How I learned to stress-test my blade against the world

There is an old Japanese tradition where samurai warriors would go out and cut down peasants, prisoners of war, or people who had crossed them in the past just to see if their blade would cut. This practice is called Tsujigiri.

Is it brutal? Yes. Is it atrocious? Totally! BUT there is still some value to be gained from the idea of testing one’s “blade.”

How often do we arm ourselves with beliefs and values that have never been tested? It could have been our families, peers, or professors who handed us these “blades,” but does that mean we should naively trust their efficacy? Certain values become ingrained into our psychology, and over time, we can’t even identify how they got there.

Yet we come to know them as true.

In 2003, I was a pint-sized, pink-haired freshman in college, and like many other students living away from home for the first time, trying to find her identity. For a while, I identified with others who also liked underground hip-hop or had a similar taste in fashion as I did — secondhand t-shirts, jeans, and Chuck Taylors. I had drinking contests with older guys who didn’t go to school but reminded me of the “tough guys” in the town I had grown up in and felt comfortable being around.

I gravitated towards the familiar.

Then, I enrolled myself in a martial arts system called Budo Taijutsu. In Japanese, this literally translates to “way of war / body art.” It wasn’t my first time practicing martial arts. I already held a black belt in TaeKwonDo and a brown belt in Shaolin Kung Fu. But that wasn’t enough for me.

I was drawn to this art in particular for its combat efficacy. For most of my time in the dojo, I was the one girl in a garage full of sweaty, middle-aged men. My instructor was a biomedical engineer who casually brought out human skeletal models and showed us the mechanics of how to smash the median nerve against the humerus or where to cut through a forearm so your assailant could no longer close his right hand.

The art is violent. It is a way of war. Yet, it is compassionate. Every technique done to me, I did to someone else. If you dished out unnecessary pain, the chances were high it would come back to you even worse. In that dojo, there was no time or place for competitive egos, only learning.

At school, I had a reputation for being weird. I didn’t have many friends at the university and I spent twelve hours a week letting strangers knock the wind out of me and push my joints to the point of breaking. My arms and legs were decorated with purple and yellow bruises, the new lessons mixing in with the old, then finally disappearing back into the skin as the learnings were internalized.

Why would a five foot two, nineteen year old girl who barely weighed a hundred pounds want to train in military-style combat efficacy? I wasn’t going to be in special ops. I didn’t lead a dangerous life. I had never been in a fist fight, and I wasn’t looking for one either. And yet, I loved it.

I loved it more than partying. I loved it more than music or fashion. I loved it more than anything I had ever encountered before.

Looking back, I understand that this moment in my life is when I understood the value of the stress-test. In the dojo, we didn’t accept our techniques at face value. We would take a three-hundred year old technique and really see if it worked. Would it work on someone tall? How about someone short? What if they were heavy? We tried the techniques in every scenario we could think of, then added staffs, knives, swords, and guns.

There were things we were told to learn — ancient techniques, drawn out in scrolls, passed down from generation to generation. Some instructors make an entire career of just going through these historical texts and acting them out.

But in our dojo, we took those principles and ruthlessly tested each one. We would put every technique through the stress test of different body weights and weaponry. Would this work in a hallway? What about on a rocking boat? How about on the edge of a cliff? The possibilities were endless.

The process was downright stressful. Long nights in the garage with oddball characters, racking our brains to find scenarios where our techniques might fail us. Even after leaving the dojo, the training didn’t stop.

I couldn’t stop thinking about what else I could stress-test. Could I test my values? Ideas I held as true? Everything I had learned in school up until now?

Driven by the process of testing in order to keep what works and throw out what doesn’t, I embarked on a journey that would change the course of my life. I left the country to study abroad and removed myself from everything that was familiar in order to put my identity to the test. Without my friends, family, or support system as my safe space, what would I become?

Sitting in the airport in my chucks and pink hair, I had no idea. I was excited and scared, but hopeful for the journey to come. I was ready to test my blade against the world.