Episode 104 - Sensei Ashida Kim
Sensei Ashida Kim - Episode 104
It's hard for one person to have a fight. It takes two to tango.
Ashida Kim
Today's episode is with well-known martial artist and ninjitsu practitioner Sensei Ashida Kim. While I had heard his name before, I'll confess that I didn't know a lot about him. When a past guest suggested he would be someone good to speak with, I did a bit of research and found that this man's resume is pretty incredible. While much of the writings on the internet about Sensei Kim are very strongly opinionated - both in his favor and not - I was more concerned with his stories. As we always do on the show, we give our guests the opportunity to speak freely and talk about that which they want to. That's exactly what we did here - and it's a great episode.Sensei Kim is a prolific author and has written a number of books still available. We discuss a few of them during the episode and you can learn more at his website, linked below.
Today's featured whistlekick product is our line of tee shirts. We have something for everyone, in a variety of styles and sizes. Check them out, and the rest of our martial arts sparring gear and apparel, at whistlekick.com
Show Notes
Ashida Kim
Movies - Conan the Barbarian, Fearless, Circle of IronActor - Jet LiBook - The Encyclopedia of Dim MakSensei Ashida Kim's primary website is ashidakim.com, but you can also learn more about his books and the books he has helped publish at dojopress.comYou can follow Dojo Press on Twitter and Facebook.
Show Transcript
You can read the transcript below or download it here.Jeremy Lesniak:Hello, everyone! It's episode 104 of whistlekick martial arts radio. The only place to hear the best stories from the best martial artists like today’s guest, Sensei Ashida Kim. At whistlekick, we make the world’s best sparring gear and here, on martial arts radio, we bring you the best martial arts podcast. I’d like to personally welcome you. My name is Jeremy Lesniak. I'm whistlekick’s founder. I'm very fortunate to be your host here on martial arts radio. Thank you to the returning listeners and hello and welcome to those of you listening for the first time. If you're new to the show or you're just not familiar with what we make, check out all the great t-shirts we offer. From comfortable to functional, there's something for everyone. you can find them at whistlekick.com. If you're interested with our sparring gear which is the heart of what we offer, you can find that there too or at amazon.com. If you want the show notes including links and photos, you can find those at whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. If you're not on the newsletter list, now’s the perfect time. We offer exclusive content to the subscribers and it's the only place to find out about upcoming guests for the show. We only email a few times a month, we will never, ever sell or give away your information and sometimes we mail out a coupon. Here on episode 104, we have Sensei Ashida Kim. One of the early pioneers of the ninjutsu in America, Sensei Kim’s history weaves itself into many stories you likely already know. It involves quite a few martial arts legends. His is a well-known name and one that martial arts historians may have quite a bit to say about. Sensei Kim was very open with his stories and I had a great time talking to him. Let’s welcome him to the show. Sensei Kim, welcome to whistlekick martial arts radio.Ashida Kim:Thank you so much for having me today. I enjoy talking on the radio and talking to people about the martial arts and I appreciate the opportunity to do so.Jeremy Lesniak:Thank you for honoring us by coming on. This is going to be a lot of fun and I'm sure we’re going to get in to some good stuff and we always do so that’s why I like doing this. I got the absolutely best job in the world. So, before we get too deep, we always like to get context for our guests. Why don’t you go way back, tell us how you got started in the martial arts.Ashida Kim:My father was in the army when I was growing up and most of the, one of the, army bases that we were posted at had some sort of a judo club for the soldiers that like to practice judo or train in judo and I used to, when I was 8 or 10 years old, I used to go down to the movie theaters every Saturday morning and watch the movie serials and the cartoon features that are on there and we posted about 15 cents so it was a great bargain at the time and one day, I heard a bunch of noise and everything coming out of some wooden building that I was passing by and I decided to go in and investigate that and then, spotted my first judo class and I just kind of stood there at the door in awe watching these guys throw each other around and do different techniques on each other and after that, I didn’t go to the movies anymore. I would just come down and watch these guys working out on Saturday morning and, of course, being 8 or 10 years old and these guys being professional soldiers, they really didn’t have a lot of time to pay attention to me so I just, I learned a lot from just watching them and every once in a while, kind of like the Shaolin experience, they let me sweep up the floor or show me a couple of falls and these kind of things and one of the things that I'm most fascinated by was the idea that these guys could choke each other out and be completely unconscious and they wake each other back up and that kind of set me on the idea of the health aspects as well as the martial arts aspects of judo and later on, other martial arts. Back in those days, judo was about the only thing that you could study and later on, when I was in high school, I was on the wrestling team on high school. We didn’t have a very long-lived wrestling team because it was a very small school but I enjoyed wrestling, picked up some techniques there and then, when I was at college, a friend of mine asked me to go to a karate demonstration with him one night and we went over and we watched the demonstration and we decided to sign up and that’s when I started studying Shotokan as my initial martial art or real martial art and as time went on, I learned more systems and techniques and whatnot and when I went to Chicago and [00:04:40] that I learned some of the real Kung Fu at that time which, in the ‘60s, Kung Fu was practically unheard of, still, and so getting into the Black Dragon Fighting Society is one of the ways that you learn a lot of the [00:04:56] or death touch techniques. You learn a lot of the healing techniques as well and so, it's that’s when I started studying in a variety of martial arts and really being in to explore some of the Chinese and getting into acupuncture and that sort of thing and so, it's kept me entertained for quite a long time now. There's always something new to learn. So, I'm constantly picking up new techniques and going to people’s seminars and trying different styles and weapons and things like that and practicing different systems so you get a better overview of how all these developed and have a good philosophical understanding of it as well.Jeremy Lesniak:So, you brought up the idea of the healing side of martial arts and it's interesting that over the last few weeks, we’ve had a few people on the show that have, either brought that up, or have made that their profession and it's something that we don’t talk about a lot in the martial arts that there is a flipside to that coin so I'm wondering if you might offer us your thoughts.Ashida Kim:When I first started taking martial arts, we did a lot of exercises like meditation and yoga-type stretching exercise and things like this and one that I most liked, it's called the 8 Pieces of Brocade which is a very ancient health and longevity system and it's only 8 exercises but it basically works on the 8 psychic channels of the body and these psychic channels are the deep rivers of energy that flows through the body just like the acupuncture meridians and the superficial rivers of the body and so, the 8 psychic channels connect the 4 seas of the body which collect the energy and blood and marrow and things like these and so, by keeping these channels open, you can maintain good health and receive longevity and plus some of these exercises help you develop what is known as iron body so you can take impact and not be seriously hurt. Bob Wall who is in the Enter the Dragon with Bruce Lee was somebody who practice a lot of the hard style of Iron Body techniques and there's a lot of video of him having 2 backboards broken over his arms and breaking bricks with his fist, these kind of things. The idea then is to be able to, when you disrupt somebody else’s energy is to be able to restore that balance so they're not permanently injured. A lot of sport martial arts use a closed fist as a striking technique because when you use your open hand, you can actually transmit energy into the person’s body and cause serious internal damage that’s not even really noticed on the outside. These are one of the things that [00:08:02] when he did the bottom brick break in the movie Bloodsport. I was trying to illustrate the fact that you can hit somebody and not leave a mark on the outside of their body but still do damage to an internal organ and Erle Montague was one of the pioneers of these sort of things from Australia. He wrote the Encyclopedia of Dim-Mak which is a very comprehensive work on acupuncture and the deft touch and he gives the antidotes to all of the techniques he has in his book as well as how to strike the various points, which angle to use and whether you're exhaling or inhaling and these sort of things to overcome your opponent with as least damage as possible. Breaking bones, breaking elbows and knees and things like that, those type of techniques are more commonly found in the hard style martial arts like the Okinawan systems and the Taekwondo and things like these whereas the more subtle Chinese systems like Bagwa and Xing Yi and the idea of using the fingertip pressure to unbalance the enemy and overcome them without having to cause any permanent physical damage and all these things are also described in several, one of the masters that I had in the Black Dragon Society was [00:09:27] original students up in Chicago and we did a book called Poison Hand which showed 77 techniques and the antidotes for each one of those techniques. In Montague’s book, a couple of times there a couple of places where he says there is no antidote for this technique but there are antidotes for the techniques, even the ones that he described. It's just a matter of knowing enough of the acupuncture systems and the acupressure systems in order to be able to restore the balance which is essentially the key to all of these stuff is to have a balance. It's kind of like Mr. Miyagi said in the Karate Kid, balance is lesson for whole life and it applies to everything and so, the ideal imbalance in the opponent as a way of taking him down or defeating him in competition and the idea of restoring that balance so that you remain friends that can train together is something that comes from those early judo classes that I watched because all those guys knew each other, they all trusted each other and they were willing to experiment with each other with different techniques and find out what works, what didn’t work so they developed a really elaborate and efficient system of martial arts and most of these martial arts like the hard style and things like that also have the healing systems in their system if you get far enough up into their system. When you get above 3rddegree black belt in most of these styles, they start teaching their resuscitation techniques and things like this and you learn how to fix a broken nose, a broken finger which are fairly common injuries in martial arts schools and then, you start finding out that you can fix other things and then, you essentially, the older you get, for the most people that I've known in martial arts says, as they get older, they concentrate more and more on the idea of healing the other person than the idea of hurting them and so, some people spend a lot of time trying to make up for karma that they’ve caused by hurting other people because in martial arts you go through several different stages as you develop and at one point, almost inevitably, you come to the realization that you're a serious warrior and that you can actually hurt people and at that point, you have to be very careful not to become a bully and use your powers and your techniques to impose your will on people and after you get past that stage, when you realize that you can actually hurt people, then you get past that stage, you realize that you don’t want to hurt people, that you want to actually help them and a lot of times, that’s when people start getting into teaching and start getting into the medical techniques and I have several friends that started out in martial arts and one of them in Kenpo who has a clinic now and does all sorts of techniques in terms of, he doesn’t do any acupuncture techniques but he uses acupuncture points or acupressure points to help people get over things and he’s actually cured quite a few people that I'm aware of. One of his cases, there was a lady that was going to a cancer center in Tampa and she had brain cancer and the doctors said there's nothing we can do for you. We’ve done everything we know and so, one of her doctors that was a friend of mine, suggested that she go see him and not tell him what was going on or anything. She just got and visit with him and see what he can do for her and he did his diagnostic techniques on her and he told her and said well, there's a little something going on in your head here. Let me work on that so she came back for 3 treatments and using energy techniques and systems like Reiki and Shiatsu and things like these and after about a month or so, she went back to the cancer center and they x-rayed her and whatnot and there was no more brain cancer there and so, then, they didn’t believe it actually had worked but she did fairly well for quite a long time after that and there was another patient of his from Arizona that had a 35-pound tumor in his abdomen and over a period of about a year, they took care of that and got rid of that and the doctors, of course, wanted to operate and do the surgery and put him on chemo and all those kind of stuff. it wasn’t really necessary. It just got a little bit more to do it, a bit longer to do it with the energy techniques and the herbs and things like that. I've known several martial artists that are at that level. They are able to do amazing things in the healing systems and, of course, they're very happy to do that because they understand that that’s the real art and when I was studying Jiu Jitsu, one of the first things they told me was the systems that I studied came from a place called Koka city which is in Japan which was north of Tokyo and 40 miles or so by train and it was always known as the city of medicine because they grew mugworts and [00:14:56] healing techniques like these and when the shogun decided they were going to wipe out all these people in these provinces because they were ninjas and he was afraid they were going to overthrow him, the doctors and the healers, not wanting to hurt anybody developed a system of martial artists that were essentially nonviolent which is the ninjutsu system that I practice and the principle of that is to basically throw sand in their eyes so that they can't see for a second and then, run away so you don’t have to hurt anybody and that’s where the whole ninjutsu invisibility system came from and so, in that way, there's nobody, there's only one person. It's hard for one person to have a fight. It takes two to tango and so, if you know that you can hurt the other guy, then proving it is irrelevant because you know you can do it. You don’t have to show it and you don’t have to prove it to anybody else and usually, people will want to fight at the bullies and things that they're concentrating on now, these people have some deep seated insecurity and they're trying to prove how strong they are and it's pretty much a useless endeavor because every time I felt that I was really bad and was a super fighter and can beat anybody up, usually somebody came along and showed me that I wasn’t so bad and that I could be beat up myself and I have to learn to be a bit more humble and so, that’s usually what happens with bullies too. Sooner or later, they’ll be up against somebody that explains to them, in no uncertain terms, that their behavior’s inappropriate and it's not going to be tolerated. So, this is something that you go through in martial arts. You learn these lessons and there's a lot of hidden lessons in martial arts, even in the katas and things that people practice. There are very subtle techniques to some of these forms that most people are not even aware of and most people, especially in America, don’t put a lot of confidence or spend a lot of time practicing kata because they think it's just a low, boring exercise but if they get into it far enough, they realize that in the kata there's also secrets to where the pressure points are, how to strike the pressure points and also sometimes how to avoid being struck in those pressure points so it's a very complicated system. When I first studying acupuncture or acupressure, they told me there were 365 points. You had to know each point, you had to know whether to needle them counterclockwise or clockwise and on and on and you get very complicated but eventually, I came across a teacher who is able to tell me that there's only 12 meridians and if you know which way they're flowing then you know which way to needle the meridian to cause the effect you want and so, then it was fairly easy to understand the system once you understand the principles then it's fairly easy to understand the system as opposed to having to learn each one of these 365 points individually and just think of it as a memorization exercise to do that and then, all of that also relates to the 5 elements because if you understand how the 5 elements work in the body, the different cycles that they have, then it's even easier to unbalance the opponent than it is if you only know the acupuncture point. The healing arts, in my opinion, the top level of martial arts and most of the people that I know that are above 7thor 8thdegree, very seldom engage in the competition. They just try to teach other people these various life lessons and the techniques and they spend most of their time helping other people to be better and to learn about themselves because much of this is involved in self-knowledge and when you understand yourself then you understand pretty much everybody else too because most people are pretty much the same and so, when you understand why the other person wants to fight you, then a lot of times, you can talk him out of it or you can overcome him and prevail without having to do some kind of serious damage to them.Jeremy Lesniak:That makes a lot of sense and I like some of the things that you were saying and they're around the simplicity and the progression kind of through, I had this almost parallel, in my mind, as we’re talking about the way training goes. People start. For them, it's about combat, it's about fighting, it's about competition and then, you reach a point where as you said as you realize that there's always going to be somebody that’s a better fighter than you, there's always someone that can prove to you that they're not so bad but you get to a point where you realize this isn’t really what it's about and it's about that self-growth.Ashida Kim:I was taking Shotokan and they showed me eventually when you stay in this long enough, you'll be able to look at somebody and you know what style they're going to use just by looking at their stance and how they hold their hand and stuff. I thought that was, of course, impossible but over the years, I've managed to develop that sense of when you see your opponent, you see how he’s standing, you got a pretty good idea what he’s going to do. It's just based on his stance and whether he’s grounded or not which is another interesting aspect of all of this is the idea of being grounded and rooted to the earth and being able to draw energy from the earth to do these different healing techniques and things like that. Most of these systems don’t really teach what we call grounding or rooting to the earth but that’s one of the essential part of doing the energy techniques. Like I said, a lot of it depends on where your teacher is. If your teacher is into the competition, he’s going to teach competition technique and if he’s into healing, he’ll teach the healing technique and the other part of that is will it amount to being very commercial? Mostly commercial schools teach you one technique every three months and so you have to keep coming back for a long, long time to learn the whole system and of course, you have to keep paying dues for all of that whereas these techniques like in ninjutsu, the idea of throwing sand in the guy’s eyes, anybody can learn that in 5 seconds and so, it's a system of self-defense that you can use very quickly and that you can use very effectively in almost every situation and it doesn’t take you forever to learn it and of course, once you throw sand in the guy’s eyes, you don’t have to run away. You can pick up a brick and bash him in the head if you want. It's just gives you the power that you, the empowerment technique that you need to feel like you can defend yourself. There a movie that one time called Enough with Jennifer Lopez where she was an abused wife and she went and took lessons from martial artists in the film and at one point, he said okay this is the technique that you use when he’s sitting on your chest choking you to death and she said, well that’s not going to happen because I know all these other techniques and he said, yes, but you don’t have the heart. You don’t have the will to hurt this guy. No matter what you say and no matter how hard you train, you don’t have the will to hurt him so at some point, when you confront him, he’s going to have you on the ground. He’s going to sit on your chest, he’s going to be choking you alive. This is how you get out of it and sure enough, that’s what happened in the movie and even though, it's a movie, it's a parallel of real life that most people do not want to hurt other people. In the movie [00:23:06] they talk about a study that the army did. It said most soldiers in their first combat experience will aim high and not intentionally try to shoot the enemy because they really don’t want to hurt anybody. After they’ve been shot at a few times and after they’ve seen their buddies get killed all around them, then they're willing to kill the enemy but even after all the training they go through in basic training in AIT and things like these, most people still do not have that attitude of wanting to hurt the enemy and it's a particular mindset that you have to develop and like I said in martial arts, this develops when you get to the point that you feel like you can hurt these people and then, which is, like I said, then you get to the point where you decide you don’t want to so it's a very…martial arts is a lifelong experience and I've been very lucky to have enjoyed as much of it as I have. I recommend it to everybody. I just finished a book not too long ago for one of the grandmasters of the Black Dragon Fighting Society, Jay Blanton who was bullied most of his young life basically until he was able to start taking martial arts lessons when he was in high school and we did this whole long book about these terrible things that people did to him and embarrassed him and humiliated him and all these things and how people tried to stick up for him and protect him and whatnot and none of that worked. As he said in his book towards the last chapters, because he doesn’t give any details of any of the fights that he had, he just says in one of the last chapters, once they learned that I could take care of myself, they left me alone and that’s the essence of the whole bullying or anti-bullying campaign is you have to learn to stand up for yourself. Nobody can protect you. you have to do it yourself and the same thing apples to the Jennifer Lopez movie. I've had a lot of girls that have come up to me because their boyfriends are beating them up and I train them in martial arts and this kind of thing. It helped them about a few times and whatnot but you can't save these people. They have to save themselves and they have to learn how to stand up for themselves and that’s one of the great things that martial arts teaches you is to be empowered even though it's just a handful of sand and once you realize your own self-worth and realize your own internal strength to do these things, then you can avoid a lot of trouble with bullies and people like that and they said the only thing that matter, there's a lot of anti-bullying campaigns right now but the only thing a bully really understands in a punch in the mouth. You could argue with him. You could negotiate with him. You can tell him this is wrong. You can give him all kinds of behavioral things to study and put him into programs to try to rehabilitate him and stuff like this but generally speaking, the only thing a bully understands is a punch in the mouth and if you're willing to give it to him, most of the time you don’t have to because most bullies don’t want to fight either. They just want to bully people and so, most of the people that I've talked to over the years, bullies and victims as well, they all tell me the same thing. If the guy fights back, even if he doesn’t win, if he fights back, he’s no longer a victim and the bully doesn’t want to pick on him anymore. He goes and finds somebody else and it's easier to deal with and so, it's just the nature of all living things in this planet to have a pecking order and to have the people who are the alpha dog and this sort of thing and people who try to put themselves in that position and so, it's part of nature that you're going to be picked on. I know people that were picked on because they were fat. I was picked on because I wore glasses. Everybody gets picked on. You have to learn how to stand up for yourself and that’s one of the lessons of being alive on the planet.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah, I completely agree and we’ve talked about the subject of bullying on this show a few times and I think the martial arts community on the whole is fairly unified, at least, around what you're saying. The confidence instilled from having the skill is about the best neutralizer.Ashida Kim:That is true. At one time, there was a dwarf basically and he also had several other medical conditions. One of them was that his bones were so soft that he couldn’t stand up on his legs because his legs would just collapse and crush down on him and so, he sits on a wheelchair most of his life or for all of his life, actually, and we developed a series of techniques that he can do from the wheelchair and some self-defense things and when it came time to breaking a board which is one of the ways to develop some of his confidence, I told him you don’t have to do this because I know what the situation is with the calcium in your bones and stuff like that and I don’t want you to hurt yourself. I said, you don’t have to break this board even though it only takes 8 pounds of pressure and so, he was determined to do it and once he broke the board, you could see a change come over him. You could see that he was filled with joy, with confidence and about 2 weeks later, he went to a bar in Orlando where I was teaching at the time and was flashing a bunch of money around because he always wanted to get into a fight and this guy was, he was less than 3 feet tall and in a wheelchair and anyway, he went out to get into his car and he had a Ford Maverick at the time and the way he had to do this was get to open the passenger side, pull out a board, put it on the wheelchair, slide across the board into the car, pull a board in, reach out, grab the wheelchair, fold it up, pull it into the passenger side, close the passenger door and then, get over to where the pedals were adjusted so he could actually reach the pedals to steer the car and whatnot and so he goes out on the parking lot, he starts on this procedure which takes 5 or 6 minutes and a guy came up and tried to mug him because he’d seen him flash all those money around and so, this student of mine told him, if you want it, you got to come take it and the guy came up in the groin with a ridge hand strike and basically knocked the guy out and the guy was still laying in the parking lot when he drove off and that was one of the things that he wanted. He had to test himself. He had to prove to himself that it would work and so he deliberately set this particular incident up and after that, he never came back after that to class because he had everything he needed to learn from the few lessons that we had together and so, and a lot of times, this is the kind of thing that you run into with students once in a while. They learn something and they want to go out and try it on somebody just to see if it works.Jeremy Lesniak:I think that’s natural. I think there's some human nature in there and I've certainly felt that pressure myself.Ashida Kim:Sure, when you do this with sparring is it's supposed to give you that confidence that you can prevail, you can win in a fight basically. Of course, self-defense is not anything like sparring but if you spar enough, you get that confidence that doesn’t matter if the other guy hits you or not. You're still going to get that technique in and you can prevail which is another thing about ninjutsu that I studied is that it's not about winning or losing, it's about prevailing and prevailing essentially means keeping the peace and trying not to hurt anybody.Jeremy Lesniak:I like that word distinction. Prevailing versus winning. I think that gets pretty close to the heart of what a lot of us feel about martial arts but I just never heard it phrased that way, I like that.Ashida Kim:There's a similar aspect to that when these guys will say that the best martial artist wins without throwing a punch and that’s essentially the same thing. To be able to overcome the enemy without having to hit him is if you can get some of these techniques like Haraki and things like that and Haraki is an advanced form of the command voice that police and drill sergeants, things like that, use because when people are shouting at your face, it has a psychological effect on you and when you shout in somebody else’s face, it has an effect on them and so, of course, Haraki is the idea that you can just use the energy of the voice to overcome the enemy. In the Kung Fu Hustle, there's a lady who has a technique called the Lion’s Roar and I’m sure that there must be some Chinese school that teaches it. I haven't run across one but the idea of it is that she could scream at such a frequency that it would knock people out and knock things over which is sort of what Haraki is supposed to be but a really good shout at the right time, a lot of times, the beginning of this is [00:32:34] when you start off in martial arts and you learn how to [00:32:34] that’s the idea of the [00:32:41] is to freeze the opponent in seconds so you can hit him and so, that’s the first step in learning these more advanced fight techniques.Jeremy Lesniak:Cool. Yeah, and certainly there's a lot of mythology around that and a lot of really interesting fact.Ashida Kim:I've seen several things on Facebook of people supposedly able to do this and the problem with that is when you're using your students as your ukes that they're going to be receiving this technique, they know what you want, they know what you expect and very often, they overplay it and so, the technique, even if it does work, doesn’t look real because the student is trying too hard to make the teacher look good and so, and of course, I've seen some of these techniques when people try haraki on people that weren’t students that worked nearly as well but it's still a valid technique to practice because it teaches your breath control and breath control is another major part of all these martial arts technique because, in the healing arts, there's a lot of breathing exercises that can be used to lower blood pressure and cure diabetes, things like this, that western medicine doesn’t accept but there are breathing techniques. They can do a lot of good in terms of healing illnesses and balancing things out and stuff.Jeremy Lesniak:I agree, absolutely. We just got a lot of great context for you and the martial arts and what is important to you around the martial arts and we meandered a bit there which is great and I always love that because I think that gives us a better view into who we’re hearing from.Ashida Kim:I like to use a lot of people, or I had a couple people telling me that I quote movies a lot but there was a professor of anthropology named Joseph Campbell that was at [00:34:47] university and he wrote several books and was very well-known and his attitude was the storytellers are the ones that keep the history of the tribe alive and they give the lesson that you need to learn in these different stories for people to listen to and understand and get the deeper meaning of the story. One of his books was called Hero with a Thousand Faces where he had studied a lot of Greek and Roman and Indian mythology and he realized that they were all telling essentially the same story and so, there were just different context, just different frameworks that these things were put upon, different symbolism was used but essentially, they all told the same story and which was how to be a hero and how to be a hero in your own life and how to set a good example for other people and help your fellow man and that’s what all the major religions also teach, is how to help your fellow man and to be kind and so, using these movies is a good way of expressing those lessons in an entertaining way. One of my favorite movies is The Razor’s Edge and the great lesson in that is to be kind and so, it's a very good book and a couple of really good versions of it in the movies. Like I said, there's a lot of good symbolism. Maybe get a really good director and get some really good symbolism and things in the movies too and it helps in sharing the message to you on a subconscious level so that it's all about being willing to go and see Star Wars and see how these heroes behave because then you try to be like those people and you become a better person and so, even though there's not that much action and adventure in The Razor’s Edge, it still teaches you a lot of very valuable lessons in terms of how to deal with people and how to live a good life and how to be a good person. I think that’s what everybody would really like to be able to do. It's just that because of economics and politics and princes imposing their will on people, it’s not as easy as it sounds sometimes.Jeremy Lesniak:No, it's unfortunately not.Ashida Kim:Well, I do believe that there's a big awakening that’s coming. They’ve been predicting doom and gloom ever since I was a kid. When I was a kid, the Russians were going to destroy us all with nuclear war and then, after that, it was going to be another apocalypse and there's going to be an apocalypse in 2000 and there's going to be an apocalypse in 2012 and there's the apocalypse is happening all the time. It just doesn’t happen very fast like all these people think it's happening because the world is changing and people are changing and eventually, if you watch the political scene now, everybody is waking up to the idea that the system is pretty corrupt. It doesn’t matter what you do. If you aren’t one of the privileged few, you can get away with anything and if you're not one of the privileged few, you're going to be set upon all the time and you're going to be harassed all the time and you got to learn to fight back against that and people are slowly starting to come to this realization that it's not quite like it is on TV. There's a million police shows on TV about how these guys go to extraordinary lengths to get justice and that’s TV. That’s not the way it is in real life. In real life, it's a lot harder to get justice and even if you get people that are really trying as hard as they can, they still can't get justice sometimes so it's part of the propaganda machine. It's part of keeping everybody either scared to death or in poverty so that they just do what they're told instead of learning how to think for themselves and it's part of the education system that we’ve had to for such a long time. They’ve changed history so many times, it's not at all what they taught me when I was in school and it's not, most of them is not true anymore and so, it's unfortunate that people don’t have heroes. I mean, when I was growing up, there was the Lone Ranger, Lloyd Rogers, John Wayne, all these people were examples of how we should behave and how we should deal with other people and now, all of these characters have been, in some way, discredited over the years like Thomas Jefferson, towards Washington, they have been discredited because they made beer. Everybody made beer back in those days and so, it wasn’t a big crime and so, by finding ways to bring down the heroes, you break down the culture and this is something that Sun Tzu said in his treatise on war in 6000 B.C. was you can destroy the country from within, you don’t have to invade it and one of the ways of doing that is to break down the institutions and discredit all the leaders, even the ones that were in the past and so, that’s why it's important now to have heroes that people can want to be like and in most of the movies, even nowadays, you don’t see that sort of thing. The Batman and Superman movies, these characters have so much angst. They're constantly wondering did I do the right thing? Should I do the right thing? Is that the right thing? And the original Superman or Batman knew what the right thing was and they did the right thing and everybody followed their example. So, that’s why it is important to have heroes and right now, we don’t have a lot of them. At least, not over here so maybe back in Europe and some of these other places. In China, they got one guy named Wong Fei Hung who was the most famous boxer in China and he was a doctor. He didn’t go out, he only taught martial arts to a very few people because he was primarily a doctor but nobody could beat him and he’s very similar to the guy that Jet Li played in Fearless who was Huo Yuanjia who was another famous martial artist and in the movie Fearless, there's a scene where he comes in his realization that he doesn’t have to kill his opponent and he understands finally why his father who was also a martial artist gave up fighting for money and gave up fighting in tournaments because he didn’t want to hurt people anymore. Huo Yuanjia basically did a lot to restore national pride in China because this was, he was around during the period when the Japanese were invading Manchuria, that kind of thing. There was a lot of strife going on over there that he helped restore the Chinese national pride by being able to defeat anybody that they put in the ring against him and not hurt him, just prevail against them and show that the Chinese systems were good systems and that they were effective and they would work. You just have to be really good at it but he was quite a famous hero also so I think it's great to have historical characters like that that you can look up to and follow and try to be like.Jeremy Lesniak:Let’s talk about competition for a second. That’s kind of threaded through a little bit. What’s your experience? Have you spent much time as a competitor? Was that ever part of your training?Ashida Kim:Been to a few tournaments. I've been in a few fights for money and things like this and there's a lot of politics at most of the tournaments that you go to. Very often, the person putting the tournament on, most of his people tend to win because he picks the judges and they're all his friends and they’ve all been invited there and this kind of thing. It's not necessarily an evil plot but that’s just a tendency that happen in those and sometimes, you get some prejudices. One time, we had a school in Central Florida and we were having the Tampa Bay Open which is an open competition for anybody that want to come over and there was a thousand people there, if I remember correctly and there was some big name martial artist there, one of them was John [00:43:41], I think, he was from Miami and he was like the Father of Florida Martial Arts and during it, I decided I would get into the kata competition and so, in the hard style kata competition like 35 people competing and so, it took quite a long time to get through everybody. When it got to my turn, I would happen to introduce myself and I told them I was going to do Kata Dante and John [00:44:11] looked at me and he said you mean [00:44:16] and I said yes because I knew he wouldn’t let me do the kata if he knew what it was really going to be and he said okay, so I stepped back and did a little bow and then, I did the kata that I learned from Count Dante out in Chicago in ’68. I did 27 moves in 5 seconds and I did it so fast that one of the judges looked away and didn’t even see it so he couldn’t give me a score on it and then, they called me back up to the judging line there and he asked me what the kata was and I said, it was Kata Dante and they said do you know who invented that kata and I said yes, sir, John Keehan in Chicago and they gave me very low grades on the form. First because it was unlike anything that anybody else did. Everybody else was doing long katas like [00:45:06] modified and they had flying kicks and all those kind of thing and so, it lasts 2 or 3 minutes and mine lasted 5 seconds and so, plus, they didn’t like Count Dante. There was a lot of prejudice against Count Dante and so anybody who was doing his system was automatically not as well-thought of as the other competitors and so, I got very low points on that one. I didn’t get any trophy for it but I had a really good time and a lot of people came up to me afterwards and asked me where I have learned that and said they’ll study it. Another tournament I went to in central Florida, I did my hand in the steel trap trick which is an iron hand technique and I went up and told them I was going to demonstrate iron hand ninjutsu, this is a number 4 steel trap, I put a pencil in it, snapped a pencil right in half. A pencil is about the same size as the bones of your fingers and so I set the trap again and did a breathing exercise, I put my hand in the trap and it slammed shut on my fingers and I held it up and I set it back down, opened the trap up, took my hand out, shook my fingers to show that I was okay, once again, because it was so unusual, other people had like bō staff katas, nunchakus, things like these and they all scored pretty high but because nobody had ever seen anybody put a hand in the trap before, they didn’t give me very good marks for it but when I turned around to leave and go back into the dressing rooms to change and head out, the whole place kind of parted like the Red Sea and I had several people come up and ask me afterwards where was I training and where could they come and study to learn that kind of thing. Like I said, some unusual experiences. One time, I was out of school, we were about to do some sparring at a taekwondo school and we were doing, me and 3 or 4 of my students there, we were all having a pretty good time and I was sparring with the sensei at one point and he threw a really high sidekick and I was able to get under his kick and I caught him at his platform leg and knocked him over and of course, I knew that was the wrong thing to do because this was his school and you don’t want to make the teacher look bad in his own school and I figured I should give him the next point and sure enough, he knew what was going on to and so, the next time we engage, he took a back leg trip on me and when I hit the ground, he came down with a stomp kick right next to my head to show that yes, he could take me out if he wanted to and of course, I complimented him on it and we sparred a little bit more but the thing was, we restored his respect from his students by letting him prove that my kick was a lucky kick and his kick was a serious and intended technique. Things like that happen in these things and like the way I got my nickname was Ashida was when I was at the Shotokan school is I like to kick a lot more than most of the other Shotokan guys did because Shotokan is a hand-based boxing type of system and so, at any rate, at one point, we call him Hodge. My opponent stepped up and scored a point upon me right away and so, I felt a little bit embarrassed about it and so, when we set up for the second beginning, when the referee called for us to begin, I did a spinning back kick and I kind of caught him in the chin and usually, I don’t throw the kick any higher than waist level because it's much better balance at about the stomach but this particular time, the thing that matters was to catch him on the chin and it did knock him out but it stunned him pretty well and it chipped one of his teeth and so, because at that time, we weren’t wearing any safety gear and at that time, there wasn’t any safety gear except kendo armor and we weren’t using that for the tournament but at any rate, after that, everybody started calling me bigfoot because I was, I kick a lot and that’s where the name Ashida because Ashi means foot, Da means big and so, that’s how I got that particular nickname. This tournament and competition is a very subjective sort of fight. I was in a tournament up in Pennsylvania one time. It was supposed to be light contact and so, I was judging this one ring and one of the competitors kicked the other one in the stomach and nobody gave him a point for it because he hit the guy too hard and the referee actually told him, that’s too much contact so 10 minutes later, he did it again and he hit the guy a little bit harder and I was the only one that was in the position to give him a point for it and I didn’t give him a point because it was too hard of a technique and I told him again, this is too hard of a technique. It's supposed to be light contact so the third time this happened and I refused to give him a point, he got pissed off and walked off the floor and I didn’t care because he was not going by the established rules that everybody had agreed to. It was not supposed to be kill your opponent or rupture him or knock his feet out, it was supposed to be light contact. That’s how you get the point and so, they said a lot of times that kind of thing happens at tournaments and there's a very good movie called Circle of Iron. It's sometimes called the Silent Flute. It's a story that Bruce Lee wrote and at the beginning of the movie, this sort of thing happens. The hero is at a tournament trying to win a medallion so that he can go and meet Zetan who is the keeper of the book of enlightenment and find out his own enlightenment, basically, and during the competition, he knocks his opponent down and knocks him out and of course, he’s disqualified because that’s not allowed in the competition and so, this is one of the ways that Bruce Lee was able to get all the martial artists to empathize with the hero and get into the movie and play the movie from the hero’s point of view because almost everybody that’s been to a tournament where they felt like they got cheated. They didn’t get points for techniques they threw or the other guy got a lucky hit and defeated them and there wasn’t a real fair fight so everybody has been in that stage or been in that state of mind where they felt like they got cheated at a tournament and so, just like what I said, one of the tricks to get people in was storytelling basically in that particular movie. It's an excellent movie, if you ever get the chance to see it. It's pretty seldom to be shown on TV and I don’t think that it enjoyed a very wide release in the theaters either but it's available if you're just able to track it down but it has so many great lessons in it because I'm sure you’ve seen Return of the Dragon with Bruce Lee when he was fighting Chuck Norris in the Coliseum and at one point in that fight, when they start off they're using basic techniques and one guy got scored, the other guy scores, it's kind of a back and forth battle and then, when Chuck Norris start to win a little bit, Bruce Lee realizes that he's going to have to fight harder so he starts dancing. He starts bouncing on his toes like a boxer and every time Chuck Norris comes in, Bruce Lee hits him on the beat just as if he is still dancing and Chuck Norris, not knowing what the beat is, of course, is vulnerable with this particular attack and this is what Bruce Lee is trying to tell you is to use rhythm and timing as one of your weapons and not just punching and kicking. Rhythm and timing and speed are part of this so when Chuck Norris starts to accept the rhythm and starts to bounce up and down on his toes and try to throw boxing techniques, then Bruce Lee hits him on the half-beat by being a cha-cha champion which is just an extra beat in it, basically, for a half-beat and eventually he wins that fight. In Circle of Iron, he expressed the same thing because there was one of the people that the hero had to fight. He was called the Rhythm Man and the Rhythm Man had his little circus that he ran most of the time. Whenever he sparred with anybody, he would always have his band basically play these musical instruments all around them and he was not even fighting, he was just dancing but because his opponent, most of the time, didn’t know how to use rhythm, he was able to defeat him because he was able to hit him on the beat and use rhythm and timing to land his punches and the opponent couldn’t so this is one of the things that Bruce Lee was trying to teach us with his movies. Not only the one that he wrote but also the one that he was in with Chuck Norris in the sense that rhythm and timing and speed are very important parts of everything that you do and very often, especially in the commercial martial arts schools, you have to develop that on your own. They don’t really make a big point of teaching you rhythm or timing. The timing comes in when you do one step but actually, the technique of using rhythm is one that you either develop on your own or you pick it up somewhere outside of the martial arts school because most martial arts schools, at least the ones that I've visited, don’t stress that sort of thing. They concentrate mostly on blocking and punching and counter-attacking.Jeremy Lesniak:I would agree and I’ll see if I can track down links of that movie just like we do everything else over at the show notes for anyone that’s new to the show, whistlekickmartialartsradio.com.Ashida Kim:Yeah, it is available and it's an excellent movie. It's got a lot of really good lessons in it and a lot of good hidden techniques in it. I could talk all day just on the movie because it's got so many great things in it. I've watched it a thousand times because every time I have a student come and train with me, I make them watch that movie so they can get into the mindset that Bruce Lee had about some of these things and get some of these hidden lessons that are easily observable in the movie but it would take a long time to explain and a long time to develop if you didn’t understand the principles itself. There's a lot of good stories along those lines and it's just a question of the example that you want to present because one of the other things of this movie because at the beginning of the movie, the hero berates one of the other competitors and he’s just a dancer, I'm a fighter and at the end of the movie, his best friend is the dancer who is also a martial artist. He learns to overcome his prejudice and he learns to accept people the way they are and appreciate what they can do even though it's not exactly the same thing that he's doing. This is one of the problems that you get a lot in martial arts. They feel that my style is the only style that’s any good. Everybody else’s style is no good. Cross training is evil, these kind of stuff, but cross training is the best way to learn. You pick up techniques from everywhere and I bet a lot of good techniques that I picked up from watching basketball and football because when you fake the guy out of a position so you can go around them with a basketball or you do a spin move so the guy can't tackle you, that’s ninjutsu, that’s invisibility. That’s being able to not be hit and to not have to hit the other guy and so, all these sports have excellent techniques like that that you just have to look for a little bit and see how they can be applied to do what you're doing and so, I said, most martial arts don’t teach you these techniques or to avoid the punches. They teach you to block them or they teach you to counterattack but instead, in ninjutsu, the idea is to not get hit at all if you can help it and wait until there is an opening before you try and hit the other guy. It's pretty self-defense, basically, when you come right down to it.Jeremy Lesniak:Right. So, as we start to wind down here, let’s talk a little bit more about you in a specific way. You have some books if I remember?Ashida Kim:Yeah, I had quite a few. Back in the ‘80s, I wrote about a dozen or so for a publisher out in Colorado and I was over in Australia and had a guy ask me what did I think of the new ninja training manual that just came out and I said, well, I haven't seen it and so he brought me a copy of it and it's just one of my books. It just has a different cover on it. This is the original book of the ninja, they just got ninja training manual in front of it instead so when I came back, I contacted the publisher and found out that there were a whole bunch of these books that were being sold under other titles and sold all over the world, basically. At one point, they told me that they had translated a bunch of these books in Portuguese for Brazil and into German and French and Spanish and different things like that and they told me at one point, they had actually translated my books into Japanese and I asked them to send me a couple of copies and then, they denied that they had translated into Japanese and then, I found that all these overseas sales were not being credited to me, they were going to some literary agent and so, I broke away from that particular publisher and started self-publishing and now, we’ve got about 250 books or so on Dojo Press. Not all of them, of course, are mine because I've got a lot of really good friends that I helped put these books together and videos of these other people too and we don’t promote as much as Amazon does or some of these other big people because to me, it's more of a hobby than anything else to have these books out there to make them available to people. I mean, I certainly, I wouldn’t mind having a massive number of sales and being rich but basically, to me, it's more important that the information is available to the people that look for it. Instead of trying to sell people something, I'm going to let them come and find it and then, it means more to them that way and they get more out of it that way and I had a lady who has been to a couple of our Black Dragon gatherings and she’s been writing to me for the last couple of months, talking about how she is re-reading secrets of the ninja from the first ones that I've published and how she’s finding so much hidden technique in that book that she didn’t realize before and comparing it with a lot of these things to the Tai Chi and things like that that she’s doing now because she’s evolved to that level where she’s practicing Tai Chi primarily now and, for instance, in the [01:00:23] technique, there's a position where you form a triangle between your index finger and your thumbs and you extend your fingers and this is a technique called Control of the Elements basically because each one of the finger represent each one of the 5 elements and there's a lot of meditation things that you can do with that and she was asking me if this is not, in fact, the same hand position that you find in one of the Tai Chi forms or several of the Tai Chi forms where you flash your fingers to the opponent’s face to make them blink so that you can hit him and I went certainly, it's exactly the same technique and that’s just one of the things that we teach in ninjutsu. It comes from the meditation part is the idea of being able to flash your fingers to the guy’s face to make them blink. They only have to close their eyes for half a second and you can be gone or you can drop down and do a real low leg sweep and knock your feet out from under them so there’s the idea of using a distraction as your initial technique or using something that’s going to make a guy blink as your first technique is, to me, is what qualifies these things as invisibility and ninjutsu and like I said, a lot can be learned by anybody for a short period of time.Jeremy Lesniak:What other, for people that might be interested in checking out the books that you have available at Dojo Press, I assume that’s dojopress.com?Ashida Kim:Yes.Jeremy Lesniak:Okay, dojopress.com. 250 is a lot so we’re certainly not going to go down through a list but what kind of books are people going to find? Obviously, martial arts but…Ashida Kim:We’ve got all the ones that I originally wrote. Secrets of Invisibility, Ninja Death Touch, Ninja Mind Control. Ninja Mind Control is one of the best ones available. It's actually still being sold under other titles overseas and other translations and stuff but it has a very good explanation of the meditation techniques and the [01:02:20] techniques and it doesn’t go into a lot of elaborate detail of what you can do with these techniques because once you start practicing them, you discover what you can do with them and you discover exactly how they're used and these kind of things and why they're in a particular pattern that they are. I've got a couple books on Lady Ninjas, Kunoichi and the Dragon Lady and things like that and some grappling books and whatnot but the one thing that we published a couple years ago that I'm very proud of is The Healing Hands of the Ninja which is a big 8½ by 11 book and it has a lot of techniques that are, what we call, energy work. Every punch that you do has, what they call, a build to it where you charge up your hand, charge up your body which is energy and then, when you hit the target or the opponent then you transmit that energy to the opponent and double the effect of your technique and whatnot and the same energy can be used to heal people and so, this particular book has 25 or 30 different techniques that you can use to build energy up and draw energy to your hands so that you can use your hands to correct imbalances and to heal things and help people to feel better and be healthy and develop longevity but this is very similar to Reiki techniques. They have a particular system that they use to draw energy to their hands so they can then use this energy to help people with different energy imbalances and this particular book has a great variety of techniques that you can use to charge your hands up and this is the kind of thing, there's another one we did for Grandmaster Day, it's called Tibetan Burning Palm and this technique is a breathing exercise. It takes about 15 or 20 minutes to do it but when you get done, your hands are energized and this is the technique that you use to break the bottom brick and this sort of thing when you do breaking techniques and other breaks. We have a picture of Grandmaster Day breaking 13 concrete slabs with his hand and so, and the way you do that without hurting your hand is to put chi or energy on your hand so that it's like an armored glove and then, when you hit something with it, it doesn’t hurt you. It's the same thing as putting your hand in a trap. It doesn’t hurt you, it hurts the other person so it's like doing the energy techniques is where I've evolved to a lot more now. Even though I don’t have a clinic or anything to do with myself, I like to try to share those things to people now and we have several books that are on good health and longevity also and then, of course, there are other authors that have their own versions of ninjutsu and have basic techniques and meditation exercises. We've got quite a bit of people who have done sword technique also and various other weapons so there's some pretty good selection of things on there, depending on what sort of technique you're looking for.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah, it sounds pretty diverse.Ashida Kim:Yeah, we try to, over the years, we start out basically with the first 12 that I did and worked up from there and over the years, we’ve picked up other people that wanted to include other books into the catalog and we felt some of them do that and some of them who just did the books and then we publish them to sell and whatnot but that’s the great thing is that nowadays, you can self-publish and you get the word out there to people.Jeremy Lesniak:Great. So, as we start to wind down here, you’ve shared a lot of amazing stuff and some really great stuff and I appreciate all the stories that you’ve given us today and I think we’re going to have to have you back on. Longtime listeners will know that we got to maybe half of the questions, depending on how you want to look at it so I think that’s great. I love when we get to wander on the show, I think it's for the best of what comes out.Ashida Kim:I was just going to say yeah, I greatly enjoy it myself. I love talking about martial arts and sharing these stories and the techniques with people and I’d be glad to come back anytime.Jeremy Lesniak:Fantastic! Let’s end the way we always like to end: with a bit of advice. If you have some advice to offer to everyone listening, what would you say?Ashida Kim:That’s a good question. I would have to say that my primary piece of advice is to be kind and try to help other people and then, stand up for yourself and gain self-knowledge so that you have a sense of your own value and a sense of your own self-worth and not to quote another movie but in Conan the Barbarian, there's a scene where after Conan has been set the opponent in the fist fight that they did and killed them, of course, the narrator makes a remark. He came to realize his own self-worth and if you realize that, if you realize that you're a human being and that you're a child of the universe and you have an important part to play in the universe and the world, that it makes you want to be a better person and the key to that is to be kind because if you're kind then people will love to see you coming. If you're a bully, nobody wants to be around you except for your cronies, basically, but if you're kind and if you help people then they’ll be glad to see you and it would be like one of these ninjutsu schools that say wherever I go, people are safer and wherever I am, people have a friend and so, it's not really a matter of making a big show. I was telling a friend of mine the other day that I have a lot of t-shirts that people have given me over the years of martial arts t-shirts and clubs and things like that. I very seldom wear anything that has a logo or a sales pitch on it or anything and this is one of the subliminal parts of ninjutsu is the idea of not attracting attention. When the time comes, you step up and you do what has to be done because it's like what John Kennedy said, we do the hard things, not because we want to but because they have to be done and that’s what martial arts has taught me really is to be able to do what has to be done and to be kind to other people.Jeremy Lesniak:Thank you for listening to episode 104 of whistlekick martial arts radio and thank you to Sensei Kim. Over at whistlekickmartialartsradio.com, you can find links to Sensei Kim’s books, his websites and a lot more. If you like the show, be sure you're subscribing or using one of our free apps. They're available both on iOS and Android. For those of you kind enough to leave us a review, remember, we randomly check out the podcast review sites and if we find your review there, we’ll mention it on the air and then, you can go ahead, email us. We’re sending you a free pack of whistlekick stuff like a t-shirt and some other fun things. If you know someone that would be a great interview for the show, please fill out the form at whistlekickmartialartsradio.com or if you want to suggest a topic for the Thursday show or give us some other feedback, there's a form for that as well. You can follow us on social media, we’re on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and Instagram and our username is always whistlekick. Remember the products you can find on whistlekick.com or on Amazon like our t-shirts and our sparring gear. If you're a school owner or a team coach, you should check out wholesale.whistlekick.com for our discounted wholesale program. We’ll be back soon but until next time, train hard, smile and have a great day!