Sharp Spear, Crystal Mirror by Stephanie T. Hoppe

Author:Stephanie T. Hoppe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Martial Arts/Women’s Studies
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2012-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

Were these values in your family also? That you learned from your parents?

That’s part of it for sure. All of those things were there, but also when I was younger, I used to beat the shit out of people—boys; I had to fight with boys all the time. Judo just—you already know you’re better than somebody else and you don’t display that. Only if it’s absolutely necessary. I think it makes you a softer person, not a hard person, if you think about it in the right way. I can be a very dangerous person. I could do lots of things to you or to anybody because of my knowledge. But I don’t think about that. I think about putting a stop to something before it gets to that place. I don’t want to deal with it that way.

But I stopped doing Judo in the 1980s. I haven’t done any Judo for years. Not because I don’t want to! I don’t have the time; I put it into the self-defense.

In 1969, after I came back from Japan, I had a lot of women coming into my Judo club and saying, “I’d like to learn how to defend myself.” And I’d say, “Well, you can. You join the Judo club, and probably in five or six years you’ll be able to do that.” And of course they would leave. But like most martial artists, I felt that the only way women could learn how to defend themselves was to practice a martial art, to really practice it. Over and over and over—it’s repetition.

What I was finding was that women were leaving Judo, because that was not what they wanted. And Judo’s very hard, because you have to take falls, and a lot of people don’t like that. That’s why Karate also is much more, I think, impressive or—easier. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have hard practice, but when you get slammed on the floor all the time, that’s very different. I was losing these women, so I decided that I should look into teaching an experimental kind of class in self-defense. I had seen a book on self-defense for women. I thought it was a joke, but there were some things in there, and I said, I’m going to do that. So in 1969 I did, through the Judo club. And it was rather fun and the women really enjoyed it.

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