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Martial fashion (part 2)

Fashion 1

Accessory: kit bag

Following on from the previous fashion post, there’s a new image in the gallery: Martial Fashion (part 2).

This one addresses the problem of accessories. You can’t go to all the trouble of dressing up and then stomp out onto the mat or into the arena wearing shoes that don’t match. That would be wrong. So hopefully Fudebakudo can help the fashion-clueless amongst the martial arts community (you are out there: we see you) with this simple guidance, which this time makes some sensible suggestions for your shoes, bag, and gloves.

You might think that trying to merge the disparate worlds of hand-to-hand combat and a sensitivity to stitching would be impossible. But you’d be wrong. It turns out that having a feel for what goes with what and how a garment should hang without clinging can perfectly complement the sweaty business of twisting an opponent’s shoulder out of its socket or just kicking someone very, very hard. This point was made clear at this month’s Martial Arts Show at the NEC in Birmingham. The guest of honour was none other than fashion/nudity consultant Gok Wan. Doing a fashion show. No, really.*

Still to come in the series (obviously, I think): hats and bling.

This helpful illustration was drawn for the current issue of MAI magazine.

* Yes Gok has martial arts connections: his brother is a Jeet Kune Do instructor. And even little songstress Katie Owen, who sang at the Martial Arts Show, has a black belt in taekwondo. Everything fits so neatly together.

But if it’s martial arts + singers that you want, it’s hard to beat this splendid film clip showing Anita Harris doing judo so well she actually appears to turn her opponent into a dog. They should have had that at the Martial Arts Show. Maybe next year, eh?

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Martial fashion (part 1)

Fashion 1

Wardrobe

There’s a new image in the gallery — this one is Martial Fashion (part 1).

The fact of the matter is that dressing up is a huge part of the martial arts and it’s by no means as necessary or normal as most of its practitioners would have you believe. Even the baggy white jimjams, or keikogi, popularised and standardised in judo and copied in karate and subsequent Japanese-influenced arts, are a relatively modern invention and nowhere near as traditional as they need to be in order to have any historical credibility. In fact, people wearing them might actually be dressing up as Japanese firemen.*

Judo: dressing up as firefighters and tripping each other up.

This cartoon was drawn for the current issue of MAI magazine.

* I’m hazarding a guess that there were no Japanese firewomen at the time.

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Fudebakudo master goes rogue; displays art in public

In a shocking breach of centuries-old tradition, a Fudebakudo master has gone public.

Fudebakudo in public

Ba Desheng publicly reveals the art. Unbelievable. Note elderly bystanders pretending not to be interested.

According to the British free “newspaper” Metro, “Ba Desheng gives a whole new meaning to the term martial art, using kung fu moves to sketch out giant Chinese letters — known as calligraphy — in front of impressed onlookers.” Read the whole story at the Metro, if you dare.

We can only speculate as to why Ba Desheng decided to reveal himself in a world where Fudebakudo masters normally pass amongst us unnoticed. His choosing to wear the classic red-and-black “signature colours” is a very bold statement. A cry for help, perhaps? Is he imparting a desperate message to the rest of the Fudebakudo world? Perhaps. Sadly we will never know because he left the inkstone out of the mix, and the ink is so watery that when the sun came out his urgent message was lost forever.

Strange times indeed.

(So, Chinese letters are “known as calligraphy” — thanks for clearing that up, Metro).

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Suffragette ju jutsu

By way of this blog’s recognition of International Women’s Day, here’s a tip o’ the hat to the most remarkable Edith Margaret Garrud, suffragette ju jutsu teacher. Amongst other impressive achievements, she taught the all-women Bodyguard corps specifically for protecting key Suffragettes against the police. She was introduced to the art by the perhaps better-remembered Edward Barton-Wright, he of Bartitsu fame (who was himself a fascinating character and pioneer, and who taught Sherlock Holmes his fighting technique, as far as such a thing is possible).

Ju jutsu as a husband tamer

Mrs Garrud’s Ju jutsu as a Husband Tamer, from the website of The Journal of Non-Lethal Combatives.
“I’ll learn this ‘ere jucy jujubes, Liz, for I could do for you if I was sober,” he says.

Anyway, on the topic of Suffrage . . . Royal Holloway (now of the University of London) was built as a women’s college and was opened by Queen Victoria in 1886 (hence the Royal). Inevitably, given the minority status of women’s education at the time Holloway was built, several key members of the Suffragette movement studied there including, for example, Emily Davison. This is pertinent because I have a number of connections with the place. Not only do I live very close to it, have studied there, worked there, trained in at least three different martial arts there (technically true), wrote a large part of one of the Exploding Pen books in the Victorian library there, but to top it all I was once commissioned to produce the Royal Holloway Board Game there. Yes, really.

If you’re interested in the Suffragettes, as clearly — today of all days — Fudebakudo expects you to be, I highly recommend the defaced penny episode of the BBC’s excellent “A History of the World in 100 Objects” series.

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Wee aikido graphics: free as in beer

Uke and tori

Uke & tori (useful terms)

Some aikido graphics (drawn for the “welcome pack” of my local aikido dojo, Spelthorne aikido club) are now available under a creative commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. This means you can use them for your dojo’s website or welcome pack or even aikido book — provided you credit Beholder, and propagate the license. It also means that perhaps you no longer need to infringe the copyright of Oscar Ratti’s superb drawings from
Aikido and the Dynamic Sphere.

See www.fudebakudo.com/aikido for the images.

This isn’t the full set — there are more images to come.

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Battle cat advert

Here’s the ad we’re running in the current (Christmas) edition of Martial Arts Illustrated magazine. MAI tends to have a lot of photos of grimacing, bald men in their pages, and no kittens. So Fudebakudo has changed that, at least for one issue.

Photo credit: Neil Hamilton (Flickr:neilh205) under a CC attrib 2.0 generic license.

Also, for the story behind battle cats in Fudebakudo, see this previous blog post: Battle cats.

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Bows and arrows

It’s been a while. Been busy. Work and stuff.

But Cecil (of the Straight Dope) just answered a question I have been wondering about for years (although, being English, I had wondered about it in the context of the English Civil War, a century or so earlier than Cecil is considering). That is:

Given that early firearms were so cumbersome and slow, and longbows so apparently devastating, why didn’t armies continue to employ archers against, say, enemy musket-men who stood, often unarmoured, close together?

Cecil, who happens to be the smartest person in the world, gives this answer.

Incidentally, it turns out that actually some archers were deployed in the English Civil War, but it was effectively their final appearance. Of course there were some later exceptions, most notably perhaps “Mad Jack” Churchill, who fought in WWII armed with longbow, sword, and bagpipes. Indeed.

Several years ago I recorded my visit to Pip Bickerstaffe, longbow maker, in the post The string’s the thing here on the Fudebakudo blog. Pip’s fascinating work and research challenges much of the popular opinion about the English use of the longbow.

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Ways of throwing

Throwing

Throwing elaborately

There’s a new image in the gallery — this one is
Ways of Throwing.

It was drawn for the current issue of
MAI magazine. This is the June issue that’s out in time for the Seni expo in London. Sorry, but Exploding Pen won’t have a stand at Seni this year, although I will probably be there for a few hours just to marvel — not in a good way, you understand — at the current state of the art of Eye of the Tiger-backed jump-kick demos that have more in common with Riverdance than the performers would care to admit, juxtaposed with lots of grimacing bald men surging with preposterone. And maybe to meet a few Seni friends there too, from previous shows.