Hidden in Plain Sight: Esoteric Power Training Within Japanese Martial Traditions

Original 🇬🇧 & Translation in 🇫🇷

Ellis Amdur’s writing on martial arts has been groundbreaking. In his first book, Dueling with O-sensei, Amdur threw down a gauntlet to practitioners, that the moral dimension of martial arts is expressed in acts of integrity, not spiritual platitudes and deification of fantasized warrior-sages. In Old School, he applied both academic rigor and keen observation to offer the reader as close a look as words can provide to some of the classical martial arts of Japan, leavening his writing with vivid descriptions of some of the actual practitioners of these wonderful traditions.

The first edition of Hidden in Plain Sight was Amdur’s attempt to establish the existence of something all but lost in Japanese martial arts – a sophisticated type of training, encompassing mental imagery, breath-work, and a variety of physical techniques that offered the practitioner the potential to develop skills sometimes viewed as nearly superhuman. Commonly referred to as ‘internal training,’ and usually believed to be the provenance of Chinese martial arts, Amdur asserts that not only was it once common among many Japanese martial traditions, but elements of such training still remain, passed down in a few martial arts – literally ‘hidden in plain sight.’

This second edition is so much more. Two-thirds larger, Amdur goes into far more depth about the nature of physical culture pursued for martial ends, and goes into detail about the roots of such esoteric training in martial arts such as Daito-ryu and it’s offshoot, aikido, within Japanese swordsmanship emanating from the Kurama traditions.

As always, Amdur reminds us that this is a human endeavor and he provides vivid, even heartbreaking, portrayals of some of the great practitioners of these skills, men who devoted their lives to an obsessive pursuit of power.

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