he spotted his archrival Yoshitsune in an exposed position. Yoshitsune’s retainers saw Noritsune coming. Quickly, they insinuated themselves between him and their leader. In spite of this human shield, Noritsune, wielding his famous Shigeto bow, fired arrows fletched with hawk feathers at his enemy, dropping eight of the Minamoto samurai surrounding Yoshitsune. One of his targets was pierced from the left shoulder to the right side.
In the final sea battle at Dan-o-ura, Noritsune was a demon. He boarded a Minamoto boat and laid waste to several of the enemy with his long-handled naginata. On the rocking, pitching boats, hand-to-hand combat was breaking out. In the confusion, it was some time before Noritsune caught sight of Yoshitsune. As soon as he did, he charged. But Yoshitsune, who had learned his own martial skills, legend had it, from mountain goblins called tengu, employed a method of jumping in armor that allowed him to leap successfully to another boat. Within the time it took the oarsmen to pull half a dozen strokes, Yoshitsune had once again escaped.
Enraged at the loss of another opportunity to kill Yoshitsune, Noritsune tore off all his armor except for his breastplate, one woven with fine Chinese silk. He shouted to the boats of his enemy, the Minamoto, rocking all around him. “Isn’t there a single warrior among you who wishes to take me on?”
Aki-no-Taro Sanemoto, a Minamoto samurai who was an expert in grappling, took up the challenge. He, his brother Jiro, and another Minamoto retainer launched a small dory-like boat toward the larger vessel where Noritsune waited. They leaped aboard and attacked as a group. With a kick, Noritsune knocked one retainer into the drink. He seized Aki-no-Taro in a wristlock, then grabbed Jiro. “Come on,” he roared, “let’s climb the Mountain of Death!” And with his enemies in tow, he jumped into the foaming swells of the straits.
Three trails of bubbles rose . . .
Noritsune’s sacrifice, like most of the famous sacrifices of the samurai throughout their history, is remembered principally because it was futile. The Taira lost. They lost the battle at Dan-o-ura, and shortly thereafter, they lost the war with the Minamoto entirely. Their clan was doomed. But the spirit of Noritsune is a perfect example of the fighting spirit of the samurai at its best. The violence of combat as it is popularly depicted in modern movies or other forms of fiction tends to be horribly fraudulent. Popular heroes in these take on a whole army of enemies it seems, tackling a regiment of terrorists or a battalion of gangsters or the majority of the adult male population of any country in Southeast Asia. And while our hero may be bloodied a bit or bruised—and his shirt will always be torn—we may be sure that by the time the credits are rolling or the final page has been turned, he will have emerged the victor.
Those of us fortunate enough to have been exposed to the tales of the campaigns between the Taira and the Minamoto when we were kids learned a valuable lesson. We learned that heroes don’t always win. Sometimes, as with Noritsune, they die. They go down, taking as many of the enemy with them as they can—that’s part of what makes them heroes. But they die, nonetheless. In a battle against overwhelming odds, victory is not always possible. But here is the lesson for the warrior: going into a battle with the spirit of Noritsune, with the determination to die and take as many opponents with you as you can, does not guarantee success or victory. You will not always win. Yet with that kind of spirit, can it ever be truly said of you that you lost?
The Dead Zone
Choose a stance, one from the repertoire of karate, or judo, or aikido; any of the budo. Get set in it; really get yourself as solid as you can be. Then have a dojomate give you a little push. Just a gentle shove. Chances are, if your training’s been good you’ll be able to withstand the push. That’s one purpose of a strong stance. But have him continue to give pushes and as he does, have him move around you slowly, pushing from different angles as he circles your stance. There is no need for him to hurry or to try to sneak a quick push in when you don’t expect it. At some point in this exercise, your friend is going to topple your balance. He has found your shikaku, your “dead zone.”
Some budoka might doubt their balance can be upset, particularly when they are prepared for an attempt to do it, particularly when the push isn’t going to be a surprise, particularly among those who have come to believe their stances are immovable. But try it somewhere in the radius of pushes, even a very moderate force will break down your stance. Don’t worry. Your failure to maintain your balance has nothing to do with any flaws in your practice or in the stance. It has to do with the shikaku that is inherent in any stance and in any human’s posture.
At its most basic level, shikaku maybe thought of as the angle (or angles, to be more exact) where an upright human is vulnerable in terms of balance. It is, in a kinesiological sense, his blind side. In a left front stance as one might take in karate, your partner can slam his sweeping left foot against your left foot all day long in a lateral motion, to no avail. But if he hooks his foot slightly and sweeps at a shallow angle to his right rear corner, you’ll go down like you have been hit with a cattle prod. In that stance, that direction, your own left front, is the angle of your shikaku. In aikido against a wrist grab you rotate your seized hand as if you were going to strike your attacker in his face with your tegatana, or “hand sword.” Doing so causes his upper body to twist away. You are able to pin his arm in the basic aikido technique of ikkyo. But it isn’t until the aikidoka learns to shift his body center slightly at the onset, to readjust his extension of power against the opponent’s dead zone, that ikkyo and every other aikido technique really work.
As you have probably discovered by my descriptions so far, shikaku is a difficult concept of the budo to describe. Too often, exponents have only a fragmented view of shikaku, and so they are not able to exploit it fully in an opponent or minimalize its effects in themselves. The stance experiment described above is illustrative of just a small facet of shikaku, for example. Against a stable, stationary position (such as a stance), it is possible for even an unskilled person to find another’s shikaku. Rotate 360° around him, pushing at every angle of the circle and you’ll eventually strike it. That, however, is a controlled experiment, where there is no moving resistance. Try finding the shikaku against someone who is moving, shifting his balance point constantly along with his stances, closing and lengthening his distance from you (and trying to find your shikaku as well). That is shikaku in real life.
Since, except for very good meditation disciples and your average dedicated couch potato, we tend to be mobile in our waking lives, our shikaku are mobile, too. The angles of vulnerability in our posture are in constant flux and flow and just as importantly, they are multidimensional. This latter can be observed when the tai chi expert seems to pull in a partner in “pushing hands,” drawing him forward and down and then shooting him up and back, uprooting his stance dramatically. In karate, a properly executed rising block takes advantage of an attacker’s dead zone, up and to the rear of the attacker’s punching arm.
Perhaps the best-known illustration of shikaku is a portrait of the eccentric swordsman Miyamoto Musashi. Gripping both his long and short swords, Musashi’s posture and countenance are electric with power. His slit-eyed stare is furious; wholly concentrated. Any number of his biographers and interpreters of Musashi’s writings have suggested there is some meaning in the posture of the warrior in this remarkable portrait. Most of these interpretations are drawn from the discipline of kendo, an art incidentally, that Musashi never practiced. I would, rather presumptuously, like to add my own thoughts about that painting.
To me, Musashi’s portrait is like some kind of koan, one of the mental/spiritual quandaries posed to disciples of Zen by their masters. It is a simple rendering. Musashi stands erect, dressed plainly in kimono and a haori vest, and his swords, long and short, are gripped in a position that does not seem very martial or threatening at all. They appear to droop in front of him. The expression on his face is, as I said, fiercely concentrated. But it does not seem to be directed at any outer enemy.
