A couple of essays on teaching from 2009. – Kim Taylor, 2009 – Re-posted 12 Sep 2023

Some Explanation of the Gloating

It occurs to me that the previous note was a bit cryptic. Allow me to expand a little on teaching in the martial arts since I’ve been thinking about it.

It’s a pain in the butt, always has been. I’ve never had enough instruction around to allow me to simply be a student. The Aikido club at the University of Guelph was started in 1980 by Peter Yodzis who taught twice through the week as a third kyu. Bruce Stiles came up from Toronto once a week on Sundays to teach a class. As a result I was doing some of the teaching within a couple of years, maybe from third kyu.

The same thing happened when I started teaching iaido formally at the University in 1987. I went down to Toronto to study with my instructor (Goyo Ohmi sensei) and brought back what I had learned to the students here in Guelph. There wasn’t any grading in iaido until 1991, some 8 years from my first lesson, so I was practicing and teaching for quite a while without any rank at all.

The rank doesn’t matter, but the teaching certainly does. There are many students of budo who can’t wait to start teaching, figuring that this is the ultimate goal of their training. After all, sensei gets to tell folks how to train and seems to know it all so hurray when we get to teach. We’re a big cheeze now!

These folks are, I’m afraid, almost always a real drag on the system and not good instructors. The desire to teach is, in that most Platonic of ideals, a big recommendation against teaching. Teaching slows if not entirely prevents your own progress in the art. It is also the place where you start getting into all the nasty grimy stuff like finding a place to practice, dealing with landlords or administrations, and finding continuing instruction for yourself and for your students within a larger organization that is inevitably as hard to get along with as all organizations are.

Like I said, a pain in the butt.

But at some point you usually need to start teaching, often out of necessity when you move away from your teacher, sometimes because the art is very small, or eventually because you are simply the “last man standing” and you outlive everyone above you in the hierarchy. Yippee for those who avoid this until they’re 6 or 7dan, as is the case for many in Japan, but here in the west it’s unusual for a 5dan not to be teaching.

When it finally happens and you’re out there in front of a bunch of beginners looking at you like you’re some sort of intelligent being, you want to do your best for them. You want to do your best for the art. You want to teach as hard and as well as you practiced while you were a student. You want to survive until the beer at the end of the class.

If you’re very, very lucky you will teach long enough and have students who are smart enough to become better than you are. Those students will take the art forward to something better than it was when you started practicing.

Despite teaching way too early, and having to grab instruction where and when I could for myself, despite not being as good at this stuff as I could have been if I’d had a sensei to kick my ass four or five times a week while I was in my 20s and 30s, I have some of those students.

And that’s something to have a little gloat about.

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Being Japanese

From time to time the discussion of who can teach the martial arts comes up. Quite often the talk turns to the “Japanese bias” of students, where they will tend to assume that anyone from Japan is a sensei, and all Japanese, despite their rank or skill level, are more knowledgeable than Western instructors.

I think the bias is something that anyone who hangs around long enough to start teaching this stuff runs across eventually. The thing is, we had it ourselves when we started. It’s not really all that much of a problem, since everyone who sticks around for 20 years comes to a better understanding of the difference between race and talent, but it can be annoying and in some cases, for instance in arranging seminars with local instructors, it can be a problem.

Beginners like the exoticism of a Japanese martial art so of course they are going to like the experience of being taught by a Japanese sensei. It’s just a natural reaction, the same desire for a foreign flavour that took you to budo in the first place is going to incline you toward a Japanese instructor. There’s nothing wrong with that, especially if what you’re after is a cultural experience.

This same search for the exotic will lead to such assertions as you have to be in Japan to learn a koryu, that you have to understand modern Japanese culture in order to really understand a 400 year old martial art, and that anyone who has gone to Japan suddenly gets “touched by the kami” and knows some secret.

Western instructors often play this up as well, making a fetish of their time in Japan, their access to the Japanese sensei and implying that they have certain secrets that they can impart. This helps perpetuate the assumptions and is mostly harmless if the students are only after the exotic.

It can, however, be a problem if students are serious about the arts and are preventing themselves from learning by not listening to Western instructors who are both experienced and local. By ignoring these sensei the students are losing a valuable and regular source of training.

The Japanese themselves understand this problem, and there are several here in Canada who recognize and lament the rather silly assumption that a Japanese instructor is worth more than a Westerner. This is apparent even in what you can charge to attend a seminar with a Japanese (even if a local Japanese) instructor compared to a non-Japanese instructor.

In Canada we’ve been lucky to have many Japanese issei and nisei instructors who have no respect whatsoever for the idea that “being Japanese” implies superior skills. They are as happy to see a westerner sweating on the floor as they are to see a Japanese, and more importantly, just as frustrated with a Japanese who won’t give it their best at practice. In other words, we get over the Japanese thing earlier here because we are exposed. In other places with no Japanese population I’ve seen more than one cult grow up around westerners who have “talked to Japanese”.

The fact remains, whichever budo we practice, it’s a Japanese art and while there are many westerners who are quite good at kendo, iaido and jodo, there are many more senior Japanese sensei out there. We would be as foolish to ignore them as we would be to ignore senior Western instructors in our own countries.

The beginners will always believe that any Japanese has great skill in Budo, just as, I am sure, the “man on the street” in Tokyo believes Canadians know about hockey, Americans know about 6-guns and Europeans know about football. We should simply accept this and move on, confident that anyone of any nationality will eventually be skilled in our chosen arts if they continue to train for a couple of decades with good instructors, regardless of where they were born.