Kosho Reflections Issue #2: There Is No Body Contact
Feb 02, 2026
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To the Reader
Most of you reading this have spent years learning how to hit. You have practiced strikes, blocks, throws. You have conditioned your body. You have trained your reflexes.
I am going to tell you that the highest level of what you do requires none of it.
Sit with that before you continue.
The Teaching
In true self-defense, the high art of Kosho Ryu, there is no body contact.
This is not poetry. This is not philosophy dressed as combat. As Mitose taught, there is no higher form of true self-defense than that of no body contact. The objective in conflict is having no conflict. You escape. You control. You do not destroy.
Destruction is easy. Preservation is difficult.
If you get to the point of destruction, you have already failed. Everything after that is damage control. The fight you win without touching is the only fight you truly win.
TO THE READER
The most valuable thing a man owns is sometimes the thing he did not reach for. And the surest way to fail a test is to know you are being tested.
There was a document that changed the course of an entire art, and it spent part of its first afternoon in a waste basket. This was not disrespect. It was, in a strange way, the very reason it had been given.
Pay attention to what a per...
TO THE READER
A man decides he is ready to die, and instead of despair, what fills him is calm. Not resignation. Something closer to freedom.
We spend enormous effort avoiding the one outcome that is certain for all of us, and in the avoiding we make ourselves easy to move, easy to frighten, easy to defeat.
There is a different way to carry it, and it was shown to Hanshi in a single startling i...
TO THE READER
Two men can stand in the same place and see two different worlds. One sees walls, bars, and hard men. The other sees beauty, and means it.The difference between them is not the place. It is the seeing.
There was a man who had lost his freedom, his name, and very nearly everything else, and who could still look around a maximum security prison and call it wonderful. He was not pret...
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