Recently I went on a cruise. It was my first time so I paid special attention to the safety video (unlike on a plane, where I’m already immersed in a book when the emergency procedures are demonstrated).
Since this was a cruise along the coast of Norway there were detailed explanations on how to put on the hypothermia suit. The characters doing the demonstrating were CGI cartoon, moving in quite a human way, but there was something wrong about them; and since the video was shown every time the ship docked, which it did four or five times a day, I got an opportunity to study it closely.
What I realised at last was that they moved too well, too smoothly
Amazingly, the Japanese have an expression for this coined by robotics professor Masahiro Mori: Bukimi no Tani Genshō, which is usually rendered into English as Uncanny Valley from the 1978 book “Robots: Fact, Fiction and Prediction” by Jasia Reichardt.
Mori’s theory states that as the appearance of a robot is made more human a point is reached beyond which the observer’s response becomes one of strong revulsion. It accounts for the flop of the Tom Hanks film “Polar Express”. And yet, as the New York Times review said, “ … none of the humans have the countless discrete fluctuations, the pulsing, swirling, twitching aliveness that can make the actor such a pleasure to watch on screen.”
Because human’s don’t move that way. Our humanity is represented in our frailties. Anyone watching me at the beginning of an aikido class would have no doubt of my humanity: I groan when I get up, have to used my hand to help push off the tatami, and then wait until the circulation comes back to my legs. After that I limp into the exercises.
What makes us human are our aches and pains, our failures and all our little quirks and foibles. We do not move smoothly through life. We stumble. We “suffer the Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune … the Heartache and the thousand Natural shocks that Flesh is heir to.”
And then, because I couldn’t be distracted enough by Norwegian fjords, the Arctic Circle and the Northern Lights, I started to think about how all that applied to aikido.
Obviously, I started with myself. I have written before on the problem of teaching “old man’s aikido.” I’m sixty-one now and I physically can’t do some of the things I could thirty years ago. The knees don’t bend as well or as far as they used to (or rather, they certainly bend the same, but they don’t get up as well once they’re down!), and I definitely don’t have the same physical power or speed.
I acknowledge that since my teens, my hearing has got worse, by my forties I needed glasses for reading, and in my fifties my hair was gone and when I reached my fifties, my hair was vanishing and what was left was turning grey and my wrinkled skin had lost its snap. Arthritis means that I find shikko, hanmi handachi and sieza waza and kokyu dosa difficult to perform. In short, I’m slowly falling to bits.
But I like to think I replaced the things I have lost in my aikido with improved technical ability and greater sensitivity. It is a lesson learned from a man I used to practise with who had suffered a brain aneurism which had resulted in partial paralysis of his right side. It meant he could not easily tenkan on techniques like kotegaeshi. He had adapted this “weakness” and drew uke round his body and into the technique – you literally ran onto the wrist lock with all your impetus and body weight. Naturally, it was a variation of kotegaeshi which I have included in my own arsenal.
So my techniques are my own unique flavour, which favour my weaknesses, and it’s only when I see photos and videos of myself singularly failing to “maintain the vertical” when it is something I am constantly telling my students to do that I cringe.
Nevertheless, I should not deliberately pass on my little cheats to my students, unless I do it in a very conscious way, explaining what I’ve done and why.
And the same applies to them. I see young ones who want to rush around and slam-bang everywhere. Ones who have started at an older age tend to be more cautious, and then there are those who carry some specific injury or condition. They all have their own style and my job is to help them do the best possible technique they can within those boundaries.
Since I’ve made one Shakespeare reference already, I suppose it’s fair to say that most of us come to aikido in the fourth age of his Seven Ages of Man:
Then, a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth.

And it’s that recklessness which gives us the wisdom of experience which makes us such a know-all in the fifth age, before our assertiveness becomes a joke in the sixth age and we end up in the seventh age:
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Shakespeare was probably being a little harsh, but we’re none of us perfect – in fact just the opposite. We are an agglomeration of imperfections, by and large, doing our best.
To return to “Uncanny Valley” and my original point for a moment, CGI characters in films like “Polar Express” and “TinTin” do not make eye contact with each other, they do not relate to each, they do not make a connection. They are what one reviewer called “soul dead”.
We, on the other hand, perceive and accept the imperfections in each other and accepting them is one of the things that makes us human, which makes us “soul alive”.
We should revel in our imperfections and build on our weaknesses. After all, we want to be human, not computer-generated perfections.

Apparently we like to move in time with each other. It’s called “synchrony”. At a concert we end up clapping in time with each other, walking with friends (or even enemies) we find ourselves falling into step with each other. A study at the University of California found that couples in romantic heterosexual relationships synchronised their heartbeats and their breathing; well, actually, the women in the relationship adjusted to their partners, not just physiologically but in everyday emotional experiences too, suggesting that women may have more empathy.

I learnt all this from Oliver Burkeman’s “This Column Will Change Your Life” in The Guardian. If you haven’t come across it in the newspaper or on-line I thoroughly recommend it. Several of the pieces I have written have been triggered by something I read in his columns. The title, by the way, is ironic, I assume – it won’t change your life, but it will make you think about it.

The second interesting thing about synchrony is that it makes us feel better. So apart from being irresistible, doing things in a group gives us good feelings, towards ourselves and others. The historian William McNeill argues that doing things together is what helped humans from the Stone Age onward to band together and survive.

And there are times when we enjoy it, singing and dancing at a concert, or kneeling in prayer, and there are times when the need for solidarity can be exploited, particularly in times when things seem out of synch and chaotic – people like Hitler encouraged group marching and group chanting to bind his followers together, and draw others in.
In fact, you see similar surrendering to the movement of the group in many present day cults, skilfully manipulated by a charismatic leader.
And now, in one mighty bound from Hitler to aikido!

One of the central tenets of aikido is to harmonise with one’s uke. We all know the experience of a bad technique which jars both our self and the person we are practising with. And we all should be familiar with those (rare) techniques when we blend so completely that it doesn’t feel as if we’ve done anything at all. It is usually followed by uke getting up and saying “What did you do then?” To which the reply is usually a puzzled shrug and “I have absolutely no idea.”

But we do know how good we feel after a technique like that, in comparison to how bad we feel when the technique causes a clash between tori and uke.
Further study into synchrony suggests that we might perform better by matching our movements with our partners, rather than trying to control them.

When Usain Bolt and Tyson Gay are competing against each other, even though Bolt is taller and with a longer stride, he and Gay often found themselves pounding along the track at exactly the same time.

The two scientists who noticed this, Manuel Varlet and Michael Richardson, concluded that rather than slowing both athletes down, syncing might have made the men faster. Previous studies had shown “that the stability and efficiency of gait behaviour can be enhanced when entrained to external rhythms.” This suggests that Bolt and Gay run side-by-side – each flanked by one of the few human beings capable of keeping pace with them – improved their already near perfect form.

So in aikido, mirroring uke’s movement, rather than trying to impose our own, might actually improve our technique.

This idea of “mirroring” also pops up in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, where it is referred to as one of the most useful and easiest NLP techniques there is. Apparently if someone is very good at mimicking your body language and your speech patterns, your vocabulary style or specific choice of word and your pace, tempo, pitch, volume and tone it is very hard to dislike them.

Once again, isn’t that exactly what we’re trying to achieve in aikido? We want to learn to do techniques in which the person who has been on the receiving end doesn’t hate us. Otherwise they’ll want to get up and attack us again and again, until one or other of us is smashed into the ground. In aikido we’re trying to achieve a zero-sum game.

It seems to me that science is catching up with Morihei Ueshiba’s thinking. He had lived through war and seen the destruction that abuse of synchrony can bring about in the wrong hands, and he tried to set people on a different path. But it wasn’t necessarily a scientific path he was following, it’s simply that in the 21st century, science and O’Sensei’s paths have crossed.

The difference is, of course, in the underlying attitude. Science is interested in why things happen and the discovery often comes without a moral judgement. It is only later that the men and women behind the new invention may have qualms about what it is they have discovered. For example, many of the scientists who developed the atom bomb in the Manhattan Project opposed the dropping of the bomb on Japan and appealed unsuccessfully to President Truman. And Einstein said in the same year, “The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking … If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.”

Stage hypnotists understand the secrets of neuro-linguistic programming and can use it in entertaining or tawdry ways depending on their own code of ethics.
There is a moral imperative underlying aikido that goes beyond simply trying to do as little damage as possible. If that’s the case, all we are doing is following the fake credo of the old Kung Fu TV series: avoid rather than check. Check rather than hurt. Hurt rather than maim. Maim rather than kill

O’Sensei said, “Aiki means ‘to live together in harmony’, in a state of mutual accord. Aiki is the ultimate social virtue. It is the power of reconciliation, it is the power of love.”
And in the spirit of harmony, let me finish with two quotes from the celebrated cosmologist, Carl Sagan, just to show that science (and scientists) can hold the same moral imperatives as aikidokas:
Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

And finally:
For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
I don’t think O’Sensei could have said it better.