Jim Wagner Reality-Based Personal Protection

Traditional Kung-fu school goes Reality-Based

Jim Wagner 

When you think of the country of Switzerland you probably think of international banking, quality chocolates, world class watches, picturesque mountain scenes with cows casually meandering about on green hillsides wearing large cow bells, but you don’t think of crime or terrorism there. Most people don’t. Indeed, violence is plaguing their European neighbors located to the north and west of their borders, but Switzerland has remained untouched; at least when it comes to horrific radical Islamic terrorist attacks. Crime has increased, largely due to some “bad apple” immigrants from war torn countries like Somalia, and who have little respect for Western law and order, but terrorism is still unfelt in this picture postcard country. However, the Swiss are not ignorant people. The Swiss military, police, and security companies know that it is just “a matter of time” before their peace-loving country (a country that has not been in a war since 1847) is hit, and they are preparing for the inevitable. What is surprising though is that some martial arts schools are starting to “wake up” to this fact as well. One such school who sees the writing on the wall is the WULIN Martial Arts Academy, which has its headquarters located in Volketswil only a 20 minute drive from the most populous city in Switzerland – Zurich. 

The WULIN Martial Arts Academy is a traditional martial arts school, and the moment you step foot into their main school of four schools this is quite apparent: long Chinese calligraphy scrolls on the walls, burning candles next to Buddhist statues, the light hint of incense wafting through the air, and Asian architectural accents adorn each room. The owners of this martial arts confederation are Fredy Jundo Kuhn and Sandy Taikyu Kuhn who offer their communities the arts of Kung-Fu and Qi Gong, along with yoga and Zen meditation. However, pull open up one of the black doors of the storage closets in the main training hall and you’ll find Airsoft pistols, the Impact Head, and the Jim Wagner Training Knife. That’s right, Fredy and Sandy are Jim Wagner Reality-Based Personal Protection Knife Survival instructors, and have been for a few years. However, this year they made a decision to expand their RBPP footprint on the communities they serve, and they decided to start getting certified in more subjects that I teach. For 2017 they decided to start with the Defensive Tactics Expert Instructor package, and this December is when I made it happen for them. 

I was already scheduled to teach the owners and top instructors at the Swiss Security Academy in Zurich, Switzerland for six days overlapping the first two weeks in December. This had been planned months in advance. Then, lo and behold, I get an email from Fredy and Sandy. It was an email of disappointment stating, “Jim, the courses in Germany had been cancelled?” For you see, I had originally been scheduled to teach three different instructor packages (Defensive Tactics, Knife Survival, and Terrorism Surival) in Cologne, Germany through my host of 10 years Boker (the famous knife manufacturer headquartered in Solingen) the last week in November, and that extended into the first week of December. Boker had cancelled these yearly courses, because they were restructuring their company, and in this major shift of direction they decided to drop all extra-curricular activity, and one of the casualties was my Reality-Based Personal Protection courses. Unfortunately, a lot of students throughout Europe, and two instructors as far away as India, had been planning on coming to the Cologne courses to get additional instructor certificates from me to expand their businesses. Joe Joshi of Fitcomb has already introduced approximately 20,000 people to my system in India. Oh sure, Boker properly notified everybody enrolled in the course, but some people, like Fredy and Sandy, tend to sign up just a few days before a course for a wide variety of reasons. I didn’t even know that they were planning on attending the Defensive Tactics Expert Instructor package in Cologne, and the reason was they didn’t know in advance if they were coming or not was because they didn’t know if they’d have anyone to cover for them while they were away. Then when they finally decided to come, they found out the bad news. So, I replied to Fredy and Sandy’s email telling them that I’d give them private lessons in their school while I was in Zurich. Sandy called it “karma,” and I called it “God’s good timing.” 

On December 4, 2017 Fredy and Sandy picked me up from my hotel in Zurich. They came to get me in their company car, which serves as a mobile billboard sign for their school; it is wrapped in state of the art graphics. They then drove me Volketswil, which is 20 minutes outside of Zurich. When I entered their school it reminded me of my own beginnings in the martial arts as a young man, because I had started my long journey with traditional systems: Tae Kwon Do, Karate, Kenpo, Kung-Fu, et cetera. The school had the same “feel” as some of those I attended from my past. After a brief tour of the place we got right to work. With their instructor outlines and pens to the side on a study table we started with the Reality-Based Personal Protection warm up in the main training room. Within minutes my two students realized that even the warm up has a lot of science and tactical considerations involved.