Taikyoku Araki-ryu Pac NW

  There are many resources available for information on classical Japanese martial arts, with popular and scholarly sources in English readily accessible. This Recommended Reading List is updated from time to time as more work is published. Online Resources  Check out  Kogen Budo  for writings by Ellis and others on classical martial traditions.  Koryu.com  gives a good general sense of the modern practice of classical Japanese martial disciplines. This article  at Budo Japan and  this one  by Dr. Karl Friday. Dr. Friday has various writings online and in print addressing and re-assessing Japanese warrior culture in light of ongoing scholarly research. Everything he writes has relevance and informs how we approach practice.  Popular Sources on Classical Martial Arts Good reading for a general introduction to the study of classical traditions would be  Diane Skoss' Koryu Books  series. They bring the work of a number of current ...

Officer deploying knife in weapon retention training I post these with a strong caution. They are GRAPHIC and for some may be quite disturbing. People are seriously injured and stabbed to death in various circumstances in the videos below. Fair Warning. This is not "Knife Porn." They are representative examples of how actual fighting - more often simply assaults - with edged weapons occur. I feel that it behooves those of us who purport to be practicing effective methods for using and dealing with edged weapons - classical or contemporary - know what actual violence with them looks like.  In my career as a police officer, I attended many stabbings and dealt with the aftermath, and saw the video evidence of many more. I have had friends and colleagues stabbed, including one who suffered what a medical examiner said would have been fatal wounds during a chaotic ground fight with a suspect had he not been mistakenly killed by other responding law enforcement.  There are plenty o...

  Our study  focusses on Araki-ryū’s close combat catalogue ( torite  and  kogusoku ), in an  innovative model that allows us to explore diverse practice methodologies.  M ost of Araki-ryū’s close quarters   kata ( pattern-practice)  apply nearly “as is” in modern-day tactical and protection  situations involving edged weapons.   How  they are trained is our primary concern.  Close combat is violent, involving intense interactions of physical force and opposing will. Thus elements of opposition *must* be included in practice for it to properly prepare the practitioner for an actual encounter.  The modern tactical training term for this is force-on-force (FoF).  Practice that does not include FoF has been appropriately decried as “empty forms” and mere choreography for hundreds of years. However, force on force does not mean simply turning pattern training into “free fighting.” Instead a system of coherent and int...