 Meik Skoss talks to Sawada Hanae who has been training for nearly 70 years. She holds the hanshi certification from the All-Japan Naginata Federation, and teaches both atarashii naginata and Tendo-ryu in Tokyo. Meik Skoss has been a student of Sawada Sensei in Tendo-ryu since 1976. This interview was conducted on December 9, 1996 at the Shinjuku Naginata dojo.
Meik Skoss: Sensei, thank you very much for taking time to talk with me. I'd like to ask you to share some of your thoughts about training in both the modern and classical martial arts. I believe that your family has been involved in the martial arts for many generations, and that your father was a kendo expert. What was his name?
Sawada Sensei: Yoshida Seiko. My grandfather was also a kendo hanshi. Everyone in my family received this rank.
MS: From the Butokukai?
SS: Yes. It is not a rank for a particular ryugi (traditional style).
MS: What was your father's style?
SS: Shindo Munen-ryu. My grandfather also practiced a classical style, but I am not really clear on what it was and feel a bit uneasy about saying this as a fact. But it is all written down and there is a record of all the generations in my family and their styles. My ancestors were from the Marugame domain in Shikoku.
MS: When did you start training?
SS: I started training in second grade in my father's dojo. But even though I started training so long ago, you have to keep in mind that there were days when my father wasn't there, so I didn't go to train, or days that I just sat and watched. I could get away with this because I was just a child. So you can't really say that I was training, since I was only in the second grade. On top of this, I was just a little thing and was always training with people who were bigger than me. There were many times when I couldn't hit my partner because I couldn't even reach him. I didn't train with other children. It wasn't like today, when children just train with other children and not with adults. It was a lot different then; I was always getting hit.
MS: Did you start budo because you liked it?
SS: Of course not. We had a dojo in our house. That's why I trained.
MK: But you must have liked it, to continue.
SS: It wasn't really that I liked it, but rather that I had found something that was interesting. There was never any point where the training was complete. If I had thought at any time that I had finished, I am pretty sure I would have quit. But I never reached that point. I always felt there was something more for me to learn, so I continued to train.
All through the years, there were times that I hated it and times I wanted to quit for personal reasons. There were also times when I simply was not able to train and wanted to quit. But there was always something fun about naginata for me. I enjoyed the give-and-take with my opponents and coming to realize what to do in different situations. That was fun, so I kept training. I could keep coming back for more because I had realized there was more to naginata than met the eye. If it were an art that was easy to grasp, then I'm sure I would never have kept at it for this long. Don't you think professional baseball players must feel the same thing about their sport? It is different for them, of course, because they receive money for playing, but still. We don't receive money, so we are doing it because we enjoy it. We do it because we have found something that captivates us. So, as you can see, the attraction of martial arts is hard to understand from the outside.
Budo is not something that can be done in a day, or a year or two. With training, there is never a point where you can stop and say this is enough. There is a deeper level. The sons of samurai families began training when they were just little children. They began even before they shaved their heads and donned hakama. The number of years they trained is not comparable to the amount people train today.
MS: This was just in the families of the bushi, or warriors, wasn't it?
SS: Yes, that's right. Warriors were different. Private citizens were only that. But they, too, had to protect themselves, so they practiced various martial arts among themselves. They did this in some of the towns, or in the villages; Maniwa Nen-ryu was practiced in a village in this way.
MS: When did you begin training at the Busen?
SS: In 1934. What we, or at least I myself, did at the Butokukai in Kyoto was to practice six or seven hours a day. And we did this every day. Even though I was practicing that much, my father told me that one year was not enough. I was made to continue for two years, then three years. Most people finished after one year of practicing in this manner, then they went out to teach. But my father made me continue until the first semester of my fourth year, when I became ill with a bad case of pleurisy. Then my father finally allowed me to stop. But he still warned me that my training was insufficient.
In my student days at the Butokukai, we practiced the naginata Kata for a long time and then we practiced kendo. In Tendo-ryu, there is both naginata and ken (sword). So we had matches with both naginata and ken. Then we returned to the beginning and practiced the naginata forms again. That was the way we all learned in the old days. So all the older teachers have experience with competition; we competed with kendo teachers. We did training in the forms, then competition. Then the cycle began again.
MS: You mentioned Tendo-ryu. I believe you studied directly under the former headmaster, Mitamura Chiyo. Do you have any particular memories of training under her?
SS: Chiyo Sensei never said anything to us, regardless of what we did. Every once in a while, though, she'd say, "Good!" When this happened, we wouldn't even know what she was referring to by this "Good!" I used to think very hard when I trained, but finally, in the end, I quit thinking about anything. I was able to do the technique straight. This is what the "Good!" was for. It was not right for the strike to come from the side. It had to come straight down from above. It had to have all the right lines. It took a very long time to get there. I trained over and over again.
In Kyoto, when we went into the dojo, there was a big mirror for training in the changing room. Everyone would stand in front of it to practice. They would look and wonder how do the techniques straight. But I always went where I could train alone. I would do things over and again and would try this or that. Sensei would always know. She would come into the room, which was some distance away, because she hadn't been able to hear my voice. She would ask, "Hanae-san, what are you doing?"
It's like I am always saying: it is not about whose voices you hear. You can say, "That is his voice, that is hers." What is important is whose voices you don't hear. It is with these people that you begin. You, as a teacher, know what kind of training they are doing, or what state of mind they have attained. Of course, I didn't know this at the time. So when Sensei entered the room, I was really surprised. I thought no one would see. But Sensei knew.
My father told me about another example of this kind of awareness. He knew the priest, Nanzenbo, because he practiced Zen for a while. This was when Nanzenbo was quite old, just before his death, in fact. But my father was very impressed by Nanzenbo. When I asked him why, he explained that one day all the monks were sitting as they should be, practicing Zen. But my father was too hot so he went outside of Kaisenji, the temple he was at, and did his Zen sitting on a rock. Later, he went in to talk to Nanzenbo, who, after greetings had been made, asked him, "Where did you practice Zen today?" He could ask this even though he had never left his room. He was too busy for that, because he always had someone coming to see him. But he still knew. My father didn't, at the time, understand how Nanzenbo was able to know this. People just aren't this aware anymore. Only people who've studied or trained for a long time can sense such things. Someone who thinks he is great because of doing four or five years of training really has no idea.
Traditional Ways
MS: It is sometimes difficult for foreigners to understand all this. Do you think this is because many elements of traditional Japanese culture are no longer very apparent in modern life?
SS: Yes, that's correct. There is a traditional way of thinking and doing things. For example, in the old days, homes always had a special room that contained a tokonoma (decorative alcove) with a hanging scroll and a flower arrangement. This was the place for the guests. You normally spent your time elsewhere. The flowers that were put in the tokonoma were more than just flowers. The arrangement wasn't just a bouquet like you see today. There was a formal way to arrange them.
Then there is the calligraphy. You couldn't hang just any old picture or calligraphy in the tokonoma. It had to be worthy. Now, we live in apartments and people hang all kinds of things all over their walls. But if you go out to rural Japan, you'll still find people who have retained the tradition of keeping scrolls and flower arrangements in the tokonoma.
So, these traditions remain in various individual homes and families. In order to do this, though, you must study flower arrangement. You must do tea ceremony. Martial arts are merely a part of this tradition. You cannot become, or create, a cultivated person without doing all the different things related to the tradition.
MS: You mean in the education or training of people?
SS: Yes. When we were in school, everyone also studied the tea ceremony and flower-arranging. I continued studying both of them the entire time I was in Kyoto. Everyone at the Butokukai did. This is called shitsuke, breeding or training. Martial arts are one element of shitsuke. People who are fond of the tea ceremony continue their studies of the ceremony and then they teach others. In my family, both my older sister and I do naginata, though she has a bad leg now and can't actually practice. Our ancestors did martial arts, so we preserve and continue that tradition, the same as in other martial arts families. But we didn't do only martial arts. We also studied tea ceremony and flower arrangement. You must do many different kinds of things.
I'm a woman, so I also needed to know how to cook and sew. When we were younger, we always made our own kimono. We basted them, then put glue on them. We waited for this to dry and then we sewed them. I even embroidered mine. Our children wore clothes that we made ourselves. In the generations before my own, women used to buy silk cocoons, unwind the silk, and then weave it into cloth. They also spun and wove cotton, and then they made clothes for their children out of this. My grandmother did this at my home. These days these sorts of things are cheap, so we all just buy them. But in my time, we all sewed.
Doing the laundry is the same. These days you just dump your things in a machine and all of the laundry is washed for you automatically. Before, though, first you had to soak your clothes in plain water. Then you had to fill a barrel with water and wash your clothes in it with soap. Then you had to change the water several times to rinse out the soap. Only then could you say you had done the laundry. Now you just dump it in and it is done.
Rice is the same. Nowadays, you just stick it in the rice cooker and turn on the machine. You can also buy frozen foods and just push a button. Presto. you have curry rice. These things have all become simple. easy. But professional chefs aren't like this. They start by peeling the skins of potatoes and carrots. They start from the very beginning.
These days everything is separate. Restaurants here, laundromats there. Everything has become easy these days. I think perhaps this has made people simple, too. This is what I think, anyway. People have become so simple, it seems they don't understand anything anymore.
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