Dale Seago on Mythbusters

[Nighthawk]

I liked your "Yeah, we prefer to get out of the way" answer. That's Justin Kyoshi's attitude, too.

[Dale Seago]

I liked your "Yeah, we prefer to get out of the way" answer. That's Justin Kyoshi's attitude, too.

Well, just seems to make sense. If a car careening out of control were heading toward you as you stood on the sidewalk, would you try to contest ownership of the space you occupied with it?

Prob'ly not.

So it seems the same should apply to anything else that might potentially hurt you, whether it be a foot or fist, blade or bullet, or whatever.

Which, by the way, brings up something about our arts that is different from a lot of others. We don't take the approach of "If he attacks with a punch do X, if it's a knife, do Y", etc. We always respond as though there's a weapon involved that we may just not have noticed yet.

From my website FAQ:

These arts developed in, and survived through, periods of warfare in feudal Japan. As such they are weapons-based arts, though the physical methods are designed to work in fundamentally the same way, with the same movement dynamics, whether the practitioner is armed or empty-handed. Even the empty-hand methods take weapons into account and affect the way we approach things. For example, in a purely empty-hand sport art such as boxing a practitioner might be willing to absorb a couple of blows in order to get to a point where he can do something really decisive to his opponent. The Bujinkan practitioner would tend to move as though the attacking hand held a concealed knife or other weapon which he simply had not yet seen, and would deal with the attack in such a way that the opponent would be unable to use a weapon effectively if there was one.

[Nighthawk]

Which, by the way, brings up something about our arts that is different from a lot of others. We don't take the approach of "If he attacks with a punch do X, if it's a knife, do Y", etc. We always respond as though there's a weapon involved that we may just not have noticed yet.

From my website FAQ:

Actually, we sorta do, too. We train with the philosophy that the hand/foot is itself a weapon, and treat it it as such. Kyoshi says to take it away, and then give it back... The part making sure the opponent can't effectively use said weapon is completely pertinent in all cases. In the words of Just Kyoshi "You go home; they go to the hospital."

[Jack Daw]

Good goin', Dale! I love that show!

[Bill aka Mole]

Seago Sensei, Thank you for sharing. Semper Fi!

[Taygrd]

Wow, that was awesome, I saw the episode and it clicked, "that's Dale". I guess now I am a sgian dubh supplier to the stars Great Job Sir! Would love to train under you.

[Macman]

I really enjoyed that, Dale. It's great to see you in action!

[Dale Seago]

Before I forget, I prob'ly should mention something about how I came to be on that episode. They were doing a full-hour special on stuff pertaining to the Ninja of Japan; they'd done enough background research to know that my teacher over there, Hatsumi Masaaki, is the inheritor of the last surviving historic ninja traditions, so they contacted me since I was local to the San Francisco Bay Area and brought me on for both pre-production consulting and to demonstrate some stuff. The icing on the cake was that it turned out that their San Francisco studio was literally about a 3-minute walk around the corner from where I was teaching my classes at the time.

The consulting stuff was pretty useless, in both directions, as they wanted Hollywood-ryu fantasy and I kept setting them straight about reality. They asked me about the mizugumo "water-shoes" and if it was possible to walk on water with them. I pointed out that what they actually were for was providing support in muddy/marshy areas, in the same way snowshoes do on snow. I said if you strapped them on and stepped into a swimming pool you'd go straight to the bottom, whereupon Adam perked up and said, "Hey, we can do that!!". (And they did, on the show.)

How 'bout things like throwing down a smoke-bomb and vanishing? Sorry, pyrotechnics of the time were black-powder based and fuse-lit. I'm imagining our ninja spy, bent on escaping enemies, lighting the fuse and dropping his smoke bomb, shuffling his tabi and whistling tunelessly while waiting for it to get going as they close in. . .No, I don't think so. I did explain how pyrotechnics were used in that era for special-ops missions to disrupt supply lines, provide cover for an advancing or retreating force, etc. But they had no interest in what we REALLY did back then and how we did it, even though as a former commissioned Army intelligence and special-ops officer I was able to relate everything to modern contexts and analogues.

Okay, then. . .Can you catch arrows shot at you and throw them back with enough force to injure or kill the shooter?

Umm. . .Let me point something out here, 'kay? In the Sengoku Jidai/"Warring States" era where the ninja were most active, they used a lot of sharp & pointy things on the battlefield like arrows, swords, spears, and halberds. Rather than develop arrow-catching skills, what they did develop to deal with sharp-&-pointies -- exactly as the Europeans did in the same period -- was this stuff we call "armor". Not too long after that, when firearms were introduced by the Portuguese and became hugely popular on the battlefield, they didn't begin working on bullet-catching skills: What they did instead (before they all got together under the Tokugawa shoguns and banned firearms) was upgrade the capabilities of their armor. Certainly it's "possible" to catch an arrow in flight, and it's done sometimes as a "martial arts parlor trick". But it has no meaningful martial (in the sense of "pertaining to, or suitable for, warfare") utility.

Comment in response from Jamie: "So what you're telling us is that real ninjutsu is totally oriented toward real-world practicality?"

Duh. Okay, I could tell he was trying to define some parameters for the expectations of the rest of the crew, fortunately. So I just said something like, "Well, the very meaning of the term implies surviving through adversity. That requires recognizing and appropriately responding to the reality of any situation, not to your fantasy of what you would like reality to be."

So, in consequence, they basically ignored almost everything I said AND only worked me in there for about 3.5 minutes of the show.

(I really was trying to help them make a good show. I even contacted our Soke, Hatsumi sensei, and let him know what I was doing. And since I knew the crew liked to blow stuff up, I even obtained from him a historic ninja black-powder recipe he'd received from his teacher, Takamatsu sensei -- which as far as I know has NEVER been openly published ANYWHERE -- and gave it to them. They didn't use it for anything, though we'd discussed things like the historic field-expedient use of wooden cannon made from hollowed-out tree trunks.)

That's NOT a put-down of the crew, or even of the show itself. But they had their own agenda going in, and I didn't really fit it.

[CopperNGold]

Well done, Dale! Very impressive and I agree with that 'steely glint in the eye' comment," combined with cool calm. It's unsettling to watch someone you know, but do not know.

Cheers, Jocelyn

[Alan H]

That was great...really enjoyed that.

But come on....no Michelle Yeoh?