"Donahue, John - Sensei" - читать интересную книгу автора (Donahue John)

myself during bokken practice.

It's a pride thing. There's a lot of talk in the martial arts about
letting go of your ego and all that, and we try, we really do, but the
fact is that, at this level, you have invested a tremendous amount of
time and effort into developing your skills and attaining a certain
ranking in the dojo, and you really get just a bit ticked off when
something happens to threaten that. All the bowing and titles, the
uniforms and colored belts, are about status, your sense of worth. It's
a closed little world with its own system for ranking you, but it's
still a status system, and human beings respond to that.

This woman was good with her weapon. I could sense that and so could
she. She was pressing me a bit altering the tempo of the moves,
delivering her cuts with something close to full force, shortening the
time between parry and counter delivering a type of challenge to see
whether I could meet it.

I could, of course, but that wasn't the real point. For me, the
challenge was how to respond to her force with something more refined.
It meant that instead of parrying her cuts with a force that would make
our bokken bark out with the shock of impact, I needed to finesse it a
bit.

I changed the angles slightly, moving my body just out of the line of
attack, which served to place me out of the radius of her strikes. I
tried to keep my hands supple as I parried, accepting the force of her
blows and redirecting them slightly, but things were getting a bit
sweaty and I didn't want the sword flying out of my hands and shooting
across the room. It happens occasionally, and if nobody gets hit we
all laugh and the one who let go gets ribbed unmercifully, but this was
not a situation where I was willing to get laughed at.

I knew this woman was a relative beginner at the dojo, and I counted on
her weapon fixation. It was an unfair advantage in a way, but it's
also an example of what Yamashita calls heiho strategy.

Between shifting slightly and redirecting a bit more through the next
series of movements in the kata, I built up enough frustration in my
partner for her to over commit in her next strike a little too much
shoulder in the technique, her head leading into it and it was all
over. I simply let go of my bokken with my left hand, entered into her
blind side, led her around in a tight little circle and took the sword
away. It wasn't a move that was in the kata, but Yamashita tells us
any time you can do tachi-dori (sword taking), you should, just to keep
your partner on his or her toes.

The pivot took her around on her toes, all right. She knew what was
happening about a split second after the spin began, but it was too
late to get out of it. I handed her back the bokken. She smiled a bit