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Chapter One

HONEST AND RELIABLE PREPARATION FOR REAL THREATS

I still remember the first time I was threatened with stupid pointless violence. I was in kindergarten, walking down a school hallway in line with classmates in 1954. The boy walking next to me, a complete stranger, turned to me and said, “I bet I can lick you.”

I was perplexed by the boy’s odd comment. “Lick me”? His words made no sense, but I nonetheless felt an ominous ugliness. At home I was used to affection, intelligence, and courtesy, so I could not immediately identify the violence implied by his words. Still, I sensed that something creepy was going on. I had never been assaulted by anyone, but down in my bones I somehow knew the boy did not have friendship in mind.

I was five years old and knew nothing of territorial imperative or a need to assert my manly image. I did not know how or why to act tough. In confused innocence I replied, “Yeah. I bet.”

The boy seemed content with that and we walked on wordlessly. It was over. He had won something he wanted. I was not harmed at all, but something inside me had changed. I had sensed my vulnerability at the hands of another who lived by values far different from mine. The boy had not even touched me, but I felt violated. The icy casualness of his desire to humiliate another child left me unsettled and sent me on a lifetime search for a dignified foundation of personal security.

Healthy people want to live life in a happy, expressive, and positive manner. Therefore, healthy people usually prefer to avoid situations and individuals that would impede the freedom to live a satisfying, stimulating, and meaningful life. For healthy people, the idea of enjoying willfully fighting with others seems odd or perverse or even sad.

Not seeking out fights in life, and thereby having little reference for handling confrontation, can leave us awkwardly unprepared for random violence when it does happen, though. For many people in these days of fragmented communities, transient workplaces, and overcrowded prisons, fear of falling victim to violent crime is a common impediment to the freedom to be happy. Think about it. Do you know anyone who might choose to limit life and avoid certain places or certain activities because of concern for danger?

Conflicts to be avoided are not just physical assaults. There are many ways to be defeated. For some in these days of fierce economic pressures generated by an ever changing international marketplace, danger appears in veiled forms that threaten to undercut the personal financial security needed to sustain a family. For others in these days of disintegrating cultural values and their emerging hollow and disjointed replacements, threats to personal fulfillment take even more subtle guises to sap the energy and defeat the will to prevail.

If we are not careful, without realizing what we are doing, we can end up assisting our adversaries to succeed in their attacks against us. We get in our own way because we do not understand the thinking process in the mind of the kind of person who enjoys violent treatment of others. To add to the difficulty, we do not have a clear picture of how we ourselves operate when under the pressure of threats, whether those threats be physical, economical, or emotional. Indeed, most of the children I went to school with in the 1950s were encouraged to defuse and smooth over confrontation. We were taught to consider threats as misunderstandings. Our mothers admonished us that mean people would go away if we just ignored them long enough. Few of us were taught how to stare danger in the eye and make it fear us.

This volume is an intelligent approach towards learning how to survive encounters with dangerous people, including situations requiring rescue of others from danger. We start with solutions for the most likely and most common forms of assault and build from there. I call it intelligent because it includes a lot of knowledge routinely absent from more primitive systems of self-defense training in how to fight.

Based on over 40 years of observation, I believe that most martial arts books and schools completely overlook the crucial area of training the mind and spirit as an effective part of the overall self-protection unit. Of course many martial arts programs imply that you will be sharper, more resourceful, cooler under fire, more disciplined and more determined to win as a result of their training, but there is little actual instruction in how to accomplish such personal elevation. In crude programs like that, you are expected to just keep banging away at training and the advanced life skill capabilities you hope for will somehow magically emerge and mature despite lack of direct instruction in such qualities.

What if there were a reliably effective way to prepare yourself for conflict and confrontation in potentially dangerous streets, unpredictably troubled workplaces, and too-often unstable family homes while still maintaining a hopeful or optimistic outlook on life? What if there were a way to stay prepared for a violent clash without sinking into a pained mind-set of isolation and cold aloofness towards others? What if there were a way to build your awareness of personal security without losing the freedom to be trusting and joyous? What if there were a program that could show you how to feel more confident while not requiring you to dedicate your life to unabated alienating toughness? What if there were a way to prepare for possible conflict without having to become as cruel or brutish as the loathsome characters who take pleasure in violent damage to others?

My program emphasizes an ethic of learning to be a protector as opposed to a predator. Sure, some schools give lip service to such ideals, but evidence shows there is still a lot of loud aggressive ego even among some highly rated martial artists. I am disappointed to say that I have met too many martial arts teachers still controlled by the inner demon fears of inadequacy and insecurity that led them to seek instruction in how to fight in the first place. Sadly, beneath any noble creed can still lurk a need to present oneself as the roughest, meanest, or cruelest. Check and see. Flip through any popular martial arts magazine and count the photos of those who cultivate the look of tough criminals or thugs—the very monsters we train to protect against!

Our ideal is to become a tatsujin —a fully actualized person of accomplishment. The point of our training is creating more strength and safety in the world, instead of seeking thrill through hurting, beating, or conquering others.

If your martial arts training does not cause you to grow as a human being, such training can actually add to your pain in life. Without evolving and becoming stronger and bigger internally, you are stranded in a place where you have highly cultivated skills for hurting other people and yet are still dominated by internalized angers and fears collected in younger days of vulnerability. Do you really want to study how to be strong from a person whose fierce bristly external armor is but a brittle shell holding back the leftover childhood rage and loneliness he hopes you will never see in him?

This book is written for real people seeking realistic answers to real problem possibilities. Over the years, I’ve interviewed law enforcement officers, security professionals, emergency room doctors—and even coroners—to find the twelve most common attacks likely to be thrown at good people by dangerous aggressors. I then adapted the technique principles I learned from my decades of ninja taijutsu martial arts study and developed a first line of training to show people how to defend against these assaults. Begin your adventure with a look at how to win in the twelve assault types most likely to occur in a dangerous confrontation, how to work in those twelve threat situations to rescue yourself or other people, how to use twelve natural body self-defense tools, and how to develop the grounded presence of focused command in high-pressure situations.

I am first to acknowledge the training scenarios in this book are not the breathtaking exotic stuff of martial arts fantasy movies. I also do not hide the fact that seven of the twelve attacks covered in this book would be unlikely to show up in a prize fight arena, ring, or cage. The material here is neither for entertainment nor contest. These skills and insights are what you would want your loved ones to know if they ever had to walk some mean streets or make their way home from realms of predators. Less cool. More tool.

I admit my ego had to struggle with choosing a reality premise for this book. It is so tempting to just show off. I do have plenty of amazing tricky techniques I teach at my martial arts school, and a few friends urged me to make this an edgy and over-the-top book to impress others and celebrate my own decades of training for mastery.

I nonetheless chose to go with the ground of reality for this volume. A few of my other books teach some of my martial art’s more advanced skills, and my purpose in writing this book now after a lifetime of practice is not to show off or impress other martial arts masters. I have been asked by many people to present the distilled truth of what makes up the most important lessons in how to protect the good and the pure from the cruel and brutal. This then is indeed that. Here is the curriculum I wish I could have studied in my early days of passion for the martial arts when I began my training odyssey back in the 1960s.

The self-training program in this book gives you a solid and reliable foundation for learning how to prevail over violent aggressors. There are three sections to each lesson.

First, you will study a fundamental response for each problem. What do you do when you suddenly must intervene to protect yourself or someone else? These fighting hits and grabs are called “the basics” in English, or kihon in the original Japanese language, and are your primary fighting tools.

Next, you will study a defense against each of these rescues gone bad. What if a confused or violent person uses the same skills to attack you or another? Practice each kata, or “fight scenario form,” over and over as a way to learn to recognize the problem, condition yourself to find the right answer for the problem every time, and internalize how it feels to win.

Finally, you will practice your skills full-power and full-speed against training targets to advance your fighting attributes. How powerfully, quickly, and precisely can you move? You need to build muscle strength and flexibility, improve effective balance when you move quickly, and develop more fitness, finesse, and focus.

Depending on your level of expertise, you can practice each kata defensive action sequence with training partners approaching from appropriately progressing degrees of challenge:

“I’m new at this” - Practice the defense from a set place against a stationary simulated aggressor with a designated right or left attack

“I’m learning this” - Practice the defense from a set place against a stationary simulated aggressor who sends an attack from right or left without predesignation

“I’m getting this” - Practice the defense from a set place against a moving simulated aggressor who continuously changes position around you and then sends an attack at you from right or left

“I’m good” - Practice the defense while you move and change position against a likewise moving simulated aggressor who sends an attack from right or left

“I’m really good” - Practice the defense while on the move against a moving simulated aggressor who moves against you from right or left, and in multiple movement flow combinations with additional techniques from the same block of three lessons in the chapter

“I’ve got this down” - Practice the defense while on the move against one or more moving simulated aggressors who attack from right or left, as part of a multiple strike flow combination with additional strike or grab attacks from the entire series of twelve lessons.

This program delivers the twin benefits of efficient training for overcoming dangerous people and situations along with effective foundation building for personal self-development and well-being. If you are less vulnerable to humiliation or damage, you are more likely to be at ease in more situations with more people. The more at ease you are in more situations, the more likely you are to experience more peace in life. The more inner peace you find as a result of increased outer security, the more likely you are to cultivate enhanced health and happiness from less stress and tension. The healthier and happier you appear to be, the more other healthy and happy people will want to be around you. You win.

Author Stephan K Hayes’ wife Rumiko demonstrates a classical bojutsu long staff defense against the Japanese sword from the historical ninja martial arts at root of To-Shin Do as modern self-protection training.