Taikyoku Araki-ryu Pac NW

  A video  recently gained some attention for its demonstration of the brutal nature of close quarters combat, and how even in the modern day, personal combat with a grenade and rifles can quickly end up in an up close and intensely personal knife-and-bite fight.  There is an incredible amount of absolute nonsense put out there in EVERY facet of the martial arts community. People have forgotten the difference between the things they are training and what is seen on this video.  Some of the most verbose pontificators, including highly regarded teachers, blathering on "the reality of combat" have never even been in a fight,  let alone actual personal combat. If they can't begin to understand where they are wrong, how can they know where they are correct? The places I've seen this video shared is on combatives sites, maybe some jiujitsu pages, probably because the most significant portion of it is on the ground. It is NOT jiujitsu by any stretch, but valid discussi...

"They do not have any rough, noisy, and loud pastimes except  wrestling, which they practice as an exercise and art for war." - João Rodrigues (1561 - 1633) This Island of Japon Some practitioners of medieval and early modern Japanese martial arts - koryū bugei - augment  their training with some form of combat sport practice in order to add "live" or "freestyle" fighting, as many koryū eschew any kind of sparring practice entirely or do not place much emphasis on it. This includes weapons' disciplines, where practitioners may add an art like kendo, more rarely another Asian weapons or historical European art with sparring; and grappling, where people tend to study judo or, increasingly BJJ ("Brazilian" Jiujitsu). 1 I've explored sumō instead. While I have been interested in it from very early on, after reading up on Chinese wrestling and sensing a connection between them, I first experienced sumō-like training in Araki-ryū. We would do...

This list continues to expand: Of course the works of  Ellis Amdur,  who heads this line of Araki-ryu: Dueling with O Sensei Old School Hidden in Plain Sight Follow his blog at  Kogen Budo  for more of his and others' writing on classical martial traditions in practice.  Other good reads for  an introduction to the classical traditions would be Diane Skoss' Koryu Books series. These bring the work of a number of current martial researchers and scholars together in one place: Koryu Bujutsu Sword and Spirit Keiko Shokon Scholarly Research   Scholarship on Japanese warrior culture has expanded considerably over the years, with many new insights developed from ongoing research, some of it made available to the non-specialist reader. More often than not these days, my reading list is more academic work than "martial arts research." Accessible versions of some doctoral theses are out there and in some cases more focussed on martial culture, even specif...