Adventures in Aikido.
Personal experiences in the Aikido Dojo (this has been previously cross-posted on another blog, so my regular readers may not have seen it.)
I absolutely loved Aikido! There were so many positives from my experiences on the mat. There was very little in Aikido training that went against the grain and jarred with my training in Wado karate. The experience supplemented my skills and my overall understanding of martial arts outside of my defined skill-set, and, in addition there were extra skills that piqued my interest and that I was able to hold on to and make use of.
Beginnings.
I had moved to Essex in 1982 and was always looking for opportunities for extra training, and, on a whim, I chose to plunge into Aikido training at a local sports centre.
Sensei Jim.
The first instructor I worked with was Sensei Jim. He was a rough and ready old timer, affable, funny and with a very East London turn of phrase. Jim was very technical and ran a fast-moving class, but crucially he gave me a secure grounding in the basics of Aikido. It was with him that I developed my breakfall abilities and learned the importance of being a good Uke; ‘Grip solidly and give resistance’ was the order, Jim didn’t like too much compliance.
As an older martial artist, he carried the injuries of his youth, but he seemed particularly resentful of damage he’d suffered at the hands of a Japanese Sensei called Chiba, this was Chiba Kazuo, who was resident in the UK from 1966 to 1975. Chiba Sensei had a chequered history while in the UK and according to Sensei Jim inflicted a catalogue of injuries on the various older-timers who were his contemporaries, but I guess there are always two sides to any tale.
Jim corralled me into the only grading examination I ever did in Aikido. He’d organised a weekend course with an instructor from the Ki Society, Wasyl Kolesnikov and there was a grading at the end of it. I wasn’t keen on the idea of the grading, but I did it anyway. I suppose something must have gone right because although I was going in for the lowest grade, Kolesnikov Sensei bumped me up two grades!
I don’t know what happened, but Jim eventually stopped showing up; ill health or changed job, I don’t know. This left the Dojo in limbo but, two of the seniors, a husband-and-wife team, originally from Yorkshire with a background in Tomiki Aikido (the one where they tried to turn it into a competitive thing with rubber knives), they took over the running of the Dojo. But it wasn’t for long, because a new Sensei turned up.
Sensei Dave.
Sensei Dave was very different to Jim, he was younger, more contemporary in his approach but also really steeped in the art of Aikido. For Dave ‘culture’ was everything, this was Japanese culture. Dave was very proud of his connection with another resident Japanese Sensei Kanetsuka Minoru, who took over from Chiba Sensei when he left for the USA.
Dave was really interested in the weaponry side of Aikido, particularly Aiki-ken and the Jo, his sword work was always drawing from other traditions and I found this fascinating. He knew I was interested in this aspect and invited me to Iaido classes he was attending in Hertfordshire. I learned so much from those additional classes, but the rigidity of Iaido did not appeal to me, so, although you could say it was a complementary art to Wado karate, I found that I just could not invest in it. Incidentally, later on I was to encounter Batto Jutsu (sword drawing) from other traditions that appealed to me more than what I encountered in formal Iaido.
In his Aikido, Dave was light and quick, he was also very technical. The Yorkshire couple once organised a weekend course and invited their old training buddies from the North. Some of these were big guys and at times I had trouble throwing them, but Sensei Dave flipped them easily, not with strength, with pure technique.
He was always perceptive with his students. An example being, I had been on Suzuki Sensei’s Winter course in Wado karate, travelling daily to Islington. It was tough training, with long sessions on core foundational techniques which takes its toll on the body. All the same I did not want to miss my weekly Aikido class. That evening I turned up at the Dojo, didn’t mention that I had been training all day but Dave noticed that I was a little worse for wear, exhausted and battered. Without saying much, he decided he knew exactly what I needed and for a good fifteen minutes threw me all over the mat, no breaks no explanation, just hammered repeatedly into the tatami. When it was over, he just smiled at me and said, “Now, don’t you feel so much better after your massage?” He was right.
Sometimes he used me as his stooge. A typical instance would be during a defence against a punch. I never liked that peculiar Aikido ‘punch’, it was always so flaccid and anaemic, they seemed to just step in and scoop a half-hearted strike at the defender, who would then catch it or connect with it, or whatever they were supposed to do. I didn’t mention much about my karate background to my fellow trainees; it wasn’t important, we were there to do Aikido, but there was this one guy who seemed to think he knew it all. I had been training with him on a defence against a ‘punch’, in a very ‘when in Rome’ way I usually defaulted to the Aikido method of punching, I hated doing it that way as it contradicted everything I had been training in for years, but on this one occasion Dave decided that ‘Mr know-it-all’ needed a lesson. Very quietly, out of earshot, Dave said to me, “hit him”, I must have looked at him in a way that said, “are you sure?”, he nodded. Well, that was it; I took the classic Aikido stance and then just launched at him… the inevitable happened, he didn’t have time to move before my punch folded him in half – I am sure that the only thing that was bruised was his ego, but, lesson learned.
We had a couple of years of great training with Sensei Dave and then his work took him away and we had to say goodbye. The club limped on; a junior Dan grade took over, but it was clear that he was a shadow of Dave. I don’t think I lasted long, my training just lapsed.
Then, one day, I bumped into the Yorkshire couple, maybe a year after and they were keen to tell me that a new Sensei was now running the show, I think they said he was a Godan, this was Sensei Brian (name changed for obvious reasons, that will become apparent). So, I decided it was time to resurrect my interest in Aikido. Somebody should have warned me.
Sensei Brian.
Brian’s reputation ran ahead of him; I heard later that someone had seen him at his resident Dojo swaggering around with a Tanto shoved through his belt and pronouncing all kinds of rubbish; I only found this out afterwards though.
I turned up at our usual venue and introduced myself to Brian. Initially everything seemed fine, although one turn of phrase put my teeth on edge.
There weren’t many there so Brian was thinking about cancelling the class, something I would never do; my idea was always to give my time fully to those few students who were keen to turn up; but Brian didn’t think like that. Finally, he decided that the class would go on, but it was what he said that made me wince… “I suppose we could just have a poodle about”. WHAT! ‘a Poodle about’?? What did he think this was, a knitting circle? Now I know this is a small point but when I thought about the level of seriousness that Sensei Dave always insisted on, it was a tiny, but maybe meaningful red flag.
Anyhow, training started but something wasn’t right; where were the sharp crisp techniques I had learned to expect? This was definitely down the evolutionary scale.
As I said, there were only a couple of us, but it seemed to me that we were Sensei Brian’s playthings; if we did any actual techniques, it was very little. No, instead Brian just bounced me and the other guys around.
After a while, the other students were getting tired and pretty much it was just me and Brian, and then he started to get tired, but what ended it was supposed to be a technique called ‘Iriminage’; I wasn’t to know this, Brian hadn’t been using this technique, he just seemed to rely on flipping free-form between Shihonage and Kotegaeshi, occasional Koshinage, maybe it wasn’t one of his preferred techniques? And then it came out of nowhere… it wasn’t Irminage, actually I was just clotheslined!
I landed hard on my back and my head bounced off the mat, and I knew I had done… something, and it wasn’t good. I was smart enough to stop – he knew as well and made all kinds of ‘just rub it better’ noises, but I just bowed out and left. Not only had I been injured I had also been suckered – compliancy only goes so far.
I didn’t seek medical treatment, I think I was too embarrassed, but it took ages to recover, in fact, it never really did. From that point on my neck was inclined to go into spasm and I had to really work hard to protect it (I still do). Many years later I had an X-Ray done of my neck that revealed a kink along two planes. When viewed from the side most people’s neck vertebrae shows a gentle ‘C’ curve, mine is an ‘S’ curve. I am still permanently damaged in that area and I don’t have the full range of movement – thanks Brian.
The ’Brian experience’ may have ended my Aikido career, such that it was, but it didn’t diminish my respect for the art; Brian was the bad apple and I had to accept that.
I know Aikido takes a lot of flak, I know that while the critics might be in awe of those amazing graceful breakfalls, they are really rankled by the level of compliance, I get that, and I think the Aikido practitioners do too.
Aikido is full of contradictions, I think that the godlike founder of Aikido, Ueshiba Morihei, set a personal standard far too high for anyone to achieve. And it’s not like he was some mythical figure from the 15th century; here was a guy who only passed away in 1969, who had an army of students and his techniques were performed on film for everyone to see. He spoke, he preached, he lectured on his art and, after all that, nobody alive today can do what he did.
As a postscript, I have to apologise for abusing the accepted Japanese way of referring to specific Sensei. Mainly, it is not the done thing to use a Sensei’s given name, it is more correct and precise to use the surname only, with ‘Sensei’ tagged on the end; e.g. ‘Smith Sensei’. But in this case, I stayed away from directly identifying these instructors without their permission, with the exception of ‘Brian’ of course, who deserves his anonymity.