Episode 212: Physio for Ninjas, with Erick Ellison
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This episode is with Erick Ellison, who is a Bujinkan instructor and physiotherapist in Helsinki Finland. Regular listeners will already have heard of him as the person who fixed very old injuries in my shoulder, my knee, my neck and various other places. He qualified as a physiotherapist in 2007 and has been running his own practice since 2012. His list of professional credentials is both very long and very varied, incorporating modern medicine and traditional Japanese approaches.
In our conversation we talk about the history of Ninja, their strategies and techniques, and some of the misconceptions around them. We also talk about physiotherapy and the training involved, and how a practitioner like Erick chooses which technique to use on a person.
Erick also shares a set of movements called the Five Tibetan Rites, which he believes are a great general guideline for maintaining strength and flexibility.
You can find Erick online here: https://www.fysiosakura.fi/
Transcript
Guy Windsor
I am here today with Erick Ellison, who is a Bujinkan instructor and physiotherapist in Helsinki Finland. Regular listeners will already have heard of him as the person who fixed very old injuries in my shoulder, my knee, my neck and various other places. He qualified as a physiotherapist in 2007 and has been running his own practice since 2012. His list of professional credentials is both very long and very varied, incorporating modern medicine and traditional Japanese approaches. We first met when he attended one of my seminars hosted by Auri Poso, whom you may recall challenging me to a duel in Episode 131 so his interest in martial arts is as broad as his interest in physio. Now, without further ado, Eki, welcome to the show.
Erick Ellison
Thank you very much. Pleased to be here.
Guy Windsor
It's nice to see you, and nice to see you when you're not about to cause me enormous amounts of pain. So well, I know it's kind of your job. So, just to orient everybody. Whereabouts are you at the moment?
Erick Ellison
So I'm in my clinic at the office here, where I usually cause you bodily harm, and sometimes that helps. But yeah, in Helsinki, it's right next to the train station here, very easy to come over. Highly recommend it.
Guy Windsor
Honestly, I have been telling people who live in Australia that the best thing they can do for whatever is ailing them is fly to Helsinki and see you. So, yes, so the directions are excellent. All right, let's start with the martial arts side of things. So how did you get into martial arts? How did you end up teaching Bujinkan?
Erick Ellison
Well, originally, my father was an Aikido instructor. So I got into Aikido that way in the children's group. He had a bunch of martial arts books at home. Some of them were related to ninjas. Some of them were fairly good. Some of them not so good, as tends to be the case, and I got really interested in the Hatsumi Sensei’s books, who headed the Bujinkan organisation. I did shop around for different martial arts, tried a little bit of Taekwondo, along with the Aikido. I was into the LARP scene at one point, with soft swords, buffers, stuff like that. And while going to fencing training for that sort of fighting, I ran into a person who, well, I was lamenting to him that I've been looking for this one martial artist really difficult to find at the time, internet wasn't a thing. And he said, wait a minute, I know someone who trains something like that. We were actually on the ferry to Suomenlinna, so a big castle fortress nearby Helsinki, and he was saying, okay, I'll introduce you to this guy, he'll be at the training. And that's how I was introduced to a person named Tovo. And he was running the basic course for Bujinkan Dojo Finland, and it was in Helsinki Herttoniemi at the time. And when I was around 15 years old, I attended my first Bujinkan class, and have been doing that ever since.
Guy Windsor
There are so many things to unpack there. I'm just going to take them out of time. Firstly, most people probably don't know that when I was about 11 or 12, I was either going to be Conan the Barbarian, or a ninja. And it turns out that Conan is fictional, so ninja it was. And, you know, there are these three movies that came out in the 1980s: Revenge Of The Ninja, Enter the Ninja. And I've forgotten the name of the third one, and they were massively impactful on my developing brain. So, okay, when people think of a ninja, they think of someone dressed in black, only the eyes are visible and with a sword on their back, breaking into castles, murdering people and escaping. That's the basic kind of ninja model. So I'm guessing there's not a lot of breaking into castles in modern ninjitsu.
Erick Ellison
Nope, not a lot. There actually are tools for that, but you mainly find those in museums, and it's not something we actively train. So if we talk about the kind of popular culture version of a ninja, that is exactly what you were describing, which is pretty much completely wrong in almost every sense, to the historical ninjas.
Guy Windsor
Okay, why don’t we start there. Tell us what a historical ninja actually was and did.
Erick Ellison
So that is a little bit difficult to answer, since it varied from time and from the area. So what we generally consider ninjas would be the people of Iga and Kōga. So it would be Igariyo and Kogaryu in Japan. So there's an area pretty close to the old capital, Kyoto, which is a very mountainous area, and people who, for one or other reason, wanted to disappear, maybe they were on the losing side of a battle, or sometimes they were persecuted for their religious or political beliefs, and they had to escape. Usually found themselves in that region. At one point, the region actually became autonomous, and it was at the time Japan was mainly ruled by daimyo, so warlords who had a fiefdom that they controlled. The Emperor was there, but they were ruling in name mainly, and it was either a Shogun or then a various military dictator that was actually holding power. And the daimyo had a lot of power themselves, and there were many wars fought for this. So the people of Iga and Kōga actually managed to break away from this system at one point. If you think of Europe, and you think of Switzerland in the Middle Ages being this mountainous region that specialized in selling mercenary services abroad, and that's one of the main ways, yeah, this is one of the main ways they maintained their independence at the time. So that's what the people of Iga and Kōga were doing, and they were ruled by a council of elders from different families, instead of one feudal lord. Originally, I think it was the Buddhist monasteries that controlled this area, and they were taxing the local populace quite heavily. And I think the original uprising was against them, where they gained their independence initially, and then they managed to keep that by selling services to other clans, especially services related to information gathering. Breaking into castles was a specialty they had. So these sorts of special skills that they were very good at. Also swimming was a special skill. Our kind of style comes from different families. In the Bujinkan there's actually nine different martial arts that it's made out of. A few of them come through the Momochi line. So in fiction, you're usually referred to Momochi Sandayū. In movies and stuff like that, I think some of the movies you mentioned refer to Momochi Sandayū also. The historical person was called Momochi Tamba, but they are pretty sure it's the same person. Anyway, in his compound, I actually visited the ruins of it in Japan a while ago, there was a moat, and the moat is supposed to be there for protection, but also for training in water techniques, especially swimming, because swimming was a specialized skill. If you're going to specialize in breaking into castles, then having that ability is very important. So what we consider special ninja skills and stuff like that, most people know these days already, in that sense. So if you know survival skills, you know how to swim, these sorts of things, those were considered specialized skills at the time. Because Iga and Kōga are very mountainous regions, they were naturally very good at climbing. So these kinds of aspects come into this. Also another thing is that in popular culture, there's a great divide between samurai and ninjas. That is also incorrect up to a point. Now, in Iga, they were mainly, I think it was Jizamurai. So samurai who own a little bit of land and do farming on the side, and kind of they’re independent land owners, you could say.
Guy Windsor
Wasn't it so that that in most of Japan, the samurai class could not own land. It was the peasants that owned the land.
Erick Ellison
I wouldn't be too sure about that. I don't so.
Guy Windsor
It’s relatively unusual for samurais to be owning land and farming on the side.
Erick Ellison
Well, to be farming land. So they were the farmers themselves also, and this is considered Jizamurai. So it's a lower class of Samurai, you could say. So they were basically free men landowners, if you think of it in a European sense. And then they would have this well, special training. And sometimes the head of that area would ask them to do these missions. And the idea was that there were a few main families that ran that. The three main families in Iga were the Hattori, the Momochi and the Fuibashi families. And they came together and decided things together as a community. I believe the Iga region historical group, refers to it as sort of democracy, but it really wasn't that, but it was more democratic than anything in Japan at the time. But anyway, so it was a different way of taking care of politics than the norm. Let's put it this way. And the people of Iga and Kōga which were referred to Iga mono and Kōga mono, which is another name for ninjas, but it just refers to the people living in that area were under a more kind of relaxed, more free society than you would have in other places, but they were still mainly considered to be Samurai, just a lower class of Samurai. And one of the things I was about to say was that if you look at some of the old scrolls.
Guy Windsor
As I often do. I mean those old Japanese scrolls.
Erick Ellison
Yes, what they get into are things like how you predict weather changes and things like this. And it refers to strategy. So if you have the wind blowing at a certain direction, certain time of year, if it was cold or warm the previous day, you would have a possibility of fog, for instance. And if you can predict fog, it gives you an idea of when you want to move large troops so that they would be undercover. Also, it gets into the phases of the moon and when it is a good idea to move troops, and when it is a good idea to just stay still and observe. So of course, when the moon is full, you stay still and observe. And when you have a crescent moon, that's the time when you would be moving around, conducting your missions and these sorts of things. And if we look at modern warfare, for instance, the conflict in Ukraine with Russia and Ukraine, what they've had to start doing now is moving their troops during fog to prevent the drones and these sorts of things. So the drones are more difficult to spot the troops when they're moving around in fog. So it's actually principles, tactical and strategical principles, that are very real in today's warfare. Now also, if we get into kind of this martial arts aspect of it, it's very similar to jujitsu, and these sorts of kind of weapons techniques you would have at the time anyway, there are some specialties there related especially to intelligence work, how you would dress to infiltrate a certain area, if you're trying to get into a castle, what are the options? Is like we're talking previously, is to swim through the moat, climb the wall, break into that way, and your main objective is to start fires, maybe poison the well, or open the gates, so stuff like that. But an even better strategy is to get employed there. So get a job as a servant, or maybe some sort of cleaner, or something like this. One thing that was done was that if there was a party, you would dress up as a woman to gain entry that way, and you would have people dressed up as women, and once they get inside, and hopefully the defenders are inebriated, and they would be more easy to take out, and then they would leave the door open, the main gates open, and the army could attack. So these sorts of strategies. But mainly, if we talk about the martial arts sense of it, the techniques are very similar to what you would have in Jujutsu or kenjutsu, soyuzu, using spear naginata, these sorts of things that were common at the time, but you would have specialized weapons that were more easily concealed. Some of the swords would be shorter because of this, so you could conceal it more easily. And if we get into one of our schools, Togakure-ryū, there's actually some moral aspects of that school. And one of the moral aspects of it, it's interesting to say this about a ninja or ninpo school, was that you're not supposed to kill people.
Guy Windsor
Why?
Erick Ellison
Well, because killing people is generally a bad thing.
Guy Windsor
But if you’re getting the castle gates open for the army, the army is going to come in and kill everyone anyway.
Erick Ellison
It was especially concerned with intelligence gathering. Your main purpose as an intelligence gatherer is to stay alive and deliver the package you're carrying, so the information you have. So the techniques of that school, almost all of them end with you running away. The idea is that if you have, for instance, multiple attackers around you, you would assess the situation, try to find out very quickly who's the leader, who's the strongest, and who's the novice, who's the weakest. And you might feint an attack toward the leader, the strongest one, but you would then quickly change and go through the weakest person, and you're just trying to break through this encirclement. Then you would have different types of specialized weapons, like metsubushi, which are sight removers. So metsubushi you would have a powder which was aggravating to the eyes and your breathing. So we have kind of a medieval version of a pepper spray or some sort of gas weapon.
Guy Windsor
Every Fiore scholar right now is thinking of the poison pollax, where we have dust in the head of a pollax for blinding your opponent.
Erick Ellison
Exactly the same principle. We actually have a kusarikama or kyoke shoga version of this, where you have a rope or chain weapon, and you tie that powder on the end of that, and you would swing that and hit it toward the side of the head, and disperse the powder that way. So, very same principle.
Guy Windsor
So the powder would be in like a breakable paper bag or something.
Erick Ellison
Actually, traditionally, it would be eggs.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so you put it in an egg shell.
Erick Ellison
Yeah. So you would take the yolk out of the egg, allow it to dry for a bit, and then you would pack it with the powder, and you would use some rice glue and a piece of paper to glue the end of it. And actually, if you pack it tightly with powder, it's actually fairly strong. You need a little bit of force to break it and but they're fairly safe to carry. Another style would have used nuts, so having it inside walnuts and those sorts of things. So there's different ways of using this. Also, at one point, the police would have a metsubushi device that they would put in their mouth and blow into it and that would disperse the metsubushi. The police, yes, or the law keepers time. It was also used by the samurai in that sense, but I think it was probably originally developed by the different types of espionage schools. Now, again, so with the techniques of that particular style, that particular school, the most important thing is to disengage and disappear. And the other thing it talks about is using the Chinese elements. So, you know, the Japanese elements that come from Buddhism is Chi, Sui, Ka, Fū, Kū. So it's earth, water, fire, air and void. Now those kind of have religious significance, and they're very similar to the Greek elements from antiquity. Now the Chinese elements were different, so you would have metal, wood, water,
Guy Windsor
Earth and fire, I think.
Erick Ellison
Fire, yes, so those were used in the Togakure-ryū for escape methods. So you would have the escape principle of Earth and escape principle of metal and escape principle of fire. So you would have this martial arts technique that would allow you to escape. And then, depending on the situation you are in, maybe you have already dug out a trench where you can jump into to escape. That's one possibility. With the method of wood, maybe you could climb a tree and disappear that way. With water, of course, you have the option of swimming. You could also use a combination to where, if someone was after you, maybe you're running by a stream or a lake. So you grab a rock and throw that into the lake while you jump behind the bush. Basically, the people following you hear a big splash and maybe jump into the water after you, while you're actually hiding somewhere else. So these are kinds of the ninjutsu principles, ninpo principles, and we don't actively train these. Well, sometimes, if we have training outside and stuff like that, we can do some of this stuff, but we don't actively train espionage techniques. We're more interested in the kind of the martial arts heritage of this. But there's books, there's knowledge, and you can take a couple of your friends and kind of try some of these things out. Like, for instance, Shoten No Jutsu is something I used to do as a kid a lot, and I still enjoy it. So Shoten No Jutsu means climbing up to heaven, or running up to heaven, actually. So the idea is that you have a wall, or maybe you have a rock surface that's quite a steep surface, or at a ninety degrees angle, and there's a technique for running toward it and taking a couple of steps. Maybe you've seen those kind of ninja warrior type of things, where they have this agility range that they go through. So at the very end, they usually have this wall they run up. It's that. And it was an actual technique. And actually Toda Sensei, who was the teacher of Takamatsu Sensei, Takama Sensei was teacher of Hatsui Sensei who created the Bujinkan organization. Toda Sensei was very famous for running up poles and the idea is that if you have this castle wall, if you have some sort of barrier, you have to get over very quickly. So there is a technique for getting those few initial steps in, falling toward the wall and grabbing it with your hands to quickly jump over quite high walls. And so we do have these sorts of techniques in the martial art we train, but at the dojo, at our regular training, we're mainly interested in the martial arts aspects of it, and not so much the kind of agility, espionage stuff, though they are fun to do.
Guy Windsor
I mean, it strikes me that if a ninja ends up in a sword fight, something has gone horribly wrong.
Erick Ellison
Absolutely. That is absolutely the principle of it and the case.
Guy Windsor
Whereas if a knight ends up in a sword fight, it's business as usual.
Erick Ellison
Exactly. And the ninja does not want to stay engaged. They want to disengage. And if they can't disengage, they want to incapacitate the person as quickly as possible. And really, killing the person is not your main concern there. Your main concern is getting out of there. And like I was saying in the Togakure-ryū, there are these moral principles of you should not kill people, and the most important thing is survival. And this is where that comes from. And I think in kind of modern day, everyday life, these are very good principles to live by. We have other styles, other schools we do practice, and of course, they do have more of this samurai mentality of battle, battlefield tactics, these sorts of things, where the techniques do involve either severely injuring the person, killing them, these sorts of things. But especially from the Togakure-ryū, the Bujinkan takes its kind of ethical and moral principles mainly from that school.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so modern Bujinkan is sort of a development and amalgamation of various ninjutsu sources and styles, and it's trained primarily, like most other martial arts, sort of in a dojo with, like, bokken. And, I mean, you have shown me some shuriken throwing stuff in your dojo, which was great fun. So you have some of, like, the sort of cool, sort of side weapons. But a lot of it is Jiu jitsu and basic sword stuff. Is that fair?
Erick Ellison
I would say so, yeah, and you have to remember that only a few of the styles we do have ninjutsu heritage. And this is kind of one of these things where you can either say that only a few of them have ninjutsu heritage, or you can say that most of them have that. It depends on your point of view again. Because you have to remember that samurai did practice espionage techniques also, and there are quite a few famous Japanese styles outside the bujinkan that have ninjutsu and ninpo techniques in them. They just don't advertise it too much or concentrate on those techniques. Now, we have a few styles that are almost purely espionage styles, but most of the things we do are samurai styles. They do come from very long family lineages, maybe the one that's best documented would be our Takagi Yoshin-ryū. So you have many different styles of that. You have Yoshin-ryū, you have Takagi-ryū, Hontai Yoshin-ryū, Hontai Takagi Yoshin-ryū, Takagi Yoshin-ryū. All of these are just splits of one particular school that's a very famous, very respected samurai style in Japan, and taught in very many other places around the world these days. So it's not just ninja stuff, it is traditional Japanese warfare fighting techniques that we train.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. Now, the reason I was laughing earlier is, just as you were rattling off all those Japanese names, I was thinking, oh my god, Katie, poor Katie. Katie is going to be doing the transcription for this. There's going to be a long list of okay, Eki, How do you spell all of these things? So just brace yourself for that, yep. Okay, so basically, you got into Bujinkan really early and just stuck with it because it's cool.
Erick Ellison
Oh, yeah. Basically, yeah.
Guy Windsor
And when did you, when did you open your school? Like, when did you become, like, an independent instructor? Well, independent being the wrong word, but, yeah.
Erick Ellison
For a long time I ran basic courses and taught every once in a while, in a couple of different dojos, couple of different schools. So when I set up my physiotherapy company, I was just looking at the kind of finances, and I had a registered healthcare business, and kind of all the things that go into that. And so I just figured that okay, at this point, it makes more sense for me to kind of set up my own Dojo here, rather than be part of another association. So it was really to do with me becoming a physiotherapist, getting my own space, having my own little Dojo area there. And then, it kind of slowly got to the point where I actually had my own dojo.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, can I just say, going to my physiotherapist, and there's a training space where I can do my prehab stuff and my rehab stuff and various exercise and stuff, so that when I actually get into the session, I am warmed up, and I've done as much of the work myself as I can before the professional gets their elbow in. That is so much better than everywhere else where you're expected to sit in a fucking waiting room on an unergonomic chair waiting for the person to see you. It's like, this is foolishness, I mean, and I've attracted many funny looks by doing various like stretches and warm ups and stuff on the floor in the waiting room, because there's nowhere else to do it. But I go to your place and there's an actual Dojo with mats and stuff to hang off and all sorts of things. It is brilliant. So putting those two things together is a stroke of genius. Just have to say.
Erick Ellison
Yeah, it really works, and it's so useful, so good in so many ways. But hey, before we get too much into that stuff, what I started to ramble off on, was you were asking about ninjas, and what actually is a ninja? So unfortunately, I only answered a fraction of that. Quickly glance through this. So you had the people of Iga and Kōga, and that's what people mainly would these days recognize as those are ninjas. But then different clans bought services from different groups, similar services. So for instance, the Takeda clan used what were called Rappa. Rappa were basically local ruffians and highway robbers, and they just bought services from them, and ask them, okay, can you please harass our enemies? And they would, for instance, light horses on fire and have them run through enemy encampments to keep them awake at the night and stuff like that. And of course, they would have had a completely different background, a completely different training and a completely different kind of moral set of codes to the independent people of Iga and Kōga. And an interesting thing is that there aren't a lot of documentation about ninja assaults or ninja actions or these sorts of things that are kind of reliable. There's lots of stories and stuff like that, but not too many instances that are very well documented, except for a couple. One of them is Hattori Hanzō, for instance.
Guy Windsor
Just a quick sidebar, the Hattori Hanzō, the real historical person, not the swordsmith in Kill Bill.
Erick Ellison
No. Actually there were three historical Hattori Hanzōs, it was a family name that went past a couple of generations. So if you're Googling this, you have to keep that in mind that there's a couple of them. But at the time that Tokugawa Ieyasu, who became the Shogun of Japan, his Lord Oda Nobunaga, was assassinated, killed by his samurai generals. So this concept of ninjas do assassinations. There's many more historical instances of samurai assassinating people than ninjas would have been assassinating people. But anyway, he was visiting, I think it was a temple, and he was basically caught behind enemy lines on his holiday when this assassination happened, and he had to be smuggled back into Kyoto to his base of power. And he managed to get Hattori Hanzō to help him. And Hattori Hanzō smuggled him through Iga and Kōga, and they would use smoke signals to signal that they were heading in that direction, coming over. And they would have to pass quite a few borders to get him smuggled back into his base of power. And this is very well documented. This particular case. There's a couple of other instances of Hattori Hanzō helping Tokugawa Ieyasu, especially, and some night attacks and guerrilla tactics that they used. So there are good historical documentation of ninjas existing. That's not a thing. Some people think that it's fiction. It's not. But our understanding of what they are is based on fiction, mainly. But yeah. So Hattori Hanzō was a real person, and later on, when Tokugawa Ieyasu became the Shogun, Hattori Hanzō and a couple of other people specialized in espionage, did help him set up his secret police, and that system that was enforced for quite a few years after that, and there's some evidence we have. One of our senior instructors, Sean Askew, has written a couple of books on the subject that I highly recommend. They're very good, where he's looked at the history of the Toda family and their relation to the secret police. And there's a historical connection to falconeering also, and how falconeering was important in espionage at the time. But anyway, it's very interesting stuff.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, and so dressing up in black, so that anyone who catches you knows you're a ninja, is not a thing.
Erick Ellison
No, that comes from the Noh theatre. So the black dress is in the Japanese traditional theatre. The theatre hands would dress in black, just so the audience would know that, okay, this is invisible. These persons are not part of the play. So that's where the ninja garb comes from. And there were some plays that had ninja in them. And if you want an invisible person, you would have them dressed in this black outfit.
Guy Windsor
So basically, if you have somebody coming on stage to move a table or get rid of a screen or something, and the audience is supposed to know that they're not part of the show, they're just like scenery movers, ignore them, you dress them in black so people know to ignore them. So when you want a character who's supposed to be invisible, you dress them in black, and the audience knows that you're not supposed to see them. Ha, that is a fascinating bit of kind of specific cultural nuance that just informed an entire generation of martial arts nerdery.
Erick Ellison
So in actuality, if you were on a mission and you wanted clothes that's easy to move around, that can be used for camouflage, you would usually use the farm overalls, basically, that were traditionally used in the Iga area. It's a kind of a bluish gray outfit that's similar to what you would see in Ninja movies and stuff like that. And you could have pockets, extra pockets put into it for your metsubushi and other specialized equipment. But that's only if you were interested in camouflage. In that sense, it would be much more common if you're working as an espionage agent, to dress in whatever outfit is suitable for the task. If you were moving around borders from one border to another, it would be very common to dress up as a priest or a monk. Because they would be easier to move along that way. There's one way of smuggling information in your scabbard, because a sword was a very personal thing and a very kind of important object. So if you're being checked, it would be uncommon for someone to take your sword and check your sword scabbard, but if you have a shorter blade, again, we get to these specialized weapons. If you have a shorter blade, and there's empty space at the end of that, you can use that smuggle equipment or maybe a piece of paper, or you could also use that to have that irritating powder in it, so that metsubushi. So as you draw your blade, you would actually also draw the scabbard and use that, flick it, to throw the irritating powder to the person's face while you run away or cut them, and then run away. So, they're very practical tactics. It's not magic. It's nothing special in that sense.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, there are so many parallels. Like, you know, if you want to wander around an office building, dress in a business suit. If you want to persuade someone to let you into the building, dress to somebody from the gas board with a thing say, you know, got to check for a gas leak or something. Yeah, there's all sorts of ways of getting into places you're not supposed to go just by dressing according to a certain culture.
Erick Ellison
Like we were talking before. If you want to get into a drunken Christmas party, just put on some makeup, get some fake boobs and nice dress, and that's how you get in.
Guy Windsor
That's how you get in. Next time I want to go to a Christmas party, I will bear that in mind. Excellent. Okay, now we do have to talk about physiotherapy at some point, because it's kind of critical. So how did you get into becoming a physiotherapist? And can you sort of just briefly summarize your training.
Erick Ellison
Actually, originally, I worked as a security guard for a number of years, and then I just figured that maybe I want to do something else with my life than just this. And I got into security guarding because I was interested in martial arts and stuff like that. So another aspect of martial arts is anatomy, and it is quite traditional for martial arts teachers, practitioners, to also be healers. So I was interested in that aspect, and that's how I got into physiotherapy. Applied to get into Stadia. So the Helsinki senior occupational school and physiotherapy course, it's a three and a half year basic course. After that, I realised that this is not enough. It does give you basic understanding of your anatomy, how to treat people, but it really isn't enough, in my mind, to treat people effectively.
Guy Windsor
I have seen probably 30 physiotherapists over the last 30 years. And maybe two of them were good. And you are by far the most successful at treating me of all of them. Well, I keep coming back every time I come to Helsinki I book like four sessions.
Erick Ellison
Yeah, but there's less and less stuff wrong with you, so you're making it more difficult on me.
Guy Windsor
Good, good. That's that is the goal. So, three and a half years solid basic training. That made you a qualified physiotherapist, though?
Erick Ellison
Yes.
Guy Windsor
So there are people practicing who just have that?
Erick Ellison
Yes.
Guy Windsor
That explains a lot.
Erick Ellison
As a general rule, it's considered that everyone should have at least one extra training a year. Not everyone does that, but as a field, that's what you should do, at least one extra training a year.
Guy Windsor
And what does a training consist of?
Erick Ellison
Well, some sort of course, it could be a weekend course, and it really is dependent on your interest. Maybe you're treating more neurological patients. So you could go on a specialised course related to Parkinson's or MS. You could, if you're interested in manual therapy, you could do a specialised weekend course on how to treat neck injuries. You can specialise in sports medicine. The thing about Physiotherapy is that it's a very, very wide field, and usually what happens is people specialise in some area of it that they have an interest in. And then the courses that they would do, occupational courses, would be somehow related to that field of interest. But usually it would be maybe a weekend course. It could be a longer course where it's maybe a few weekends, a month, two months, there are longer occupational courses also that can last for a couple of years. So it varies quite a bit.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so right, your training. This is just me reading off your website. Mulligan Concept, spiral stabilization. I'm going to mispronounce this. Hichi Buku Goshinjutsu, Feldenkrais, Anatomy Trains and a whole bunch of other stuff. And on my recent trip to Finland, when you were treating me in a single session, you did classic physiotherapy stuff, dry needling, which hurt like a motherfucker, this fishy Japanese thing where you move the back like a fish, all on me in one session. So okay, you have these very many strings to your bow. When you have a patient in front of you, how do you know which of your many tools to use?
Erick Ellison
Well, it all starts with your basic physiotherapy assessment. Physiotherapy is Western medicine. That's one thing that it's good for people to understand, and we use the same conservative orthopaedic tests that doctors use, or should use, when doing a conservative assessment of the patient. Now these days, especially in Finland, what we tend to see is doctors mainly look at imaging. They ask you questions, and sometimes they might touch you, but maybe not so much. So to my mind, it would be good if they also did a more substantial, conservative assessment, like they used to do before imaging was so prevalent. Imaging is very good. It is extremely important, and it does give you part of the puzzle, but not the whole thing. Same as a conservative assessment does not give you a complete picture of what's going on.
Guy Windsor
Okay, just to be clear, for non specialist listeners, imaging refers to things like X rays, MRIs, ultrasound, that kind of thing.
Erick Ellison
Okay, so that's the thing. What we do, or what I do, are examination methods that were originally developed by physicians, doctors, and the diagnosis is based on that. So I have an idea of what's wrong, what's happening. Is it an impingement problem? Is there a ligament strain? Is there a nerve impingement? Which nerve is impinged? What muscles does that affect? In this particular case, which muscles are affected? And so on. So once we have a good understanding of what's going on, and we found some sort of test we can use on the person that either aggravates the problem or maybe relieves the problem, but we have a test we can use, then we start treating, and we do a test treatment and well, depending on the problem, there's a wide range of different types of techniques we can use on the particular person. It will vary depending on the person's age, demeanor, their physical condition and their mental condition. So I do have many different ways of doing the same thing, and depending on what the person's situation is, I will choose either a quicker, maybe stronger method, like for you, I can go pretty strong. You can take it.
Guy Windsor
I squeal a lot, but yes, I can take it.
Erick Ellison
And you have experience with you usually get very quick, effective results. Okay, so with someone who is maybe a little older and has more issues, we would go much lighter, and then it might take a little bit longer to get the same sort of result, but it's very important to consider those sorts of things, and also what their mental state is. Sometimes people are very tired, especially in today's world, people are stressed. They can be having issues with their personal life and their tolerance for treatment might be much lower, and all of these things go into deciding which sort of method, what sort of technique we're going to use. And personally, I don't really use methods. I take different principles and different techniques from different methods, and then do the treatment according to what the person needs. So just doing what is necessary for that person. What I mean is, if you have a certain protocol that I would first treat, let's say the shoulders. Then after the shoulders, you would move down to the back, and then you would go to the buttocks. And you have a protocol so you do the same thing every time on each patient. And that can be a very general good treatment if there's nothing really wrong, or it could be a good tool to learn different types of techniques or methods, but I don't like protocols. I want to find out what's wrong with that person, what particular areas are affected, and I treat exactly those areas that person needs, and then I give them the tools to continue treatment themselves, and usually this is the way we get good results in a long time frame, instead of just helping them for a moment, and then they have to come back the next week.
Guy Windsor
I have a library of videos of you doing an exercise I'm supposed to do. So I can refer to them. So, every time I come and see you, I always come out with at least one new video of this exercise thing I need to do to treat this particular thing. And there's you doing it, so I can see how it ought to be done, which is very helpful, particularly because I can't come back next week, usually, because I live in the wrong country.
Erick Ellison
When I started working as a physio, we had these different programs where you would write up the exercise program on the computer, and then you would get different images on that, print it out and hand that over to the patient. Now, the problem with that is it takes a lot of time to do that. Again, if it's tailored to the patient, it takes a long time to do that. It would eat up a lot of time from the treatment session. If I would do it after the treatment session, then I would have to bill the patient more. I like to just ask them to video on their phone the exercises so they have it right on their own device. They can move it to their cloud, if they want to keep it there, or download it onto the computer or something like that, and make a library like you have of them, so they always have it with them. If they forget how to do the movement, they check it on their phone, and they're good to go. So it's a good system of working.
Guy Windsor
yeah, and you know, I have a lot of experience of writing out instructions for people to do physical things with photographs and text and compared to just shooting it on video. I mean, a book will usually take me about two years to write, but I can shoot an online course with the same material in about two days. It's extraordinary the difference it makes just people having these super computers with cameras attached in their pockets. Now, I don't know if you're aware, but you know, in my own practice, we do a bunch of light massage and not physiotherapy, but it's making sure people can squat properly without hurting themselves, that kind of stuff.
Erick Ellison
Yeah, I watched a couple of your online videos about this. They're quite good.
Guy Windsor
All right. I was thinking, oh, shit. What have I done? Well, okay, I'm very glad you think so. Okay, so the problem is, you have a like, 20 students in front of you, and you're supposed to be doing a, in my case, I don't know, 14th century longsword class, and in the warm up, when people are doing a squat, you see that three people are collapsing their knee inwards, right? And you go, this is really bad. They shouldn't be squatting like that. We should stop and fix this. But you're in a class full of 20 people, and they're there for a sword class, not physiotherapy. So I've got my own sort of ways of balancing out those requirements, and it very often is something like, I'll go up to the person during class and say, we need to just work on your squats. See me after class, and we'll do some stuff together, something like that. But I imagine with your physiotherapy specialisation brain, you will see much more of that stuff than I do, even in the same class. So what do you do to balance the students need to not injure themselves with but I'm actually trying to teach a sword fighting class.
Erick Ellison
Well, there's a couple of different ways to go about this. One of them is, don't care.
Guy Windsor
It doesn't strike me as you, somehow.
Erick Ellison
No, and usually I don't do that. But sometimes, if that's happening a lot, maybe it's a bigger seminar or something like that, you have no choice. You can go through something general with the group that's related to that. It's also not a good idea to like you were saying, it's better to after the class, go to the people and say, okay, let me show you something after the class. It's not a good idea to, during the class, single someone out and work on them like that. If there's something I can quickly fix that's a mechanical thing that can be mobilised or manipulated, I can do that really quickly. And the Hichi Buku Goshinjutsu you mentioned before, is actually a bone setting type of treatment system that is within the Bujinkan so it comes from the martial art art practice, and it's related to the Kukishinden Ryû of the Bujinkan. That's kind of where it comes from, the Amatsu Tatara part that was held by the Kuki family. So it's a healing system. So I have a nice little way of getting about this is I can always say that, ah, well actually, you know this Hichi Buku thing, maybe we do a little bit as a group. So I am not licensed to teach Hichi Buku Goshinjutsu, so I am not licensed to give licenses out on that, but I am trained in it through Peter King. I highly recommend Peter King also. He lives in the UK, in Epsom. He has his own King clinic. There he's osteopath and physiotherapist, and he also does acupuncture and, of course, Hichi Buku Goshinjutsu, but he also tends to use Hichi Buku Goshinjutsu as part of the treatment, and maybe not as a treatment form only in itself, as far as I understand. But anyway, so this is part of our martial arts heritage again, this how to treat people. So if there is an issue like that, and there's something related in the Hichi Buku to that particular thing, we can do a little session, and there's self treatment things on that also. So we can do a little session on that and maybe get some of those things sorted out that way.
Guy Windsor
So it's not strictly off topic for you, because it's part of the system. So, like, I can say, okay, we're doing a sword class, but you know, actually, to get this lock right you we're going to need to do some dagger stuff to kind of see it in this context. And then we'll take it back to the sword. You can do that with a healing system that can allow you to basically, like, segue away from the the punchy, kicky, hitty stuff into the health stuff and back out again without actually leaving the system. That's very helpful.
Erick Ellison
Yeah, yeah, it is. And the Hichi Buku Goshinjutsu is a very holistic system, so there's many aspects to it. There's the self treatment aspect. There's also the aspect of how to treat others. There's soft tissue stuff, mobilisation stuff for joint work. So there's a lot there. And since it's related to martial arts and the way Hatsumi Sensei has been teaching it, there's at least one very good video of him teaching it at a seminar he was talking about treating people in armour. So there really is this kind of martial arts aspect to it, that if you're injured and you're wearing armour, maybe the armour is damaged in such a way that you can't take it off the person. So with the bits that are visible through the armour, how you can actually treat people through those.
Guy Windsor
That is the coolest thing ever.
Erick Ellison
So these are the kinds of things we consider.
Guy Windsor
Send me a link to that video. I'll stick it in the show notes, because I think people are going to want to see how you heal people who are still wearing armour.
Erick Ellison
It shouldn't be online and YouTube. I think you can buy it from somewhere. I'm not sure if you can actually get it through Peter King, but I will have to check. But it shouldn't be publicly available. It should be something you can buy.
Guy Windsor
That's fine. We can share to buy links if people are interested, because that's something that I'm definitely going to go out and buy as quickly as possible.
Erick Ellison
Yep. But also when you come over next time I can show it to you. But so Amatsu Tatara, just to get into that a little bit more. So Amatsu Tatara is what it’s called in many instances. But Amatsu Tatara refers to a set of scrolls that have all kinds of knowledge in them. A very small part of that is called the Hichi Buku Goshinjutsu, which is the healing side of it. So this is a misunderstanding even with the people practicing the Bujinkan, quite a bit. You can say Amatsu medicine and these sorts of things. But the Amatsu Tatara itself is a much larger document, and a very small part of that document actually has the healing side in it, and that healing side is called the Hichi Buku Goshinjutsu. I am not trained in the Amatsu Tatara, but I do have training in the healing side of it. Also, just to mention about the Feldenkreis, I am not a Feldenkreis instructor, but I have some training in the Feldenkreis as a method in general. I've done some smaller courses related to that, but I'm not a Feldenkreis instructor, so a little bit kind of the same sort of thing.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so one issue that anyone doing historical martial arts, or any kind of martial arts, will tend to have is a martial art is not generally adapted for longevity, other than survive the fight which helps you live longer, right? So to train seriously for any significant length of time, you do need to have various sort of prehabilitation, rehabilitation and a general sort of approach to keeping your body fit and able to do this thing that you want to do, right? I refer to that under the blanket Finnish term Jumppa, right, which is prehab and rehab and fitness and strength and flexibility, and visiting Eki when I come to Helsinki so he can hurt me again, all that stuff, right? That's that's in my head. I just call that Jumppa. So, for somebody who is not in Helsinki, so can't come and visit you, and for someone who is not a trained physiotherapist, and therefore should be able to do this for themselves, what would be your general advice as to where they should go to find out what they should be doing or what should they be doing. What would you say?
Erick Ellison
Well, actually, I have a fairly simple answer to that. It's what I generally call, I have to think about what I would call this in English. So I call it Humbug yoga in Finnish. I think you know what that means.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, yeah. It's sort of bogus yoga, over here.
Erick Ellison
It actually, as far as I understand, it is a legitimate system of yoga and a real thing. But I don't know if you're familiar with the Five Tibetan Rites.
Guy Windsor
No, I am not.
Erick Ellison
Okay, so it was a Major in the British Army that was stationed in India, I think, and they traveled to Tibet, and they had an injury, and he was basically looking for Shangri La, fountain of youth stuff, and went into this monastery and saw that the monks were in really good shape and really fit. And he figured, ah, I found this now. And he found out that they were doing a set of six movements, actually, but five of them were kind of physical stuff, and the last one was a breathing exercise. And he started doing that himself, and it healed his injury and brought that back to England, wrote a book about that. And this is kind of really early stuff. I don't remember exactly the dates, but I think it's maybe 18th, 19th century stuff. So, but they're fairly simple movements, and they're really good. They are most of them at the same time. They're neurological stretches and strengthening exercises and muscle stretches at the same time. So you have these five movements you would do as a set. And you would slowly build up your tolerance to do them, your ability to do them. You would start at maybe doing them just three times, all of them once, and then you would move on to doing a little bit more, a little bit more, until you get, I think the magic number was 21 for some reason, you would have to check, I would usually do this just for 20 times if I wanted to, but, yeah, you would build up your ability to do them 20 times and just maintain that do them once a day. And those are pretty good as a general rule, if we don't get into specific injuries, just maintaining your flexibility, strength, and there is that neurological aspect to them. Also, they're actually pretty good. The first one is related to balance. You would be spinning around 20 times. You can get quite dizzy that way. But if you start off slowly, you can build up your tolerance for that. And they're generally pretty good for elderly people also, you would start off maybe doing the movements at a smaller range of motion, whatever is comfortable for you, and then build up on that. But also for younger people, there's people who have tried that and really swear by that method. Now, all of this talk about remaining youthful forever, Shangri La and these sorts of things. You can have different opinions on that, but as physiological movements, they make a lot of sense to me. And just as a general guideline for maintaining strength, flexibility, I'd say they're pretty good.
Guy Windsor
And where would we find them?
Erick Ellison
The internet.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so just basically Google. Tell you what, this is fascinating to me. So what I will do is I will look up the history of it, find some sources and whatever, and give it some thought, and then I will post something that I think the listener can rely on as at least reasonably not bullshit.
Erick Ellison
Yeah. So I would suggest doing them a couple of times and again, it's nothing magical. And the basic way that they're supposed to be done is you slowly build up your ability to do them. So maybe don't start doing a set of 20 right away. If you're in fairly good condition of course you can do more quicker, but I would do it maybe for one week, just just do three of them each, and then you would progress. Now the sixth right is a breathing exercises that would also require celibacy, according to the text. Again, these were monks.
Guy Windsor
Absolutely not.
Erick Ellison
Yeah, I've never been able to do that one myself, either. And the idea of helping with celibacy, I think, is what they're going for here, but, yeah, the last one is a breathing exercise. You can do different sorts of breathing exercises. They're very useful, but I haven't practiced that for, let's say, obvious reasons.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, okay, so, so I will dig up the Five Tibetan Rites and I will put something together. Let's stick it in the show notes, so that people can see what they are and have a go at starting. That's fascinating. I was honestly not expecting a simple, straightforward answer to that question.
Erick Ellison
I've had to answer that question for patients and students before. So, yeah, I have a ready answer.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. All right. Okay. Now there are a couple of questions that I ask pretty much everyone who comes on the show. And the first is, what is the best idea you haven't acted on yet?
Erick Ellison
I am, unfortunately, fairly impulsive on that, so actually, probably the best idea I haven't really acted on yet is taking a holiday.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, quite a lot of the people who show up on my radar, such that they get invited onto the show tend to be the sort of people who act on their best ideas. So okay, you're not alone in in not having a particular thing that you kind of think you should have done or would like to do, but, yeah, take your holiday. It's the Finnish thing. When my kids were quite young, I was just chatting to my students about something, I forget exactly what, and I just accidentally dropped into the conversation, I didn't mean anything by it. I just mentioned that, you know, I had a holiday in 2003 and this was now 2012 and because, you know, you're running your own business, you have a martial arts school, and the head of the association, a guy called Ilpo. He looked at me. He was like, seriously? I was like, yeah, why are you even responding to this? Come into the office. So he marches me into the office, and then we have this wall calendar with like the year up there, and he hands me a pen. He says, mark out three weeks, right? So I just looked sometime in, like June, July, or whatever, I just kind of went, Okay, right? You do not come to work in those three weeks. Okay, yes, boss. And you know what, he was, right. They got a better instructor at the end of those three weeks than they had at the beginning.
Erick Ellison
Yep, it's important to take time for yourself. It really is, and that's something that I am practicing, trying to get better at.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so yeah, and you know, taking the wife and kids to your wife's mother for Christmas for three days does not constitute holiday.
Erick Ellison
No, it does not. No.
Guy Windsor
It may be a wonderful way to spend time, but it's not holiday. Now, taking your wife and kids, I don't know, to Lapland, or if you prefer, to the south of France for a couple of weeks of either skiing or lying on the beach. That's a holiday.
Erick Ellison
Now I am an amateur smith also, so I do like to bang on hot steel every once in a while, and that's a mini holiday for me.
Guy Windsor
Okay, you're in good company. I've done a little bit of that. My main craft would be woodworking, so like all those bookcases and stuff, I made those. But hitting hot metal is very therapeutic. I've made a few bits and pieces with the assistance of a professional smith. So where in Finland would you go to hit hot metal?
Erick Ellison
I have my summer cottage.
Guy Windsor
So you have your own little smithy setup?
Erick Ellison
Yeah, so I just got a gas forge there that I've been playing with. I made my own coal forge that I used before that charcoal forge, but now I've moved into using a gas forge, which is much nicer and cleaner and so on.
Guy Windsor
Wow. So you're actually pretty serious about as a hobby. Am I right in thinking that some of those shuriken we were throwing were ones you made?
Erick Ellison
Yes. Okay. So especially Bo shuriken, so they're the sticks, not the stars, mainly for legal reasons in Finland. So stars are a little bit more difficult because of that, but sticks are fine,
Guy Windsor
okay, so in Finland, it's legal to have sharp sticks for throwing but throwing stars? Are they just blanket against the law?
Erick Ellison
It's more a case of buying and selling them, which is the issue here, but if you figure a star is easier to throw, but it won't dig into the target as strongly as a knife or something like that, and knife throwing is fine. Throwing axes is fine, but for some reason, these stars, they've singled out, especially. Buying and selling them is not allowed. And as an extension of that, if we in the bujnkan would practice throwing stars, we would use calling cards. If you're very good at throwing cards. You know how to throw metal plates. That's not an issue.
Guy Windsor
I did throwing playing cards at school, because something on TV in the 1980s just hit off this craze in my school of throwing playing cards, and we actually got quite good at it.
Erick Ellison
Yeah, there's a special method for doing that. It's a little bit different. I think, with playing cards, you usually have it between your middle and index finger and throw it that way. With us, you would have the thumb and index finger supporting that and then throwing it a little bit like a Frisbee. So there's a special method for throwing. We call them senban shuriken, which are the star shape, and that, again, is particular to the Togakure-ryū. The koto-ryū would have a teppan, which are the shapes, the special shapes of the stars.
Guy Windsor
Well, if you ever need someone to bring a consignment of throwing stars into Finland to give you because it's illegal to sell them, just let me know. Happy to.
Erick Ellison
I wouldn't recommend that. Let's not test that particular law.
Guy Windsor
It's not buying or selling. It's just giving.
Erick Ellison
True, true, but I'm okay. Thank you.
Guy Windsor
Okay. No, you're very welcome. Okay, so last question, somebody gives you a million euros to spend improving. I mean, my normal question is historical martial arts, but feel free to interpret that to include whatever martial arts you prefer worldwide. How would you spend it?
Erick Ellison
Yeah, you did send me this question beforehand, and I really don't have a good answer for this one. I'm a little bit stumped on this. I mean, people who will be really interested in traditional martial arts will find a way to get to a good teacher and training in martial arts, especially traditional martial arts, there is a certain amount of work you have to put into it yourself. You can't make it too easy either. So having people have to work for something is important. So just in relation to access to traditional martial arts, I think that's that's a thing. So I don't know if I would need money for really anything. If I need training equipment, something like I could build most of it myself. I have a space for my personal training. If I have one student that's interested that I can train with. That's enough for me. But luckily, I have more people than one that want to train, but even one would be good, so yeah, I really don't have a good answer to that.
Guy Windsor
That’s interesting, because, okay, historical martial arts come from a very different kind of cultural milieu than Bujinkan, right? Because it is a widely dispersed practice of finding sources and studying the sources and translating the sources and figuring out what the sources have, and then figuring out how to practice those and teach those. And, you know, it's a very heterogeneous field with lots of different people and lots different types of people doing lots of different ways of doing the same basic project, which is recreating these arts in one way or another. And so like paying institutions to digitize a source is a common use of funds, which makes sense in that context, paying professional translators to translate that source because it's in a language that we can't read is another thing, and spending five years to learn that language, the really serious students, many of them will do that. I mean, I've had many students who have learned Italian so they can read the sources in the original, right? But one wouldn't expect a beginner showing up to a martial arts class for the first time to find they have to learn a whole foreign language to do it. A few technical terms, fine. And I bet you have Bujinkan students who start learning Japanese so they can get into the sources, right?
Erick Ellison
True, but here's the thing, well, Hatsumi Sensei has retired at the moment, and he's just turned 94.
Guy Windsor
He's just retired? That's a bit slack isn’t it? Couldn't he have kept going to 100?
Erick Ellison
A few years ago he retired. We had the nine schools. So he gave them to different senior students that are the new grand masters of those styles. So we have Tsutsui Sensei, we have Noguchi Sensei, Ishizuka Sensei, he's unfortunately passed away now. We have Nagato sensei. We have Kan Sensei, Sakasai Sensei, Furuta Sensei and Iwata Sensei, and they have different schools that are under them now, but they're all still part of the Bujinkan, and they're excellent teachers, but all of them have their own way of looking at the Bujinkan and looking at these martial arts and teaching them forward. And they don't only teach that one style. They have all of the Bujinkan, but Hatsumi Sensei’s way of teaching things, and I think this is what was appealing to people about the Bujinkan, was that he wasn't too rigid about formalities or the realities or the traditional techniques, in the sense that he was more interested in the feeling the application of the techniques. If you think of a technique as a tool or a vehicle, it's a vehicle to get you somewhere, and they're vehicles for your own personal development. And you can use a technique to train different aspects. You can train an aspect of distance. You can train an aspect of Kyojitsu, so Kyojitsu would be truth and falsehood. So you're doing feints, for instance. You can use the same technique to train how to take balance. And you can do it very strongly or very softly. You can use the technique in a way where the person kind of falls into the technique themselves. Or you can force a technique on a person. You can do it strongly with a lock, or you can concentrate more on the striking aspect of the technique. It's the same body movement, same technique, but you're using different principles applied through the technique, and you're learning different aspects of martial arts through the same movement principles. You can adopt weapons into the same technique. Maybe you're wearing weapons on your body while doing unarmed stuff. And this is very applicable to police officers, security guards, who would have equipment around them. Maybe you don't want to do break falls because you have equipment or a bulletproof vest or these sorts of things on. So looking at this aspect of using a technique to learn different things, the technique will be different depending on the situation, depending on the person, depending on whether you're physically weaker or stronger than person you're doing the technique on. So because of this, there's a lot of interpretation on even traditional kata, traditional techniques. So every teacher will have their own view on this, and these teachers that I just mentioned have very well taken to heart what Hatsumi Sensei was teaching. Therefore one day, they will show a technique one way and another day they will show the same technique in a different way, depending on what is the concept, what is the principle they want to be teaching that particular day. So therefore, in the Bujinkan we have a huge amount of variance on even the basics. And this is what makes this martial art very challenging. And you really have to work on it yourself to be able to kind of figure a lot of this stuff out. And it's important to have a good instructor, but it's also important to do the work yourself. So regarding sources, we almost have too many sources, too many variations, too many ways of doing things. Now you're absolutely correct that regarding written sources, it would be really nice to see some some of the original Densho that were written by Takamatsu Sensei. Some of them have been published, not a lot, but some of them have. Again, that deals with the medicine part Hatsumi Sensei did ask Peter King to publish a book on that. So if you go to I think Amazon, you can find his book there that has the transcript of the original Japanese text in it also, but, yeah, it would be interesting. But we already have so much. I'm working on even some of the basic stuff, still trying to really understand that, because there's so many different points of view to go through. So yeah, we almost have too much.
Guy Windsor
That's fascinating, yeah, so I think you're the first person who has basically said, we don't actually need money for this. That's very refreshing. I think to a large extent, depending on your goals, you're right. If, though, let's say you wanted to make Bujinkan common in South America, for example, you might easily be able to burn up a whole chunk of cash, like paying for instructors to go there, paying for people from South America to fly to Japan, doing that sort of stuff, because it would facilitate it all. But maybe that isn't necessarily what Bujinkan’s all about.
Erick Ellison
I think you're right. And there was a time period when Hatsumi Sensei was traveling the world quite a bit, conducting big seminars around the world. And he did go to South Africa, and there is a big, very nice Bujinkan community there. But yeah, money can get you so far, but I think you really need the people who are generally interested, and those people will find their way anyway. Now, because of the wonderful job Hatsumi Sensei did, we have a huge amount of DVDs, we have books, we have all kinds of information and sources, thanks to him, available to us. So if that didn't exist then, yeah, I think I might have an answer for you related to like you were saying that maybe we need more research, maybe we need more translations, but Hatsumi Sensei really did take care of his legacy here, and I'm extremely grateful for him for that. Again, it doesn't mean that I understand even a fraction. He was trying to teach. I'm working on it, but he did do a good job. We have a lot of information. It's just a question of going through it, really, training on it. It's not enough to kind of learn a technique and then be done with it. Like I said, there are vehicles to get you somewhere. As long as you're travelling, you're okay. It's when you're staying still that's a problem.
Guy Windsor
That is a really useful idea. And yeah, nowadays, anyone with an internet connection has access to hundreds of historical martial arts sources, 1000s of videos of various people doing it, and really all you need is a stick. I have a bunch of swanky swords because I can, but you can get an awfully long way with an internet connection and a broomstick. Fascinating. Well, I think that is probably a good place to wind things up, because I know we could definitely keep going for another two hours, but I know you have a time window we need to operate inside. So thanks so much for joining me today. Eki, it's great to see you again.
Erick Ellison
Thank you. Was great fun and a good time. Thank you very much.
