I am guilty of poking some fun at my martial arts friends. This column constitutes my penance on that count. In case you are a Gajin [Japanese for ‘alien’ or ‘outsider’, often used to describe us Western barbarians] knucklehead like me, the ‘uke’ in martial arts is the witless incompetent aggressor that is easily dispatched by the martial arts master by using it’s own unvarying biomechanical programming against it. The precise meaning of the term in Japanese eludes me, and my search engine access is being denied—making me something of an internet uke I suppose. So if one of you martial arts people would be so kind as to supply a brief definition at the bottom, or even your take on the ‘uke’ I would be most thankful.

Last night after training I was lucky enough to have a rambling conversation with a true martial arts personality. He did not know that he was under the microscope of ‘The Extraterrestrial Anthropologist’; his every word being recorded by my otherworldly mind’s-eye, so that he might be put on display here. I did not have an intellectual property/character assassination waiver on me and neglected to ask for his permission to repeat his story, or part of it. With this violation of my university’s prime directive in mind, and considering the fact that this large threatening member of your species is easily capable of dismembering me without the aid of kitchen cutlery, I have named him The ‘Gajin Ranger’, a minor league super hero of sorts. I hope he is pleased because I have misplaced my body armor and neck brace.

The Gajin Ranger was a U.S. military man, stationed in Japan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. His tales of training under Japanese martial arts masters, eating adventurous sushi, and attending sumo events, will be saved for another time, when I can properly interrogate the expressive giant. I can understand the Japanese fascination with this man; he’s the kind of big beasty looking fellow that all of us combat arts coaches just love to take out on the floor for a test run. He seems to be just over six feet and about 260 pounds; a big dude even by Maryland Corrections standards. His hands are NBA-sized but too thick for that. His traps and neck are very well-developed, and need to be, to support the lantern jaw and the large ‘silver-back’ head. As if this did not elevate him far enough above the run-of-the-mill scrawny primate such as myself, he has spent three decades studying numerous martial arts; and, horror of horrors, is intelligent—which, as a smallish nerd, I might add, should not be permitted. There should be a law against giant people, who can already beat us runts up, learning how to do it better.

On one occasion, the circumstances of which were lost to me between breaking bats with shins and eating living octopus, The Gajin Ranger was in a parking area, when he saw a Japanese man beating his wife. He came up behind the man, grabbed the arm of his cocked wife-beating fist before it crashed into his wife’s face again, pulled the man back, and punched him. The punched man fell to the side and The Gajin Ranger bent to render aid to the woman. He had not ‘finished’ the man, and had not checked on him first, “He reached into his boot and grabbed a knife [demonstrates ice-pick grab], and I’m standing here with my legs spread, and he spikes under the groin, into the inside of the thigh! [indicates inside of right leg.] He’s not even up, still on the ground under me, so I finish him—and I’m thinking he could have clipped the femoral artery. I was lucky. My buddy drove me to the hospital. I felt really bad—I ruined the interior of his car, bled all over the place. I gave him the money [names the amount] to replace the upholstery. That was a close call and I have a scar to this day.”

I am posting this incomplete account at this time, because we have an edged-weapons escalations seminar coming up. I was not taking notes, and therefore barely have enough information to present the above narrative, which, as you can see, has some holes in it. We were not the only two present and I did not want to turn it into an interrogation. When you do that, as a writer, some of the emotion is lost. That is why it takes more than one interview to reconstruct any account holistically. This was a stage one interview—the prequel aspect of the process I used for the Violence Project—and does not generate enough information to enter it into my edged-weapon study. For instance, I did not get confirmation as to whether this incident was inside a garage or on a parking lot, during the day or at night, which, if any, of the involved parties had been drinking, what resulted medically and legally, etc.

As an oral historian, digressions like this—where the subject bypasses combative details and recalls the exact figure of the resulting upholstery bill—make the story ‘literature worthy’; of interest to non-martial arts people; and more believable to the researcher. When someone is fabricating a story details such as this are missing or cannot be recalled. Such digressions, however, necessitate follow-up interviews, or, in the case of a sit down, a repeated walkthrough of the encounter, focusing on different aspects with each retelling.

Knife encounters are very important to study, so this is just a preliminary outline. It is not clear what The Gajin Ranger did to ‘finish’ the knifer. At that point in the story he was switching focus to his injury. To fully investigate this encounter will take a formal interview, with the brief narrative above serving as an outline which I will use to ask specific questions. With traumatic yet fleeting encounters like this our minds gloss over segments and focus on others, sometimes differently with a different telling, and this sometimes depends on who the encounter is being related to, and what if any questions are asked. Additionally, since this man is a martial arts instructor, I would not put his defense up in free content, but get his cooperation to place it in a seminar context, or publish it with a citation acknowledging him as a source in a commercial release. I don’t want to ‘give away’ a man’s once in a lifetime Oh My God encounter.

The reason for posting this patchy narrative here is four fold:

1. To demonstrate the stage one aspects of reconstructing a dynamic encounter from another’s memory.

2. To give an example of how dynamic and multifaceted such a brief encounter can be, and therefore how important the development of a free-flowing scenario-based approach to preparation is. Three people role-playing the above encounter would come up with numerous possible variations based on what type of edged-weapon the knifer was using, and how it was stowed and therefore deployed.

3. To note that as many of a third of edged weapon encounters involve ‘defensive’ uses of a blade along an escalating trajectory by people who are not ‘good guys’. These types of encounters are the focus of our August seminar, as they are more likely to occur when a trained combatant [security guard, bouncer, cop, or martial artist] is involved, and generally already have the knife user at a disadvantage, facilitating a high probability of success for the unarmed person if they have had some type of preparation. We are saving predatory murder attempts for next year.

4. How ice-pick grip uses of edged weapons tend to be ‘crazy’. Such uses [10% of total] are usually spontaneous, always ruthless, and feature the most antisocial behaviors. This is one of only three defensive uses of the ice-pick out of 322, and we will work this scenario as one of our escalation training models on August 24th 2013.

Until then I will seek out and interrogate The Gaijn Ranger until we reconstruct the situation in enough detail to extract the behavioral nuances of the encounter. I’m not a martial artist or self-defense guy. I study aggressive behavior, as well as violence at the bio-mechanical level; just providing the data for martial artists and self-defense people to utilize in their quest to adapt their art or system to the ruthless criminal world that lurks just below our everyday lives.