Book Review: "Persimmon Wind: A Martial Artist's Journey in Japan," Dave Lowry (2nd Edition, Koryu Books, 2005)

Cover of the Second Edition

I will start with the things that you must know about Persimmon Wind.  It is an excellent book.  Lowry's writing, on a purely technical level, is concise and well-paced.  He writes on a subject, and a group of people, that are as near as humanly possible to his heart, and he writes in a thoughtful, thought-provoking way.  I disagree with many of his conclusions, but unlike other books I've read (looking at you, Fight Like A Physicist) where I've disagreed with the author, Lowry's positions did not strike me as inherently disposable.

Because of its intimately personal nature, it is impossible to discuss Persimmon Wind without discussing its author.  Dave Lowry is, in modern parlance, a weeb, or, to put it much more politely, a Japanophile par excellence.  There is simply no way around that fact, though Lowry himself would argue... as would every Japanophile... that he simply has a deep appreciation for Japanese culture, although he makes a very good point in the book about what separates him from the serious Japanophile, in that his Japanophilia isn't a byproduct of hating his own culture, or at least in its modern form it isn't.  I suspect that, as a teenager, like so many of us, he went through a Phase, the difference being that the Phase stuck and also he grew up.  Lowry's background in budo - Japanese martial arts - stretches back to the 1970s, when he started studying under a practitioner of Yagyuu Shinkage-Ryuu (literally the Yagyuu New Shadow School), and he has continued studying both the sword school where he started, and other, more modern Japanese martial arts, more or less continuously since then.  He's been a noted writer in martial arts circles since the '80s, and has written books on Japanese cuisine, articles on Japanese culture, and a regular column in St. Louis Magazine as a food critic specializing in Japanese food.  There is a common thread here - he loves Japanese culture, with the enthusiasm of a convert and the intimacy of a family member.

This is appropriate; Persimmon Wind's predecessor, Autumn Lightning (which went on my to-read list within an hour of starting Persimmon Wind), is about Lowry's introduction to budo and the Japanese way of martial arts through adoption, step by step, into a Japanese family.  One of the places where Lowry comes across as most human in Persimmon Wind is his description of why he had not returned with them to Japan when they left - a decision that, to me at least, feels tinged in regret.  In the process, he absorbs Japanese culture by slow degrees, and it is clear that this long marinading made the alloy of Japanese culture in his makeup much less brittle than those Americans I've known who throw themselves into any foreign culture at the expense of their own.  Lowry comes across as having absorbed it in addition to his own instead.

He has a clear love of tradition not simply for tradition's sake, but because it allows a continuity with the past that the modern world is often lacking.  There's a discussion of why manners matter in an armed society that I think more Second Amendment chest-beaters should read; we know from bitter experience that "it looked like he had a gun" is a self-defense justification, but there are plenty of people who actually have and carry guns who don't consider the implications of going armed beyond "my rights."  He even goes into a discussion on how martial arts can make you more comfortable with who and what you are, and therefore more open-minded about who others are, which is an important point in an era where tolerance is both a key point and in short supply.  There is a great deal of thought, most of it very clear and well-elucidated, in Persimmon Wind, and even where I find problems with it, I appreciate it.

The first of Persimmon Wind's problems is that the Japan that Lowry loves is at least partly his own construct, which he readily admits.  He loves rural, traditional Japan, which, as someone who lives in rural America but grew up in suburban America, I can appreciate and understand.  He absolutely loathes the "New York on a massive dose of amphetamines" that he expects Tokyo to be, and he hates what he for some reason insists on calling "ferroconcrete," as opposed to just "concrete."  His love of Japan is rooted in a desire to connect to a Japanese tradition that he does not see in the modern Japan.  Again, I can understand this, since in another life I'm a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, whose cut-off date is about the same time as the cultural connection Lowry wishes to make.  I just dislike how Lowry seems intent on divorcing the two Japans contextually, especially since the martial mindset, divorce of emotion, insistence on readiness to die, et cetera, were key drivers in Japanese nationalism from Meiji to Showa.  It is perhaps unfair to say that Lowry focuses strictly on the good without ever discussing the bad; there's an extended passage on how to act as a second in a ritual suicide, and Lowry wonders whether that is a facet that really needs to be preserved.  Nevertheless, Lowry focuses very heavily on the positive outcomes of the warrior ethos without substantial acknowledgement of the dangers of it.

The second problem I have with Persimmon Wind is one of training philosophies.  Lowry makes (or at least appears to make) a strong argument that kata are the be-all and end-all of training methodologies - that paired kata are an adequate substitute for, or superior training technique to, sparring.  It depends, I suppose, on what one is doing with martial arts.  If it is being used to burn away the dross, as a form of moving meditation and exercise routine, getting kata exactly right, and working through minute variations of the kata, are absolutely superior training methods, just as, specifically for strength training, gym work is superior to carrying heavy objects around.  However, if it's being used "in the world," practical strength training trumps gym work; Beef Manslab simply isn't going to be as good at carrying a hundred-pound load for days on end as a Sherpa or a paratrooper, never mind that Beef Manslab can throw both of them in the air at the same time one-handed.  So too with martial arts - if martial arts exist to solve practical problems, then the idea that "just step out of the way" is a bad training form is ludicrous, and this is a solution that Lowry derides at one point as a trivial solution.  This is especially egregious considering that the Shinkage-ryuu is where the Japanese version of the full-contact waster - the fukuro shinai, or "frog training sword," which is a conventional shinai in a leather cladding for a layer of padding - was invented.

I understand his point in this, especially dealing with steel weapons as he does - as I write this, my right knee constantly aches from a low blow from a rattan sword that simply knocked my knee cop aside, and Lowry describes a moment where he could well have concussed his sensei with an errant bokken to the forehead.  However, any form of combat training exists first and foremost to solve a potential real-world problem, and Lowry himself makes this distinction numerous times, that the idea of self-defense is a relatively late graft on the martial-arts tree and that the original forms were for doing violence in service of a cause.  Thus, as a training methodology, a method that does not involve actual combat with minimal controls with an actual human being fails to be a complete training method.

This is not to say "I could run the floor with Dave Lowry."  I could not.  I would not even dream of it; I would in fact be much more interested in learning from him than lecturing him, and that is why I consider this such a good book.  I have not met the man, but merely by reading his experience, I got a sense of why this matters to him, why it matters in general, and what points I would keep and what points I would discard.  Even Lowry himself, in his questioning of whether or not he really needs to know how to decapitate a man partway in case of suicide, makes this "keep and dispose" distinction, for all that he has a clear reverence for tradition, so it is my fervent hope that he would understand my thinking here.