Thanks to Don Angier
by Sensei Richard Howell
Last year we lost a special martial artist, Soke Don Angier.
Many of the readers of the Kiai Echo will remember him and
his classes. It is my personal belief that the best way to honor a
teacher is to acknowledge his lessons and to continue to teach
what you have learned. This is an essential lesson of Danzan
Ryu. We are teachers. So I would like to remember Don by
sharing some things I was able to learn in his classes. There was
a lot more there and you may have a favorite Angier lesson that
it is not in this article. That is because we lost him too soon and
I did not get to that class or I was not ready for the lesson when
it was offered.
Don gave seminars once or twice a year in
Walnut Creek, California at the Diablo Valley
Aikido Dojo and I went to every one that I
knew about. Each of his seminars was arraigned
around some specific guiding principle. He
explained that his aikijitsu system, Yanagi Ryu,
was organized around these principles rather
than individual techniques. So in a sense each
Angier seminar was about a single thing.
One of the first things I learned in these seminars was
that there actually were underlying principles.
These basic principles could be named and
listed and practiced using a wide variety of
techniques. There were techniques that might
look very different, but would contain that
principle as an element. If you really practice
good principles then the techniques will flow from them. This
feature of his presentation was clearly explained at the end of
my first seminar and it set a direction for me from that day to
now.
Some of the things I learned were “ For power, arms push and
legs pull.” If you are pushing with your arms there is a sense
of secure balance that is missing if you are pulling. Pushing
with your arms and pulling with your lead leg also protects and
activates your center more effectively. I play with this at work
with a pallet mover, but you can have a similar experience by
paying attention to how you feel when moving a really full
grocery cart. You can make the sensation stronger by pretending
that the handle of the cart is going to break. If you are pushing
with your arms your balance can easily be regained when the
handle collapses. If you are pulling with your hands it is harder
to recover. You may even feel as if you are going to fall. Proper
body motion allows techniques to be done from the power of
our center. With some attention we can do it in any technique we
know.
“Control the elbow, control the man” is a fairly basic principle
that many of our instructors also teach. If you have the elbow
then your connection to uke’s center is very secure. It is easy to
control the center. This principle was known in my dojo as the
$5000 dollar secret because of a story Don told. It seems there
was a European studying jujitsu in Japan and after some time his
instructors offered to tell him the ultimate secret of their art for
a $5000 fee. He agreed to pay and was taken into a special room
and told about this principle. He paid.
Soke Angier was famous among the Aikido students for his
claim, backed up with demonstrations, that “There is no such
thing as ‘ki.’ There is only good technique performed well.”
That is not how many Aikido practitioners see it, but he would
answer all objections by taking any technique in question and
teaching everyone how to make it work. It was like having a
magician show you how the illusion is performed
and then giving you the tools to do it yourself. It
was delightful.
I asked him once what he was looking to feel from
uke in a particular technique and his answer was
very surprising. He said “I don’t look for anything
from uke. I just do my technique.” After some
follow up discussion the principle emerged: You
must practice the technique and do it correctly and
precisely. This also means that you actually have
to know what the correct practice is. Once you
have learned a technique correctly any attention
you pay to your opponent will rob from the best
expression of the technique. There is a warning
here: Practicing a technique precisely and wrong
does not work, even if sensei does it that way.
One of the neater tricks that he taught was “melting.” This is
much easier to demonstrate on the mat than to describe here
in words, but I will try. A simple demonstration is to have uke
grip you firmly with one hand on each of your wrists. As uke
grips, make your wrists stiff by making a fist or extending
your fingers. Then simultaneously relax, sink straight down,
and allow your elbows to drift slightly back. When done well,
uke’s grip will also relax and his balance will be affected. His
strength will have melted. With some practice this trick can be
incorporated in nearly all techniques, making them much more
effective. Don’s explanation of this effect was that when uke
grips, his nervous system is calculating several things at once.
How hard to grab, how far out to reach, how high to reach all
have to be determined. If you only change just one of these
things, uke can track and maintain strength. Changing them all
at once gives uke a system overload and uke does not know
what to do. Uke’s strength is partially neutralized as if he has
melted.
Don also had an extensive library of gossipy stories about
Hollywood martial artists. Since he finished his working career
as a makeup artist for the movies and TV many of these stories
were first hand or from the source. He was particularly delighted
by stories about Steven Segal and Judo Gene LaBell. If you
want to hear these stories find me at an event. I will not include
them here for fear of my faulty memory of the details.
Thank you, to Don and all of those who have gone before. They
dedicated their lives to developing their skills and sharing them
with the rest of us. Every one of them had something to teach
us. Our best way to honor both them and those who are still
teaching is to go to all the classes you can. In class, listen to
everyone, make it yours, and then teach what you have learned
and remember to say “I learned this from a teacher whose name
was...”
[Editor’s note: Donald Angier was the only non-Japanese to be
the soke of a traditional Japanese ryu. He inherited the Yanagi
Ryu from Yoshida Kenji, son of Yoshida Kotaro. Yoshida Kotaro
was a student of Takeda Sokaku Sensei, creator of Daito-ryu
Aikijujitsu.].
This article was published in the Spring 2015 issue of the Kiai Echo.
The Kiai Echo
The Kiai Echo is the newsletter of the American Judo and Jujitsu Federation (AJJF), a non-profit educational organization that promotes Danzan Ryu Jujitsu, a classical Japanese martial art. Selected articles have been reproduced on this web site. The Kiai Echo Editor will post contest results and Black Belt promotions immediately as they are received. These will be published online and promoted via social media (Facebook and Twitter). They will not be password protected, but will be immediately publicly available. By the time this material is submitted to the Kiai Echo, it has already been approved by the appropriate BOP members, and thus requires no further approval process. Traditional articles, as well as anything that is not native to print (i.e. podcasts, video, 3D animations, etc.), will go through an approval process.
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