Reflections on a Naginata Seminar
In late 2019, Zentokan Dojo hosted a seminar introducing naginata. Katie Roche sensei, head of the Columbia University Naginata Club taught the seminar with assistance from senior students.
By Kevin Seney
My immediate, naive reaction to naginata is that it's cool and different from anything I've tried before. I'm grateful to Roche-sensei for instructing and to her students Saya and Roger for assisting.
Possibly more interesting, though, are the things it has in common with battodo, so I'll spend more time on that. I'm a former student of a popular system of American Taekwondo and a one-time college club fencer. Since I'm new to everything else, the common theme of optimizing body structure and accommodating the body's natural range of motion in battodo and naginata is pretty striking. It now seems to me that my previous training in the martial arts and in martial art-adjacent sports was based on conflict with the body, either focusing on the body's capacity for (directed) brute force or imposing sets of movements on it with little attention paid to underlying structure.
This makes a certain amount of sense in the context of unarmed self-defense with the aim of incapacitating an opponent with punches and kicks. My mindset when I was studying Taekwondo was essentially: if you administer these strikes accurately with the appropriate amount of force and speed, you can win a fight, end of story. Defending against an opponent generally amounted to avoiding their attacks or absorbing them with a block. I recall my experience with weapons training in Taekwondo being similar, to the extent that I wasn't just putting together series of movements that looked cool. Granted, I started Taekwondo when I was a kid and ended when I was a teenager, so it's entirely possible I was missing nuance in the instruction and only getting machismo. I've been fortunate and never had to test this out with no pads on, but I suspect I would fare poorly if I needed to block punches and kicks directed at me due to poor structure. I certainly would walk away pretty injured myself, even if I managed to win due to superior strength or speed.
By contrast, my recent studies have emphasized working with the body, both to avoid injury and to take advantage of the ways the body wants to move. Take the do strike in naginata, which uses the rotation of the hips in a step forward to propel the naginata in an arc from your side into your opponent's torso. The arms are almost reduced to guides, with the power coming from the core. In the seminar, this was a bit of a revelation to me, even if it's almost implicit in the nature of the naginata itself.
For a strike to the opponent's head from a high stance, Roche-sensei instructed us to begin by clenching our fingers in succession, beginning with the pinky. This seemed an awful lot like tenouchi as we've discussed it in battodo. I think I'm beginning to understand tenouchi in a batto context, but it seemed more intuitive in naginata. This might be because I was familiar with the concept, though I think it's legitimately easier to give your shoulders a break with a longer weapon. It makes less sense to pull down on a polearm from the shoulders than it does with a hack-and-slash weapon like a sword. The naginata also isn't as linked to masculinity in the popular consciousness (or, evidently, linked to masculinity at all in contemporary Japan), so psychology may play a role.
Emphasis on harmony with the body in a discussion of the martial arts seems trite and possibly orientalist, since westerners tend to collapse all manner of non-western thought and culture to flat concepts like harmony. Even so, it's remarkable to me that these two Japanese martial arts styles put existing body structures to use. Where some other arts and sports look at the small, frail human body in the universe and try almost exclusively to make it more formidable, these two see the body's existing strengths and draw them out (with the assistance of an edged implement). Certainly there are things to strengthen or make more flexible, but it seems like more of the work in batto and naginata is learning to let the body move the way it already wants to. In batto, cutting big and taking advantage of my arms' existing reach is a big struggle for me, and just letting my shoulders move in their sockets during a cut has been difficult even if it causes much less stress.
Taking a class in a different style and finding this common ground was helpful in that it gave new, sometimes more intuitive illustrations of the same concepts and showed their wide applicability. With the scarce spare time available to me, I think battodo is in the martial arts sweet spot for me, but I certainly wouldn't turn down a chance to take another naginata class in the future.
