I assume you’re talking about my time in the Bujinkan, but I also spent a few years training a Danzan-Ryu offshoot. Danzan-Ryu is a hybrid art created by a Japanese expatriate living in Hawaii. Is it a Japanese Jujutsu, an American Jujutsu, a Japanese-American Jujutsu? I don’t know that the label is that important.
It would be American, since the founder founded the style in America, and used a large amount of Western influences like boxing and western wrestling. It is a Gendai Jujutsu just like Bjj. However unlike Bjj, it never took hold in Japan the way Bjj currently is.
Yeah, right now BJJ is pretty popular, especially compared to other jujutsu forms. But these things go in waves. We’ll see how it is 10-20 years down the road. My biggest concern is the increasing number of BJJ schools which train only for groundfighting competition and never have students learning how to defend a punch. If that becomes the norm, then I think the art will lose popularity among those who want to learn how to fight and defend themselves.
We'll there's a difference between the driving force of Bjj's popularity, and the popularity waves of previous martial arts. Before the first UFC, the martial art "fad" was typically driven by films and television. The Kung Fu craze largely came from Bruce Lee. The Karate craze largely came from the Karate Kid and/or Chuck Norris. The Ninja craze came from various Ninja movies in the 80s. The kickboxing craze came from Jean Claude Van Damme films. The Aikido craze came from Steven Segal movies in the early 90s.
This Bjj wave isn't driven by that, it's driven by perceived effectiveness of the system itself. That perception hasn't really changed in almost three decades, and thanks to Bjj's rather fluid system of reinventing itself, I don't see that really changing in the foreseeable future. I, like you were concerned about the direction that sport Bjj was taking the art, but I think Danaher really dispelled those fears due to merging the ridiculous stuff like butt scooting and berimbolos with leg locks and open guard sweeps.
The top guy in sport Bjj currently is Gordon Ryan, and he has ambitions to go MMA within the next year or so. If not for that closeness of Sport Bjj and MMA I would be concerned, but as I've said many times, MMA keeps Sport Bjj honest, and never allows it to go too far off the pasture.
Eh, I don’t know that I would put it that way (except as much as martial arts in general have a lot of under qualified instructors with inflated ranks and resumés). Yeah, if you consider JJJ to be a term which should o le be applied to arts which were created , in their current form, in Japan, then your options are limited. You’ve got the koryu arts, which deliberately limit their memberships. You’ve got Judo, Aikido, and portions of the Takamatsuden arts, which don’t usually brand themselves as jujutsu. You’ve got maybe a small handful of gendai arts which never achieved mass popularity but managed to maintain some existence (like the Nihon Goshin Aikido that gpseymour practices). You have Wado Ryu Karate which was originally intended to be an even blend of karate and jujutsu, although the jujutsu portion of the name was eventually dropped.
But for those who are not history pedants, claiming “Japanese” as a descriptor for their jujutsu is really just a matter of branding or perceived heritage, not an indicator of fraud. Heck, Helio Gracie for many years publicly insisted that he was teaching the true historical Samurai art of Japanese Jujutsu, unlike his competitors. Most arts practiced worldwide under the jujutsu moniker have, like BJJ, evolved from Japanese origins according to local needs and with influences added from whatever other arts and experiences that instructors had along the way. The differences in quality, I think, come down to the quantity and quality of fighting and competition experience that practitioners and instructors gathered along the way. BJJ started out with an unranked student who had no more than two years of Judo training presenting himself as a master of JJJ. Through generations of many, many practitioners getting in lots of fights and competitions, the art became something remarkable. Who’s to say that today’s “Billy-Bob Jujutsu”, founded by someone with a couple of years of Judo and Karate might not reach the same pinnacle.
Well keep in mind, I'm limiting this to just "Jujutsu", not Aikido, Judo, or Karate. Again, if you're constantly hearing that "Jujitsu" is effective, you're going to seek out something with "Jujitsu" in the title, and you're going to bypass anything that doesn't have jujutsu/jiujitsu in its title. So once again, what happens when you go through the jujutsu options in your area and they simply don't measure up to Bjj?
During the course of this conversation, I took the liberty of going through some "traditional" Japanese Jujitsu schools in some major US cities. The results (to be kind) weren't very encouraging.
We also have to consider WHY the other Gendai jujitsus never gained the level of popularity that Bjj has achieved, even in Japan. It comes down to the effectiveness of the system, and while there is a chance that in the future another system will come along and replace it, Bjj is going to continue to grow until that happens.
