“Bow To Your Sensei!”
In a recent conversation with a martial arts colleague, the topic of paying the appropriate amount of respect to your instructor came up. In my martial arts practice, I make the analogy of how students address educators in K-12. The convention of referring to one’s teacher as “Mr.”, “Ms.”, “Mrs.”, or “Dr.”, and having that the appropriate title precede the educator’s lat name is understood. There is a professional relationship between educator and student, and the use of that title on the part of the student, or between educators when in front of students, seems appropriate.
Going back to the martial arts environment, the same sort of convention seems appropriate for the Academy space. I have multiple martial arts titles based on the fact that I hold instructorships in several different arts. When I started teaching semi-professionally, about a decade ago, I used to try and orient my students as to when to use which title. While it is not that hard to sort out, I am aware that training with me is a lot. The student has enough to learn, memorize, and with which to get familiar. For the last few years, I have just used “Guru”, because I teach more south east Asian Martial Arts than from anywhere else. “Guru” is the south east Asian equivalent of “Sensei”.
Straight out of the gate, we have problems. First, the term “Guru” has negative connotations in the west because it gets used in phrases like “Self-Help Guru”, and the like. Second, in a lot of Filipino Martial Arts Systems, when anglicizing that word, the expectation is that it will be spelled as “Guro”. Third, if one purposefully refers in writing to oneself as “Guru”, those Filipino Martial Arts practitioners will think it is an error. Fourth, when using “Guro” in print, westerners think that there has been a typo and/or those same uninitiated westerners wonder why a reference has been made to a character from the video game Mortal Kombat (that is not a bad joke, but something that has happened to me in the past). These days, I try to use “Doctor”. I have an earned Doctor of Education Degree from a university in southern California. Every now and then, I’ll get someone (mostly) joking that because that degree is not a Doctor of Medicine, it is not a real doctorate, but that happens very rarely, and for the sake of consistency, “Doctor” seems to work well.
In an effort to not take myself too seriously, I usually ask my students to use “Doctor” or a martial arts title when we train, but if we’re in a social situation, I prefer “Bryan”. When I write a phase like, “In an effort to not take myself too seriously,…”, I do not teach martial arts/comedy classes. I take responsibility of passing on the martial arts to my students very seriously. I do not take myself too seriously. As long as people can handle moments of levity mixed in between rounds and techniques, that is the environment I prefer to cultivate. I want people to feel comfortable when they take my classes. Some instructors never want their students to feel comfortable, and they have their reasons for that. I am always trying to create a lighter tone in my group classes and private lessons.
In all of my classes and private lessons, we bow in at the beginning, and we bow out at the end. It is a quick combination of six different salutations that recognizes the martial arts from all over the world that influence our practice. When I take on a new student, I always inform that individual that the salutations are secular; we are not praying. The salutations are a thirty second investment in the idea that it is important to have reverence for once’s sources.
In the discussion with my colleague that motivated me to write this piece, that colleague brought up the idea that in contemporary, American martial arts, sadly, some instructors will culturally appropriate the Asian tradition of tasking a candidate disciple with menial labor in order to “test the worth and the resolve” of that candidate. Even more sadly, in contemporary American martial arts, the personality that will engage in this behavior often requires ridiculously daunting amounts of labor. It is not so much as “paint the fence”, but “build me twenty houses from scratch, each with a fence, and then paint all twenty fences.”
In this hyperbolic example, the imaginary instructor has gone too far in the other direction. Martial arts are still (again, sadly) very much a place where individuals can build cults of personality. The instructor begins to believe he/she is actually a Pei Mei/Sensei Kreese-type figure, and in leaning into that, the falsely “empowered” instructor begins to assume all sorts of competencies he/she does not really have. That individual stars down the road to believing he/she is infallible.
At the end of the day, try to pay the proper amount of respect to your instructor. He/she has worked hard. However, contemporary martial arts are a buyers market, not a seller’s market. If that instructor makes ridiculous demands of you, and/or if he/she seems to be leading an organization that feels, seems, and does business like a cult, just play along while you’re there (as long as you’re not being asked to do anything in violation of your ethics during that final session), and then make that the last time you ever show up to train with that instructor again. Continue your search for the kind of instructor you really want to invest your time, money, and energy into.
