A close-up on disarming, or opening the hand (Ceinture Noire Hors Série n°1)

C.N. The ideal of Budo, of the Japanese Martial Arts is best incarnated by the samurai who remains impassible in the face of death. What do you think about this?

R.D.: Martail Arts may indeed bring a person to this level. But everything depends on the individual concerned: he is the one who brings his training to the level of a martial art. Some people go training to practice a little sport, or to play some sort of game. Some want to learn tricks which are sure to work without having to make any effort. The person who gets really involved will transform his training into self-defence, or a combat sport, or if he really devotes a part of his life to it, a martial art. If we train twice a week and outside lessons we don’t even think about our training, whatever we are doing, it is not a martial art..

C.N.: Has the fact of being faced with death had any impact on the martial practice?

R.D.: Yes, provided the person who is faced with death has accepted the idea and has decided to get over the risk. If, when faced with the risk he has behaved like a victim, he will regress. This is why preparation is important.

C.N.: Is that to say that one must have accepted the idea of death in order to overcome the trial?

R.D.: This is clear! But this is really about preparation. Sometimes there is no time to think about the right way to react. So having accepted death will give us a good foundation, a very positive reflex. But the real task is to accept that we may well die even though we love life: at that moment we will emerge stronger than before.

C.N.: An ancient proverb says: “One must desire to fight without desiring to win, but also without desiring to lose.” What do you think of this?

R.D.: I agree with this: if we desire to win, our emotions act as parasites. Conversely, we must not have, for a single second, the idea that we might lose at the moment confrontation. We can think about beforehand but not while it is going on, in order to concentrate the best on what we are able to do, like a conscientious student.

C.N. Finally, could you tell us about the time when you won without fighting.

R.D.: I was a security agent in a shopping centre and I had beena attacked by a young man whom I had to beat up. His brother cam back with a baseball bat, and he was at the other end of the shopping-centre, about two hundred meters from me. He ran at me to hit me. When he was a few meters away I said to myself, “What should I do?” Either I plough into him, but you are never sure to win, or I run away and I lose my job, but that is not the answer. Then I had a stroke of genius. I cried out to him “Stop!”. He was so surprised and disorientated by my reaction that he stopped dead. And I said to him, “You’re not going to hit me with a baseball bat. You can’t imagine the mess…!” he was shocked and stupefied and I pressed my advantage by taking him by the arm and saying, “Come on let’s have a drink. We need to talk about this. You don’t seem to have understood me. There are favourable moments in which to attack someone, either before or after the height of their anger. If we couter-attack at the very height of their anger, this is not very clever. In my case this boy had just run a hundred meters brandishing a baseball bat and screaming and hurling abuse at me. He had spent a lot of energy. The height of his anger was already spent. So, I attacked him psychologically at the right moment and it all finished over a drink. The end of it was that he went home and beat his brother up for behaving so badly.