By Christopher Scott Thompson

I was recently in a fistfight for the first time in several years.

I was at a popular nightclub with some friends, talking to a few women of my acquaintance. There was a guy in a leather jacket, leaning in very close to the girl next to them. One of my friends leaned over and told me the guy was bothering the girl. Just then, I heard the girl say, "That's really offensive!" to the guy in the leather jacket, so I stepped closer to him, and said, "You'd probably better move along," in a tone of voice that was not so much threatening as an appeal to his common sense. He replied with an obscenity and tried to hit me, so I took him down to the floor face first, landed on him, and proceeded to elbow him in the back till the bouncers pulled me off him.

Sadly, as we were being separated he managed to grab a hold of my coat and rip the sleeve off it, ruining it, but I was otherwise unharmed.

It took three bouncers about ten minutes to get him out the door, because he was trying to fight his way back to me.

I wondered, later, if there was anything I could have said to him that wouldn't have provoked what happened next, but he was so drunk and so belligerent that I'm not sure there was.

Someone came up to me and told me he really respected that fact that I had fought "to defend the honor of a woman." Only that's not what happened. I spoke to the guy, not to defend her honor, but because he was looming over her threateningly and she seemed to be in some actual trouble. And I fought him only because he attacked me.

A few days later, I was giving a historical fencing lesson to a talented young student of mine, and he stated that if he was involved in a fight without his sword, he would probably run away. Of course, to actually get in a fight with a sword would be nothing short of lunacy, leading most likely to death or prison. My response to him was to smile and half-jokingly say, "You carry your sword inside you."

Things are not always what they seem. At first glance, it would appear that forgotten methods of historical fencing have no practical modern application, while learning how to defend yourself against vicious street predators is a matter of survival and a practical skill. But a closer look reveals that the situation is not so straightforward.

Situations that are potentially violent are far more common than situations that actually become violent, and most of the time your opponent is a lot more likely to be a drunk on the rampage than a hardened street predator. It’s how we deal with this potential that determines what happens next. And this is where streetfighting and archaic martial arts part company. Consider the following stories.

Before I began to study historical fencing, brawling was more like the rule in my life than the exception. One example should be sufficient to illustrate the way I thought at that time, as well as the nature of a typical streetfight and its consequences.

I was glancing through the magazines at a small convenience store, when a familiar face appeared in front of me, a girl I had briefly dated a few years earlier. She was with a friend of hers, who I also remembered.

"Chris," they told me excitedly, "There’s a guy following us around! He said he was going to kill us, and he kept asking us if we were scared!"

I followed them out onto the street. The girls were talking over each other, telling the story over and over again.

"He says he’s Satan!" they told me, "He says he’s an S.S. officer. I think he’s crazy!"

"I’ll find him," I said, "He won’t be following you anymore."

We walked down the street on a mission, to protect the girls from a threat they had actually already escaped.

We saw the man they were talking about next to the movie-theater. He was walking away from us, but the girls recognized him instantly.

"That’s him!" they whispered, and I handed one of them my coat.

It took me only a few strides to catch up with him, and I gave him no warning at all. He turned around at the last instant, but my arm shot up in a clothesline across his throat, knocking him backward over a bench. Somehow, he got to his feet before I could get to him.

"What are you doing?" he asked me, "Who are you, anyway?"

"You shouldn’t threaten women," I told him, and hit him again. He threw his fists up, and started on his crazy routine.

"I’m Satan!" he roared, "I’ll burn you in the fires of hell!"

He tried to punch me, but I knocked him down again. I kicked him a few times in the body, but avoided the head and face. He tried to kick me from the ground, so I caught his foot and dragged him along the street for a little while. Then I let go, and kicked him a few more times for good measure. Finally, I let him get up and run away.

But the trouble I had unleashed was not yet finished. A few days after the fight, he recognized me outside a café and tried to start another fight. I hit him once, and someone said the cops were on their way. I ran and hid for a few hours in case they were looking for me.

Another time, he found my brother and I downtown. He came up to us and threatened to kill us, and I looked at him in open amazement while my brother simply laughed. Apparently, he didn’t realize he had lost the fight, and he wanted another go.

I was out walking later with the same two girls when he passed us on the street. I didn’t react to him at first, but the girls encouraged me to confront him.

"Go on," they said, "Tell him you’ll kill him if he doesn’t leave us alone."

They were actually giggling to each other with nervous excitement. Perhaps my violent actions were entertaining to them at the time. But they could have consequences, as I was about to find out. I walked up to him, holding a stick, and we once again had words.

This time he didn’t threaten to kill me, or to burn me with the fires of hell. Instead, he threatened to call the cops.

For years, I had followed a rule of getting off the street after any violent confrontation. I had done this many, many times, and as a result I had never been arrested. But I was cocky that day, and instead of going into hiding, I kept walking down the street. With the stick still in my hand.

"Put the stick down on the ground!" yelled the motorcycle cop, "And put your hands on your head!"

I obeyed him slowly, very much aware that he was carrying a gun. A squad car pulled up a moment later.

"This guy fits the description from that complaint."

I knew they had me dead to rights. I had threatened someone with a weapon in my hands, and they had found me on the street less than an hour later, openly carrying that same weapon. I was embarrassed at my own stupidity.

"Do you have anything in your pockets?" asked a cop.

"Yes," I said, "A knife."

They found the folding knife in my inside jacket pocket, and set it aside. Then they cuffed my hands behind my back. In the back of the squad car, they joked about how they could make the charge a felony, to make sure I did some time.

"You think that stick is a deadly weapon?" one asked the other.

"Sure it is, sure," the other one laughed.

They drove me down to the county jail, where the cop on duty actually asked me if I made a habit of this sort of behavior or if I was only having a bad day. I told him I was only having a bad day, which wasn’t exactly true. After my mug shot, they set bail almost immediately, and I paid them off. I was free to go, but facing serious charges. They had booked me on a felony charge of Criminal Threatening with a Deadly Weapon, and Carrying a Concealed Weapon. If convicted, I could do five years in prison.

I was forced to call my wife and tell her about the situation. She made it very clear that I had made this problem for myself, and that I could expect no help from her. If I had fines to pay, she would have nothing to do with them. If I went to prison, she might not be waiting for me when I got out. By the time I even made it in front of a judge, my marriage was over.

A month later, I put on my most-civilized and lightest-colored suit, and pled guilty to reduced charges in a bargain with the District Attorney. But my life as I knew it was turned upside down. Before the fight, I was a married man with a new apartment. After the fight, I was separated, sleeping on my brother’s couch, and a convicted criminal. And even so, I got off lucky compared to what it would have been like to spend five years in state prison.

Even in my years of fighting on the street, I had always been fascinated with swords. Ever since I was a small child, the "queen of weapons" had captivated me. The sword had an intricacy and a beauty about its use; a nobility in its history. My conviction opened my eyes to the potential consequences of my way of life, and as time went by I stopped getting involved in brawls and fistfights, and started reading everything I could find about the history and philosophy of the martial arts. In my fascination with classical Japanese martial culture, I studied a system of stick and sword combat with its roots in feudal Japan. I marveled at the formidable character of my sensei, whose eyes seemed to pierce me and drain my will to fight, and whose attacks even in choreographed practice seemed alive with martial intent.

I also studied the modern art of sport fencing with the foil, a fast and very complicated game of strategy and speed; far removed now from combat, but thrilling nonetheless.

But all along, I pursued a more esoteric goal. I had discovered, in an old book at my local library, that my Scottish ancestors had not relied on brute force alone in their battles with the English and each other. They had developed their own style of swordsmanship, as graceful and effective as any other martial art, and some of that system had been preserved in manuals that still existed in museums and private collections.

I searched for years for information on Gaelic swordsmanship, and although this quest bore no fruit for a long time, I never gave up hope that I would someday find what I was looking for.

I was not the only person with such interests. All over Europe and America, individuals and small groups had begun to revive the use of longsword and rapier, broadsword and saber. The historic European martial arts were coming back to life again.

Eventually, those with access to old fencing manuals began to make them available to the public. I acquired copies of old texts by the sword-masters of Scottish Highland regiments or by Scottish mercenaries and prizefighters. The texts were difficult to interpret, and I spent hundreds if not thousands of hours, deciphering difficult passages and reconstructing the system they described with the help of a small group of training partners.

After we had been studying for some time I founded an organization, called the Cateran Society, to help me revive and promote the Gaelic martial arts. Soon I had branches in Scotland and all over America, and dozens of members practicing Scottish swordsmanship once again. However, even though my formal training had introduced me to concepts like strategy, footwork, distance and timing- ideas of which I was quite ignorant while I was a habitual brawler- my philosophy about personal conflict had not fundamentally changed. I no longer fought regularly because I no longer wanted to, and because I was wary of the potential consequences. But I still had a streetfighter’s ideas about respect and disrespect, and about the appropriate way to respond to an insult.

Three years after I had begun to practice swordsmanship seriously, I was out walking late at night. A drunk man and his girlfriend were walking down the street across from me. He had no shirt on, and she was helping him walk to their car. I paid them no particular attention at first.

The man spit on the ground. "I spit on anyone with a beard!" he growled in my direction.

I could hardly believe what I had just heard. "You’ve got a goatee!" I called out, almost good-naturedly. A tremendous weariness had come upon me suddenly. All I wanted to do was go home, and see if my roommate was awake and up for a long chat. The drunk man crossed the street.

I felt that I could not walk away. He had deliberately insulted me, however bizarre or trivial the insult. All I really wanted was to go away, but I was unwilling to be a coward. It was as if I faced an invisible jury in my own mind, a faceless tribunal that would mark me as a weakling if I backed down and failed to stand up for myself.

"Look at you," he jeered, "All dressed in black. Are you gonna do a séance?"

"Look," I asked him, "What’s your problem, anyway? What are you talking about?"

He responded with an obscene comment about my manhood.

I walked over to where he was standing.

"I don’t wanna go to jail tonight," I told him, "There are cops along here every couple of minutes. If we fight on the street, we’re gonna go to jail."

He didn’t care if he went to jail. He hated guys with beards. We all did séances.

His girlfriend had gone ahead to get the car. She pulled up beside us and begged him to get in.

"Shut up, bitch," he warned her.

"That wasn’t very nice," I said.

"If I ever see you on the street," he told me, "I’m gonna kick your ass."

I stepped up close to him, and put my face up to his.

"Why wait?" I said, "No time like the present!"

This went on for about ten minutes. I didn’t want to fight at all, but I didn’t want to back down and lose my self-respect. I was violating everything I knew about street survival, standing there talking and chest-thumping like an idiot instead of just taking care of business immediately. Finally, I’d had enough. I wasn’t going to throw the first punch and start the fight, because deep down I was too ambivalent about the whole concept. I knew I didn’t belong there in the first place. But I also knew that if I manipulated him into attacking at a time of my own choosing, then I could control what happened next. I had discovered this principle through sword practice.

"Listen," I said, "You didn’t need to disrespect me. You didn’t need to come stumbling along here, drunk…"

"Drunk, am I?" he roared, "You’re tryin’ to tell me I’m drunk?"

I responded with a stream of vulgar insults, fighting words he couldn’t possibly choose to ignore. And they had the exact effect I’d intended.

He charged at me, swinging a wild punch. I shifted my front foot back to avoid him, a central maneuver of Highland swordplay. Finding that I was no longer where he expected me to be, he overextended himself. I grabbed him by the top of the head, and threw him face-first at the sidewalk. Holding on to his hair to fix him in place, I kicked him several times in the ribs. He struggled away from me, and rolled over to get back up. I kicked him a few times in the chest as he got to his feet. He immediately dropped into a fighting stance.

"Look," I told him dryly, "You just charged at me, and I knocked you down and kicked you. If you charge at me again, the same thing is gonna happen to you again."

A van pulled up, and someone stuck his head out the window.

"The police have already been called," he said, "So you two had better go."

"Thanks for the tip," I said, and ran for the nearest alley. I barely made it around the corner before the cops.

I had been training in historical fencing for three years, and what had I actually learned? I had become a more disciplined and effective street thug. I knew about things like distance and timing. I could use footwork to misdirect my opponent. I knew a little bit about strategy, and I could manipulate my opponent psychologically so that his actions would be predictable. But I was still getting in fights for no good reason at all, kicking a man on the ground because he had insulted- my beard!

But my training had given me something. I was now capable of winning a fight even when I didn’t launch a pre-emptive attack. Streetfighters attack first because they know how badly they’re going to get hurt if the other guy does so. Their ruthlessness is driven by fear. I had just proven to myself that I could emerge unscathed from a confrontation even if my opponent was the one who got that all-important first attack. That knowledge gave me the confidence to take a leap of faith a few years later.

My research into historic swordsmanship led me to an obscure text called the Maxims of the Fianna, a code of chivalry for the elite warriors of the ancient Gaels. I was already familiar with this text by the time of the beard fight, but somehow I had conveniently failed to notice certain aspects of it. My ethic was essentially that of the duelist- that any insult to one’s "honor" required violent satisfaction. A few months after the beard fight, I was reading over the Maxims of the Fianna again. Suddenly, certain passages seemed to leap out at me:

In battle meddle not with a buffoon, for, O mac Luga, he is but a fool... stand not up to take part in a brawl; have naught to do with a madman or a wicked one...

What had my opponents been but buffoons and madmen? Not genuine threats to my safety- just belligerent fools like myself. The Maxims opened with the following line:

In other words, those who are serious students of the martial arts should save their aggression for the battlefield, using it only when genuinely required to do so. In social gatherings, their demeanor should not be aggressive at all, but "quiet." The Maxims ended with the following line:

My conception of the purpose of my training changed completely. I had thought of it primarily as an attempt to revive a certain fencing style, largely because of my obsession with swords in general and with Gaelic culture in particular. Now I began to see a different sort of potential in what I was doing. There is a Gaelic proverb that says:

Am fear a thug buaidh air fhein, thug e buaidh air namhaid.

He who conquers himself, conquers an enemy.

I made this proverb the motto of my Cateran Society, and my own motto in my training. Through making a deep study of this particular style of swordsmanship, through facing as many opponents as possible in the most grueling forms of free fencing I could participate in, I hoped to directly confront the violence inside me, transforming it into something else through disciplined practice.

It became a regular part of my life to face my opponent’s singlestick or blunted sword, knowing that if he hit me hard with his fencing weapon it would hurt more than any punch I had ever taken. I went to bed covered with purple bruises on every part of my body, lumps and welts and sore spots that made it hard to sleep no matter which way I tossed and turned. I learned to face that potential pain without losing my self-control, maintaining my fencer’s mind under pressure. I learned to think calmly and strategically in the middle of a conflict.

Years passed without any fistfights, without any trouble. I developed a tight circle of very close friends, and we spent a lot of time together out in public. Being in public, where there were drunk people and belligerent men, there was always the potential for violence. But my approach to handling such situations was now very different.

On one occasion, I was confronted by a large man, a little the worse for alcohol, who felt that I was looking at everyone aggressively. I wasn’t- I was actually lost in thought and paying little attention to the people in the bar- but I had been standing with my arms folded, and that can create an aggressive impression.

The man came up to me and stood about half an inch away from me, close enough that his arms were touching mine. At that distance, there is simply no time or room for defense. Whoever makes the first decisive move will almost certainly win the fight. According to the logic of the streetfight, then, the first move had better be made by you, and to even try to talk it out is to stick your head in the lion’s mouth.

"Why are you standin’ here like you’re gonna kick someone’s ass?" he said.

I just shrugged and said, "I’m not."

"You’re not?" he said belligerently. "You’re not gonna kick anyone’s ass."

"Not unless I have to," I said, "I’m just thinking."

Now, the key to this is that it was the truth. There wasn’t a trace of aggression in my mood. I wasn’t getting psyched up for a fight, or cleverly trying to use words to hide the potential rage below the surface. If you try to "control yourself" only in the moment, you will usually fail. You’ll just end up doing whatever it was you really wanted to do in the first place, smugly content in the knowledge that you did your best to control yourself and it just didn’t work. Real changes in behavior require fundamental changes in worldview. You have to want something else in the first place, and in this case I did. I was just standing there musing to myself and listening to the music. If I had to come up with a phrase to describe my attitude to this verbal altercation, it would be that I was playing. A friendly bout in the studio, nothing more.

My interrogator blinked a few times with a confused expression on his face, as if he had a script for what was supposed to happen next and I wasn’t feeding him the right words. Then he said, "Oh. Okay then," and wandered off.

He had no idea what to do with someone who wouldn’t play along. And so the fight never happened at all.

Comparing this to the fight with so-called Satan Man, what were the consequences of each course of action? One incident led to someone getting beaten up on the street, as well as to the end of my marriage, and criminal charges that almost sent me to prison for five years. The other one ended without anyone getting hurt, or going to jail, or having their lives turned upside down.

I learned to brawl the way most brawlers do- by doing it frequently, with all of the painful consequences that entails. But it was swordsmanship that taught me how to be comfortable while under pressure, how to maneuver my way through a potentially violent situation without losing my head. So which skill is really more practical?

Of course, despite all those things, I still found myself involved in a fight again eventually. But at least I wasn’t fighting because the man had insulted my beard.

I saw an ad in a martial arts magazine recently that said, "Violence is rarely the solution, but when it is, it’s the only solution." I have a certain level of sympathy for that viewpoint, but I’m not actually sure it’s true. I certainly have no sympathy for the idea that we should be pacifists at all costs. If the only way you can see to prevent something wrong is to step in personally and deal with it, then that is what you do. But someone else might have been able to find a different way in the same situation. I still find myself wondering if I could have been more skillful somehow, if I could have maneuvered my most recent encounter in another direction. It occurs to me now that drunk people are easily confused. What would have happened if I had just walked up to him and started a completely unrelated conversation? Would he have just wandered away like the man who challenged me for standing with my arms folded?

Tactical food for thought- if I can be more clever next time, I will. If I can’t, I’ll fight. These decisions are made very quickly, and there isn’t much time to get it right.

There will always be people who embrace violence, just as there will always be people who cringe from it and people who are willing to use it reluctantly when they have to. I used to be part of the first category, and now I like to think I’m part of the last. But there have been a handful of people in history who were none of the above, and a few of these have been great swordsmen.

It has been said by some that many of the classical Japanese swordsmanship schools were created far away from the reality of the battlefield. When the Tokugawa shogunate united the warring samurai clans and imposed a totalitarian regime on the entire nation, peace prevailed for around 250 years. There were no more full-scale battles, and even private duels were strictly regulated by the authorities. The vast majority of samurai became bureaucrats with swords, warriors in name only who had no more notion of what a real sword fight was like than the average modern martial artist.

In this environment, even those styles of swordsmanship that were created for the battlefield began to decline into ineffectiveness, and many new styles sprang up without ever having to test their theories in actual combat.

Or so the story goes. There is actually some truth to this version of events, but it is a distorted truth. The situation changed drastically in the final years of the shogunate. The Western powers had broken Japan’s self-imposed isolation, forcing the government to sign humiliating trade treaties and putting the Japanese in fear that they would be colonized by foreign powers. The outraged provincial samurai, many of them from clans that had opposed the Tokugawa centuries earlier, banded together in a revolutionary movement to overthrow the shogunate and restore the direct rule of the emperor, believing that only he could drive out the "barbarians" and save the nation.

Many of these samurai rebels voluntarily left the service of their lords, becoming ronin or masterless warriors. These ronin then organized themselves into terrorist gangs for the purpose of assassinating government officials, cutting them down in the street in murders known as "Heaven’s Revenge". The shogunate responded by hiring its own ronin, a death squad of expert swordsmen known as the Shinsengumi. For the remaining years of the Tokugawa regime, rival gangs of highly trained swordsmen fought bloody street battles to determine the fate of the nation, one of the only cases in history of major political events being partially determined by the outcome of small-scale sword melees. Perhaps most extraordinary of all is the fact that this occurred during the same time period as the American Civil War. Many twentieth century Japanese swordsmen were trained by people old enough to remember these events, and several styles of classical Japanese swordsmanship actually saw extensive combative use during those years of conflict. These included the Jigen Ryu, Shinto Munen Ryu, Tennin-Rishin Ryu and others.

The movie Sword of Doom does a superb job of evoking this time period. Gangs of samurai fanatics ambush each other in the streets, killing members of their own group in bloody struggles for power at least as often as they engage the enemy. The nihilistic and murderous main character sells his expertise with the sword to the highest bidder, aligning himself with a Shinsengumi sub-faction in a final drunken bloodbath.

Some of the actual Shinsengumi warriors were not much different from this fictional portrayal. One of the founding members, a man named Serizawa Kamo, was a sociopathic killer who used his position as a cover for rape and murder. He was also a talented and sensitive composer of classical poetry, which should give those who romanticize the samurai some food for thought. He was eventually killed by his own group because of his excesses, and this soon became the defining characteristic of the Shinsengumi. Members lived and died by an incredibly severe code of rules, their own exaggerated version of bushido. The penalty for almost any infraction was to be assassinated or ordered to commit ritual suicide. The Shinsengumi probably killed more of its own members than the revolutionaries did. Nevertheless, they were so effective at killing the rebels that they became known as "ronin hunters," and their top leaders were all promoted to the elite ranks of the samurai class by the Tokugawa government. Several of them were not even samurai by birth in the first place, but talented peasants whose skill in swordsmanship had led to their adoption into samurai families. Perhaps this accounts for their extremism and obsessive interpretation of bushido. In any case, both the Shinsengumi and their enemies were violent idealists, and they still have many admirers who see them as romantic and principled heroes. However, very few of them survived the years of turmoil. Most died in battles or back alley sword brawls, were forced to commit suicide or simply captured and executed.

Among those who were in the most danger during those years were government officials. They were a prime target for "Heaven’s Revenge" from the imperialist faction, but they could also be targeted by shogunate loyalists if they were seen as being in any way easy on the rebels. Two of the samurai attached to the Tokugawa government in its last years were a pair of expert swordsmen named Yamaoka Tesshu and Katsu Kaishu. Both of them were actually sympathetic to the rebel cause. Tesshu had even been a leading member of one of the revolutionary groups before deciding that he could do the most good by working for the shogunate. Both of them played a major role in ensuring that the eventual transfer of power happened without a full-scale civil war. They have been described as "public servants of the highest order indifferent to money, power, and personal glory." Kaishu has even been described as "the man who saved early modern Japan" due to his role in preventing an all-out war.

Kaishu was a skilled swordsman of the Jikishinkage Ryu and Choku Shinkage Ryu traditions, while Tesshu, creator of the Muto Ryu, is widely considered to be one of the greatest swordsmen of all time. Due to his government position and the fact that his loyalties could easily be misunderstood by both sides, Kaishu was fired upon at least twenty times by assassins. He had a scar on his leg, another on his head, and two on his side. As for Tesshu, he also survived several assassination attempts (in some cases becoming the sword instructor of those who had failed to kill him) as well as duels with both wooden weapons and live blades. And yet neither one of them ever took a human life. Tesshu was adept at subduing his attackers without harming them, and in duels with sharp swords his opponents could find no opening which they could attack. Kaishu, however, went even further. Despite the almost constant attempts on his life, he kept his sword tied so tightly to the scabbard that he couldn’t have drawn his weapon even if he wanted to. His only explanation for this policy was, "I despise killing, and have never killed a man."

The courage required to follow such a policy is almost impossible to conceive. Kaishu’s principles could easily have led to his own death. Yet both Tesshu and Kaishu survived the years of turmoil and went on to serve their nation for many years as officials of the new Meiji government. After the fall of the shogunate, Tesshu served in the Imperial Household, and Kaishu was the Minister of the Navy.

Kaishu, Tesshu and the streetfighting swordsmen of that era were all idealists. They all put their own lives on the line for the sake of what they believed to be right for their country. But the assassins and terrorists cut many men down in their prime of their lives, only to die in the streets themselves. Kaishu and Tesshu helped saved many thousands of lives, and they never killed anyone even when their own lives were at stake.

So who mastered the sword- and who was mastered by it? If it’s really true, as I told my student, that "you carry your sword inside you," then the answer to this question is a vital one even now. Are we trying to master the sword inside ourselves, or only to become more efficient at using it? The answer will help determine which art we choose to study- and which art we consider more "practical".