Why Kobo is Important
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I love coffee. Always have, as far back as I can remember actually knowing what coffee tastes like. So when I was looking for a job during a “break” from school, it was only natural that I should apply at Starbucks. I did and was hired. Actually, I worked at Starbucks several times, as well as a few other coffee shops, but this story takes place at the Starbucks store at the perimeter pointe shopping center in north atlanta.
The last time I did a stint at Starbucks was the second half of 2001, and the manager of our store was a woman named Sherri. She was nice-ish, but the two of us had major problems getting along. Though we both had good intentions, we seemed to go about everything in totally different ways. Of course, my way was infinitely superior in every possible manner of judging.
At least my drinks were better, and this I know because regular customers and other staffers often told me so. The thing was, nobody seemed to understand why. I would often ask them how they could tell the difference, being as how we both used the exact same recipe for every drink on the menu. Even my coworkers were hard-pressed to put their fingers on exactly what is was about Sherri’s drinks that didn’t taste right. The answer was obvious, once you thought about it.
Sherri and I were the two fastest drink makers in the store, and we both worked mornings - the busiest shift. When you have a line that stretches to the sidewalk, you always want the fastest person possible to be making the drinks, because that’s the most labor-and-time-intensive part of giving each “guest” the “Starbucks experience” (you have to use this kind of terminology when you work for a corporate chain). To be even more precise, the thing that takes the most time is steaming the milk for things like cappuccinos and lattes.
This is a fairly innocuous step in the making of an espresso-based beverage. All of the Starbucks literature goes on and on about the careful roasting and special packaging of the coffee. The cups describe the “perfect” shot of espresso - a twenty-second pour of one ounce of 192-degree water through I forget how much ground espresso beans and what pressure. Nobody ever really says much about the milk because milk is milk, and you can’t screw that up, right?
The process is actually very simple. Cold milk is poured into a stainless steel pitcher. Then the pitcher is brought up under the steam wand. The tip of the wand goes a little under the surface of the milk, and the “barista” opens the valve to allow hot water vapor to pass through the milk. The air froths the surface of the milk up a bit, and then the wand is pushed down into the bottom of the pitcher to heat the milk evenly from the bottom. Once it reaches about 140-150 degrees, it’s considered done, but it’s still good up to 170-something degrees, at which point it burns.
Now there are two ways to go about this. First, i’ll tell you how Sherri did it. When things were busy, Sherri didn’t want to have to wait for milk to heat up before putting it in drinks. So she decided that the most efficient way to do things was to fill the pitcher with as much milk as possible and steam it until it was as hot as possible. That way, she would have plenty for several drinks, and it would stay above 140 degrees for longer.
On the other hand, I would only steam small amounts of milk at a time, and only to the bottom end of the temperature spectrum. It would seem that this would require more steps when making a lot of drinks, but it actually requires much less time to steam a small amount of milk than it does to steam a whole pitcher, especially to a lower temperature. Instead of putting the pitcher on the rack at full steam blast, I would actually stand there and hold the pitcher while I kept the steam at a low level to heat the milk gradually. This made all the difference.
With the Sherri-method, you end up with milk that is unevenly heated. Some parts of it are nearly-scalded, and some of it is nearly-raw. This mixes together and gives a sour flavor to the drink. You can’t detect this right away, but the more you cook milk, the faster it goes stale as it cools. So what often happens is that you buy a drink at a place like starbucks and, by the time you get to the bottom half, it doesn’t taste good anymore.
However, if the milk is steamed gradually and evenly, and doesn’t ever get anywhere near it’s scalding temperature, it retains its fresh flavor for much, much longer.
So what, if anything, does all this have to do with kobo? Well if you’re practicing kobo correctly, it’s a lot like gradually heating and frothing milk. If you practice the way most people do, you’re trying to build algorithms for jissen, and those algorithms can never be adequate practice for something so dynamic. What about the scalding milk? That’s what happens when you try to learn jissen without a rational progression through proper use of kobo methods.
Allow me to explain:
How not to think of Kobo
First, I want to write a few words about what kobo are not. Kobo are not answers to various techniques; the actual combinations of techniques used have little value in themselves. The reason for this is pretty straightforward - there are an infinite number of possible attack permutations in jissen, since Taido techniques are made to be adaptable. This means that it is impossible to learn “defenses” against all of the possible attacks. Sure, there are a few “high-percentage” moves, but they are still virtually unlimited in their deployment because of the use of unsoku/unshin and rengi.
The way I see most people practicing kobo is based on this idea that they are algorithms for defeating various high-percentage techniques. For example, manjigeri is a very common attack in jissen. So what’s the most common practice i’ve seen for jissen all over the world? Hienzuki over manjigeri. This is universal at every club i’ve ever visited. The logic appears to be that since manji is so common, everyone will be better off if they know how to deal with it.
The problem is that people still manage to score with manjigeri all the time in jissen. Only relatively low-skilled players will ever throw the kind of manji that invites their target to jump over their heads and safely strike. There are fairly obvious ways to thwart this defense and score anyway. Yet, we continue to teach students that they should jump instinctively when they see manji.
Apparently, there is more to manji than is accounted for by the jump-algorithm. This is equally true for every other set of attack/defense kobo techniques I have ever seen practiced in Taido. For that matter, it’s just as true for all the one- and two-step sparring drills i’ve seen in karate, all the pattern drills in judo, and every single application in every self-defense book or course on the planet. Algorithms only work sometimes, and that makes them pedagogically insufficient.
A Better Concept
Having said that, we can go on to discuss what the kobo actually are. Simply: they are examples.
Jumping toward the head when someone attacks by manji is only one example of not being where the kick is headed. You can accomplish the same goal by several other methods without removing yourself from counter-range. Each one should be explored in an organic progression, but not memorized or drilled to the point of reflex-development.
The existing kobo routines in Taido do have some value to them. They show us that every attack has inherent weaknesses. They also teach us that it’s better to avoid by moving the body than it is to retreat. These are important things for students to grasp, and I think kobo are wonderful training tools for these two reasons. But there is a third reason for practicing kobo that takes them beyond “wonderful training tool” and straight into “incredibly powerful practice method” territory.
How to make great-tasting jissen
The most important thing to get out of kobo is the process. Kobo is a process of gradually building up to jissen, or combat. This buildup has to be incremental. Why? Because your emotional arousal will scald your performance if you don’t increase your tolerance to stress by adding heat and pressure slowly.
When most people start trying jissen, they are told to just dive in and try. This isn’t all that bad, since they are typically diving in against an understanding and friendly partner who will go easy on them. However, we all have anxiety about the possibility of getting hit. We also have anxiety about doing new things when we are unsure of our skills. Unless addressed, this anxiety stays with us.
Even after we have “gotten used to” the idea of sparring, our accumulated anxiety interferes with our abilities to respond appropriately to our opponents’ moves. Even before we have been moving long enough to be “winded”, we find that our hearts are pumping like crazy, and we are taking giant gulps of air. This is stress arousal caused by anxiety, and unless we deal with it intelligently in practice, we condition ourselves to trigger this response every time we do jissen.
This is the reason to build gradually from kobo to jissen. If we start out knowing what to expect and how to respond, we don’t feel any anxiety. As we gain proficiency, we can slowly begin to add variables such as speed and power, different unsoku patterns, possible counter attacks, et cetera. The important thing to remember is to add only one variable at a time. This keeps the change manageable and prevents the anxious feeling of not knowing what’s coming.
Eventually, we get to the point that we are improvising responses to complex signals at high speeds. If we have built up in an incremental fashion, this will not cause significantly more anxiety than moving slowly through a predetermined routine. Your muscles don’t tense, your teeth don’t clinch, and your breathing remains even. Your low level of emotional arousal allows you to observe and respond to things as they happen, and time appears to slow.
That’s magic. Imagine walking on to the court for a jissen match knowing that, whatever surprises your opponent has in store for you, you can remain calm and handle them. This is the edge that guys like Kaneko (who was all-Japan champion five years in a row, among other titles) have on the rest of us. This is also why most of us can do so much better in practice than we can in competition. Less anxiety. By practicing kobo as a method of incremental increase of combat variables, we can program ourselves to respond to jissen with a much lower level of emotional arousal, which gives us the ability to use the skills we have practiced in the most efficient manner possible.
Take a look at your own kobo/jissen practice and see if you can find some of your anxiety triggers - the things that make you “lose it” and make your performance go down the drain. Then you can step back to a similar drill that allows you to remain at a comfortable level of arousal. By designing intelligent drill progressions, you can deprogram years of built-up anxiety triggers in a few hours. Really. It just takes stepping back and rebuilding gradually.
Content of this page created by Andy Fossett exclusively for Taido/Blog.Tags: jissen, methods, practice, training, unshin, unsoku
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