Originally Posted by
Cliff Judge
Yeah, this is the story. Takeda received training that was deep and wide, polished himself with a long and grueling musha shugyo, and then went on the road teach an art called Daito ryu to thousands of students. When really, the true art was a secret that he taught to only a few students, and insisted that they be careful to only teach it to a very few of their students. And so today we have millions of people training in various descendants of Takeda's Daito ryu that are training in something that is empty and not the real art.
This is a horrible story. One of the worst things about it is the idea it plants in your head that you've wasted your years of training. If this is the case, nobody should bother training any aiki art.
Every art has something like aiki - inner secrets that are reserved for the soke or shihans that are given to them after years of training, not before. Most students know they will never receive those particular teachings, because they are not on track to be a successor or receive a full license. But they trust that their training is immensely valuable anyway. In the old days, you had to give your people skills that they could use to survive fights. If they died because you were withholding the secrets, you wouldn't get students anymore. So there was a built-in guarantee of integrity.
There is always this little voice in the back of your head telling you that Takeda had sort of a "there's a sucker born every minute" attitude and he was purposely selling BS. He'd get up on stage and use his aiki power to generate some technique on the spot. Then he'd rake in the money as everyone paid him three yen to learn it, then he'd laugh as he imagined them going back to their homes and practicing these useless little dances over and over again like little clockwork toys! In the meantime, he'd teach solo exercises and aiki to Ueshiba, Sagawa, Horikawa, etc, telling them that they should only pass this on to a few.
Further down the line, you get all of this bitterness, disrespect, and factionalization. You get a huge perceived value in these secrets. People trying to scheme the rights of succession away from people they've trained alongside for decades. People breaking oaths they made to teachers.
I re-read a thread on here from a decade ago where Wayne Muramoto.was talking about how Takenouchi ryu has always been taught at one dojo in Okayama prefecture, but there was a branching that allowed the art to be taught in some other dojos in Okayama, and then the Bichu den broke off and spread all around Japan and other parts of the world. By the 70s and 80s people from the Bichu den found out about the home dojo and - what did they do? Insist they were the real school and those people in Okayama were nobodys? Nope, they started building relationships with the home branch, everybody getting together to train together and share notes on what they were doing, to bring the art together and make it better.
Maybe that's just a jujutsu thing.