I began training in Shukokai Karate in Elizabeth, NJ in 1980. After I moved to Flushing, NY, in 1988, I started practicing at a self-defense oriented Aikidō dōjō in Jackson Heights that augmented its practice with older Daitō-ryū techniques and striking methods (atemi) from Nippon Shorinji Kempō. It called itself a form of aiki-jūjutsu and atemi-jutsu but is best viewed as a form of goshin-jutsu — modern self-defense distinct from competitive grappling arts such as Brazilian jiu-jitsu that are now dominant. The school claimed to maintain a family tradition of aiki-jūjutsu that its earliest student manuals credit and thank Daitō-ryū as being its source.
There were a number of NYC area aiki-jūjutsu schools inspired by the teaching of Daitō-ryū Kodokai, especially Yonezawa Katsumi. I believe our school ultimately was a mixed martial art containing some Daitō-ryū techniques likely learned from seminars Yonezawa held in the 1970s. The core goshin-jutsu I learned was a preservation of locking and throwing methods drawn from 1950s era Aikidō, especially as practiced by Tohei Koichi, combined with striking methods drawn from karate and Shorinji Kempō that were both grafted onto a set of self-defense oriented body movements called tai-sabaki developed by Dennis Fink in the 1970s, which influenced many NYC area jūjutsu styles. Variants of Daitō-ryū jūjutsu techniques were layered on top of this structure — what I learned over time, especially after attending seminars in Daitō-ryū Takumakai in 1999, was that absent from the curriculum I had learned was any aiki-no-jutsu practice.
In November 2007 I reconnected with an old training buddy, Louis Bravo. Louis is a Hakko-ryū black belt who trained in karate and Aikidō before visiting our Jackson Heights aiki-jūjutsu dōjō on the recommendation of his father. His father is a Hakko-ryū practitioner who had heard of the school as teaching an art that was a variation on Miyama-ryū and effective for street fighting and self-defense.
I asked Louis to check what his father exactly knew about our school's history. Louis himself felt it was similar in some ways to the techniques he saw in Hakko-ryū and old Aikidō that were both derived from Daitō-ryū, but mixed with Karatedō and Judō:
I got a call from my old man and he gave me the missing link. Here is the breakdown... Sensei Claudio was the founder Hoteikan-ryū. He worked with Sensei Perreira before he created Miyama-ryū. He was a Karate and Judo guy. Sensei Claudio worked out of several dojos including the basement in the Bronx [which had split off from Miyama-ryū] I told you about during this period.
Sensei Claudio met Sensei Robert Hasman and ran study groups around NYC in the 70s and 80s. Sensei Claudio was also a contemporary of Sensei William C. Morris, a sensei of Sosuishi-ryū and Danzan-ryū jūjutsu. They had a Black belt named David Samuel [the man our teacher initially claimed was his instructor]; he was a former Marine.
The art we studied was goshin-jutsu invented by Dennis Fink of Sosuishi-ryū Jūjutsu, Isshin-ryū karate, and Tomiki Aikidō that was mixed with Sensei Claudio's Karate and Judo and Sensei William C. Morris' old Danzan-ryū jūjutsu. The Basement dōjō and the first Hoteikan school was in a bank in the Bronx that is how our teacher came into the picture. The reason our teacher was not a Miyama-ryū guy is because he was part of the study group Sensei Claudio had in the Bronx.
Then in 2011, Lou was training in Chile and encountered someone who practiced Jūjutsu in NYC in the 1970s, and had some additional details:
I had a chance to meet with someone who was with our teacher in the early pre Jackson Heights days in New York. He told me the base for his art was Shorinji Kempō before Aikidō was added. He told me that the Aikidō was pre-war Aikidō, giving it more variations of throws, locks, etc. The weapons he was not sure on but said that the original goal was to be goshin-jutsu (self-defense).
He told me that even the story of Nishiyama passing away and his only daughter taking over the system was the true story of Shorinji Kempō whose head master is the daughter of the founder who died sometime in 1981 and the founder was in his own words a Warrior Monk. So both the Kempō and Aiki can be traced back to older systems of Japan and China. This is why the Atemi and Aiki work well for goshin-jutsu.
The guy told me that also at this time our teacher used the records of the Asahi Newspaper office in Osaka where many Daitō-ryū techniques were preserved on film as originally taught by both Ueshiba and Takeda Sokaku to make his art more solid and traditional. He told me that at this time the adding of arts or creating of a system was a big thing in NYC since it was the only way to stand apart from the big names schools in NYC like Oyama, Yamada, and Oishi.
I think the Aikidō and Sosuishi-ryū came first when he wanted to teach a goshin-jutsu art then the Shorinji Kempō completed the system we know today. The Hoteikan dojo from what I see looks like the lab / testing place for it and a few other NYC arts. I wanted you to know that what you spent so many years on was not a waste of time since we had variations of techniques that many of Aikidōka today have never seen. In closing, I now understand that it does have a real base but it's just that our teacher for some reason had to create a story for it and that is when I think the weapons part came into play.
Later, a former colleague began training under Dennis Fink of Sosuishi-ryū, whose self-defense teachings helped inspire many NYC area jūjutsu schools, including Miyama-ryū and its offshoots. Doing so, he discovered that many of the original stories or descriptions associated in our dōjō were also taken in part from lives of teachers of Sosuishi-ryū. So, Shorinji Kempō was not the only art our teacher stole history from.
My first exposure to koryū kenjutsu was in seminars held by Katō Kazuo in Port Washington on Yagyū Shinkage-ryū heihō in the early 1990s. It turns out I was quite allergic to the red lacquer of the fukuro shinai and did not continue my practice.
In NYC, I attended workshops from more direct lines of Daitō-ryū, including Daitō-ryū Takumakai, and came to realize what I had first learned in Jackson Heights, while effective for urban combatives, was an amalgamation instead of a traditional line of practice.
The dōjō I trained at also maintained a set of religious practices under the mentorship of members of a family line of practice from Japan. This family history was borrowed by the martial arts school in an attempt to create a greater sense of authenticity to its martial practice.
Inner Dharma started largely not because of my practice of aiki-jūjutsu but because of my interest in Shugendō, a blend of Buddhism, Taoism, and mountain asceticism practiced in Japan. The arts taught at the dōjō I trained at in NYC were held by the instructors there to be derived from the fighting practices of Japanese yamabushi. This was invented, and likely taken from the fact that Takeda Sokaku's grandfather had (according to main-line Daitō-ryū writings) been trained in Shugendō. Shugendō did have a strong philosophical influence on many classical Japanese martial arts, but there are very few yamabushi related martial traditions surviving in Japan — likely why this was chosen by a group trying to establish itself as interesting in the crowded NYC martial arts scene of the 1970s and 1980s.
Having since had contact with budō practitioners in Japan who actively practice Hagurō Shugendō, it is important to stress that aiki-jūjutsu schools in NYC in the 1980s had no formal relationship to Japanese Shugendō.
Visiting sacred places has been an important component of my
martial arts training over the years. It was in 2004, while visiting
the Dewa Sanzan area, including Gassan Dai Jinja (
From 2004 to 2008, I continued to work on refining the
modern goshin-jutsu (
I had begun learning Bagua Zhang after I moved to Baltimore and shifted my practice towards training in internal martial arts after leaving this school. Shortly thereafter I began training in more traditional approaches to Japanese weapons as well.
Before I completely shifted to Chinese methods and approaches, I received permission from my Gao bagua instructor to teach Ben what I had learned. I introduced Ben to the more sophisticated tactics and body mechanics of Baguazhang, even while we continued to drill our core set of aiki-jūjutsu techniques. Over time, we pared down the curriculum we had first practiced and revised its body mechanics to draw largely from Bagua instead of Shorinji Kempō. He was a rigorous training partner who had a strong distaste for what a friend calls “aiki accommodation syndrome” — training outdoors on a variety of surfaces, including Pennsylvania bluestone, did not lead us to simply take ukemi as we might have done on smooth tatami.
The result we called Gassankan (
Much later, I learned of a statement made by one of my first instructor's colleagues from the Daitō-ryū Kodokai seminars taught by Yonezawa in the 1970s, who eventually went on to learn Daitō-ryū to an advanced level. He once told a prospective student who was contemplating the school I trained at in NYC and later trained with us on a private basis:
It's okay stuff. Good strong jūjutsu. Go do that first and get your black belt. Once you've learned the basics, then come to me if you want to learn real aiki. But, if I were you, I would not waste your time with their weapons practice. It is all made up.
I think that was a good summary. This information came to me from several sources around the time I consulted with senior Aikidō sensei in Maryland, showing them variations of the aiki-jūjutsu I had first learned in NYC — especially versions of locks and throws I had thought were quite unique. All were variations more commonly taught in the 1950s by senior experts like Tohei and Saitō.
The sin was not in teaching goshin-jutsu. Instead, by inflating the history to suggest it was a historical form of aiki-jūjutsu, advanced students who otherwise might have sought out traditional instruction instead wasted a lot of time and effort at the school's upper-level curriculum, which was largely invented and in retrospect, not of as high quality as traditional kenjutsu or aiki-jūjutsu as practiced in Japan or by people who studied in Japan.
In NYC, I recommend those interested in the Japanese martial art of aiki-jūjutsu train at The Yushinkan NYC located in Brooklyn led by Rodrigo Kong. Several friends I knew from New York changed to training there from our dōjō in Queens and were quite happy with their decision.
In 2012, I connected with an old training partner who stopped training regularly in goshin-jutsu around when I did. He has since been training at the Yushinkan in Brooklyn and learning authentic aiki-jūjutsu.
Initially, he liked Daitō-ryū but kind of missed the energy of the hard training found in the self-defense oriented style we had practiced. I spoke to him again two years later, to ask him his opinion of the waza we had first learned — specifically, I asked him if he thought they involved “aiki” in any way. From his updated understanding, he was quick to respond in the negative. In fact, now from practicing a more traditional approach, he is seeing more and more ways in which some of his earlier practice could be improved.
It is interesting to me, that while I am practicing bagua and taiji, and he is practicing Daitō-ryū, we are coming to similar conclusions. I am sure a lot of our answers to the question of what might be done differently are not the same, but it is interesting that we are coming to similar conclusions none the less.
I had similar good experiences in 2017 interacting with the Daitō-ryū Takumakai group in Seattle led by Kenneth Freeman.