Ueshiba Morihei’s Solo Staff Practice: Beyond Hidden in Plain Sight

Because of some recent discussions on Ueshiba Morihei’s solo weapon practice, I would like to add some thoughts of my own. I am going to excerpt a relevant passage from my second edition of Hidden in Plain Sight, to set some context as to what Ueshiba was actually doing, followed by some recent observations I made during a trip to Japan, followed by another passage from HIPS.

From Hidden in Plain Sight – Chapter 13: Is The Heart Of Aikidō The Sword?

Passage #1

I was absolutely stunned by his use of a sharpened staff in a film from his trip to Hawaii in 1961. Ueshiba starts by repeating a number of movements, sometimes two or three times, and then his whole body is relaxed and at the moment of the simulated deflection his whole body snaps into an ‘implosive/explosive’ channeling of body power. The power emerges from his root and center, and out through the staff—downwards, upwards, sideways, and at angles. Imagine the moment when a bullwhip snaps—the relaxed coil unfurls, and then at its length, it pops—in this case, not only at the tip, but throughout its length. Ueshiba goes from relaxation to a ‘snap’ with all his muscles coordinated, so all the power goes through the weapon. Were he using a long spear, it would have flexed like a tree in a high wind. He is not doing it in the snappy manner of jūkenjutsu nor is it the movement used in the powerful clacking together of staffs that we can observe in Goto-ha Yagyu Shingan-ryū. This is an essential technique of Hōzōin-ryū. To be sure, he could have studied it elsewhere. He could have figured it out on his own. But the dates add up—around the time Takeda lived for months with the Ueshiba family in Ayabe, Ueshiba was out in the garden working on spear technique.

Recent Observations- 2019

I was recently walking on a beach near Kamakura and happened upon a yearly Matsuri, in honor of Benzaiten. She is a goddess of health, wisdom and music, but most importantly in this context, associated with the sea. Once a year, devotees go to the sea, pray for fortune and also thank Benzaiten for offering them the bounty of the sea rather than its destructive power. Various kannushi enacted ritual dances, prominent among them versions of Ameno Torifune no gyo, Norito no Sojo, and Otakebi okorobi.  These three practices are central practices within Shinto, and through his adoption of the practices of the Misogikai, central practices of Ueshiba Morihei.

At this point, another priest stood up, donned a tengu mask and picked up a small replica of a hoko. This is the socketed spear, brought over from China, used in war from the Yayoi through the early Heian Periods. Long abandoned as a weapon, it was retained in replica, and used in ritual dance: bugaku, the court dances that have roots going all the way back to Persia and China through transmission along the Silk Road,  and in Shinto rites. The wooden hoko that the priest picked up was about four shaku in length, the same of that of an aikijo. The tengu – for properly done, this is no longer a priest with a mask – he should become a tengu – then enacted a number of movements. In slow, stilted form, he enacted a number of movements, albeit stylized, that were simulacrums of those of Ueshiba Morihei in his solo jo practice.

I wish to be clear that I do not believe that the tengu dance I witnessed was unique to that particular shrine. Rather, there is a largely unstudied substrate of ritual martial dance among Shinto practices. These weapons-dances tell various stories of the acts of the kami, and embody the dynamic interplay of forces within an ordered (by the kami) cosmos.  Please remember that Ueshiba frequently used a small sharpened spear and he referred to it as a nuboko (“Heavenly Jeweled Spear”), the generative instrument used by Izanagi and Izanami to create the Japanese archipelago. Ueshiba, absolutely obsessed by Shinto (and not only the Omotokyo neo-Shinto version) would have been as influenced by such practices as he was by the ‘empty-handed’ Shinto rites of the Misogikai that were part of his daily practice in the last decades of his life.

What Ueshiba didn’t do (unlike some of his successors) was make a numbered choreography – the 24 jo kata, the 31 jo kata, etc. However, his practice was not impulsive, disorderly improvisation either. I believe that Ueshiba took as his base the movements of Shinto rites. Then, influenced by his spear practice, jukendo training, observations (or perhaps study) of such ryuha as Kukishin-ryu, he imbued these ritual movements with martial virtue.  As I write in the second passage from HIPS that follows, without having to worry about the well-being of a training partner, he could, thereby, unleash full power in his technique. For one example, the upward sweep to the eyebrows and thrust forward into a thrust is an embodiment of ikkyo. Done with the power that Ueshiba exerts, it is training that would turn ikkyo into an upward and downward snap of the opponents arm. [NOTE: by snap, I do not mean a ‘snappy movement.’ I mean to break the arm like a rotten tree limb]. What Ueshiba is doing is quite far from the mannered, almost prissy solo jo forms so many do. Nor is it the enactment of a fantasy of weapon’s techniques against a fantasy opponent. It’s a chain of power detonations.

From Hidden in Plain Sight – Chapter 13: Is The Heart Of Aikidō The Sword?

Passage #2

There are some very good reasons to believe that Ueshiba may have derived his solo staff form from the Kukishin-ryū solo staff. First of all, there have been such rumors about Kukishin-ryū staff ’s relation to aikidō for many decades. Second, there are several unique techniques that are shared by both. Third, this is a ryūha with which Ueshiba had a connection for many years, certainly on a spiritual level, and this school was one that, unusually, had a solo form that performed a spiritual function quite congruent with Ueshiba’s own interests. Finally, a review of Ueshiba’s training and teaching history shows that he found a way to pay homage—covertly—to the various supplemental trainings to which he owed the greatest debt. Not much should be made of this speculative connection, however; it is even more tenuous than that of Kashima Shintō-ryū and Iwama sword, or Yagyu Shinkage-ryū and the sword work of the Shingu dōjō. But Ueshiba very possibly was inspired by Kukishin-ryū ‘harai bō’ to develop something of his own, borrowing some viable techniques from the kata in the process. From that, like everything else he did, he made it aiki.

As Fred Little pointed out to me in a discussion, Ueshiba saw himself as imbued by the kami Susano-o, the ‘wind god,’ who was a combination of a trickster and Prometheus.

When Ueshiba was doing the upward and downward spirals in his jō form, that upward thrust is like a tornado spiraling up into heaven, like Susano-o using his spear to stab the repository of all the rice, hoarded by Heaven, and then the downward expanding spiral as he spreads it over the world. I don’t think he was emulating this—he was, at that moment, Susano-o.

He spun upwards with a very graphic, spiraling whole body connection, up to the heavens and then down to the earth, a move-ment both martial and spiritual. There is no doubt that Ueshiba practiced a kind of spirit possession, with his practice of chinkon- kishin empowering him to call up and become a deity. Finally, I cannot testify as to substance (body dynamics), but at least in form, he is inscribing the Daitō-ryū concepts of ‘aiki-age’ (‘rising unified power’) and ‘aiki-sage’ (‘dropping unified power’) in the air.

Why was this jō form so obviously important to Ueshiba? What symbolic import—what myth—was he embodying after his initial moves that embodied the liberation of the bounty of Heaven and spreading it all over the earth? Was he righteously ‘slaying’ injustice or obstructions that would impede the unification of Heaven and Earth through man, or was he purifying himself internally—this training, a kind of misogi that had the added benefit of making him even stronger?

More and more, I believe that this form was absolutely central to Ueshiba Morihei’s personal training, something that comes out most clearly in the film of his visit to Hawaii mentioned above. This starts with Ueshiba’s ritual with a Shintō implement, with the many pieces of folded paper symbolizing lightning, which he whirls, using waist and body, as if a rooted tree in the center of a tornado, and then he raises up and drops his entire body weight as if on an elevator that suddenly loses and regains its brakes for a moment. Then he picks up a staff, and he repeats the movements over and over again, cutting his eyes towards the audience as if to say, ‘Do you see it? I’ll do it again. Do you see it this time?’ He includes the same whirling rise of the staff, and then repeats one thrust or strike over and over, sometimes chaining several moves together, then repeating, and then taking a new avenue. The more formal kata Ueshiba does in some films is merely something to hang his practice on, a chaining-together of what he believed to be important, like pearls on a string. But in Hawaii, rather than a form, he is obviously displaying his own personal practice method. The expression of whole-body power is stunning, upwards and downwards, coiling in lateral movements, a rooted detonation of physical force directed one way or another, the body ‘snapping’ from relaxation to contained explosion. Whether his creation of a solo form, a container for his personal expression of internal power, was derived, in fact, from an idea he got observing Chinese martial arts, from Kukishin-ryū, or some other source is ultimately irrelevant because he made it so completely his own. Without the concern of hurting a training partner, either empty-hand or in paired weapons practice, Ueshiba is free to let out all of his power. In that film in Hawaii, on foreign ground, he displays the distilled essence of a lifetime of training, showing everything he knew. It was not even ‘hidden in plain sight;’ it was right there in the open. With many years of rhetoric about aikidō being the reconciliation of mankind, peace on earth and all the rest, what did Ueshiba truly have to offer other than what he really possessed and what possessed him—not more spiritual lessons with which the world is uselessly glutted, but spiritual acts. What more ‘loving’ act could he have expressed when, invited to another land, a country that so recently vanquished his own at war, he openly presented everything he knew. And we, all of us, Japanese and ‘foreigner’ alike, let it slip right through our fingers, thinking all that he was doing was waving a stick.

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