Day 258 of writing every day.
This weekend was occupied by the monthly seminar that my aikido dojo hosts. We invite our dojo’s head shihan from Tokyo to Osaka and ask him to instruct us on how to use our bodies correctly to better understand what the purpose of the techniques used in training are for. Five hours or so total over a two-day period is quite a lot of content to go over and I can’t remember everything, so I made it a goal to jot down notes to help me recall what had been taught.
While aikido has spread out across the world and probably peaked out in popularity, it has a steady base of practitioners that have continued to hold strong for an art that does not promote itself like sports with competitions. There is a school of aikido that had been sportified (against the founder’s wishes) that holds competitions, but whether it should be called aikido is another debate that should ask if “aikido” is now a blanket term for the art that practices throwing and pinning techniques among other things from a variety of grabs and strikes, or if it’s a method of personal development based on the principles of aiki and budo.
The term “aiki” has been, for a lack of better words, redefined lately as well, with many martial arts YouTubers and whatnot hopping on the buzzword bandwagon to call what looks to be the mysterious state of being able to control someone like a ragdoll effortlessly simply through touching while in a relaxed state to be the application of aiki. The founder of aikido would describe aiki as something more along the lines of some energy that permeates across the universe and associate words like “love” and “truth” to describe aiki.
However people choose to define aiki, aikido inherently is a budo that has martial aspects which need to be trained with sincerity so that one is not blindly imitating demonstrated techniques and movements, but also understanding how they and other people are using their bodies. Otherwise it might deteriorate into a social physical activity devoid of its original meaning and then risk getting appropriated by people with imaginative ideals about what needs to be introduced to fix and “modernize” the way aikido is practiced.
I’m open to the idea of being progressive in terms of having less rigidity and absolute hierarchy within a club or dojo. Everyone is still on a learning journey even if they’re in the position of giving instructions and boasting years of experience or rank that would give weight to their words and methods like any other setting such as a trade or academia.
The human factor complicates things especially when it comes to how the body and mind works. New discoveries continue to be made disproving knowledge that turned out to be inaccurate in describing the complexities of the human body and things work. There is also a qualitative aspect such as when performing an exercise that one engages the right muscles and has the correct weight distribution that can’t be seen when viewed from the untrained eye.
Sadly, prideful people will say that they’ve got x years of experience in whatever and that gives them the right to be authority on the issue, even if they got most of it wrong and teach or modify things that superficially address issues that stem from a lack of understanding of the fundamentals.
Once knowledge is lost and misinformation gets passed down, it becomes ever more difficult to sort out the truth from the fillers that got invented over the years. I’m doing my best to train with an adherence to the original budo integrity of techniques and body usage while maintaining an open feel that isn’t isolationist either. I’m only at the beginning of my journey though.
Thanks for reading!
One Chance Works 