Originally Posted by
wmuromoto
So several of such tales told later, I'm doing tea (of all things) and my sensei and I got into a discussion of why the heck some movements seem so hard for us moderns to learn, and it dawned on me that perhaps the "mukashi no Nihonjin" moved differently. --Not to say there's anything mystical, mind you, but somehow preindustrialized, premodern people (of many different cultures) moved in a different physical manner and approached movement from a different mind set than us moderns. That's a given, but I wonder if it affects how much we are capable of doing, physically speaking.
At the very beginning of The Seven Samurai, there is a scene where all of the villagers are in a state of shock and morning as they learn that the bandits are coming for their village. A few of them suddenly just drop from a standing position into a deep squat in order to moan and wail. The first time I watched it, that action struck me as being over-the-top drama. Later on it occurred to me that the peasants of that time probably spent a good part of their lives squatting-- there were no chairs, seiza had yet to be popularized, and they were out in the muddy fields a lot of the time. What seemed strange to me may well have been an accurate glimpse into how those men might have moved.
Experimenting on my own has taught me that I have a lot of trouble with that sort of squat; I think that my hips lack the necessary flexibility and my back lacks the necessary strength to drop down into it comfortably. I think that a person who spent a good portion of their lives in that posture would have a body developed in a very different way from those of us who have to spend our days crouched facing a monitor, and I suspect that the differences would make a huge impact for a martial artist.
Anyway, just my .02, which in today's economy is worth-- squat.
David Sims
"Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum." - Terry Pratchet
My opinion is, in all likelihood, worth exactly what you are paying for it.