Report: SAWS#2 "Self-Defense for Body and Mind"

Lilla DENT
ICU Undergraduate Student

【The article below is the same as the article that appears in the fourteenth issue of the CGS Newsletter.】
　

　Students attending Professor Christopher Simons' - perhaps better known as one of ICU's resident Literature professors - Self-Defense Workshop on May 31st were greeted by a gym full of large inflatable exercise balls. I know it crossed my mind: is it just me, or does this look suspiciously like a Pilates class? As it turned out, obliques and V-sits were not part of the program for the day, although the exercise balls were put to good use (more on this later), just one of the many slightly unconventional - but effective and entertaining - ways in which Simons managed to present the basics of self-defense to the group in the ninety minutes allotted to the workshop.
　As a veteran of a six-week self-defense class in high school, which had consisted mostly of being put in various uncomfortable strangleholds by the teacher and practicing punches on empty two-liter soda bottles, I was surprised and pleased to find this workshop starting on a very different note. Simons began with demonstrations of "aware" and "unaware" behavior in potentially threatening real-life situations - but these skits were more than just informative. Thus he and his assistants demonstrated two dierent skits: A person harassed by a cat-caller, and felt up on the train, before the students' own acting skills were put to the test: we practiced being approached by potential aggressors and proactively escaping, or putting a halt to the situation with simple tactics such as direct eye contact, a condent stance, and moving briskly away on sensing that the aggressor had entered one's "range," the distance within which they would be capable of easily attacking.
　The workshop turned a little more serious as Simons next demonstrated what an ordinary civilian can and should do when actually physically threatened by an aggressor. "You need to switch your brain into 'forward' mode," he explained: Whenever possible, ight is of course the best - and never a shameful - option. But if you are cornered, you need to conversely concentrate on the idea of moving forward and attacking back. "An actual ght will be nasty and chaotic," he continued, "but fortunately, you won't have to worry about breaking down your own moves into complicated blocks and attacks." Instead, the trick is to shift from the attacker's "center-line" - move off-center from them as they are facing you - and one move will take care of the rest. This move, the "wedge," acts simultaneously as both block and attack: It is simply an assertive and purposefully directed version of the natural "shape" we form when instinctively inging up our arms to defend ourselves, and it can be used by any person on any attacker, regardless of size or the relative strength of the combatants. The students then practiced deploying this move on each other, and seemed to be surprised at how eective - and easy - the move actually was. Finally, the bouncy balls got their turn in the spotlight, and the group was again surprised by their own power: Merely by applying the wedge technique we had just learned, students could send a ball bounced over by a partner literally ying across the room; judging by the laughter and the thunderous ricocheting of the hapless balls, this was perhaps the most popular part of the class.
　After the workshop, one of the participants came up to thank the professor. "We all learned a lot, I think," she enthused, "and a workshop like this is particularly useful in a culture like Japan where the majority of the population are practically trained not to oend others and shrink from confrontation." When we hear the word "self-defense," the rst thing that comes to mind for many of us still is a bunch of death-defying kung fu moves - but maybe there are some key self-defense concepts that you can pick up in ninety minutes. "Range" and awareness; the "forward" mentality; the "wedge" . . . In fact, the list goes on and on. There was something pretty serious to be taken away from all the laughs after all.