http://www.quest-l.com/collection/teaching.php
Teaching Authentic Ninjutsu?
I realize that it is not the kind of thing some people really want to hear, but one of several reasons that I stopped teaching stealth and "sneaky" survival courses after the 1980s was that I had tended to attract a lot of people with some major social and psychological defects as a result of being "the ninja guy" who dominated the martial arts media of the 1980s.
It seems that a lot of people who are attracted to creepy things are... ...well, kind of creepy.
Maybe someday I will write a small book about all the unbelievable but very true adventures I had with creepy people who abandoned their families, stormed out on dads who warned them that they were losers, and hugged their fantasy novels (in the Carlos Castaneda and Hobbit days of 20 years ago) to move to Dayton and "be a ninja".
And of course, with all of the penniless "dustballs" hanging around my scene, all of the real producers and influential people of society stayed away from what must have looked like a cult of weird outcasts.
I went somewhat underground in the late 1980s, leaving the media scene and doing things in protective services that allowed me to test out and explore what I had learned, and what it was that real people seemed to need most in life.
When I re-emerged in the mid 1990s, I realized that Hatsumi Sensei knew what he was saying when he urged me to withhold most of the ninja material that I had been taught as a student in Japan in the 1970s. Yes, there was a good reason that Hatsumi Sensei changed the gi fronts from NIN to BUJIN when all the books in America (sorry!) forced him to open the dojo to the public in the early 1980s.
We offered To-Shin Do as "self defense and self-development" when I came back to the public in 1996, and I am delighted with the caliber (and number) of people that are now a part of my life.
I was just extremely fortunate to have been there at the right time to have been taught authentic ninjutsu. Actually, my first 3 degree certificates were in Togakure ryu, not Bujinkan Dojo martial arts. As it turned out, I was there for the years when Sensei was verifying what he had been taught by his teacher. I was lucky, in that I got to learn the real ninjutsu (without the creepy people around!) that Hatsumi Sensei has been working for almost 20 years now to put back in the shadows.
That said, it seems that there is considerable demand from good Quest Center people for actual training in the stealth aspects of what is the root art of To-Shin Do.
Let me work on putting together a workshop and some curriculum elements that can be practiced after the workshop is over, and I will discretely get word out to the Quest Center students and persons who are in sympathy with what we are doing.
This will take quite a bit of time to arrange (do not look for the seminar in the next few months - maybe not even in 2001), and I will warn you many times before you get to the training grounds that real ninjutsu mind and invisibility training is probably not anything at all like what most 1980s movie-goers might expect.
- Stephen K. Hayes
