Steve Rowe made a comment over on The Martial Archive in which he said of my Machida post:  ‘To state the obvious, it's his traditional budo background and upbringing underlying his mma training that is giving him an advantage. All credit to him for recognizing it. I'm not Shotokan but can still see that the budo training has helped him.’

I’m not sure where the bit was that I recognized ‘budo training’ as influential on Machida’s success.  In fact, I talked about the baggage of the tradition needing to go.  And I’ve written extensively on the ideological implications of the word ‘budo’.  The term ‘budo’ alone is an offensive one, often misunderstood in the West as a collective description of Japanese martial arts.  Westerners use it (often romantically) without recognizing its political and ideological connotations.  However, in Japan the ideological meaning of ‘budo’ is clearly understood as character-building in support of nationalistic ideologies.  Budo is all about the superiority of the Japanese way, in all its hierarchial, right-wing trappings.  By the 1930’s ‘budo’ had become a term closely associated with indoctrination into Emperor ideology and military fascism in Japan.  Check out the links below to quickly find out more.

http://ejmas.com/jalt/jaltart_abe_0600.htm

http://www.kendo-world.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-79.html

Now the interesting guy here is called Nishikubo Hiromichi, who wrote of the distinction between budo and bujutsu.  The latter was a battlefield-derived killing art, but it fell by the wayside over hundreds of years of imposed peace during the Tokugawa period.  Nishikubo saw budo as a character-building practice to support Emperor ideology.  He was looking to produce through kendo practice boys and men for modern warfare who were loyal to the Emperor and unflinching in adversity, but he did not need to produce capable swordsmen.  The sword, by this period, was not only obsolete in the battlefield but also in personal combat. 

So the other problem with the term Budo is that it includes predominantly non-fighting arts with kendo and judo thrown into the mix.  Kendo and judo, whilst they do not fully represent fighting in all its dimensions, are nevertheless full-contact fighting systems that can impart important characteristics to a fighter.  However, the other budo systems of Iaido, kyudo, jodo, aikido, and karate do (with the exception of the modern inventions of Kyokushin Kai and Daido juku) do not include full-contact fighting.  There’s no test of the so-called attributes of the fighter.  As far as I’m concerned, these latter systems don’t belong in the same category as kendo and judo, yet they are lumped together under the aegis ‘budo.’

The semantics of all this are important.  This is because the budo systems coopted a lot of terms that originally had legitimate sources on the battlefield, and used these terms in order to wrap the practitioner in the ethos of a samurai.  But the budo practices themselves had no fighting, and the terms they borrowed from bujutsu had no substance.  They were just words.  Budo itself was largely founded on a fiction.  Read ‘Don’t Drop the Soap’ and look at the part on the Hagakure and Nitobe’s ‘Bushido’.  The foundations of modern budo are bollux.

Now, Machida has taken the principle of initiative (sen) and opening (suki) from the bujutsu (not budo) systems of the past and successfully applied these principles in MMA.  Because he’s successfully done it does not mean that the budo systems (which use the same terminology to suggest a direct connection to the past) are able to impart these same principles.  They ain’t.  Because you got to fight to learn these principles.

It’s very common in the martial arts for people to get hold of a word or concept and begin to converse about it with some authority, without ever having experienced it.  Now, the budo systems in the West don’t tend to be right-wing anti-Communist structures as they still are in Japan, but rather they have moved towards personal development as the goal of their practices.  Yet their use of the terminology of the past continues without ever being tested combatively.  So the Budo practices may contain such terms as ‘sen’, ‘suki’ and ‘zanchin’ but these terms don’t mean anything unless you know how to use them.  Most budo teachers haven’t a clue what these principles are, let alone how to teach them. 

The bottom line is, it’s no good being ‘principle based’ if you don’t have a first-hand understanding of the principle, and that comes through fighting.  People in the martial arts often use words and terms so as to appear to be an authority on a subject, when in fact they have no real-life experience of it.

Machida is the exception, not the rule.  Traditional budo practitioners should not attempt to piggyback on his success.  They haven't earned the right.