Originating practitioner's statement

I have been in practice since the age of five

The formation that followed spans decades — classical Japanese martial art under Grandmasters, classical Asian bodywork through apprenticeship in Japan, India, and China, Vedic and Daoist movement science, professional dance with Rambert and Béjart. International competition.

The traditions that trained me prepared the ground. Through direct transmission, under teachers who held their knowledge with precision, I met the martial architecture of Bujutsu 武術 and Budō 武道, the Hara 腹, and the three directions — Kappō 活法 (the art of restoration), Taijutsu 體術 (the art of bodily motion), and Sappō 殺法 (the art of life and death). In the pre-institutional Bugei 武芸 (the martial arts) of Japan these three directions were once held as one. That preparation is what opened the terrain in which SUIKIDO took form.

A violinist who has trained for decades in the discipline of the instrument expresses their own music through it, not against it. The formation opens the terrain.

In 2001, after more than twenty-five years of practice, I began to question what I had been taught. Not the knowledge itself — but the state of the teachings I had received. Forms I had been given failed direct testing. The scholarship was there — but the practice had parted from its living ground: the forms had become exercise and mimicry.

What followed was a return to first principles. The architecture of the human body. The natural forces that operate in it. Inherited form was tested. What held, stayed. What did not, was set aside. What remained entered practice.

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In 2003, at the age of 33, the discipline was named: SUIKIDO.

SUIKIDO continues the work of Kappō 活法, Taijutsu 體術, and Sappō 殺法 in the form of Bodywork Therapy, Kinetic Movement, and Martial Art. Each direction a practice in its own right. Together, one discipline — articulated in its own terms as The Undivided Art — Ichi Tai Gei 一體芸.

一 One · 體 Body · 芸 Art.

SUIKIDO is built in direct, tested practice — on the ground the traditions prepared. The vocabulary is drawn from the traditions that named this knowledge most precisely. The configuration is forged. The source of what the discipline works with — the body, the forces, the structural principles, the vital points — precedes every tradition that articulated it. SUIKIDO returns to the contact that precedes the systems.

The knowledge that underlies SUIKIDO is not new. It is ancient and living — present in any body that meets it directly. SUIKIDO is its continuation, named and configured in its own terms.

Only what holds enters the corpus. Nothing beyond this is claimed.