Friends, students and family are invited. Aloha attire.

Mahalo

Professor Jays family greatly appreciate the prayers and kind wishes of their many friends but ask for privacy at this difficult time.

The Bruce Lee Foundation hosted a 70^th birthday celebration at the Empress of China on Grant Avenue San Francisco Chinatown and guests from far and wide came for the event guided by Linda Lee Cadwell and Shannon Lee. Events began with a traditional Lion Dance display by highly skilled artists before Shannon Lee Cadwell gave a warm welcome to all those in attendance, a gathering that included Grandmasters, actors and dignitaries. Throughout the evening there were martial arts demonstrations and speeches by friends and family of Bruce, sharing their memories and experiences of him. Also featured was ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ star John Smith performing a special dance routine in honor of Bruce Lee.

Grandmaster William Cheung from Melbourne Australia spoke and showed his skills in the art of Wing Chun while Tommy Carruthers and his wife from Scotland demonstrated their abilities in Jeet Kune Do. Bob Wall, martial artist and actor from Enter the Dragon, spoke of his friendship with Bruce and shared stories and Richard Bustillo also shared his experiences of Bruce.

Shannon Lee spoke of the Bruce Lee Foundation, it`s projects and educational programme and gave a special singing performance whilst Linda Lee Cadwell gave us a deeper insight into the man and his family through her memories of her life together with Bruce.

The evening ended with a 70^th Birthday Cake, a live auction of memorabilia and hand crafted jewellery and an intimate video of Bruce’s life. This was a rare event for people to share and speak with the friends and family of Bruce Lee.

Professor Leon Jay

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Small Circle Jujitsu’s success – says Leon – lies in its simplicity and its effectiveness.  “Small Circle cuts to the chase in many ways. Finger locks for example.

“When you’re being attacked, what’s generally coming at you? If they’re grabbing you, for smaller people, women or kids or anyone really, finger locks are brilliant to take people down with.

“I was talking to some doctor friends at a party, and on that same day they’d been in London at a conference about the active mind and the motion of the body.  This is where they are using Functional MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), a form of brain scanning that shows what parts of the brain become active when a subject is asked to perform a physical or mental task.

“They told me that when it came to the fingers, 75% of the active mind was working.  So in other words, if I take a hammer and create pain on the fingers does that make it happen the other way – is 75% of the brain affected?

“They said yes, it’s a continuous feedback loop. And that’s why finger locks are so effective. A lot of the time the pain can take a person by surprise and take them down and get you out of some real bad trouble.

“Through trial and error and study we mapped the pressure points and reintegrated them into Small Circle Jujitsu, so that they release each joint in the body to make the locks even more effective.

“Small Circle has been brought to kung fu, karate, martial arts of all styles and people with no martial arts background.  We’re not just stuck in one place – Judo, or Ju-jitsu. It works across the board; there’s Aikido and Savate and Silat – it transcends stylistic differences.

“One of the key elements is about not having to use massive amounts of power to control people – we control them with as little effort and, therefore damage to them, as possible.

“Students take on board the 10 principles that Dad drew up and apply them to their own systems. There’s balance, avoiding head on collision of forces, mobility and stability, mental resistance to an attack, concentrating the maximum force to the smallest point, energy transfer, the two-way action of the fulcrum and lever and making a base, sticking to your opponent and feeling what he’s doing, rotational movement, and transitional flow – where you can flow from one technique into another effortlessly,” explained Leon.

While Small Circle’s control and it’s openness to other arts are the keys to its effectiveness, Leon is keen to put distance between Small Circle’s inclusiveness and the smash and grab techniques used by some MMA and those who teach them.  “I can understand why the traditional schools feel they need to protect what they do.

“If you look at some of the MMA schools, it’s just let’s beat each other up. There’s no real concept of bushido to it. There’s no real honour there or a loyalty. People come in and just use you for a while and go.  Dad used to take the best of things and incorporate them, but the type of person he is, well he is really something else, something special.

“In his judo team, Dave Quinonez, who still is with us in Small Circle Judo, won the High School Nationals and it was great, but Dad went to the guy David beat in the final and told him what he did wrong.

“And our people were like, ‘What are you doing?’ And he said, well, it’s not just about us being the best; it’s about us elevating the level of the sport, and the art. That’s where he came from.

“A lot of people just want to hoard it, but Dad’s never been that way and neither have I. People reveal themselves soon enough anyway.  Dad tells the story of how one of our juniors, attending a ‘Big Three’ Seminar, came running up to him all flustered.  He said he should come quick as Prof. Remy was ‘stealing all his material’.  Dad just laughed and told the kid it was okay; he did just the same to Remy, “We call it sharing”, he said.

The key is not just talking about having an open mind, it’s actually practicing what you preach, experimenting with the different approaches, and most of all doing so with some honesty and integrity.  “I’ve seen a lot of people come to our seminars and not even step on the mat. They just take notes and then I’ve heard later from people who left their club that after that seminar they came back and said: ‘Now I can reveal these secrets to you’.

“And I think, ‘Oh, come on’. But you have to pass this stuff on.”

On any given night in one of his Small Circle classes in Leatherhead, Surrey (if this is going to the American market, substitute ‘in the suburbs of London’), the teaching will flow from sparring, to knife defence, pressure points, sticks, grappling, and whatever else pops out of Leon’s extraordinary mental library of nearly 50 years of exposure to martial arts taught at the highest possible level.  Nothing is hidden, but common sense and safety dictate students’ access to the strongest techniques.

Leon settled in the UK after meeting his wife Sandra travelling in Europe.  “I grew up in California and Dad took us all over the country.  All over Hawaii, and Mexico, Canada and afterward I travelled on my own and I got tired of California and Europe appealed to me.

“I met my wife while I was sailing in the Greek islands – a nice English girl from Carshalton on holiday with her girlfriends. I really enjoyed Greece and Italy and the proximity of England to the rest of Europe.

“I find London more relaxed and cosmopolitan than California now. The violence and the crime levels in many U.S. cities are pretty bad now. I used to carry a gun in California, man. Not good.”

Leon returns home often and he’s turning his attention to the US again as he aims to reorganise Small Circle’s schools and SSJ-trained instructors across the Atlantic.

“The organisation itself is very small and we’re going through a change right now. There are people who claim to be doing Small Circle and they probably are or have been trained at some time.

“When Dad put me in charge he said there are some people over here and there, and I just want you to let them do what they want to do, and I honoured that.  Now it’s come to the point to where we’ve trademarked Small Circle Jujitsu, but someone else in Boston has also trademarked Small Circle Jujitsu in another way. How can that be right?

“Also we’ve had people forging my father’s signature on grading certificates. So it’s time to reel all that in and tighten up the website to identify who’s really doing Small Circle Jujitsu and who’s not.

“There are a lot of people using some techniques and elements of Small Circle within their own systems, which is the way Dad wanted to do it at the time and that’s fine. I don’t have a problem with that.   But is has to connect back to us. People can’t just keep creating their own certificates and forging my father’s name – it’s just got to stop.

“Yes, like my Dad, I’ve let people do what they do, but if you leave some people to their own devices they can behave pretty badly – it’s bad news and we’re putting a stop to it,” explained Leon.

However, he has created a legitimate path for groups to acquire and use aspects of Small Circle.  When he first took over as the Second Generation Head, there were tens of thousands of people world-wide who had some seminar training from his father, but relatively few full-teachers of the art accessible to everyone who wanted the training.  He wanted to expand that access, but didn’t want to drop standards in the process.  He was discussing the problem with John Mellon, the first UK based teacher to host his father more than 20 years ago and a close friend ever since.  They decided that the best way was to offer a second tier of training, the Small Circle Concepts Programme.  They first designed the Programme and began to roll it out in 2002, but found it unsatisfactory for a range of reasons.  They’re about to launch a completely redesigned Programme shortly.

Here’s how Leon describes it, “The Programme has a core group of modules, taught in a seminar format.  Each study module covers particular skill areas, principles and representative techniques, and the idea is to develop Small Circle grappling skills.
“It doesn’t matter what background you’re from; you may already be a grappler, who wants to refine your mechanical efficiency, or you might be a striking or weapons specialist who sees the value in plugging a gap in your skill-set.  You can choose to take all the modules, at which point we have three levels of instructor training available also, or you might want to just pick and choose.  The only restriction is that you must take the Foundation unit  – a sort of ‘Small Circle 101’ – first, because without it, the rest won’t make nearly as much sense.

“The rationale is that you may have attended a seminar in the past, and thought I’d really like to have those skills, but not wanted to abandon what you already know.  This way you don’t have to – you can just augment your own skills.”

If his father’s teaching could be boiled down to one, simple philosophy it would be ‘share and grow’.  Leon explained: “I’ve learned a lot from him – especially his openness with information and tuition.  As he was freely giving this out, you’d think, ‘Dad, hell, you’re giving away all the good stuff’.

“And he’d say, ‘This is what makes me become better.’  So it’s about growth.  I don’t care who you are, you always come to a point where you think oh, my God – like writers’ block or something – where you think you know nothing.

“Then you dig and you dig and you find more to learn. So keep going and going. And you know Dad’s always been so humble with it.”  Leon stops for a second and then laughs out loud.  “Ha. That’s something `I’ve really got to learn,” he says. ”That’s a tough one.”

Written by Clive Goodman

Sat 20th February saw the town of  Nairn, in the Scottish Highlands host a Small Circle Jujitsu seminar taken by Professor Leon Jay, Grandmaster of Small circle Jujitsu and son of the world renowned Great Grandmaster and Small Circle Jujitsu founder Wally Jay.

The seminar was organised by Mr. Myles MacRae (4th degree black belt Taekwon Do) and was attended by around sixty Taekwon Do practitioners from the United Kingdom Taekwon Do Federation (to which Myles is affiliated), some having travelled from as far afield as Edinburgh and one student from China to attend. A few members from the local Wado Ryu Karate club from Livingston were also present.

Professor Jay gave an outstanding three and a half hour seminar covering the basic principles of his Small Circle style.  Participants began by learning simple finger locks and progressed quickly to more complex techniques including arm bars and some very effective and characteristic pressure point techniques with the emphasis very much being on close quarter combat.  Latterly Professor Jay discussed energy transfer techniques, breathing exercises and chi.

Everyone enjoyed the seminar immensely and was impressed not only by the effectiveness of the various techniques they were shown and how they complemented the more long range techniques commonly practised in Taekwon Do but also the relaxed and friendly manner in which the information was disseminated by Professor Jay,  who was always happy to do a little one on one demonstrating to ensure everyone had a firm grasp of the purpose and application of what was being taught.

All in all it was a great day with all participants leaving feeling inspired by what they had learnt.  It’s been ten years since Professor Jay last visited the Scottish Highlands to give a seminar, Mr. MacRae and his students are hoping it will not be another ten before he returns again!

By Robin Coltman

Leith TKD (Edinburgh)

http://leithtkd.co.uk/

http://www.actaekwondo.co.uk/

It’s never easy taking over from a legend, so when martial arts giant, Professor Wally Jay handed on control of the Small Circle Jujitsu system to his son Leon, he could have been forgiven for feeling as if this was an impossible act to follow.

After all, Professor Jay Snr – 92 this year – is one of the last surviving greats of 20th century martial arts.

His combination of judo, jujitsu, Western boxing, Filipino arts, hapkido, kung-fu and other arts formed a devastatingly effective style that is revolutionary even now, let alone more than 65 years ago when the seeds were first sown growing up in Hawaii.

Coming from the comparatively cosmopolitan Hawaii, where he studied judo under Ken Kawachi and Kodenkan Jujitsu with Juan Gomez – a disciple of Master Henry Okazaki – moving to mainland America and California was a culture shock, explains Leon.

“Dad had a hard road to travel back then because the Japanese were pretty insular. The difference between Hawaii and California was vast. Hawaii‘s people were all kind of squashed together and mixed up and open with each other.  But in California the Japanese people who had come there straight from Japan weren’t that way at all. They stuck to their own selves and were very traditional in that way.

“And being Chinese in a Japanese art, well it was really tough. That was one of the things Bruce Lee liked about Dad, because here was a Chinese guy like him who was taking a Japanese art and beating them at it,” laughs Leon.

“Bruce was intensely proud of being Chinese and he liked the idea of taking the best of something and developing it,” explained Leon.

Leon would come home from school to find Bruce sitting on the doorstep of the family home in Oakland waiting to train with his father. “That whole anti-Japanese thing was a bit of an obsession for Bruce. Mind you, that didn’t stop him having a Japanese girlfriend before he met Linda though.

“She’d tease him about it. Bruce would look at something – an umbrella, a gun, pretty much anything and point at it and say, ‘That’s a Chinese invention.’  She would smile and say, ‘Yes, but we made it better’,” laughed Leon.

But the two men were as one when it came to breaking down rigid thinking, says Leon.  “Dad really did think outside the box. A lot of his peers in Okazaki style jujitsu put him down for it, too. “They’d say that’s not the way Professor Okazaki did things and he’d say, ‘But Professor Okazaki changed things; why aren’t we?’  So some people got frozen in time,” he shrugs.

While there is no-one more fiercely proud of his father’s legacy than Leon, he will protect Small Circle’s legacy, but run it his way.  “I had a revelation last year that brought it all home to me,’ he explains.

“Professor Dave Castoldi is one of our most trusted friends and professors in Small Circle and he’d come to London from Massachusetts for a seminar. They asked me up to see him and teach there, so I was happy to and did a segment.  I took my son Liam with me; he was three and a half at the time and he was jumping around and playing on the mats and I had this big flashback – that was me all those years ago when I was a kid and my father was teaching in all those gyms.

“It was just a real déjà vu moment. I started when I was two officially, but my folks told me that before I could walk I was like, slapping the mat and copying everybody.  I’m the youngest of the family. My sisters and brother and cousins are all 10 years plus older than me. They were all on their way and pretty much black belts as I was coming through, mostly in judo.

“Dad had a judo team in the 60s and 70s that really dominated everything.
At the same time he was developing his jujitsu so they worked hand in hand. He always said our jujitsu wouldn’t be as good unless we did the judo as well,” he added.

Leon trained with his father from almost before he could walk, but there was no inevitability about his succession. “To a certain extent, none of us kids had a choice back then growing up in California.  Now they’ve all moved on and don’t practice any more, but in those days you’d go to school, come home, clean the gym, do lessons, dinner, homework, bed. Next day the same and then tournaments at the weekends, sometimes both Saturday and Sunday; I don’t want to make it sound hard because we enjoyed it, but that was life.

“All the other kids were playing outside and I’m training. At school they wanted me to join the wrestling team, but dad wanted me to concentrate on the judo. But I was never really that good at judo. Dad had the top team in the country and, my God, it was a nightmare trying to keep up with those guys.

“I was always a little bit rebellious. Actually, when I really found my feet was when I broke away and started studying karate. People expect you to be a certain way because of your father but his image is so big people over there always looked at me and compared us.  But I’m not him, I’m me. Dad has always been quite pure in many ways where I could be, well, kind of a bad boy.

“Karate was something Dad didn’t do so nobody expected anything of me because of my family or who Dad was. And for another it suited my body style because I was lean and flexible – so I could do all that aerial c**p at the time,” he laughs.

Black belts in jujitsu, judo, karate, and tae kwon do followed – along with training in Western boxing, kali, and Remy Presas’s stick fighting.  But it was Leon’s study of pressure points with George Dillman that took Small Circle into new territory again.

“When I was learning jujitsu there were no kicks in it at all.  Dad didn’t do any kicks. He did throws and joint locks and chokes and did them brilliantly. Still does.  He’s getting on now, had his heart bypass a few years ago, but at seminars near home he might come down to the mat, inflict some terrible pain on someone and then disappear again.

“But because my body style is suited to kicking and all that jumping around that I got from karate, some of it found its place in the Small Circle teaching,” said Leon.

“After all the different training, all the styles, after all that, you come back to what really works.  And when you’ve been in a few street fights you work out what to use and what to discard.  What you’re left with, well, it’s pretty basic. The fancy stuff is just for looking good, It makes you feel good in front of the mirror when you’re around your friends and stuff, but in a street fight you want to stick to what’s going to work and making sure you get away unhurt when people won’t be persuaded out of a fight,” he explained.

“So I introduced kicking and the pressure points. Dad used some of the pressure points but he didn’t study them in any depth. He knew that when you hit in certain areas it made the body do this or do that.  Say, like a hit to the triceps tendon would weaken the elbow, loosen the body; stuff like that, but he hadn’t studied it in depth or detail.

“In the 1980s, when he and Remy and George Dillman got together ,and started doing The Big Three tours all over the world, Dad told me learn the pressure points and said, ‘If you don’t you’ll be left behind.’

“So I did, I got into it and I was fortunate because back then when George and Dad and Remy were really huge all over the world I toured with them and after the seminars while they would be in the front room talking with an organiser or promoter, I’d be in the kitchen with George’s top students talking until three or four in the morning sharing Small Circle, pressure points and stick fighting techniques.

“It was a great time and was very exciting because hardly anybody back then was doing pressure points that way, and the finger locking and Dad’s joint locking was really happening and Remy’s stick fighting was devastating. They brought it all to the forefront.

“I were just very fortunate to be around at that time when the pressure point techniques were so wide open and meet these guys. I mean, Remy’s gone now, and Dad’s stepped back.

“But you have to recognise and ride those opportunities.  I took a lot of our Small Circle techniques and because I knew which pressure points to hit I just modified them.

“So with study and trial and error over the years, I found that if you touch this point, it’ll release this joint. So when I do wrist locks I’m touching on small intestine then large intestine then crashing from fire to metal, stuff like that.

“It’s enhanced it and it’s also fed back the other way. A lot of the karate guys, the pressure point people, have had Dad and me in for seminars so they could study our movements and look at the applications that might be possible for their katas,” said Leon.  John Mellon, an old friend of ours, has been telling people for 25 years that traditional karate is about 60 – 70% grappling.

There’s no doubt that Small Circle’s accurate mapping and scientific use of pressure points has made Leon a star – albeit a pretty reluctant star – of YouTube.  There are upwards of 100 Small Circle clips uploaded on YouTube, many showing Kyusho knockouts and some, controversially, no- touch knockdowns.

“We took a lot of our one-arm chokes and jujitsu techniques and applied pressure points and before we knew what was happening, people were passing out. They were dropping all over the place, man and if they didn’t go straight out, then the follow-up was the grapple.

“I would add grabs and strikes into it and sometimes the people would just collapse and go and if not, I’d be moving into the choke or the arm bar or the leg bar. Flow – keep going until something works. This ‘one punch, one kill’ crap; I don’t think so,” said Leon.

“There are some tough guys out there, man; some just don’t feel pressure points. There are guys you can put the arm bar on so strong the arm breaks and they just look at you and laugh.  OK. So what do you do now?  Now you’re taking out legs just so they can’t chase you,” he adds.

“I once got into a situation with a guy on PCP at an Earth Wind and Fire concert in the States.  He was about 6ft 4ins or something and he just wanted to kill me. No matter what I said or did he wouldn’t listen.  So I picked him up and threw him on his head and there’s blood gushing everywhere. He got up so I picked him up again, cracked him on the ground again, kicked him in the head and you’d see his eyes roll around in his head and then just come back again.

“So Holy s**t – finally I got down and I’m choking him out and I see his eyes roll back and he’s finally out.  I walk out onto the concourse with blood all over me and I just want to get away. Then I hear behind me, ‘Hey – where’s that Chinaman?’

“Amazingly he’s up again – short of just busting his legs, what was I going to do? The next thing I knew he’s run into a group of Chinese people who were nothing to do with me, but in almost no time he had eight of them on him and I was gone,” says Leon.

“One of our friends is in the New York Narcotics squad and he did the pressure points and Small Circle, and he said when you suspect someone is on PCP or cocaine you go for the inside of the thigh because they make the gallbladder very active and Liver Nine becomes susceptible. Pop that – it just takes the guy out for a while,” he laughs again. “This stuff is street tested.”

But it’s his use of no touch techniques at seminars that has become easily the most discussed aspect of Small Circle online, even though in his classes it forms no part of his teaching.  “The ‘no-touch’ stuff? I’ve done 88 people so far. I don’t exactly know why it works. I have theories about it and I’ve heard other people’s theories about it but, I don’t think anyone knows for certain.

“I think that we can raise our energy levels and influence other people’s energies around us, the organic matter. I’ve heard of people affecting inorganic matter, but I haven’t seen it. It’s not that I don’t believe it; it’s just that I haven’t experienced it for myself.

“I can understand why people find this hard to believe. I used to see this stuff in movies and think, oh yeah, yeah, yeah! Then someone I knew actually did it and I thought, well, he wouldn’t lie to me.

“So finally Jack Hogan in Florida showed me how to do it and it was just weird.  But it leaves a lot of questions. Why doesn’t it work on everyone, for one? Clearly some people are more susceptible than others.

“And like I’ve said  many times, if someone is attacking me I’m not going to be looking at them going ‘weooooh’,” says Leon waving his fingers in the air.

“But ‘no-touch’ makes it more interesting for me; I’ve always known that there’s more to martial arts than the purely physical.  And being able to affect someone from a distance is fantastically interesting. Some people want to pooh pooh it; that’s fine but it’s probably because they can’t do it themselves, man. And if they ever did do it, they’d probably terrify themselves.

“A lot of people who have been around martial arts for a long time just flat out don’t believe it. They’re just into blasting people. No problem with that, it gets results. But there’s more to it,” explained Leon.  And anyone doubting Small Circle’s effectiveness is welcome to try stepping onto the mat at one of the seven packed classes a week in Surrey.  Or try one of the dozens of Small Circle seminars, camps and conferences Leon travels to around the world from New Zealand, to Europe and throughout America.

Written by Clive Goodman

There are a number of arts of which I’m proud to say I can now do a bad impersonation.  Now that may seem that a strange thing to boast about, but I think even a poor impersonation of Wally Jay or Leon Jay is something to celebrate!

Prof. Wally has always said that his is a very simple art, and that’s true, but unless you have been training a long time and had a very good education in the arts, it is hard to see what he means by that, especially after you’ve attempted a ‘bad impersonation’.  It is true that Small Circle is not complicated, but it is simple in the way a sea-shell is not complicated.  There may be a very simple outer form, but inside the structure is a complex geometry.  Small Circle Ju-jitsu is a comprehensive system and a constantly evolving art, and Leon Jay has brought the destructive principles of Kyusho Jitsu and Tuite into the mix in recent years.  A large technical base and high standards inevitably mean a long learning curve and therefore relatively few specialist students.

As more and more martial artists now cross-train, it occurred to us that we wanted more people to have the opportunity to train in the art.  Prof. Wally travelled the world for 30 years or more demonstrating what was possible, and we wanted to create access to more than occasional seminar study. Small Circle Concepts is designed to give you an opportunity to develop some of the superb grappling skills without having to learn all the material in the system.  If you’re already a grappler, it may be helpful to know that whatever your style Small Circle’s concepts are applicable; as a truly conceptual art, its principles will improve your efficiency without having to surrender your preferred approach.

As someone who has been ‘adopted’ into the Jay family circle, I believe that I am able to see it clearly, and as the Jays are so open and sharing, I have been able to examine the art up close.  Early on in my relationship with Prof. Wally I was simply trying to ‘see’ the mechanics of the art.  The Prof. explained what he was doing very clearly, but his movement is so subtle it took practise to really see it – personally I make no great claims for reproducing it as yet.

The first module, “Small Circle Mechanics – The Triceps Tendon Armbar” could well be labelled “Small Circle 101”.  It is designed to teach you both the mechanics of the grip and of the footwork required to support it.  If you do nothing else, this will change how you understand the basics of the art of grappling and increase your conscious awareness of your own techniques.

This module is the key to programme and is the first module that any student should attend; further core modules concentrate on Body Throws, Wrist Locks, Finger Locks and Entry Techniques and these can be studied in any order the martial artist finds convenient , with an additional two supplementary modules in Transitional Flow and Counter Throws currently offered.  Should participants complete all modules they become eligible to take part in the intensive Small Circle Concepts Instructor Programme, which has three levels: Apprentice, Associate or Full Instructor.

Instructor Modules

Written by John Mellon