Day: May 5, 2010

Basics & Fundamentals (part 2)


What does the Ten Chi Jin imply?

The Ten Chi Jin Ryaku no Maki is based on the three levels of life: heaven, earth and man. Man is the link between earth and heaven or between outer space and the planet. The old Chinese pictogram is a drawing representing two opposite half circles linked by a cross. The pictogram displays symbolically a human body with his legs on the earth supporting the sky with his arms, and mixing these two influences within his body.
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What are the different parts of the Ten Chi Jin?

The Ten Ryaku deals with footwork, distances and angles; this is the vertical line in the pictogram. The Chi Ryaku deals with the bio-mechanical aspects of the different waza that can be applied once uke has reached tori (gyaku, nage, torite). This is the horizontal line. The Jin Ryaku is a series of about 50 waza taken from the nine schools to show the interaction of the waza and the footwork. This is the point where the vertical and horizontal line cross each other.
The Jin Ryaku has nothing to do with the schools. The waza taken from the schools are often quite different from the waza included in a certain level of a school. They are used as examples to manifest the interaction of body movement and creativity.
This is why they can be trained on both the left and right side and why they do not imply the use of weapons.
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To be continued…

Why “Yûro Shi Tennô Taikai”?


Last August when I brought Hatsumi sensei some pictures of the Taikai in Paris decided to change its name and to call it the “Yûro Shi Tennô Taikai“. When I asked him the reason for that he said this was a pun between “Europa”  [yuropa] and the  Japanese word “Yûro”. Yûro means something like the “path to bravery”.

So we invite you to join us in this eighth “path of bravery spreading everywhere all over Europe!”  More than 15 countries are expected to come! Come to Paris and build up your memory.

Shi Tennô is the nickname that sensei gave us back in the nineties as the four of us were spreading the Bujinkan system all over Europe. If the original meaning is the “four emperors”, it is in fact the name given to the four Chinese spirits of the four directions: North, South, East and West. Nothing glorious there.

But because Kano sensei, the founder of jûdô, nicknamed his four students spreading the kodôkan jûdô over the world by the name of “shi tennô“, Hatsumi sensei decided to do the same. Unfortunately this name has nothing to do with our martial skills. 🙂

Taikai means big seminar and this one is definitely a big one. This is one of the last 3 day seminar that we have after the end of the Taikai directed by sensei. If my friends and I have decided to organize it in the past it was because we were missing those taikai with sensei in Europe and in the USA. Those Taikai with sensei that we have organized between 1987 and 2002 were always a fantastic moment of friendship and budô. This Yûro Shi Tennô Taikai is following the same tracks and this is why, each year, we have more and more success.

Over the last five years, the success of this event has been increasing so much that we had to limit the number of participants. For those of you training in the Bujinkan and who didn’t get the chance to train in Japan this year, this Taikai is your chance as each one of the instructor in this seminar has been staying in Japan one, twice or three times since last November.

As sensei was saying at the honbu recently: “only those who  train regularly in Japan with me have a chance to get what I am showing”. This is your chance to get your update.

See you there with a smile on your face.

Online prebooking

Basics & Fundamentals (part 1)


The Ten Chi Jin from 1987

During my last seminar in Chemnitz, I was asked to explain to the group the Bujinkan system. It was a discovery for many students so I decided to share here in this blog the importance of the Ten Chi Jin Ryaku no Maki.

The first thing you have to get clearly is that the Ten Chi Jin Ryaku no Maki is the best system ever created to give a martial artist a chance to develop his creativity. This is the kaitatsu explained by sensei recently.
Too often the Ten Chi Jin Ryaku no Maki is underestimated by the teacher more inclined to dwell on the rich legacy of the nine schools. This is a major mistake as without the Ten Chi Jin Ryaku no Maki no student can really grasp the essence of sensei’s teachings.
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What is the Ten Chi Jin Ryaku no Maki?

It is a program put out by sensei in the eighties as a common basic program for the beginners. The first “official” edition was published in Japanese back in 1983 under the title “Togakure Ryû Ninpô Taijutsu”. Divided into three parts which are Ten, Chi, and Jin, it presented in a certain order the elemental bricks necessary to study the nine schools and their specificities. After a few years of practice, it had been reviewed and modified to be even more practical. In 1987, we received from Japan, the first English version of this new system. The majority of the techniques were the same, but the repartition had been changed to facilitate the learning. The first published versions of this new Ten Chi Jin Ryaku no Maki (TCJ2) were done in 1991 by Pedro Fleitas in Spanish and by Mariette Van der Vliet in English. The French Protek was published by me in 1998. An adapted version in German by Steffen Frohlich was also released during the same period.  Many other incomplete and transformed versions were published subsequently.
To be continued…
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