Is it still Aikido (Iaido/Jodo/etc) if you take away the Japanese clothes and stuff?

[Joseph Svinth]

Chris --

It is quite possible that you are taking a Hawaiian attitude toward this. I used to talk to a lot of Nisei about martial art topics, and their basic consensus was that (with the exception of things that are essentially meaningless in any language), if you couldn't describe the technique in English, using English words, then you didn't really know what it meant.

And, as far as the aiki mumbo-jumbo, there is always the translation of Ueshiba's speech in Hawaii. Ueshiba rambled on, speaking his usual nonsense, and the Hawaiian translator (a young Nonaka Sensei) said, "I have no idea what he just said, but when I am his age, I hope to be as wise," and the crowd applauded. Ueshiba then turned to Tohei and said, in Japanese, "How come you can't translate as well as this young man? You translate what I say, and they all look confused, but when he translates, they understand perfectly."

That said, if an organization is going to call itself aikido, then the official language of command and exhibition is going to be Japanese. In boxing, the official language is English. Why? Because that is what the organizations associated with international sport have decreed.

All my way of saying, who cares? I know an aiki school without many uniforms or any Japanese language instruction that the Japanese visit and go away from saying, "OMG, this is just like Japan," and another with the most beautiful dojo you've ever seen, everybody in uniform like good little soldiers, and who get mad when you just stand there waiting for their nikyo to start hurting or something.

[Chris Li]

That said, if an organization is going to call itself aikido, then the official language of command and exhibition is going to be Japanese. In boxing, the official language is English. Why? Because that is what the organizations associated with international sport have decreed.

I'm not from Hawaii, so I'm not sure about the first part - anyway, here's the part that I disagree with. There is no official language in Aikido - just as there is no official language in the United States, just custom. There aren't even united organizations in Aikido that would be capable of making such an agreement at this point - for that matter, there's not even an agreement on the terminology in Japanese, different organizations often used different terms.

Best,

Chris

[Joseph Svinth]

You might want to check with SportAccord on that. There is an official aikido. Everybody else? Vernacular art. Really. Why does what SportAccord think matter? It doesn't, unless your organization is interested in getting international recognition. Then it could.

As for Hawaii, given that you list a Hawaii location for yourself, I had thought it possible that perhaps you had met a Buddhahead at some point, and been influenced by his or her worldview. It happens, you know.

[Chris Li]

You might want to check with SportAccord on that. There is an official aikido. Everybody else? Vernacular art. Really. Why does what SportAccord think matter? It doesn't, unless your organization is interested in getting international recognition. Then it could.

As for Hawaii, given that you list a Hawaii location for yourself, I had thought it possible that perhaps you had met a Buddhahead at some point, and been influenced by his or her worldview. It happens, you know.

The IAF is a member of the SportAccord framework, but many organizations - even Aikikai organizations, are not IAF members (most of the US Aikido organizations aren't, for example). In any case the Aikikai (which is different from the IAF) is far from the only Aikido organization, whatever SportAccord may think.

Best,

Chris

[P Goldsbury]

Neil,

That is exactly what I am getting at. I do some arts where it is important how you move your hands when you bow because it is an outward signal of what kind of attitude you are to be carrying internally. How you move your hands when you bow doesn't have to be that important, but in some arts it is. I was hoping to get into a discussion of what is important in various arts. It seems though that aikido (and likely karate) have become so diffused by the innumerable splits that have happened that they are huge classes of things that include so much variation they may not really be suitable for this discussion.

Mr Boylan,

I am the chief instructor of an aikido dojo in Hiroshima. With two German colleagues I teach the art mainly to Japanese. The art is taught in Japanese and at present the only non-Japanese student is a Frenchman who has migrated from Yoshinkan, but we have had foreign students, notably US Marines from the base at Iwakuni.

I sometimes ask myself why our dojo is attractive to our Japanese students (we are fairly well established and recently celebrated our tenth anniversary). All the Japanese cultural trappings are there, except for the fact that the instructors are foreign. In fact, we have called the dojo the Hiroshima Kokusai Dojo. We have not done any surveys, but I am fairly sure that our students believe that they are practising the Japanese martial art in an authentic way, so that they can go to another dojo elsewhere and continue their training without any problems.

So I tend to agree with the sentiments expressed in your blog, with the proviso that making absolute judgments here is difficult. Aikido comes in many flavours and I think a good way of looking at the art is via Wittgenstein's idea of family resemblance. Wittgenstein was discussing the defining characteristics of games and suggested that all games had a number of features such that they could be called games, but not all games had the same features. So there was no hard and fast rule for deciding the cut-off point between a game and a non-game, or for deciding which features of a game were more central and which were more peripheral. I think the same thing applies to what may be called a cultural activity and we also have to consider the added features of history, previous practice and teachers.

Best wishes,

[Ellis Amdur]

I visited a Kashima Shin-ryu "dojo" where the practice was outside - in the middle of a busy university quadrangle. They acted as if they were in a bubble of invisibility. They had bokuto. They were dressed in shorts, sweatshirts, and did a zarei - in the direction of the sun, IIRC. I was at the Maniwa Nen-ryu dojo in Maniwa village. Kids came to class wearing banlon sports sweats. One thing to be remembered about clothing, at least, is that until very recently, practitioners wore their daily wear. There was no keiko-gi. In fact, the judo-gi was a fireman's jacket, chosen because people's daily wear got too damaged.

[Guy Buyens]

I was at the Maniwa Nen-ryu dojo in Maniwa village. Kids came to class wearing banlon sports sweats.

Yes, these kids, still do Maniwa Nen-ryu wearing sports wear. Nevertheless students of Maniwa Nen-ryu also know how to dress up when doing embu.

Last time when our soke visited my house we (soke, 1 other member of HYR and myself) started a discussion on a technique which ended in almost one hour of training. None of us had special wear. This doesn’t mean that we are not supposed to put on our hakama properly when we come along to let say the Nippon budokan for an embu or even a formal training (although I have to admit that one day, coming from Tokyo by train immediately to the dojo in jeans and t-shirt, soke told me to take off my socks, pick a bo and join the class for the remaining 15 minutes).
At least when involved in a koryu, you belong to a school, therefore you have to invest in aspects that go beyond the pure technical aspects of the art. This means following the rules of that school or leave the school and do something else.

Gendai budo are may-be different in that there is no more a unique authority to define what the boundaries are. But this doesn’t relate to what people wear. In karate (which I did for at least some 35 years), I now observe people doing over stylized forms in competition, which they still call kata. And yes they wear impeccable white karate-gi.

For me the clothes as such are less important, the essence is. However, if to learn the essence, we are expected to learn how to dress, speak, behave,… then are we not more than willing to do an effort?

[Cady Goldfield]

Most traditional sports have specific attire that even modern participants continue to wear (for example, the formal breeches, ascot, boots, cap and jacket of European-style equestrians). Most of the uniforms or dress we see today evolved from practical garments that protected the wearer or reflected what was the daily attire worn at the time the sport or discipline was created. The fireman's jacket used as judo-wear, that Ellis pointed out, is another example of adapting a garment for sport/discipline use out of pure pragmatism; it became "tradition" later, after years of use. But it could just have been a jacket from another workman's trade, if that's all that had been available.

IMO, the continuity of attire, language and cultural courtesies in many disciplines, including arts such as aikido, lends to a sense of stepping out of the ordinary workaday world, into a rarified environment in which we shift our thoughts and focus from the "outside" world to an inner world and life. In that respect, clothing (and changing into it, from street clothes) becomes part of a meditation. The other trappings of the discipline... rei, terminology, etc. ... are also part of that parcel. As long as one doesn't get caught up in the minutiae of the trappings, to the detriment of actually focusing on training the martial skills themselves, then it can be a powerful tool for inculcating mindfulness and awareness, which are, IME, essential to heightening one's effectiveness.

I don't think it's necessary to have the cultural trappings of a classical tradition to successfully train in a martial discipline, and for some individuals it may even be distracting to learning the actual skills (i.e. watching the pointing finger, rather than the glorious moon that the finger is pointing to), but if we are mindful of what we are doing, and why, then it becomes a part of the training methodology, and is thus beneficial.