N
I N J U T S U
The
art of Ninjutsu has been written about, talked about and had so-called
films
made about it for the past fifteen years or so.
Most of the films
have
had nothing to do with the art of Ninjutsu at all.
In
practitioners
who have been training in the art, and like the true ways of
the
Warriors have kept very quiet and very unnoticed in their endeavours.
This
is not an exercise to try and demonstrate what a fantastic club there is
down
here, this is merely my own view of the art of Ninujutsu and a way of
trying
to put across just what an instructor goes through to keep a club
intact
and active, also it is a way of thanking my instructor Mr John
O'Connor,
for all the endless hours of training to bring us all to the
standard
we are quite proud of.
The
Bristol Ryuiki Dojo was started by John in November 1989, prior to
this
he trained with various exponents of Ninjutsu i.e. Peter King,
Chris
Rowethe, and notably Dave Heald . John also trained at many Tai
Kai
with Hatsumi sensei.
I
met John when we both worked for the same Company doing Industrial
cleaning
back in august of 1983, it turned out that we both had an
interest
in Karate. I asked him if we could train
together and we got
permission
to use a small room next to the canteen during our lunch
break. When we first started training John told me
the first thing I
had
to do was to learn to block properly.
For two months I did nothing
but
block John's kicks and punches as he came at me time and time
again,
the one thing it did teach me was to block effectively rather
than
to suffer the pain and bruises placed upon me by John during those
first
two months. John did a fair bit of
teaching in that small room
mainly
I think because he just liked to teach.
We progressed from the
room
by the canteen to a garage at the back of John's then flat.
He
carried on teaching Karate to anyone who he thought were of the
temprament
to learn without taking it onto the street, but I always got
the
feeling that there was something missing.
At
one stage John more or less vanished from the scene of training and
I
supposed he was just growing out of it like most people do at some
stage
or another, but no, John had found a Ninjutsu club somewhere
and
had been training there for some time before I found out
about
it, I think it was around the time so-called films were being
made
about it and there was a slight stigma about the art(to an extent
even
today a lot of people scoff at Ninjutsu, but thats another story).
John
enjoyed his new found art and could not get enough information on
it.
I'm not quite sure how it happened but after a couple of years John
was
becoming a bit dissillusioned about the way he was being taught the
art
at the club he was at, so, he decided to travel about to other
clubs
and go to as many seminars as he could.
At one of these seminars
he
met an instructor, Dave Heald, who John thought was different in
some
way, different enough for John to rekindle his interest.
What
was missing at the club he was at was the fact that most of the
things
he learned were based very much on Taijutsu, he had never been
shown
how to use a bo-staff or a hanbo properly until he attended one
of
Daves seminars. From then on John tried
to get to as many seminars
as
he could that Dave was instructing at so that he could pick up as
much
as possible about the true art of Ninjutsu. Shortly after that
seminar
John left the club he was at, taking with him K Robins and Pete
Savva.
I
personally think that if it wasn't for John meeting someone like Dave
Heald
he may have left the art, and that would have been a great loss
because
the club would not have formed.
Like
most Ninjutsu practitioners, he is quiet in his thoughts and fluid
in
his way adapting to any situation without thinking about it. What
also
may help John is the fact that he had his own driving school so he
was
constantly teaching people, whether it be to drive or to follow the
Warrior
ways. When the club first started I was
the first student to
join
this very different (and special) of the martial arts. I started
martial
arts when at 14 I saw (you've guessed it) a Bruce Lee film,
Enter
The Dragon, at our local British Legion Club. Bruce had and still
has
such a presence about the way he moves that even today's martial
artists
cannot even come close to the standard of technique and finesse
that
Bruce had.
As
time went by I did a bit of Judo and Kung-fu (mainly street level
stuff
as with having five brothers and sisters my parents couldn't
afford
to pay for classes at a proper dojo), but it wasn't until I met
John
that I started to get involved in a more serious way in the
Martial
Arts as a whole.
Getting
back to the main point, John opened the
club as
I
said in November of 1989 and since then has been trying to keep it
running
with the help of his students and the British Bujinkan
Federation.
The
way John trains his students is so different in other ways that I
have
seen from numerous other clubs I have been to (even Ninjutsu
clubs).
When
someone comes in off the street John takes a break from the
class
at an appropriate time and talks to them to make them feel at
home. He then gives them a brief history about the
art and discusses
with
them what they want from a club of this nature.
Most
people who come to the club for the first time expect something
spectacular
to happen i.e. people jumping throw the air with masks on
and
throwing stars and things like that, but of course nothing could be
further
from the truth. If people are watching John can almost sense
what
the person is looking for and acts accordingly.
A small example
of
how calm and controlled he is is given in the account that follows.
About
two months ago a couple of people turned up to look at the club,
they
at first seemed to be interested in the art of Ninjutsu as they
were
just sat there watching patiently. After
about five minutes John
finished
what he was demonstrating and left us to train with our other
instructor
Keith Robbins. A short while after John
had been talking to
these
people I had a feeling things weren't as they seemed, one of the
men
was getting a bit heated and emotional(its the sort of feeling
everybody
gets when they can sense a situation is getting worse than
just
a friendly chat).
It
turned out these men were from a club about twenty miles away and a
different
style and they wanted to try us out so to speak. John
basically
told them in as calm a way as possible that they were wasting
their
time and that they would not provoke any member of the club into
a
situation because there was no situation to be had. I felt that if
it
was not for John's calmness and control the situation would have
developed
and we as a club would be discredited for breaking one of the
most
important vows of all Martial Arts, being that in any situation be
it
on the street, in the home or in office if at all possible avoid
actual
combat.
John
is also a great analyst in that like most Martial Artists he
breaks
down every technique he demonstrates or is shown and puts across
in
such a way that even the very beginners can find quite easy to
follow,
maybe not so much in their body movement (which comes in time)
but
in the actual basic technique.
He
also tries his best to put across the philosophy of Ninjutsu in a
way
that all people can understand, there is
a distinct feeling when
you
train with him that he is trying to teach you to the best of not
just
your ability as a student but to the best of his ability as an
instructor
of the the Art of Ninjutsu. There have
been and will be
times
at the club when attendance is low and students come and go like
at
all clubs, but John just seems to carry on going regardless of how
many
people turn up for the class. He teaches
at the club every
Thursday
at which he charges a nominal fee to cover the hiring of the
dojo,
apart from this he does not charge for any other training, be it
at
weekends or in the middle of the week.
He is not in the art for
monies
sake like a lot of instructors of other styles and of Ninjutsu,
he
trains people because they want to learn the art of Ninjutsu. He
doesn't
know that I am writing this letter to you and I would be
grateful
if he didn't find out as he finds it very difficult to accept
praise
from his students.
I
would just like you to know that the art of Ninjutsu is one of the
best
things that has happened in my life and it is forever changing
like
the wind but I think changing for the better especially if we had
more
instructors as conscientious and easily approachable as Mr J J
O'connor
(4th Dan Shidoshi-Ho).
Andew
pearcy