Discovering the path

How I got involved with the 文武両道 (bunburyoudou) philosophy.

Everyone who signed up to this newsletter will have received a definition of the term, but just so it is absolutely clear what I am talking about here it is again.

文武両道 (Bunbu Ryoudou): A Japanese term which roughly translates as, "Walking the path of both the scholar and the warrior."

Note: When four kanji are put together to make a phrase it is a 四字熟語 (yojijukugo : four letter idiom).

Most motivated people will pick something they want to do and put effort in to be good at it. There are advantages to wanting to be the best runner and dedicating all of your free time to preparing to be an elite runner, and there are also advantages to picking something that requires brain power such as learning to be a translator in your second language. However, in my personal opinion it can be seen as putting all of your eggs in one basket if you give it your all in one area and still come up short.

Growing up in the UK I knew many people at school who wanted to be professional football players. They dedicated everything to playing football and let everything else fall by the wayside because they knew exactly what they wanted to do with their lives. Unfortunately both for me and for them I don’t know any professional footballers.

Personally, I think a balanced approach is much better because it gives you a lot of chances to be great at a lot of things.

Finding the motivation to get good at either a physical or mental pursuit is one thing, but deciding you are going to aim to be good at both takes a special amount of dedication.

I was sort of like this up until my early 20’s but it wasn’t until I moved to Japan where I really discovered my philosophy.

First exposure to the path

I moved to Japan in 2006 after graduating with a BSc in pharmacology. I was in the tae kwon do club at university and so I had a bit of this scholar/warrior mindset going already, even before I came across the Japanese idiom.

When arrived in Japan as an English teacher I was placed in a high academic school with a great reputation as my base school. Japanese high school students are (in general) very busy studying in order to pass university entrance examinations. Back in the UK universities were relatively easy to enter but quite difficult to graduate from. The opposite is true in Japan. It’s really difficult to get in but once you have entered you can ‘relax.’

Because this was a high academic school I was expecting students to be 100% dedicated to their studies and as such be a school populated by exclusively by nerd archetypes with no physical capabilities. This was not the case.

The majority of the students at that school were incredibly motivated to pass their entrance exams (so studied hard) but also were dedicated to their chosen club activities (most of which were sports or martial arts based). The baseball kids in that school were something else. (They didn’t play out on the field during rainy days but you would find them lined up in the corridors doing push-ups when the weather wasn’t favorable).

I found out that the reason for this was because the school embodied this 文武両道 (bunburyoudou) spirit and wanted to develop students of good character who were gifted both in academics and physical activity.

The impact on me

When I discovered this philosophy I really took it to heart. I saw my students giving it their all in everything that they did and their influence rubbed off on me. I mainly wanted to come to Japan to study martial arts, but because my students were dedicated to being warrior scholars, I didn’t feel right just teaching English then going to the dojo. Every second I wasn’t teaching English I was studying Japanese and all the time I wasn’t studying Japanese or working I was studying martial arts.

Trying to be a good influence on others while surrounding yourself with people who are a good influence on you will make you all succeed together.

Other experiences

While I was teaching in that prefecture I taught at some other schools that were less balanced. There was one school that was very sports focused, where the students were very dedicated to club activities but would frequently sleep through class.

Many of the students that dedicated themselves to a single activity probably had more success than many of my warrior scholar students in that area. But many of these individuals were quite arrogant and didn’t seem to value anything beyond what they were doing, because they knew exactly what they wanted to do with their lives (like the kids in the UK that are putting 100% of their effort into being professional footballers). If you want to be so focused I will say good luck to you and I hope it works out…but if it doesn’t you might need to reposition your thoughts.

Final (or beginning) thoughts to introduce this blog

Sometimes we come across attitudes or philosophies that just resonate with us. As I’ve gotten older other ideas have really clicked with me as well (David Goggins yelling about suffering got me into ultra running, and Jocko Willink’s ‘discipline equals freedom’ philosophy helps me keep going even when I need to do things I don’t want to do). But the thing that helps me keep my focus on multiple areas which involve both physical and mental output is the idea that I’m neither a warrior nor a scholar…I’m both.

You don’t need to choose. You can walk both paths. Let’s go for a walk together. (It’s not always easy, but it is interesting).

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Osu!

Anthony