Martial Virtue Within Koryū Bugei

Dear Ellis, thank you for another thoughtful essay, developing your notion of attibutes found in the more martial exponents of the generally considered soft art of aikido. I especially found your section on ukemi the most moving. I cried. Because it’s been a long time, perhaps the first time, someone who’s self-confessedly -no-longer-practicing aikido (that’s you…) who nonetheless managed to describe accurately and with great sensitivity the painful, and painfully slow, experience of doing aikido ukemi full- time, the tempering, the forging, of an aikido body…elastic steel. This description alone would have made this essay excellent but you went further… I don’ t really know, to be honest, whether some of those aikidoka you mention were as tough as people say and , according to others, even morally questionable for getting into fights in the first place. All I know is that sometimes fighting is unavoidable, even when it is the last thing on our minds.

I have come to realize that we are both asking the same question: viz. how do we acquire power in (or through) aikido? My own view, while respecting yours (because I also research other martial arts and combat sports), is to suppose that in the kata (the forms) of aikido are contained the ‘secrets’ and ‘internal training’ needed. I mean, when I go outside my discipline and find a useable point or two in a combat sport, let’s say, and decide to incorporate it into my aikido, I suddenly find on social media that other top aikidoka have been using these also (perhaps for decades).

The problem I see with merely grafting things onto aikido though, by people who aren’t fulltimer professionals (including those who are fulltimers but not committed to OS’s philosophy) is that the aikido part often gets left behind or changes and becomes less-aikido-like in appearance.

Perhaps it is, as you say, because people feel so good in training they lack the incentive to look into the more martial side. OK. But this lack in seeing anuthing martial in aikid kata seems to be shared by those who digress into other arts, creating hybrids
(aiki versions of MMA as you hinted) and they rarely return to the kind of aesthetically refined aikido which we assume O-Sensei was able to do, even with non-aikido attackers.

In other words, and I am not saying I am there yet, the experiment, as it were, to be as powerful as OS would only be half complete, unless we can take from what we see is powerful from these powerful students of his and plug them back into our aikido to make our aikido look like and function like OS’s aikido.

I have a feeling that you might agree with the functional part but not the aesthetic. I wonder what would happen though if you took a more wholistic assumption at the outset as I am proposing, namely that the aesthetic might be the expression precisely of an internal power, which we (most aikidoka, including the ones you mention) may not have found yet. Those people you mention were indeed powerful, if your reports and others’ are true. But that should not automatically mean that ‘their’ forms of power were, or are, identical to that form of power OS found.

My own view is that, while we might analyze different body movements, isolate them from the corpus of aikido techniques, and drill them, in the end, if we are committed aikidoka, we have to add them back in to every technique we do. And, having done this for decades now, I have found that some do, in fact, work that way, but others need modification if they are to fit every technique.

The best set of such moves though, assuming we find them independently of one another, must then, it follows logically, be combined, adding another level of complexity. So, while I agree with you that we should set aside considerations of leverage, angles, timing, etc so as to focus on the remainder where the secrets of true internal power ‘may’ lie, I would only advise this as a temporary measure and as part of the whole process of enriching our understanding of aikid kata.

Just to give you an idea of what I mean: while fighting is most often framed purely in terms of power differentials, instrumental thinking (strategy, tactics, threat level detection, us vs. them or an adversarial process with a clear winner-loser outcome), and an inevitable calculus resulting in the assessment yes / no, fight / no fight, punch into the gap or save it for later, fire this muscle but not that, etc, leading in turn to very specific training methods in the dojo and in the gym.

Or, if for job reasons (soldier, bodyguard) or personal reasons (such as saving grandma from being spat upon by a schizo with Covid-19), etc, we may have to act on instinct, whether we ultimately win the fight or not.. that is,the attitude is beyond training but perhaps a result of training (hard) with barely any instruction other than ‘sink or swim.’

Nonetheless, what I’m getting at is the notion of ‘braking’ (as opposed to ‘breaking’); an aspect of fighting underresearched in my view, perhaps because of the overemphasis on conventional uses of the terms ‘power,’ ‘efficiency,’ ‘winning a fight,’ etc.

We use eccentric slow(ing) contractions when walking downhill, for instance, where the muscle stretches under load rather than contracting into a knot as we normally envision muscle ‘contractions’ (a bicep curl, for instance). My own theory, which I begin to outline in my book ‘Aikido Body,’ employs this eccentric model bcause not only does it have functional value it also enables me to bring in ethics and aesthetics in one.

Isn’t it true after all that ethics is about ‘not doing’ certain things as much as it is about doing things..? And if, in the not doing, there is actually some doing going on which turns out to be the breaking function, which also turns out to stretch the limbs rather than contract them and thus, leading, incredibly and counter-intuitively, to recognizable aikido forms…

I am not sure, if my starting assumptions are correct but I do know that they have produced different (consistent if limited) results to what you have listed here, while the purely instrumental method, I can confirm, does produce power but at the expense, how can I put it, of a certain je ne sais quoi we see in OS and also among a list of powerful non-fighting disciples of his and students thereof: I am thinking mainly of the Yamaguchi-line but also the Hikitsushi school but there are others.

In summary, and I’m sorry for my long response, both approaches of testing power, IMO, while yieding different results, may help aikidoka aspiring to reach the higher echelons of technical virtuosity.

Thank you for this essay (work) and as usual you getting right to the point.

A student asked O-Sensei: „Why are you so strong?“ Amused about this question he said: „Because I trained hard every day for the last 60 years!“

„Today’s aikido is so dimensionless. It’s hollow, empty on the inside. People try to reach the highest levels without even paying their dues. That’s why it seems so much like a dance these days. You have to master the very basics solidly, with your body, and then proceed to develop to the higher levels…. Now we see nothing but copying or imitation without any grasp of the real thing….“ Gozo Shioda (1915–1994, Founder of Aikido Yoshinkan and long-time Uchi-deshi to O-Sensei before the war.)

Aikido is true Budo, a martial way! You don’t learn Budo to achieve the most efficient way to kill someone. Through Budo you obtain a higher moral and human level, which in a life-threatening situation, enables you to protect not only your life, but also the life of your enemy. Budo is to forging your body and mind by years of hard training. Every day! It’s like a Boxer that becomes focused, calmer and wiser through years of training and the insight that you have to control your temper, if you want to win a fight. In the end it is about learning how to deal with fear.