I was watching the comedian Reginald D. Hunter’s documentary series “Songs of the South, which was a trip into his childhood, looking at the music of the Southern States of the United States from Kentucky to Louisiana. I was particularly interested in an interview he had with a zydeco musician called Geno Delafose.
Hunter asked him to explain the difference between certain types of Cajun music, and Delafose said words to the effect that it was like Cajun cooking. There was dirty rice – which is basically white rice which gets a “dirty” colour from being cooked with small pieces chicken liver or giblets, green bell peppers, celery and onions, and spiced with cayenne and black pepper.
And then there were the people who added more salt to their rice; but whether it was dirty rice or salty rice, it was all still rice. It was just that some people liked dirty rice and some people liked salty rice.
And of course it struck me that people think the same about aikido.
Considering that we practise an art with the word “harmony” in it, there are endless disagreements, heated discussions, and knock-down-drag-out fights about which type of aikido is best.
A lot of this debate ranges around pre- and post-war aikido.
1938 is regarded as the heart of the golden years of Aikido Founder Morihei Ueshiba’s Kobukan Dojo, known as “Hell Dojo” for the severity of its training. There were approximately twenty uchideshi (live-in students) in the dojo at that time and they trained from five in the morning until nine in the evening. The most famous student from this time is probably Gozo Shioda, who began training in 1932 and stayed on as an uchideshi for 7 years.
After the war he went on to found the Yoshinkan style of aikido which emphasizes self-defence applications and has a reputation as a tough, systematic martial art which is taught to Japanese riot police.
At that time O-Sensei was ensconced in Iwama, and although he later started travelling and teaching again he did not teach at the Hombu Dojo in Japan on a day-to-day basis. When he was there his instruction often centred on philosophical subjects. It was Koichi Tohei and Kisshomaru Ueshiba who are the persons most responsible for the technical content and development of aikido within the Aikikai Hombu system in the post-war period, when aikido seems to have been characterised by a “softer”, more flowing style.
It has been argued that this emphasis on aikido as “The Way of Peace” was a necessary in order to overcome General MacArthur’s ban of the martial arts after the war, but regardless socio-political reasons, people who study aikido seem to fall into one of two camps – hard aikido or soft aikido.
There are those who insist that aikido should primarily be a means of self-defence. They are fond of quoting Ueshiba’s dictum, “My technique is 70 percent atemi (striking) and 30 percent nage (throwing),” which is echoed and expanded on by Shioda:
“The founder, Ueshiba Sensei, said, In a real battle, atemi is seventy percent, technique is thirty percent … Atemi is virtually omitted in Aikido training on the ground that a preliminary blow should not become a matter of predominant concern. However, there are quite a few cases in which the meaning of a technique becomes incomprehensible if the attendant atemi is left out.”
There are others like George Ledyard of Aikido Eastside, who studies under Mitsugi Saotome sensei, who argue that the purpose of atemi is generally a means to facilitate another technique. I was told to refer to this kind of atemi as “taking the mind” as it distracts the opponent, shifting his attention to the strike instead of the technique that is being performed. Ledyard argues that:
1. A strike that is itself the technique and designed to cause damage, as in striking arts such as karate, boxing and types of kung fu is contrary to Aikido principles as its intent usually involves serious injury to the opponent and is only to be used as a last resort, and;
2. Atemi based on causing pain is unreliable against a determined attacker, who will expect to get hit, but just ignore it to continue with their attack.
So the argument would go that too much attention to atemi takes the practitioner’s attention away from the key element of aikido, which is well-performed technique. And one of the foremost proponent of getting the basics right was Morihiro Saito shihan. He placed particular emphasis on the relationship between the armed and unarmed aspects of the art, leading as it does to an understanding of ma-ai (combatative distance), developing good posture and a strong centre as well as strengthening the arms and shoulders.
Saito was committed to carrying on Ueshiba’s legacy, following and preserving Ueshiba’s teachings as he had learned them. I can recall at seminars he usually had a flipbook of photos of O’Sensei, and when he was emphasising a particular position he expected us to take in a technique, he would produce a photograph of Ueshiba in the same position.
You could argue that Saito occupies the middle ground with his emphasis on correct technique, but even he believed that strikes were a “vital element” of aikido.
This brings us to the third aspect of atemi that George Ledyard highlights; what he calls “the not striking of striking”.
Essentially the strike is just fast enough that the attacker cannot avoid or block it, but is just slow enough that the attacker can only respond to it by breaking his posture and taking a fall in order not to be hit. It can give the impression that the attacker is throwing himself, but if one tried it with an untrained partner it result in that partner being hit. Ledyard argues that it is the timing and intention that differentiates the “Not Striking of Striking” and “Strike as a Technique itself”.
And of course this leads to what might be called the “ultra-soft” styles of aikido which involve no-touch throws as a result of the manipulation of ki. There are those who would argue that a genuine no-touch throw is a result of good technique and possibly George Ledyard’s “not striking strike”, but there are others who insist that it is something more. And that debate will go on for as long as aikido practitioners get together.
In a book I have referred to before, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the author, Robert M. Pirsig says that even if Quality is not defined, we all know what is good Quality and what is not. And I think it would be fair to say that after practising aikido for a while and being exposed to a variety of teachers, we can make judgements about what we think is good or bad aikido.
Some of us like our aikido salty, and some of us don’t, but it’s all aikido.