and treat everyone in the dojo—not only your instructor and seniors, but also your juniors and yourself—with sincere respect.