Hello Ben,
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Well, I have read Suzuki's essay and I must confess to being highly unimpressed with the lack of scholarship displayed in reference to Morihei Ueshiba and aikido. The essay, allegedly,
"will focus on the kyudo of Awa Kenzo that Herrigel encountered, and by comparing his experiences with Ueshiba Morihei, I will pursue an outline of the history of budo within the purview of contemporary and modern Japanese thought and cultural history" (Bennett, p.18).
Now Suzuki is a Japanese professor at the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies and therefore is in a position to gain easy access to the wealth of material on Morihei Ueshiba in Japanese. However, he is content to discuss Awa Kenzo and Morihei Ueshiba on the basis of quotations of Ueshiba in English and at third hand.
The discussion appears on p.37 of his essay. He uses Peter Payne's Martial Arts: The Spiritual Dimension, published by Thames & Hudson in 1981. Actually, I was training in London at the time Payne was preparing the book and recognize many of the photographs. It is quite a good book, well illustrated, but makes no pretensions to being an academic work.
Suzuki takes issue with a quotation from Payne in which Ueshiba refers to God as the 'Creator of the Universe' and suggests that Payne made a loose translation. In fact, Payne took all the quotations of Ueshiba in his own book from another book, Aikido, a work by Kisshomaru Ueshiba published in 1975. The wording is exactly the same and the 'Creator of the Universe' part appears on p,154 of the edition that I possess.
If Suzuki had dug a little, he could have found the Japanese original of Ueshiba's statement. It took me just a few minutes. The statement appears on p.47 of Aikido, one of two Japanese original works of which Kisshomaru Ueshiba's book in English is a translation. The original of the phrase was clearly aware of the mind of God, the Creator of the Universe is konu uchu wo souzou sareta kami no kokoro ga, hakkiri rikai dekiriyouni natta.
I am in no position to judge the quality of Prof Suzuki's research on Awa Kenzo, but, given the main topic of the paper (quoted above), the general sloppiness of the discussion on Ueshiba makes me wonder.