“The martial arts are a self-improvement method, whose aim is to make human beings autonomous and able to take the responsibility for their own lives. The student is never educated but learns, guided by a teacher, to educate himself.”
During the 1970s, after years of passionate Shotokan practice, I began to discover technical deficiencies in modern karate. So I began to do research on traditional karate forms, research that led me to the roots of unarmed martial arts practice, Shaolin chuan. It was then that I began to study and practice Shaolin.
When in 1983 I decided to found my own school in Paris, I defined my karate practice as Shaolin mon, or door to Shaolin, and I proposed a method that rediscovered the martial qualities of the original karate, bringing its practice to the Shaolin tradition. It’s a method to which I later added elements of Japanese martial arts that I had studied and practiced for a long time. During this period, I traveled to China and Taiwan, and often returned to Japan to do further research.
In the mid 1990s, I felt ready to start a new personal journey by proposing a new form of practice, a new martial art, fruit of the knowledge I had accumulated. In the years since, I was finally able to define the proper aim of this practice: Jisei budo, or self-training through the martial arts.
In 1999, with the publication in Japan of the book Buteki Hassò ron (Reflections on the Martial Arts), I redefined it as Jisei-do, a name that means the way of self-training through the practice of a method that we create ourselves. Thanks to the success of the book in Japan, I have been returning to my native country every month for a week to conduct training sessions in Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka since 2002.
My pursuit has reached a point where, paradoxically, I do not need to indicate martial arts as the point of reference of my school. Of course, my art, the art I study, practice and teach, is unarmed combat, but the method is also a way of approaching things, an approach to life in which the art that you practice, even music or painting, brings personal and spiritual growth. The practice of combat arts must bring health, well-being and efficiency, which means returning to the origins, without the harmful deformations, both physical and mental, that arise from a spectacular vision of a competitive sport as an end in itself.
Tokitsu-Ryu is now the name of my school's method, a method with a goal that is simple and accessible to people of all ages: self teaching through martial practice. A practice that, day after day, helps to define a personal journey, in art as in life.
I practice martial arts above all for pleasure, just as for pleasure I conduct this research that is also historical. Initially in Japan, then in France and now in Italy, I have refused to be a part of the system, to be an anonymous employee in a large corporation. I have chosen to do what I like, and what I like are the martial arts, philosophical thinking and sociological studies. I have explored the meaning of life from the standpoints that these passions have opened up to me. Today I live fully in the practice and the study of martial arts, in literary and scientific research, as well as in the study of social sciences. I could say that I live every day as if I were on vacation, and when I am on vacation, I do the same things every day.
Master Kenji Tokitsu