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rsamurai2
29th June 2001, 22:03
i hope you folks can help me? i am a shodan in shotokan karate do and judo i am also a sankyu in jujutsu. i am wondering which style of akido would be best for me. i like randori but i am not looking for a sport oriented akido. would tomiki ryu or a more clasical style of akido be best for me?

Gil Gillespie
30th June 2001, 04:01
Hi Richard

What aikido is offered within a reasonable driving radius in your area? ("Reasonable" is yours to define.) If you have a chance to see different aikido by all means do. Get a feel for the people and the sensei. That is all so much more important than any arbitrary overview of style. Hopefully you will have choices. Trust your judgement. As a shotokan shodan you're not an empty bucket. I hope you discover a rewarding aikido experience. Perhaps others could offer you better advice, but I thought too many folks had viewed your post for me not to at least reply.

Karl Kuhn
30th June 2001, 14:15
While Shodokan Aikido (Prof Tomiki's name for his art) does have randori that can be done in full speed competitions and embu kata competitions, most of us that do it do not really consider it to be, well, sport oriented. The randori (tanto and toshu) and embu kata are just training tools and a great way to learn from your contemporaries.

That being said, I am a firm believer that it is the instructor not the style that matters most. I would suggest that you vist area dojos and see what looks right for you. The design of the Shodokan system is the product of an educator and very pragmatic.

Good luck,

Karl Kuhn

PRehse
2nd July 2001, 07:00
Hi Karl;

Wish you were here. The humidity in Osaka is brutal but at least with Shihan looks over it at least looks like you are working your butt off - gasp. I've wimped out a bit - taking Sunday off. My excuse is to wash my gi but reallity is I need recovery time.

Karl of course is completely right in both that one must look first to the dojo rather than the style and that only those outside the system seem to refer to Shodokan as sport's orientated. This may of course be the fault of the organization which sometimes refers to itself as Aikido Kyogi but the main distinguishing feature of the system is the nature of the techniques utilized in the kata. As the quote below attests one could say Shodokan (Tomiki) Aikido is classical. The teaching/training methods are innovative, the techniques are classical.


from George Ledyard in Aikido Kokikai in the Gendai Budo > Aikido forum of e-budo
What is traditional Aikido? John Stevens has chosen to call his version of Aikido which he learned from Shirata sensei "Classical Aikido". But since Shirata Sensei was a contemporary of Tomiki, Shioda and Mochizuki Senseis one could just as easily call what they did "classical". When you look at the post-war Deshis you find innovators like Tohei, Nishio, and Saotome Senseis all of whom have developed unique ways of training quite different from what they experienced directly from the Founder. Would you want to say that they are or are not traditional?

Aikieagle
4th July 2001, 21:38
i do agree that style is very subjective. But what i wonder is how can a martial art(aikido), that is so young, can be referred to as "classical", it hasnt even been around that long. Maybe when aikido becomes 200 or even 150 yrs old, then can we say classical and modern. But aikido is still very young and has much growth to do as a budo before it can be considered classical.
In fact i dont think anything is classical in aikido, techniques and ways of doing things are always changing. I've seen one technique change 4 times in two years by my teacher. But that's not bad, i think they do have to change with time. If it stayed the same the martial art would stagnate and would not grow. But still with this change the concepts are the same, just the means to acheive these ideas are changing.......

Cesar

George Ledyard
7th July 2001, 18:51
Originally posted by Aikieagle
i do agree that style is very subjective. But what i wonder is how can a martial art(aikido), that is so young, can be referred to as "classical", it hasnt even been around that long. Maybe when aikido becomes 200 or even 150 yrs old, then can we say classical and modern. But aikido is still very young and has much growth to do as a budo before it can be considered classical.
In fact i dont think anything is classical in aikido, techniques and ways of doing things are always changing. I've seen one technique change 4 times in two years by my teacher. But that's not bad, i think they do have to change with time. If it stayed the same the martial art would stagnate and would not grow. But still with this change the concepts are the same, just the means to acheive these ideas are changing.......

Cesar
Generally, in Japanese martial arts the use of the term "classical" refers to the various Koryu that have existed for hundreds of years. Hence the use of gendai budo on this forum. In this usage Aikido will never be a classical art no matter how long it is around.

Using the term "classical" in the manner that John Stevens Sensei does has a bit of the implication that the pre-war Aikido of teachers like Shirata Sensei etc. represent a core foundation for the art in the same way that the "classics" of Greece and Rome were once considered essential in any educated person's experience.

Whether you believe this can depend on the style of Aikido that you do. If you look at what eventually became Aikido, a term not used before 1942, you would have to consider Saito Sensei to be the true "classical" form. Everything O-Sensei and his post-war deshi taught was based on that foundation of technique that O-Sensei put into form during the Iwama years. I know that the folks at the Aikikai Honbu Dojo didn't really consider a lot of what developed pre-war to really be Aikido. The former Doshu actually asked Tomiki Sensei to change the name of his art to something other than Aikidoi but he chose not to do so.

Now Aikido is in a state in which the oldest teachers are dying and some of the younger teachers like Saotome Sensei and Nishio Sensei are trying to find methods of instruction that re-introduce elements that make have disappeared in the post war period of development such as martially effective technique but that are true to the technical strides O-Sensei made right up to the end of his life.

P Goldsbury
8th July 2001, 03:48
Originally posted by Aikieagle
i do agree that style is very subjective. But what i wonder is how can a martial art(aikido), that is so young, can be referred to as "classical", it hasnt even been around that long. Maybe when aikido becomes 200 or even 150 yrs old, then can we say classical and modern. But aikido is still very young and has much growth to do as a budo before it can be considered classical.
In fact i dont think anything is classical in aikido, techniques and ways of doing things are always changing. I've seen one technique change 4 times in two years by my teacher. But that's not bad, i think they do have to change with time. If it stayed the same the martial art would stagnate and would not grow. But still with this change the concepts are the same, just the means to acheive these ideas are changing.......

Cesar

Yes, I tend to agree and, as George Ledyard suggests, what you define as "classical" aikido depends very much on your viewpoint. The problem I have with a term like this when applied to aikido is that you need to do one of two things: either 'freeze' a segment of the Founder's historical development and call this segment "classical": or 'freeze' a segment of the techniques and call this 'core' segment "classical". There are difficulties with either approach but, where this has happened, it has usually been done by the disciples and not by the Founder himself.

If we take the Founder's development, it is continuous from the time of the Ueshiba Juku c. 1920 right up to his death in 1969. Which bit is "classical"? You might say, the later part, after the art became 'aikido' in 1942. There are two problems with this. First, the change of name has a political dimension and does not entail a change of substance. Secondly, it would exclude the crucial Kobukan period, from 1931 till 1942. Many important disciples, including Rinjiro Shirata and Kisshomaru Ueshiba, trained continuously in this period and the two texts 'Budo Renshu' (1936) and 'Budo' (1838) were also written.

If we take the second route and try to distinguish a core of 'classical' techniques, we have a problem, which can be put roughly like this: to what extent did the Founder present aikido as an anachronistic teachable or learnable system (by 'anachronistic', I mean something which does not essentially change over time)? The two manuals mentioned earlier are not really evidence for such a system created by the Founder himself. 'Budo Renshu' was put together by some Kobukan disciples and the Founder became aware of it. There are many techniques (which the Founder did not give names to), but it was essentially an aid for those who were already quite proficient. As was 'Budo', which was put probably together in response to a request from the Japanese military (see the introduction by Stanley Pranin to the Aiki News edition). The Founder never sat down himself and composed a training manual of core techniques which could be given to complete beginners and lead them through the 'system'.

But many of his disciples did, starting with Kisshomaru Ueshiba in 1956. Kisshomaru Doshu states quite explicitly in his autobiography "Aikido Ichiro" that "Aikido" was a response to the need to explain the basic concepts of Aikido to ordinary people and he adds that this was necessary because virtually nobody understood what the Founder talked about in his lectures. So what you have are expositions of aikido as understood by people who were trained by the Founder at different times in his life. Every single one of these manuals can claim to be 'classical' because they present an art learned directly from the source, but, and this is crucial, as seen through the eyes of the persons who learned it. Some disciples have not written books, but I guarantee that anyone who has continuously attended the Wednesday classes taught by Sadateru Arikawa over the past 20 or 30 years (assuming he has the considerable stamina required to cope with such training) will have seen the Founder's aikido through the eyes of a very close disciple.

So, which aikido is 'classical'? One answer might be, the aikido which is taught by the Doshu. This might be true, but it implies a judgement about the art as a tradition which has to develop in a certain way in order to preserve the art.

Yours sincerely,

Peter Goldsbury
___________
P A Goldsbury,
Graduate School of Social Sciences,
Hiroshima University