By Nelson Pecora

To read a version of this article in Japanese, click here.

I’ve been studying Battodo for about eight years, and the Japanese language for five of those years. Often, Japanese people have asked me (in Japanese) why I study the language. When I was earlier in my studies, I would explain that I practiced iaido and wanted to better connect with my teachers in Japan, but that would always lead to blank stares. Surely, I thought, native Japanese speakers would recognize a Japanese word like iaido, no?

Clearly, I had a lot to learn about language.

While I’ve been interested in Japanese since I was a kid (I rote-memorized hiragana in middle school, and took language classes in college), budo was the thing that made me start getting serious about language study. The deeper I got into swords, the more I wanted to overcome language barriers with my teachers and be able to read primary sources that discuss our art.

In the summer of 2024, Anthony Deen and I performed a Battodo demonstration for my Japanese language school. We had a mostly Japanese-speaking audience, so I focused on explaining a few fundamental budo concepts in Japanese, which in itself presented a unique challenge: I started noticing huge differences between how we use Japanese in the dojo versus how it’s used by native speakers. The more I dug into these differences, the more I started thinking about how martial arts terminology is used differently in America, how we classify certain words as jargon instead of colloquial speech, and how the history of budo influences the modern Japanese language.

American Japanese

In American martial arts communities, there is a lot of Japanese terminology used: Sensei, ki, kenjutsu, the list goes on. But most American martial artists don’t speak Japanese. As Anthony detailed so thoroughly, Americans have been teaching and spreading budo in the United States for multiple generations, so the pronunciation and meaning of budo terminology has drifted quite a bit from its original context.

Take kenjutsu (剣術) for example. In America, there have been many times where a teacher explained that kenjutsu is a specific set of techniques that happen after a sword is drawn, like parries or blocks. In Japan, however, kenjutsu is just a generic term for sword arts: To a native Japanese speaker, even western fencing is considered kenjutsu!

This isn’t to say that American martial artists are wrong! These words, when used in the context of martial arts in English-speaking countries, do mean something different than they mean in Japan, in the same way that an American “pudding” and an English “pudding” are two separate (but delicious) things.

This is why I often talk about practicing iaido (居合道) using iaito (居合刀) in English, but I study battodo (抜刀道) using a mogito (模擬刀) when I’m speaking Japanese. The former terms are a lot more familiar to American martial artists, but the latter are much more literal: They simply mean “the way of drawing a sword” and “using an imitation sword.” When I’m in Japan and I use iaido and iaito, the much more metaphorical “way of mental presence” and “a sword for immediate reaction,” I get blank stares.

Terms like battodo and mogito are comprehensible in Japanese, even to someone who’s never touched a sword. Moreover, for many martial artists in Japan, they’re much more common than the words popular in America!

In a similar way, American martial artists tend to imbue certain everyday Japanese words with a weight of meaning that doesn’t exist in the original language, for example sensei or ki. In Japan, sensei is used for anyone teaching or imparting knowledge, such as a doctor, lawyer, or the like. Ki, which over the decades has taken on an almost mythical meaning in English, is an extremely common word in Japanese that’s used for such mundane phrases as kiotsukete (気をつけ - pay attention) or kimochi ii (気持ちいい - a pleasant feeling).

The same happens in Japanese to certain English loan words. You might think amerikan doggu (アメリカンドッグ) means a hot dog, because they’re so American. But did you know that it specifically refers to a corndog? The Japanese word chance (チャンス) means the same as it does in English, so why is it almost always stylized as CHANCE? Well, in Japan the nuance is that a “chance” is a special, beneficial opportunity, which is much more meaningful than the way we use it in America.

Jargon and Idioms

The more I dug into the technical terminology we use in martial arts, the more complicated it became. Did you know that half of the terms we use are everyday Japanese words, and the other half are nearly incomprehensible jargon? Neither did I!

As I see it, there are four major categories of martial arts jargon as it pertains to Japanese:

Terms that are everyday words in Japanese
Terms that are specialized technical vocabulary in both languages
Terms that used to be the same, but are now idioms in everyday Japanese
Terms that are archaic words you probably shouldn’t use in casual conversation

Everyday Words

When I started studying Japanese, I was immediately surprised by how much vocabulary I understood. A lot of technical terms used in American martial arts are, unsurprisingly, normal words in Japan. Shisei (姿勢) simply means posture, and maai (間合い) is just the distance between two people. Words like these, or sensei and ki, lose their weight of meaning when you start using them in their original context.

Other everyday words, like inazuma (稲妻 - lightning), are used in budo because they take a literal everyday thing and become an evocative metaphor when used to name techniques. In Toyama Ryu – where our kata have straightforward descriptions like mae no teki (前の敵 - enemy to the front) when we’re not simply referring to them by numbers like ipponme (一本目 - first one) – we don’t often connect to the wider history of evocative, metaphorical names that exists in martial arts. The only time we’re exposed to these in our style are through the names of some advanced cuts, like nami gaeshi (波返し - returning wave) or kasumi (霞 - spring mist).

Technical Vocabulary

Some words are technical terms in both languages, which makes discussing them difficult when speaking with Japanese laypeople. Usually these are words that are more metaphorical than literal, like iaido, but you might be surprised at how many seemingly straightforward words fall into this category. Terms like metsuke (目付け - attaching the eyes) or zanshin (残心 - remaining mind) are easy to reason about if you know their kanji, but when they come up in Japanese conversation they require lengthy explanation.

Then there are technical terms that become stripped of context when used in America.

A phrase like jo-ha-kyu (序破急) has incredibly specific nuances in Japanese that are often lost in translation. In American martial arts, jo-ha-kyu is often taught as “slow, medium, fast”, i.e. you should regulate acceleration during a kata. This advice isn’t wrong, but this translation doesn’t tell the whole story.

Gagaku, from 17th century bungaku scroll, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The term jo-ha-kyu originates in gagaku (雅楽), classical Japanese court music of the 10th century. It is a set of concepts around modulation and movement that has influenced everything from tea ceremony to theatrical performance to poetry. The individual kanji represent different points in classical Japanese dramatic structure: The beginning, the point where things break free, and the sudden climactic action. This concept’s ubiquity in classical Japanese arts can be thought of similarly to the Hero’s Journey or Monomyth in 20th century America.

With that new nuance in mind, we unlock another layer of meaning and application to martial arts: Kata, at their highest levels, tell a story. Jo-ha-kyu is the narrative framework that helps us make the story comprehensible and meaningful to ourselves and other martial arts practitioners.

Mutated Idioms

In much the same way as some literal meanings became evocative names for martial arts techniques, everyday Japanese has evolved over time to turn some of the jargon we use in the dojo into metaphors and idioms on the street.

"Hasekura Tsunenaga in Rome" by Archita Ricci, 1615, Tokyo National Museum

Remember that budo terminology often originated and was formalized during the Sengoku Jidai, the end of which was roughly linguistically equivalent to Shakespeare’s early modern English. Consider the word graceful, which in the 16th century had a very specific meaning: Benevolent, divine influence. Back then, if you said a dancer was graceful, you didn’t just mean that they had natural poise. Instead, you implied that a deity had personally blessed the dancer with superhuman abilities.

Over time, the meaning of graceful evolved. It went from literal to metaphor, and from divine to mundane. Nowadays, it’s just a pleasing, refined elegance, and a time traveler from the 1590s would be very confused by Dancing with the Stars.

In Japanese, this is the case with words like shinken (真剣). In martial arts, this term specifically refers to a sharp sword, as opposed to a blunt practice sword. Over the centuries, the fact that pulling a sword on someone was deadly serious led to the word’s meaning passing into evocation and metaphor. In modern Japanese, shinken simply means something that’s serious or earnest. Thus the phrase shinken shobu (真剣勝負), which literally means “real swords, win or lose”, came to have the more widely known meaning of a game played in real, almost deadly earnestness, as if it were a sword fight.

Archaic Lingo

When I was first starting out in my Japanese studies, I made the mistake of using some budo terminology in everyday conversation. One time in class, I was discussing the CSA box I got every week and I said that I “received a box of vegetables from the farmers.” I had been practicing my Wanikani and thought I knew all of the words, so I confidently said この野菜を農民から届けています (kono yasai o noumin kara todoketeimasu). From the confused looks and the long discussion afterwards, I learned that noumin does translate to farmers, but a better translation was probably serfs.

Duel between Musashi and Sasaki Kojiro at Ganryu-jima, by Yoshifusa Utagawa, circa 1847

There are a number of words like this in our technical vocabulary as martial artists. Like with shinken, we tend to use words whose literal meaning has disappeared from the popular consciousness. Sometimes the meaning is replaced by metaphor, but sometimes the word itself is no longer used. This is the case with reiho (礼法 - etiquette). While people in Japan might still recognize it as meaning manners or etiquette, it has a distinctly 1800s vibe. It’s like wanting to say manners, but using the word proprieties.

A lot of the terms we use in the dojo feel more at home in a show like Shogun than in everyday speech.

Connection, Collaboration, and Context

So, why is all of this important? What does it matter if we’re using old fashioned words, or technical jargon, or terms that mean something completely different in the context of American martial arts?

A whole bunch of materials (books, videos, etc.) purport to teach martial arts, but most practitioners know that you can only truly learn from direct experience with a competent instructor. There are subtleties in form and movement that take years to even notice, much less control, and it’s nearly impossible to develop that kind of sensitivity without feedback from real, human teachers.

Most legitimate Japanese martial arts have a nearly unbroken lineage of direct instruction, and this connection is important. In our style, there are very few people alive today who received instruction directly from Nakamura sensei, and even fewer who feel comfortable explaining subtle concepts in English. Being able to speak Japanese opens up a much richer feedback loop with Japanese teachers, and allows American practitioners to discuss budo with the older generations of instructors.

Being able to converse in Japanese helps maintain a connection with our teachers, but it also helps build community. Unlike what you may have seen in anime, Japanese swords are very much a niche hobby, and most Japanese people have never seen a sword in real life. In Japan, seeing someone practice iaido or battodo is similar to going to Colonial Williamsburg and seeing reenactors fire off muskets. With such a small community, it’s imperative that younger generations of martial artists create the same kinds of relationships that today’s senior teachers like John Evans sensei and Dave Drawdy sensei forged, and grow those into real friendships that connect the US and Japan. Being able to shaberu (喋る - chit-chat) with fellow students when visiting a dojo or taikai in Japan helps create this connection and grow our little community.

Lastly, understanding the context of martial arts terms and the nuances in their native language help us think more critically about the art that we practice. Like with the term jo-ha-kyu, by unlocking meaning we can better understand and appreciate the connections between swords and other arts, as well as modify our practice to emphasize the nuances, such as narrative flow in our kata. This is not a new idea: Sword practitioners throughout Japanese history have thought about these arts in conversation with other arts and cultural practices, from Zen to Nakamura sensei’s application of the eiji happo (永字八法) to the eight basic cuts of Toyama Ryu and Nakamura Ryu. Budo has always existed within this larger cultural context, and being able to explore and understand these connections deepens our understanding of budo itself.

Eiji Happo, from The Spirit of the Sword, by Nakamura Taisaburo

When we think deeply and critically about the language we use, words stop being black boxes that solely represent some external idea. Instead of symbols, they become meaning, and we can internalize and use these meanings to better understand and explain martial arts to our students and to the wider world.

言葉隠: Budo and Modern Japanese Language