Bill
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LISA WROTE:
Dear fellow martial artists,
I'm concerned about a martial arts organisation I last trained with over a year ago which was being run like a cult instead of a sports organisation. I wondered if anyone else had come across similar groups.
I have studied six styles of martial arts in London and the Southeast of Great Britain, and no others displayed the same types of behaviour. I wondered if perhaps I had only recognised the signs because I have also spent time researching splinter religions and cults.
These 'symptoms' of cult behaviour are: Taking an individual away from their
family and social life; using up all their spare time and money; introducing
techniques using hypnosis or without proper physical preparation which could result in injury; belittling and debunking students and teachers of other styles while basing their own style on techniques taken from them; takeover bids to classes teaching other styles to expand the organisation; over-emphasis on fawning, grovelling, (call it what you like) being treated as general dogsbody to the organisation leader which was not linked to normal dojo respect. For example, when he hadn't packed in time to catch a plane after a training tour, dragging trainees into his room to pick up and pack his and his wife's underwear and toiletries. Amusing, but also an abuse of position.
Gradings had no form or discipline and it was joked that you could get one if you brought enough doughnuts for the Sensei. Demonstrations arranged for an evening at a sports centre resulted in the inner circle clique of black and brown belts being called in to a last-minute meeting at the centre which went on for two hours where they argued, smoked some pot, and then cancelled and went home. It boasted of having no professional or sporting application, and focused on killing techniques and mass rioting or affray. Like religious cults, they showed great interest in new recruits until they had paid their
membership and were 'in' - after that, you were simply a number while more recruits were scavenged from other classes or brought in as friends and relatives.
My personal experience was from a Ninjutsu class which was then taken over by this organisation. When on a training course abroad, I got pregnant by one of the brown belts, who offered to pay for an abortion I hadn't asked for. I kept the baby, and since being two months pregnant heard from neither the baby's father or the rest of the organisation. They closed ranks on me completely - which was even more difficult because some of them were co-workers of mine who had talked me into joining their club a year earlier after finding out that I had studied martial arts before. Nobody would tell me if there was a class or wanted to teach me, although I had access to many reports on training during pregnancy. I admit I expected very little in terms of support or interest, but not total alienation. Some of the class members I had been very good friends with and the kind of mass disacknowledgement I experienced was very hurtful. I was not sorry to be out of the organisation but sorry to lose the friends I had, which in essence it what a cult does - you can't associate with members if you aren't one.
Now I have a nine-month-old baby and I am considering going back to train somewhere else, but the experience has put me off just a bit. I'm 27 and first trained in Judo aged 13, where in contrast everything was healthy and normal - what concerns me is whether this way of running a dojo or organisation is a new phenomenon and considered to be valid, in which the definition between sport and cult has been entirely lost, or if it's not,
why some sort of martial arts governing body hasn't opened or investigated?
This problem has concerned me since I first got pregnant, which was about six weeks after the initial takeover of our dojo, and I haven't spoken of it until now as I was worried that whatever I said would be dismissed as symptomatic of raging hormones!
Seriously though - I would like to hear from anyone with similar experiences, and if anyone wants furtherinformation on the organisation involved please E-mail me.
Take care,
Lisa
