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
There is a comfortable place you return to without noticing. A favorite technique. A preferred side. A distance where you feel safe. You have rehearsed it for years, and it feels like mastery.
It is not mastery. It is a bubble, and you are living inside it.
The trouble with a bubble is that it feels exactly like home until the moment it fails you, and by then it is too late to lea...
TO THE READER
You can know a thing perfectly and still be unable to live it. This is one of the quiet tragedies of being human, and the martial arts are full of it.
There are men who can explain peace with such clarity that you weep, and who cannot get through a single afternoon without conflict. And there are men who could never explain it at all, who simply are peaceful, the way water is wet....
TO THE READER
There is a particular kind of help that arrives from a direction you were not watching. It comes from someone who owes you nothing, who belongs to a different camp, who has no stake in whether you succeed.
When that help comes, most people are suspicious of it. They start looking for the angle. What does he want? What is this going to cost me?Sometimes the answer is nothing. Somet...
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