Kosho Chronicles Issue #12
To The ReaderThe Octagon is not a diagram on the floor. It is not a shape you step around during a drill and then forget about when the drill is over. It is alive. It lives in your body, in your opponent's body, in every joint, every crease, every rotation of every limb...
Kosho Chronicles Issue #11
To the Reader
Every man has a price. That is what people believe. They believe it because, most of the time, they are right. But every once in a while, you meet someone who does not have one. And when you do, it will tell you more about yourself than it tells you about ...
To the Reader
You have been taught to be strong. To overcome. To dominate.
What if that teaching is incomplete?
The Teaching
In weakness there is strength. In strength there is weakness.
This is not wordplay. This is natural law. You cannot have hard without soft. You cannot have soft without har...
Kosho Chronicles Issue #10
To the Reader
In the martial arts, people will do extraordinary things for a piece of paper. They will travel across the country for one. They will lie about one. They will spend years chasing one and then, once they have it, spend the rest of their lives defending it i...
Kosho Chronicles Issue #9
To the Reader
The hardest part of learning from Mitose was not learning from Mitose. It was coming back to my school and trying to explain what I had learned to my students. Every visit to the prison gave me something new. Every class I taught afterward felt like trying ...
Kosho Chronicles Issue #8
To the Reader
You already know everything. That is the problem. You have studied, you have trained, you have built a framework of understanding, and now you filter everything through it. Whatever fits, you accept. Whatever does not, you reject. And you call that knowledg...
Kosho Chronicles Issue #7
TO THE READERYou trust your eyes. You have been trained to watch the punch, track the kick, follow the weapon. Your eyes are the first sense you turn to in danger, and they are the reason you get hit.
Mitose called them the great betrayer. I did not understand what he me...
To the Reader
If you teach, this will challenge you. If you study under someone, this may confuse you.
Either way, pay attention. What follows strikes at something most martial artists protect without realizing it.
The Teaching
The student is a better teacher than the teacher.
This is not a contr...
Kosho Chronicles Issue #6
To the Reader
Every martial artist I have ever met wants to know what to do when the punch is coming. That is the wrong question. The right question is why you let it get that far.
Mitose began explaining the manuscript to me in a way that turned everything I thought I k...
Kosho Chronicles Issue #5
To the Reader
I told you the manuscript was a riddle. That Mitose wrote it using religion and politics to hide the martial arts. That he said it was his duty to teach me everything in that book.
This issue begins the teaching. The first thing Mitose explained to me from ...
Kosho Chronicles Issue #4
To the Reader
Last issue I told you about timing. About how Mitose moved slow but moved on time. About how he dropped me to my knees and called me stupid.
This issue is about something that confused me even more. Something that took me years to understand. Something I ...
To the Reader
Speed is a lie. Everything you think you know about being fast is wrong. If you cannot let go of your obsession with speed, stop reading now. You are not ready.
The Teaching
One visit, Mitose asked me to hit him. Real hard.
At the prison, there was a guard there who knew who I was....
