Where our art comes from

Shorinji Ryu Aiki Ju Jutsu is a modern school built on old ideas. The name points to China, where some of those ideas began. Shorinji is the Japanese reading of “Shaolin Temple”. Ryu means school. Aiki means joining with an attacker’s energy, and ju jutsu is the art of yielding.

Like most martial arts, ours has more than one source. Two streams feed it: Chinese ideas about softness overcoming strength, and the Japanese close-combat arts that became ju jutsu and aiki.

This page follows both to the present day. Where a famous story turns out to be legend, we say so.

China: where the idea begins

Fighting skills have been recorded in China for well over two thousand years. Wrestling and “hand-fighting” appear in court and military records centuries before any temple was linked with them.

The best-known story says an Indian monk, Bodhidharma, taught the Shaolin monks to fight some 1,500 years ago. It is a good story, but historians have traced it to a manual written around 1624, and it only became widely believed in the early 1900s.

What the records do show is still impressive. Shaolin monks fought in battle in 621. By the 1500s they were famous for fighting with the staff, and in 1553 they helped defeat a band of pirates. Their empty-hand boxing came later, in the late 1500s and 1600s.

By then China already had a rich fighting culture well beyond the temple. In the 1560s General Qi Jiguang named sixteen fighting methods of his day, among them specialists in kicking, throwing and joint-locking.

China’s best-documented gift to the Japanese arts was a principle. A Chinese military classic about two thousand years old teaches that the soft and yielding can overcome the hard and strong. The saying at the heart of ju jutsu, “softness controls hardness”, is traced to that book.

Japan: from ju jutsu to aiki

Japan’s oldest chronicles, written in the early 700s, tell of a legendary unarmed duel that was won with kicks. Close-quarters fighting was part of a warrior’s training long before it had a name. The first school with a firm founding date is Takenouchi-ryu, in 1532. It taught fighting with a short blade, strikes to vital points, grappling, and ways to capture and restrain an opponent.

The word ju jutsu came into use in the 1600s. Under the long peace of the Edo period (1603 to 1868) hundreds of schools grew up. They taught throws, joint locks, chokes and strikes to vital points, for use in everyday dress instead of armour.

Ju means pliant or yielding: give way to an attack, redirect it, and take the attacker’s balance. It describes how force is met. It does not mean being gentle with an attacker.

When the samurai class was abolished in the 1870s, ju jutsu lost its place in society. Kano Jigoro, who had trained in two of the old schools, reshaped it into judo in 1882 and gave it a new life in education and sport.

The documented history of the aiki arts begins with one man. Takeda Sokaku (1859 to 1943) travelled Japan from the late 1890s teaching what he called Daito-ryu. His school’s tradition traces the art back to the 11th century through a samurai clan. Researchers have found no record of it before Sokaku himself, and most regard him as its founder, or at least the person who gave it its present form. The name “aiki-jujutsu” first appears in 1922.

Aiki means joining with an attacker’s energy. In practice it means taking someone’s balance at the instant of contact, often through the very point where they grab you. Timing does the work that strength would otherwise have to do.

Sokaku’s students carried the art in different directions. Ueshiba Morihei developed it into aikido, a name made official in 1942. Okuyama Ryuho founded Hakko-ryu ju jutsu in 1941. Others kept Daito-ryu itself alive. Every major aiki art traces back to this one teacher.

Britain: how the art reached us

Ju jutsu arrived in Britain around 1900, when Edward Barton-Wright brought the Japanese experts Yukio Tani and Sadakazu Uyenishi to London. Tani took on all comers in the music halls, and both men opened their own schools.

Edith Garrud, who trained under them, ran a self-defence club for suffragettes and from 1913 trained the Bodyguard, the movement’s protection unit of about thirty. In 1918 the Budokwai opened in London. It is described as the oldest Japanese martial arts club in Europe. Aikido followed after Kenshiro Abbe arrived in 1955. He is described as the first master to teach it in Britain.

Our own line came by a longer road. By the style’s own account, in the late 1960s a British student came home from Melbourne, where he had trained under a German-born judo and ju jutsu teacher, and opened a club in Keighley, Yorkshire. He came to call his style Shorinji Kan, which can be read as “Shaolin Temple hall”. From the late 1970s it spread through university clubs across Britain.

Our school grew from that tradition and is part of the Aiki Budo Fraternity, a group of clubs teaching aikido, aiki ju jutsu, ju jutsu and other Japanese arts. The aiki in our teaching comes through the Fraternity’s teachers.

So the name Shorinji is a nod to the Shaolin tradition, as many schools’ names are. It is not a claim of an unbroken line back to a Chinese temple or a samurai clan. What we teach is Japanese ju jutsu: the throws, locks, pins and strikes of the old schools, with aiki timing and Japanese etiquette, shaped in Britain for self-defence.

Why it matters today

Much of this history circles one question: how do you deal with someone bigger, stronger or more aggressive? Some of the old teachers’ answers are still useful today.

Street defence starts before the first move. The tradition has a word for it: zanshin, a relaxed alertness to what is around you. It also holds up the ideal of winning without fighting. UK police guidance says much the same in plainer words: talk first, calm things down where you can, and use force only when you must. We teach this alongside the physical techniques, as the thing to reach for first.

The techniques allow a measured response. The law in England and Wales allows reasonable force in self-defence. You need not wait to be struck first, but what you do must be proportionate to the threat. No technique is lawful in itself. Locks, holds and balance-breaking are meant to let you scale your response and let go when the danger stops. Police officers are trained in holds, joint locks and restraint, and licensed door staff in escorting and simple holds, as a last resort.

Confidence comes from calm. The tradition calls it fudoshin, the immovable mind. We call it being calm in the storm. Practising with partners, week after week, is how we work towards it.

We won’t promise you a new personality. Research does suggest that how a martial art is taught matters. In the studies that compare teaching styles, schools that stress etiquette, self-control and avoiding conflict are linked with lower aggression than those that teach fighting technique alone. The studies are small and mostly of young people, so we treat this as a reason for how we teach, not a guarantee.

Respect is built into every class. Each session begins and ends with a bow. The budo scholar Alexander Bennett describes it as a mutual pledge: I will give my utmost, I will harbour no ill will, and I trust you to do the same. Practising joint locks safely depends on that trust.

Your instructor

Sensei Adam Saunders, 4th Dan, has led the Bristol school since 2006 and has been teaching for more than twenty years. His approach comes down to one phrase: be calm in the storm. Whether the lesson is an escape from a grab or a defence against a blade, the aim is the same unhurried control.

Adam also studies Goju karate, which adds directness for the moments that call for it. He teaches at international martial arts gatherings, and keeps classes as small as he can so that everyone is taught, not just supervised.

The best way to understand any of this is to try it. Your first session is free: join us.