Ashida Kim, bizarre How-to-be-a Ninja books, Dojo Press, and the Publishing History of some of the most notorious Ashida Kim Publications

As the phrase goes "High Weirdness by Mail" in American Pop Ninja Land

Greetings my beautiful lovelies!!

Had to try something new there, and I have been watching the Emmy Made YouTube series where a lovely and vivacious but sometimes eccentric woman named Emmy shares videos on food. Cooking food, eating exotic foods, unusual canned goods she has found, McDonalds from foreign nations or make your own McDonald’s style foods at home recipes, and, here’s where things can get important, foods that can be saved for long term storage, foods that are good for a survival situation, MREs from around the world (army rations AKA Meals Ready to Eat or MREs), and, yes, foods you can make real cheap in hard times. (Including a dish called “glop” that my mom used to make for us all the time. imagine that. As I said last week, I think it’s likely that food prices in the USA are going to go up and am educating myself a bit, just a bit, on how to stockpile and eat cheap and doing so in a fun way too. Life should be fun, even when you are scared it’s especially important to try to have fun.

Also with the possibility of tarrifs against China looming, one might also consider stocking up on some of those hard to find Chinese cooking ingredients such as Sichuan peppercorns, doubanjiang (spicy Sichuan dried beans), and Chenkiang vinegar just a thought.

If interested, I included a couple of her many, many videos below, but included two of many related to China. (And, hey, how come so few of you ignore these wonderful videos that I always share? Less then 20% of you click on the videos. I don’t know why. Often they are truly awesome videos, both entertaining and educational. I think these videos are great. )

Also if interested, I had another piece pubished at JEMS.com (the Journal of Emergency Medical Services ) . Here’s the link: JEMS.COM -- Mental Health Risks of EMS: Self Care and Prevention Read it if you like.

Speaking of EMS and ambulance related stuff, my Advanced EMT course is comng to an end in a couple weeks, and I am feeling a big time crunch. It’s a time consuming course, 7 hours plus of class time each week, 6 to 8 hours of time spent learning from the professionals in a local emergency room and performing I.V.s the last five Saturdays, and lots of homework and take home quizzes.

And to add to that today I must go to a memorial viewing for a classmate from this course. Gone at 60 years old, the unofficial report is that he and his crewmates went out with the ambulance to respond to a cardiac arrest, delivered CPR and other necessary care, got the patient’s heart to start beating again, and delivered them to the hospital for long term care. Not too long after return to the ambulance garage this EMT had a heart attack himself, and he himsef did not make it. Copake (NY) Rescue Squad EMT Dies after Medical Event While On Duty November 21, 2024 He died doing what he loved, but he died much too young while doing something stressful. Please appreciate your local EMS providers. Not only do they put themselves under large amounts of stress for the benefits of strangers, but they literally risk their lives from driving in snow storms or other weather when sensible people don’t go out, to being exposed to covid and other diseases (I made a personal choice to sit out the pandemic, but returned when vaccinations came out, and then caught covid anyway probably on duty), and these days EMS training sometimes literally includes tips on how to dodge bullets. (Hint. Bullets can ricochet and skid down down walls. Do not throw yourself against a wall if someone is shooting at you. Hopefully something that none of us ever actually need to know.) I mean you don’t have to be nice to me in particular, but please appreciate the people who are out there ready and trained to take care of you.

Unless they are assholes, of course, if you meet asshole EMS providers, and they are out there, please feel free to treat them like shit. But please be nice to all the others. And now for this week’s Asian studies fix.

So, this week, we take a week off from the saga of mass Chinese violence in the Gold Rush Era but I do love the subject and expect to return next week. In the meantime, we return to the works of Ashida Kim, self proclaimed American expert on not just all things ninja but much things Asian and exotic in general. Whoooopeeee!!!!

(It was sitting around 80% finished. Good to have plan for when things get tight.)

But first an update on a story from a couple months ago, the lawyer for Linda Sun, a Chinese American aide to New York State Governors Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul who was charged with espionage and being an unregistered foreign agent, has released a statement in her defense. (Hochul fired her by the way. Cuomo did not.) See my piece Linda Sun, the Chinese spy in NY who was paid partially with Nanjing Salted Ducks This was reported in the Albany, New York based newspaper the Times Union. See 'This indictment is about money': Linda Sun spins charges of being Chinese agent It’s probaby behind a pay wall, but as you may recall Linda Sun early in her New York State Government career was a DEI or Diversity Equity and Inclusion official. In my piece about her, I expressed my views on DEI people. To recap, while I definitely think diversity is a good thing for many reasons both practical and ideological,. I also, no surprise, think racism is bad, but it needs to be said that overfrequent and frivolous charges of racism empower actual racists, and just make things worse. I also stand by everything I said last time where I said a lot of DEI people are “hate filled bullies who enjoy intimidating others” (or words to that effect), and I definitely feel that a lot of defective people out there lash out using charges of racism when you corner them and they have no other defense because they were caught red-handed doing something naughty and poorly thought out. Therefore, I confess I laughed when Sun’s lawyer said the entire thing is racism and only happening because society is not ready for a financially successful and very wealthy Asian. (Please see my extremely long piece on the subject, where I compare her publicly recorded New York State salary in her position with the vast amount of wealth that she had amassed . . . somehow. No one knows how because she has not been convicted yet, but the Chinese consulate was sending her gourmet food including Nanjing Style Salted Duck so some think the Chinese Communist Party might have sent her some cash too, like huge amounts of it, because even the Chinese Communists learned long ago that cash motivates people much more easily than Marxist ideology motivates them. Okay. ‘Nuff Said.) So, yeah, I laughed at that. It would have been so much better if she had just done like Alice Guo (see many previous pieces New! Shorter! -The Evil Mayor Alice Guo takes selfies in captivity being the latest to learn about her) and said “I really don’t remember how I got all those cars. Are you sure they are mine?” or words to that effect.

Please enjoy this week’s piece. Thanks for stopping by.

WHO IS ASHIDA KIM AND HIS PUBLISHING HISTORY

Several weeks ago, I shared a book review of an erotic, pulp fiction ninja novel called The Erotic Adventures of Ashida Kim. How not to write ninja pulp erotica - The Amorous Adventures of Ashida Kim The book reviewed was, semi-amazingly, written by Ashida Kim, Ashida Kim being the pen name of a White American martial arts enthusiast most likely but not necessarily named Radford William Davis. In the 1980s, at the height of the Ninja film craze, Ashida Kim began writing “how to be a ninja” books and has never stopped. I wrote about his first book, Secrets of the Ninja, here: Enter the American Ninja, Ashida Kim, a legend and name of renown in the realm of how to be a ninja book publishing. It’s one of several pieces that I have written on Ninja pseudo-history.

Since then Kim has written many follow up books offering readers his interpretation and views on what a ninja should be and do and how they should act with the results being viewed as widely varying in quality. After unpleasant interactions with multiple publishers (from Kim’s public statements and my inside sources at one of his publishers, I can say they were unpleasant on both sides), Kim took to self publishing and his books can be found at either www.ashidakim.com or www.dojopress.com . They tend to be overpriced and with very hefty shipping fees.  

Most people consider “The Erotic Adventures of Ashida Kim” to be his worst and most bizarre, with “Secrets of the Ninja,” his first, beiing arguably his best.

In this article, I am going to write about some of Ashida Kim’s other most notorious or bizarre other publications.

The Publishing History of “The Amorous Adventures of Ashida Kim.”

This novel is hard to find. Second hand copies are virtually non-existent, (I couldn’t find any, and I’m pretty good at googling.) and it’s not available through Amazon and the usual sources for on-line book purchasing, perhaps in part as it has no ISBN number, a standard piece of data used by book dealers. The only references to it are a few snarky reviews that mock the book. A google search reveals no copies for sale on ebay or elsewhere. Bookfinder.com, a website that helps people find second hand books does not find any. Abebooks.com, a website offering access to a network of different second hand books sources found none, and despite an automated book search at that site for all Ashida Kim books none appeared. Google books does not help in this case.

The only place to buy these are through Ashida Kim himself, and there they are quite frankly way overpriced. (I suspect that Ashida Kim is quite aware that people are laughing at him. I also suspect that he has decided to simply laugh all the way to the bank and charge as much as he can for his most notorious products.)

How “experts” pop out of nowhere sometimes, Ashida Kim, and the niche he carved out

Years ago, I read a book on controversies in psychotherapy entitled “House of Cards, Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth,” by Robyn M. Dawes. (Copyright 1994, The Free Press, New York) This was a very important field at the time (and still is) as many innocent people were being falsely accused of terrible things including sexual abuse of children when none had occurred and even worse being part of non-existent Satanic cults that not just also performed sexual abuse in rituals but also human sacrifice and kiling babies and worse. (By the way, these same bizarre claims in a modified form, with the same lack of actual evidence, have re-emerged as part of the “Pizzagate conspiracy” and other Qanon conspiracy claims and they have a great deal in common with medieval and even Roman Empire claims of the same thing. I wrote about in my book More Scams from the Great Beyond. (Buy my books please.)

These same problems with misunderstandings of how human memory works and the misuse of techniques that were falsely believed by many to aid in the recovery or restoration of “missing” or “repressed” memories led to many strange claims of not just bizarre and extreme abuse often of a sexual nature, but also reports of abduction by space aliens. ( I have written about this too, several times in The Skeptical Inquirer as well as in my book More Scams from the Great Beyond. but also more recently not just here but in an academic book, you can download for free The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony )

Dawes was s a Psychology professor knowledgeable in how psychological research is done and comes to be accepted. One of the most important points that he makes in this book is that when the pubic and society become interested in a subject, especially important problems, they will seek out “experts” who are knowledgeable in a problem. Inevitably someone will appear who will say “I am an expert on the subject, and I would like to tell you all about it.”

Now, importantly, sometimes this person does not actually know very much about the subject, particularly if the subject is of questionable veracity and may not even exist. Two examples are the above named Satanic Ritual Abuse claims and the UFO Abduction claims both of which have or have had widespread belief but no evidence of reality and yet despite this lack of evidence for which countless “experts” can be found who are quite willing to speak at length on the subject.

And the same was true of the art of ninjutsu. The ninja craze in movies of the 1980s and the idea that ninjas were real led to a demand for people who were willing to teach others how to be a ninja or produce materials on how to perform ninja skills.

Therefore, despite any evidence that most claims of ninjutsu have any real historical basis (see either my pieces here using the searchable archive or see Professor Robert Tuck's "Critical Ninja Theory" substack newsletter ) self proclaimed “experts” on how to be a ninja and practice the arts of the ninja and develop the skills of the ninja have naturally emerged.

In the 1980s, the first two of these were Ashida Kim and Stephen Hayes.

Of the two, Hayes had the better claim to legitimacy and is better spoken, writes in a more believable fashion, and is respected among skilled and respected martial artists, In the 1980s, he moved to Japan with the goal of studying martial arts, spent time studying in a school ( dojo) in Japan that advertised that it taught Ninjutsu, and came home to the USA and taught, shared, and wrote of what he had learned. As far as I know, none actually dispute any of this although the credentials and background of the school in Japan and its teacher need to be carefully be examined before one can verify that what he has been teaching is something connected with an actual historical group of people who could be called ninjas. Many dispute that it is. Hayes had a falling out, I have heard, with the teacher in Japan and in recent years, Hayes has been moving away from using the term “ninja” in his school and teachings. He is the author of many books, and I hope to write more about him and his teachings in the future.

The other self-proclaimed “ninja expert” of the 1980s who emerged was Ashida Kim. Kim is a White man who uses an Asian name, oddy enough a half Korean, half-Japanese name, and has never offered any explanation as to where he learned the ninja arts, instead stating that a true ninja would never reveal the source of his knowledge or who his teachers were and thus it must stay secret.

I have a medium size carboard box full of Ashida Kim books, and it is indeed a box of wonder. While his first book, Secrets of the Ninja, was actually not bad if you just wanted to learn “ninja like skills” without worrying about authenticity over the years they have become stranger.

Unfortunately, there are a couple Ashida Kim books I would love to have but have not been able to acquire. Because I am one of those people who obsesses over things I cannot have, I will write about these today. I am compelled to do so.

It seems (and Ashida Kim is not alone for doing this) that when Kim saw or heard of something that excited him, something Asian, exotic, and somewhat related to the martial arts, he would write a book about how to do the things he had heard about and try to teach others how to do them.

And thus it is that one gets a large number of books that mix together Japanese and Chinese terms (interestingly often using the older Wade Giles transcriptions) without any real pattern and include strange claims to historical events and organizations that are questionable at best and in some cases I suspect he or someone else invented whole cloth, with step by step instructions intended to teach the reader how to do things that are often impossible to do.

The impression is that if Ashida Kim has heard that people in Asia have an “art” and are able to do something, then he often seems to claim to be able to do it too, and to do it amazingly well. Of course, when he writes about it, he mixes in his own ideas, and thus we get books like the following.

History of Ashida Kim’s “The X-Rated Dragon Lady” Book

I mentioned there were two Ashida Kim books that I would love to get my hands on. The first of these is called “The X-Rated Dragon Lady.” It is not to be confused with Ashida Kim’s “Dragon Lady of the Ninja,” a completely different book published by Paladin Press. I already have that one. I also have his book “Ninjutsu for Women, Ninja Secrets of Defensive Fighting” and a book called “Kunoichi, Deadly Sisterhood of the Ninja,” which despite having the author listed as “Terri Shimua,” a woman, I believe to be heavily connected with Ashida Kim. Of course, I could be wrong. Sometimes I make mistakes.

So I have three different books that are or appear to be Ashida Kim books teaching nina skills to women but I want a fourth one and it’s just too much money for me and second hand copies are virtualy impossible to find.

WAIT!! STOP THE PRESSES!!

Sorry I interrupt my own writing because I just discovered there is yet another Ashida Kim how to be a lady ninja book on the market . . .

All I can say is please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. I obviously need some money ASAP.

https://dojopress.com/catalogbk109.html

Back to writing about Ashida Kim’s “The X-Rated Dragon Lady” book

Okay, we’re back on track again. . .

-

And that book is called “The X-Rated Dragon Lady.”

I therefore set out to learn what I could about the pubishing history of the book.

Having no idea where else to go, I went to archive.org, also known as “the Way Back Machine,” a website that archives other websites and is useful for tracking their history and changes.

I have not read “The X-Rated Dragon Lady” but it’s notorious in some select circles. It’s sort of a non-fiction, x-rated, women’s self defense book. I have heard, but not confirmed,  that it includes detailed instructions on things like killing abusive boyfriends in their sleep (not that I’m terribly opposed to that on moral grounds, if the guy deserves it, mind you, but it sounds like a tough sell to the jury to claim self defense in such situations) and a discussion of the advantages a woman has when she fights a man while naked. (Haven’t read it, but I assume he argues that it’s distracting. Not sure. I’d make a joke about offering to practice martial arts with naked women here, but I know if I did, it would come back to haunt me someplace. Regardless, I am not aware of other self defense instructors who argue that being nude is an advantage for a woman in a fight.)   

So let’s see what the way back machine can teach us about the history of the most extreme Ashida Kim books.

https://web.archive.org/web/19991007055200/http://ashidakim.com/bookstore.html 

The earliest archive for Ashida Kim’s website is from October 1999. While The Erotic Adventures of Ashida Kim does not seem to exist yet, The X-Rated Dragon Lady book does exist.

By the way, you can see that Ashida Kim is advertising materials from the Black Dragon Fighting Society, Count Dante’s organization. The interactions between Kim and that organization are an interesting subject, but reportedly they sued him asking him to stop, but later came to an accomodtion, and now he is allowed to sell their materials including a membership certificate for the organization. (I would love to have one, by the way, but they just cost too much.)

While the Wayback machine did not save the first appearance of the book, here is an early advertisement for it.

DOJO PRESS... CATALOG PRODUCTS Ashida Kim Books Book-14

https://web.archive.org/web/20040609003356/http://www.dojopress.com/catalogbk14.html

Here’s a variant of the advertisement.

As for the book itself, here is what the cover of the book looked like on December 10, 2004.

Interestingly enough, that same picture was used to advertise The Erotic Adventures of Ashida Kim. One has to wonder whether or not Kim had difficult getting two different women or even the same woman to pose twice for such a picture, but it would be mean to write such things.

Interestingly enough the book disappeared for a while but it’s back again, either the same book with a different title or most likely a modified reworking of the original materials.

Alas, it seems unlikely that I shall acquire this book any time soon and I will have to make do and try to learn to live a full life with just the three Ashida Kim women-oriented ninja books that I already own.

Ashida Kim’s Secret of the Jade Bedroom

And for all you folks out there who wore out your copy of “The Joy of Sex” and were wondering what to read next, yes, Ashida Kim did write a how to book on love-making and how to perform better in the bedroom.

First, as mentioned elsewhere, and this is accepted historical fact, the early Taoists of China had a great interest in how to maintain one’s health and increase longevity. They were quite concerned with balance, and proper use and maintenance of the human body, and this extended to the area of human sexual relations.

Being strong believers that the way the world worked involved interactions of yin and yang or feminine and masculine energies, and acknowledging that human sexuality (usually) involved the interplay of the feminine and the masculine, they naturally had ideas and teachings on the healthiest and best ways for human beings to engage in sexual relations. A great deal was written about this over the centuries and a great deal has then, naturally, been written about what was written. (As always, I have not written about these things here. Perhaps some day. I remember when I started, I was worried that I would find enough to write about here. Alas, this is definitely not the case.)

And if the ancient Chinese or Japanese wrote about how to best do something, then it seems Ashida Kim will claim to be a master of it as well and write a book about it.

And as we read (or at least I read) in Ashida Kim’s allegedly autobiographical novel, The Erotic Advntures of Ashida Kim, Kim is a master of the ancient Taoist sexual techniques. He is able to withhold his ejaculation for a long, long time perhaps indefinitely and thus please his partner best while they share each other’ yin and yang energies.

Which leads to the next obscure Ashida Kim how-to book:

This is the cover of the early editions of the book. The blurb is shared beIow.

DOJO PRESS... CATALOG PRODUCTS Ashida Kim Books Book-25

https://web.archive.org/web/20040609015715/http://www.dojopress.com/catalogbk25.html

But there’s a newer edition. You can order it here.

https://dojopress.com/catalog/dragon-lady-of-the-ninja

Here’s the book blurb.

 

This week’s truly awesome videos!!

Despite her race and my featuring her videos here, EmmyMade is not an exclusively Asia oriented YouTube channel, but the sheer volume of videos there is such so that one can easily find a great deal on Asian related subjects.

I don’t watch them all, but they are usually fun and if they are not, I turn them off and find one that is.

https://www.youtube.com/@emmymade/search?query=china

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Thanks for stopping by!! Please come back next week and tell all your friends!