Ink in the Wind

About the book

Ink in the Wind collects 285 original haiku, each paired with a short reflection. They come from more than fifty years of karate, long stays training in Japan, the influence of Zen Buddhism, and a life in which the principles of budō were tested far beyond the dōjō.

These are not haiku about cherry blossom and the turning seasons. They are about courage and fear, timing and distance, stillness, discipline, compassion, ageing, loss and mortality, and about what a lifetime of training is actually for.

Traditional ideas such as ma-ai, zanshin, kuzushi, fudōshin, mushin and shuhari are explained as principles for living, not only as martial terminology. Each haiku catches one moment or principle; its reflection opens the idea without exhausting it. The book does not tell you what to think. It makes room for thinking.

Inside the book

• 285 haiku, each with a reflection
• Essays on concepts that are often misunderstood, from shuhari to sen no sen and go no sen
• Rōmaji versions of selected haiku, so you can hear them in Japanese
• Sensei Chōjirō Tani’s own brush drawing of the okugi circle
• A closing chapter that tells one story twice: as a sequence of haiku and as a Western poem
• Sumi-e ink illustrations by the artist and calligrapher Kumiko

A task set by a teacher

When Paul Mitchell was a fourth dan, his teacher Chōjirō Tani, the founder of Shūkōkai, decided that his karate needed balance. The technique was strong. What Tani wanted to draw out was the softer side: not soft in the Western sense, but the jū in gō-jū, the yin to the yang.

His answer was haiku. For about nine years Mitchell carried his poems to Japan, where Tani corrected them and helped him write more. Tani spoke of two or three years. It turned into decades.

Decades later a serious illness kept Mitchell in hospital for a long stretch. He used the time to gather the haiku from old notebooks and computers, sort them by theme, and write a short note to explain each group to his senior students. A paragraph became a page, the pages became chapters, and the notes became a book.

Tani had once given each of the Shihan he graded the notes he made while studying kata with his own teacher, Kenwa Mabuni. Ink in the Wind is written in the same spirit: something to hand on.

When you can no longer demonstrate what you know, what exactly have you learned?

Where the title comes from

Sensei Tani wrote calligraphy, as Mabuni had before him. Mitchell remembers watching him paint the circle that stands for okugi, the innermost technique. Before the brush touched the paper, Tani dipped it and flicked away some of the ink. That is what makes the circle bold at the start, then fade and feather, so that it seems to live on the page.

The book began as The Path Beyond Technique. The longer he worked on it, the more it became Ink in the Wind: the ink that isn’t needed for the picture, and yet never goes away. Asked which haiku best captures that idea, he declines to choose. No two drops of flicked ink are the same size or shape. “They are all as individual as a person’s fingerprints.”

Martial haiku

A haiku sets a thought in three lines of five, seven and five syllables. Traditionally it belongs to nature and the seasons. Mitchell’s haiku belong to the dōjō: leadership, being a sensei, effort, patience, loyalty, respect, timing in combat, the bond between senpai and kōhai. Some are written from a warrior’s view of war. Some echo the death poems of the samurai. Some, as he says, are not beautiful at all, but confronting.

He wrote them in English, usually in pencil. To fit the form, pronouns and connecting words fall away, yet every haiku must still tell a story. Many also appear in rōmaji, carried from English into Japanese rather than translated the other way.

His standard was strict. Only haiku he rated nine or ten out of ten made it into the book. When he realised he had nothing good enough about training with impact pads, he sat down and wrote new ones, and five haiku took him longer than ten chapters.

Stillness is not empty

Sensei Tani used to say that stillness is not empty. A pause in kata, the moment before you meet an opponent, a breath before you discipline a child: none of these is empty space. In combat it is the snake coiling. In life it is the moment you clear away anger and assumption, and see what is actually in front of you.

It is not magic, he says, but something you can practise. The trouble is that most of us are far too busy, too rushed and too distracted. He hopes the book will help readers step back and reflect on what matters more than the technology around us.

Who it is for

The essays are written for every serious student of karate-dō or karate-jutsu, whatever the style. Too much of what circulates about these concepts is simply wrong. Mitchell learned them sitting with his teachers, not from the internet, and he explains them as accurately as those teachers would have.

The haiku reach further. You don’t need a black belt to read them, only an interest in Zen, Japanese culture, poetry, philosophy, or growing older with your eyes open. Like Musashi’s Go Rin no Sho, which Mitchell has read at least fifty times, it is a book that changes as you do. A passage met at twenty may mean something quite different at fifty or seventy.

Lineage

The book belongs to a line of teaching. Tani set the task, and Tani’s own calligraphy came from his teacher.

1. Kenwa Mabuni 1889–1952

   Founder of Shitō-ryū. Tani studied kata at his side in his twenties and kept the notes that later became a book for his own Shihan.

2. Chōjirō Tani 1921–1998

   Founder of Shūkōkai and senior student of Mabuni. He set Mitchell the task of writing haiku and corrected his work for nine years.

3. Paul Mitchell

   Uchideshi to Tani, holder of Menkyo Kaiden, and the only non-Japanese practitioner Tani personally graded Shihan. He also learned from Kimura Sensei, Yamada Sensei, Kawata Sensei and Nambu Sensei.

About the author

Dr. Paul Mitchell began karate in the 1960s and became a direct student and uchideshi of Chōjirō Tani. In Kyoto he studied Takenouchi-ryū Bitchū-den under Nakayama Kazuo Sensei, and time at Daisen-in, within the Daitoku-ji Zen temple complex, under the Zen priest Ozeki Sōen shaped his understanding of discipline, silence and impermanence.

A former military officer, he has taught internationally for decades, including long-term work with police and military personnel. He was Australia’s national kata coach at 38 and has trained referees and judges across the Asia-Pacific region and in Japan. Today he is a ninth-dan Hanshi and the Soke of Seito Shūkōkai Karate-dō Sangokan.