New incident from the real world coming up...
Monday night I once again visited another dojo which I am not a permanent member of, which is something I believe strongly that everyone should do whenever the opportunity arises (there is only one person who has the closest equivalent to the "truth" about taijutsu, and he also happens to be a very poor teacher as well as live in another country). Without going into specifics, the training attitude at this particular place is that neither beginners nor advanced students should focus too much on specific technical details, i.e. if you want to elaborate on what the instructor just showed you, that is perfectly acceptable - at least everyone does it and nobody's really complaining openly.
Anyway, after a while I got to train with this guy I had never met before - young, probably about 15 or 16 at the most, with what I estimated as a training time of probably no more than a year. He started out throwing three sequential punches the way the technique we practiced called for, and as soon as I got control of his elbow joint I noticed he was resisting and trying to get up. I didn't think much of it just then, I simply bent my knees to make him go to the ground, and allowed him to roll away afterwards.
He punched again, I gained control of his arm, and now he was resisting in another direction, a bit more obviously this time. I allowed him to get up again just in time for me to apply an ura oni kudaki henka and take him down into a take ori controlling hold on the ground, after which I said "you feeling anxious about something? No need to dude, chill out". He punches a third time, and this time I hardly got to control his arm before he turned clockwise and tried to hit me with a spinning elbow to the face. Now, I started to realize something was seriously wrong with him. I flinched with my right elbow and speared the triceps of his right attacking arm while simultaneously lightly kneeing the small of his back to break his balance. He then started to fall down but surprised me by managing to catch my neck in the fall. I could have resisted it but instead tried to follow him to the ground to see if I could talk som sense with him there. Ironically, I then found myself following the standard Gracie anti-headlock procedure by grinding my forearm against his carotid to make him release the grip, after which I put my left leg in front of his throat and my right knee at the back of his neck while grabbing the arm to apply - you guessed it - a kimura/reverse hammerlock.
Upon having him under my control, I gave it my last shot at being polite and asked "do we really have to be like this all the time?"
He responded "it'll be more fun for you that way". Shortly after that, we were given a new technique which was apparently some sort of a koku/renyo henka, in which we were supposed to catch the leg and opposing arm (right leg - left arm) and take him down. Sure enough, partially due to my own sloppiness but also because of his behaviour, he tried to trap my leg with his arm after falling down. I decided that was to be the end of his antics. I therefore went down hard with my right knee on his right thigh just above his knee, put on my best expressionless Wanderlei Silva face and asked "do you want me to do those things as well?"
"What?" he asked, looking mildly worried for the first time.
"That", I said briskly. Sure enough, he said nothing for a second or two after which we were given a new technique and told to switch partners. He seemed to behave a bit better towards the others after that, though I don't know how permanent that will be.
There are a lot of boundaries you will go over by doing certain things during training, just as there are a lot of messages you send out to others both by means of your actions and by means of your words. People have been known to complain about me that I often look too bored, distant and/or uninterested at times - in actuality, I pretty much never feel that way, it's just that I always practice the use of my peripheral vision as much as possible.
Ponder for a while what hesitance/willingness to go to the ground and continue to work from there will tell your partner about yourself. How will he react to you being tense in any way, how much will he let you experiment with techniques, what is his reaction to sudden moves, how much does he feel it is acceptable to give or receive verbal corrections? Also ask yourself during which circumstances you may apply hip throws or similar things without your partner feeling uncomfortable, how many times you can use a head takedown before your partner starts to think you have poor imagination and/or ability to improvise. When could you pull out a hidden weapon such as a neck/boot training knife, when do you start applying controlling holds after a takedown, and to what extent do you need to demonstrate your ability to control someone?
Somehow I've always felt that it takes some serious cojones to be a good uke to someone you haven't met before, especially if you're visiting a training seminar or a dojo where you haven't been before. Any jerk who received hard slaps to the face by dad between 1982 and 1994 can be a pain in the a** to his training partner. The reason for this is very simple - you don't know what he might do to you, accidentally or intentionally. You don't know if he's one of those guys that makes something come loose in your elbow every time you practice with him. You don't know if his lack of control when wielding a bokken will result in a bloody nose or a black eye for your part.
On the other hand, I spoke about this issue earlier this year with the instructor who coined the term "rock-and-roll kihon happo", in which, as I've said before, the uke attempts to protect himself a little more than usually. He then said to me something along the lines of "well, that's exactly it. If I as an uke am going to play the part of not knowing what tori is going to do to me, of course I am going to defend myself a little more".
This got me thinking. How much are we actually programming ourselves to compliant uke, and how clever is that really in regards to reality?
I know of some people who constantly b*tch about the fact that the people acting as uke for Hatsumi and the Japanese shihan tend to feed them way too meager and weak attacks, and that that is poor uke training because "you should always be in a position to attack again and again as uke". However, as anyone would know who has experienced instances in which someone has decided to test the Japanese for real, they are more than capable of dealing with whatever you throw at them without raising an eyebrow. The complex part is that the amount of punishment and/or negative reputation you're going to receive is at the very least equal to the amount of violence you dish out against them, which most people who act as uke to them are very well aware of.
Could it really be as simple as this - that it is the instructor's job to specify just how compliant people should be with each other, even at larger seminars?
