Nariyama embu

Nice video of Nariyama Sensei demonstrating at a recent event.

Goshin Jitsu

The third of the Kodokan judo kata set, Goshin Jitsu (The Forms of Self-Defense) is the Kodokan's modern self defense kata. Invented in the 1950's by a committee headed by Tomiki, it bears a striking resemblance to Tomiki aikido, including the Tomiki kata, Koryu Daisan (also known as Goshin no kata).

Explicit and implied in various ryuha

Jujitsu is divided into specific ryu, or streams of thought about the material being taught. Over the years, each ryu has divided into smaller streams (ryuha) as students, each with different understandings, have become teachers. The Fugakukai aikido and judo that we do may be classified as descended of kitoryu, daitoryu, and several other ancient ryu down through the ryu of Morihei Ueshiba and Jigoro Kano, down through the ryuha of Kenji Tomiki and into Karl Geis’ school from which it has been disseminated to his students and their students.

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So, though it’s really all the same type of material (jujitsu), the exterior form taught in one branch of the family tree often looks very different from the forms taught in another branch. But within a particular ryu, like aikido (Ueshiba-ryu), what differentiates the various ryuha? It is mostly the following three things:

• what is considered fundamental or foundational (kihon)
• what is to be taught explicitly (kata)
• what is implied or assumed to be learned over time (randori)

For instance ikkyo omote is an explicit thing in Aikikai (ikkyo being the first thing you learn, the most foundational technique) but it is mostly just implied in Tomiki. The Tomiki curriculum to some degree assumes that if you happen to get someone fairly close to ikkyo omote then you’ll be able to figure out how to do the technique. Shomenate is another example. Shomenate is an explicit technique in Tomikiryu (indeed, it is considered the most foundational of techniques) but in Aikikai it is mostly implied, or absorbed within other concepts (e.g. irimi). In each system, some material is made explicit and other material is either assumed or is taught in an unstructured way (i.e. in randori).

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Hopefully, at some level, the students of all ryuha will progress beyond the foundational material and all the different ryuha will begin to approach the same thing – the ryu – aikido – takemuso aiki - aikijutsu. In my experience, Tomikiryu begins looking a lot more like Aikikai toward the end of the student ranks (sandan). Some of the videos of Doshu Moriteru very much express the same qualities and attributes as Tomikiryu.

To tuck the foot or NOT

Well, I got several comments on the rolling video I posted a few days ago. I wanted to break these two rolls apart and discuss them, so I'll start with the back roll. First, what is excellent about this form of rolling? As several folks mentioned, it is very smoothe. Potatoe Fist also mentioned the demonstrator's awesome ability to roll smoothly to standing without apparently stopping and orienting in a kneeling position. This is very difficult to do - at least, I can't do it. But there is one glaring problem with this form of back roll, and that is the tucked leg.

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First, the leg is not made to bear weight with the top of the foot against the ground. Rather, it is made to bear weight with the bottom of the foot against the ground. This means that once the leg is tucked, it cannot be effectively used to slow the fall down.

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Second look at what we are trying to do with these falling exercises. We're trying to build a reflex that will save you when you are surprised and forced to take a fall from an awkward position. In order to execute this form of the backfall, you must first be in a prepared position, then you have to shift your weight forward, tuck the leg, then fall. There are a lot more steps than it first appears. What happens when you internalize this skill of this way and then you are placed in an awkward position in which you don't have time or control enough to do the weight shift and foot tuck?

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One more point against the foot-tuck fall. It is somewhat against the "Budo Spirit." By that, I mean by placing yourself into a weak, helpless position, you're giving up before it is necessary. What if, during the technique, something happened and tori lost control of the technique? Could uke reverse the fall and stand back up? IF you tuck the foot you commit yourself to the role of uke. Falling without the foot-tuck offers you the option of reversing the technique for a longer period of time.

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The way we teach this back fall is to take a half step backward, squat onto the heel bearing your weight on the ball of the foot. This way the foot becomes a smooth extension of the curve of the back. Then you just allow the foot and back to act like the rocker it is shaped like. This way your bottom leg is in a much better position to help you slow the fall.

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I used to think that this backfall was just a superficial difference between judo and aikido training methods. Judo guys tend to teach to fall like i'm talking about while the foot-tuck fall is most often seen in aiki classes. But then I saw an interesting thing - The non-foot-tuck fall is demonstrated as the basic form in Gozo Shioda's book, Total Aikido. You also see the non-foot-tuck fall in old videos of Tomiki. So, The old, "hard style" aikibudo guys were doing non-foot-tuck falls. I don't really know where this foot tucked fall originated from?

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I've had students who had started learning this backward fall in other classes and it is a difficult habit to break, but once broken, they have all admitted that falling from a crouching position with the bottom of the foot on the ground is much better than falling with a tucked leg. One even mentioned that he broke his tailbone learning to do that tucked-leg backfall and never knew why. Well, it's because you can't use that leg to slow your fall, so if anything goes wrong with the smoothe curve of the thing then you just plop down onto your coccyx. I'm surprised you don't hear of that sort of thing more often.

Judo and aikido from jujitsu

Nathan at TDA posed the question the other day, "What aspects of total combat are not present in your martial art." That got me to thinking about an essay that Tomiki wrote about the derivation of aikido and judo from jujitsu. The jujitsu schools were more complete systems, containing aspects of virtually anything that could be useful in a battlefield scenario when disarmed. The modern martial arts specialized in parts of the jujitsu systems, or if you want to look at it that way, they took out some parts.

Aikido is much the same as judo because the origins of both reside in the ancient schools of jujutsu. If we generally classify the kinds of techniques (waza) in the ancient schools of jujutsu, there are four categories:

• Nage-waza (throwing techniques)
• Katame-waza (locking techniques)
• Atemi-waza (striking techniques)
• Kansetsu-waza (joint techniques)

Among these, many nage-waza and some katame-waza have been collected into the system of training that is "competition judo" (judo kyogi), and various atemi-waza and kansetsu-waza have been collected into the system of training that is "competition aikido" (aikido kyogi).

So, basically, Tomiki is saying here that judo took the throwing and locking techniques from jujitsu while aikido took the joint manipulation and striking skills. Of course, there is some cross-over of skills. Judo does have joint manipulations, but that is restricted to the elbow, so in general, aikido has a greater variety of joint manipulations. Tomiki viewed aikido throws as forms of atemi. Basically you get in a strong place when uke is in a weak place and hit him so that he falls. So, judo in Tomiki's thinking had a greater variety of throws while disallowing strikes. Aikido also has several pins and holding techniques, but not nearly the variety found in judo. So for the most part Tomiki's generalization holds: aikido is striking and joint-twisting while judo is throwing and grappling.

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Why is it necessary for this division to take place? Kano restricted judo technique in order to create a randori system that was functional but still safe. Techniques that could not be thrown full-force all the way into the ground were excluded from judo. Thus striking and joint-twisting had to be disallowed or restricted. This is actually a strength of the judo system because even though there is less variety of technique, everything is acid-tested. Everything can be thrown full force against complete resistance in a competitive situation, so if uke hits the ground, tori is assured that the technique works.

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Having mastered both judo and aikido, Tomiki took the remains of jujitsu that Kano was not able to make use of and began working on a way to create a randori system that would acid-test the striking and joint techniques like Kano's judo randori did for the throwing and grappling techniques. By the time of his death, Tomiki had come up with a ruleset for tanto randori that allowed competitive testing of techniques.

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A lot of people still practice this tanto randori, and that's okay. Fugakukai, under the direction of Karl Geis, continued looking at different ways to do this randori and finally came up with a system of open-hand randori very similar to the push-hands practice and competitions you can see Tai Chi practitioners doing.

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In every generation of martial artists, folks come up with the bright idea, "Gee, I'd like to pull the judo techniques back into aikido randori," or "Gee, I'd like to pull the aikido techniques back into judo randori," but so far no one has come up with a good way to do good, vigorous free randori with both technique sets and still be safe. You basically have to sacrifice part of the technique set or practice in an unrealistic way (pulling punches, stopping and starting, etc...) in order to stay safe.

8, 9, 10, and Goshin Jitsu

Today we had a fun aiki class. We were incredibly sore from Thursday (at least I know I was and I think Andy was in much the same shape). We warmed up and then worked on nijusan #8, 9, and 10 (hikitaoshi, udehineri, and wakigatame). This was mostly review for Andy and Patrick M., but we refined these techniques and toward the end they were looking much more precise. At the end of class we worked on the first set of Kodokan Goshin Jitsu. Goshin Jitsu is interesting because it is very much the gray area where aikido and judo become the same thing. Invented by Tomiki and his cronies at the Kodokan in the 1950's, much of it either bears a great resemblance to Tomiki's Koryu Daisan or it compliments Daisan well. I recorded some video and should have it uploaded soon.

Tegatana walking exercise

This is a video of our first exercise in aikido. The Japanese name is Tegatana, our common name is walking kata. This exercise is composed of most all the movements found in aikido techniques. These movements are abstracted out of their context and put together in this exercise so we can practice and improve motion efficiency without having to worry about an attacker jumping at us. This is the only solo exercise we do.

This isn't the greatest video,but it is sufficient for my beginning students to get the main idea and begin learning the movements.

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If you like the execution of the exercise, that's me doing the kata. If you don't like it I don't know who that fat guy is.

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Here is another rendition of this exercise, and here is some video of Tomiki doing some of the motions that were to become this kata.

The wrong yardstick

Bravo! This is a fine video essay on the effectiveness of aikido. It mirrors some of the material I have written on effectiveness here and here. I don't especially like this person's definition of aikido as 'the thing that Ueshiba invented,' (my paraphrase) because that makes it a static thing. A dead thing. Tomiki and Geis and many, many others have made advances on Ueshiba's ideas. As I wrote in a recent article, I consider Ueshiba's ideas of aikido to be the first, but not the last. But upon the idea of the effectiveness of aikido as a martial art, I think this is a very fine video response.

Shihonage and tenkai kotegaeshi

Everybody pretty much does some form of shihonage. It is one of the fundamental ways to force somebody to the ground. Most everybody does some variation of a two handed grab, turns under, and forces uke down backward. But perhaps a lot of folks don’t know that there are (at least) two very common forms that appear in randori.
Tomiki, when he started formulating the fundamental randori no kata, had both variants in the kata. He called them shihonage and tenkai kotegaeshi. At some point he combined these two into one technique called shihonage in the 17 basic forms, but over the course of 30 or so years of randori, Karl noticed that tenkai kotegaeshi popped up a significant part of the time – maybe even more than shihonage, so he put it back into our version of the form so that we get regular practice on both variants.
The differences between the variants mostly wash out when tori is able to take a two-handed grip on uke’s arm, but if tori is only able to get one hand on uke’s arm, the technique that pops out depends on the relationship. A cross grab (aihammi) results in tori’s strength being behind uke’s shoulder, so you get the standard shihonage as above. A mirror grab (gyakuhammi) results in tori’s strength being more off to the side of uke, so tenkai kotegaeshi results, similar to the model below.

Kotegaeshi, kotemawashi, and wakigatame

As rat mentioned in his comment to the previous post, kotegaeshi seems to occur much more often in randori than does kote mawashi (nikkyo). Tomiki noticed the same thing as he was putting his fundamentals kata together. He originally thought there would be roughly fifteen techniques (including kotemawashi and kotegaeshi), but through a period of randori it must have occurred to him that people just don't put themselves into mawashi-type situations as much as they go for gaeshi-type positions. He didn't discard mawashi, but his next version of that same fundamentals kata included seventeen techniques and did include kotegaeshi but not mawashi. We have found through the years that kotegaeshi and wakigatame (gokyo) are probably the two most commonly occurring locking techniques in randori. Resistant ukes seem to always be pushing into wakigatame or snatching their arms back into gaeshi. because these two techniques transition into each other so much, we work a good bit on flowing between them in chain #3.

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Stay tuned for some discussion about the nature and use of locking techniques in general and kotegaeshi in particular.

Judo stories for the Rat

Dojo Rat asked me to expand some on my previous post about the matches between the Judo and jujitsu guys early on in the history of Judo. To avoid retelling the whole thing I've looked up a few good articles for you.

Basically, the koryu (pre-Meiji restoration) jujitsu guys had kata as nearly their sole training method (See this article by Tomiki). You did kata then you went out and fought death matches or went to war as the only real test of your skills. Well, Kano comes along and collects the techniques of several jujitsu schools together and organizes them based on this idea of maximally efficient use of power into what he calls Judo. He also develops and implements a randori system, so his players simply get a lot more practice at testing the viability of their techniques than do the kata-only guys.

So, the eclectic Kano iritates a bunch of the older jujitsu teachers because of these changes that he's making, and the Metro police sponsor a tournament between the Kodokan and the old jujitsu guys. The Kodokan guys win all of the matches except one, establishing a batch of several new Kodokan demigods. Bear in mind that these were not the friendly little tourneys we're used to. These guys said goodbye to their relatives before they competed. These were death matches. The one Kodokan guy that failed to win his match stalemated the jujitsu guy for over an hour and still felt like a failure.

Well, in my opinion the take home lesson of this tournament is the point I made in the previous post. You have to have a randori system and you have to practice in that mode a lot.

Aikido with my son

Tonight was just Whit and myself, so we warmed up counting 1-Jigoro-Kano, 2-Kenji-Tomiki, etc... up to 8-counts. We did ukemi, including forward kneeling rolls and forward standing kindergarden rolls. Wrist releases #1 and #2 with #2 chained into #1. The performance goal for #2 was "walk backwards around me until you turn me around, then do #1. Worked great. We played these releases seeing how fast Whit could get behind me when I grabbed him. This was a neat exercise and Whit figured out pretty rapidly how to control his momentum so that he could run behind me without slinging away. We did suwari kokyudosa (kneeling knockdown) throwing each other onto laser beams. Then we repped #6 from nijusan, oshitaoshi (shomenate ikkyo omote).

What is kuzushi anyway?

Greg Henry (The Aiki Struggler) made the interesting comment on a recent post regarding kuzushi (unbalancing):

...I think that we need to have a better definition of ... kuzushi. Right now it seems like you're saying any type of unbalanced state is kuzushi. ... That seems a bit broad to me. Instead I suggest we use the term to mean a state from which you must take an unnatural movement to prevent falling down...

I've heard Karl et al. define kuzushi as "any time uke has to make an unintended step." The idea being, virtually everyone on the planet takes one step at the same speed, so if uke has to take one extra step, then tori gets what amounts to a "free move." It is as if uke is standing still like in the classic happo no kuzushi drill because he has to take that unintended step before he can go back to fighting against tori.

He also tells the story in which he asked one of his Japanese instructors, "Show me an offbalance." The instructor replied, "You see that man walking there? Chance, chance, chance, chance...," implying that uke is offbalance on every step.

Greg continues:

...That being said, you must do something, even if its getting out of the way to put someone [in] kuzushi unless they're doing some sort of insane off the top rope type of attack. All types of kuzushi occur pretty much by tori doing something, even though that something is often just relaxing.

I like to tie the facets of kuzushi together in my mind sorta like this: Uke is always offbalance when he is moving (unless tori is holding uke up), but tori is not always able to use that perpetual offbalance to his benefit, so tori must occasionally adjust uke's offbalance so that uke is off balance in some specific way at some specific time so that tori is able to use that offbalance. Thus, Karl's talk about bumping parallel or perpendicular right as the foot touches. That is a pretty minimal offbalance system that still provides sufficient kuzushi to apply anything in the Kodokan and Tomiki syllabi. The cool thing about that is, tori can apply this kuzushi model to uke on every step no matter how uke is moving no matter the size or strength difference. This is the true "happo no kuzushi" in the sense of "off balance in all directions."

How does kuzushi REALLY work?

So, we've been discussing how kuzushi (unbalancing) works in general and in the context of aikido and judo especially. In a desperate attempt to get more commentary on these blog posts (HINT) I put up a PollDaddy poll so y'all could tell me how you think it works. Well, with a sample size of 10, 80% said that uke is always unbalanced, 50% followed that up by saying that tori has to learn to recognize and use uke's perpetual unbalance and another 30% said that tori has to actually work to keep from putting uke back on balance. Only 20% said that they thought tori had to do a specific thing to uke to get them off balanced.

Interesting results. I would have bet that more folks would have answered, "Tori has to do something to get uke offbalance." I mean, come on. Look at the Tomiki system - it teaches the shichihon no kuzushi (7 forms of offbalance). The Kodokan guys outline happo no kuzushi (8 forms of offbalance). Karl tells us Fugakukai guys to 'bump' uke perpendicular or parallel (2 or 4 methods of offbalance, depending how you look at it) These are pretty bright guys explicitly telling us, "Do this to get uke offbalance - then throw."

Well, the correct answer to the poll is... (drumroll, please), "Yes." Or maybe, "mu." All of these responses are different facets of kuzushi. Uke is a two-legged, moving thing, so of course he is inherently unstable. But we are wired to be very good at compensating for that unbalance to avoid falling, so tori typically hs to do something to accentuate the offbalance or to make it happen in a specific way at a particular time so it is usable. Tori also has to watch out for uke trying to use him as a crutch to regain balance. So, all the answers are partially right. Look back at yesterday's shomenate example. If you follow along with the sequence of events in that technique, I said that the explicit, technical execution of proper kuzushi was secondary to the evasion and the actual execution of the technique.

Now hold on! Before y'all get to screaming 'heretic,' let me finish. I agree that kuzushi is crucial to a good technique. You can't do a throw unless a condition of unbalance exists beforehand. That must mean... You guessed it! If tori can do shomenate without first doing a kuzushi that must mean a state of unbalance already existed - without tori doing it. Now, I also said in the previous post that tori could often make the kuzushi better, or use it to effect a better throw if tori does something to create a specific offbalance before the throw.

So, you're all right. Sorta. I promise the next poll won't be a trick question!

Here's y'all a decent basic reference video on how to do shomenate.

Mutual education

What a great randori session we had tonight. It started out as judo with Rob and myself, but we were both feeling lazy, so after some standing drills (including some work on happo no kuzushi - look for the posts in the next couple of days) and some light nagekomi we de-volved into chatting about knife randori and our aikido system. We ended up shutting up and putting up. We played with some of the variant forms of randori that I've talked about on this blog lately, including grab-and-go knife randori and the S.T.A.B. hug the arm maeotoshi. I got my thighs and belly cut up pretty badly a couple of times but managed to catch Rob a couple of times with shomenate (You remember, the technique that Tomiki said preceeds all successful aikido).

It was neat trying my aikido against a really dangerous knife guy in some unfamiliar randori situations with some resistance involved. You want to have someone worthy of testing your skills against, go find one of Bram Frank's CSSD Modern Arnis guys. It was neat to see how well the core of our aiki system (shomenate) works even against this worthy an adversary.

We also played some drills that I've been preparing for the Aiki Buddy Gathering next month. Using aiki brushoff and rolling the ball to integrate the kata and chains we do into randori. Cool stuff. For instance, we worked on a couple of nijusan techniques (shomenate and oshitaoshi) with uke given the instructions to absolutely not fall using the standard fall from kata. This leads, naturally into rolling the ball to stay safe and retain control and aiki brushoff to disengage and flee. Really cool. Worked wonders on Rob even as he added greater levels of force and speed and resistance. And Rob was able to do it well with minimal instruction.

The really cool thing is, I think I managed to communicate to Rob what I've been trying to tell him for a while (that the Kihara methodology is really cool) and he was definately able to show me better than tell me what he was talking about in his knife randori comments (that the CSSD modern Arnis guys really know what they are talking about). We clarified and simplified a lot of our talk and theory in the crucible of randori tonight.

The role of the knife in aikido

Rob has an excellent, reasoned comment on my ongoing discussion of knife technique in aikido. he makes the point that he essentially wouldn't want to go empty handed to a knife fight. That he'd rather have a knife (a tool). Too true. But I think there is an underlying misunderstanding of the role of the knife in aikido training in general.

Tomiki, when he started teaching aikido, put a foam knife in the hand of the attacker. Why? Some people say it was to facilitate competition. That's nonsense. He could have just as easily devised a competition ruleset with the attacker doing lunge punches. Some say that it was to preserve the budo spirit. I find that shaky too. If he's wanted to develop a traditional samurai-type sport he could have had them wearing kendo armor and defending against bokken or at least swinging foam bats. So, what does the knife do for us?

The obvious answer is, "We learn to defend against a knife." Well, that's the biggest load of malarkey yet. The knife has evolved over the course of thousands of years as the best weapon around - even surpassing the firearm for general utility. Knives cause gruesome, debilitating wounds even when they are not fatal.

Now, I'm biased. I'm not a fan of the Tomiki tanto randori methodology. From what I can see from what little I've watched. About the only thing that anyone has ever learned from competing against a foam knife is that if you take two relatively equally trained aikidoka and give one a knife, he will almost always win (see the video below). The knife is simply that big an advantage. Sure, in tanto randori, someone is occasionally able to knock the knife guy down, but it is almost never via clean technique and it is almost always at the cost of being cut many, many times. So, how do they balance that huge advantage of the knife in randori? They only score the attacks in which uke stabs moving forward with decent balance and they specify that the knife must enter tori's torso at nearly a 90 degree angle. Basically you can only do zombie stabs (albeit fast ones). But this is NOT a rant against tanto randori players. If you want to practice that way it's no skin off my back. I'm trying to get at what is the role of the knife in aikido?

In my opinion, the only reason we practice against knife attacks is in order to learn to deal with being totally outclassed. It doesn't really provide much incentive to test yourself against those that are weaker than you - you never have an incentive to get better. But if you give even the most inexperienced player a knife then all of a sudden everyone gets the point that everyone is potentially dangerous. With the knife we can see how we stand up in the absolute worst of situations, and that is incentive to improve. We learn that we have to treat everyone the same - as if they are so awesomely dangerous that they totally outclass us.

Kihon in judo

So, the founder and the early generations of judoka left us several huge piles of techniques but little in the way of organization or clues about how to teach them. In a way, this was good because it freed successive generations to be creative, and that creativity has been successful in large part because of the emphasis on the randori system. Coaches taught, for the most part, what worked for them in randori/shiai, and players used it if it made sense and dropped it if it didn’t make sense at the time.
I guess one reason that this surprises me so much is the fact that Kano and Tomiki, et al. were educators. Kano had this idea that “what one man can learn, he can teach 100 generations of men.” With this current structure of “try it, use it, or ditch it as it pleases you,” there is nothing to keep judo from becoming a system of three techniques (i.e. osotogari, single leg pick, and seoinage for instance), and if that happens, then the knowledge that Kano was trying to preserve and pass on will fade away. I had a pastor tell me a while back that you only have to fail to teach something for about one generation (30-40 years) before it is gone.

The first thing that judo apparently lacks in its curriculum is a set of kihon. If you look at all the other systems for teaching martial arts that I am familiar with (aikido, jodo, karate) they all have these sets of fundamental building blocks that are practiced at the beginning of every single class as a sport-specific warmup. Shotokan has a set (taikyoku) of identified stances, blocks, strikes, and transitions that the masters identified as comprising most of the rest of the system. Tomiki has a set (variously called tegatana, unsoku, or tandoku undo) of kihon. Jodo has their own set of kihon building blocks. This type of constant basic review makes sense from a teaching point of view – even in non-martial activities. In every church service we attend we say the Apostle’s creed (“I believe in God the Father Almighty…” In the Saxon math program every lesson begins with a short review of much more basic material.

So – what should a set of kihon in judo look like? Here we get to a sticky point. Judo is really two systems – a groundwork system and a standing system. So it is difficult to identify a single set of foundational material – Judo should really have two sets of kihon. But that is almost an oxymoron because kihon should be representative of most of the system. So, the two sets of kihon should be strongly and functionally integrated into each other – almost one set. Additionally, for purposes of review and warm-up you’d want your kihon to be significantly shorter than the entire system – otherwise you might as well run through the entire syllabus every class. Cognitive theory guys suggest that we easily remember chunks of 7±2 things – so a good size for a kihon exercise would be between 5 and 9 separate things.

If you do nothing else, you should have a set of kihon that is representative of the vast majority of the system and you should practice it as a sport-specific warmup every class. When you scan over the majority of the system like this at the beginning of every class it is much more difficult for knowledge to drift or die out and the repetition helps to make it stick.

Judo newaza practice

Rob and I had an individual session of judo tonight in which we reviewed our beginning movement drill that teaches motion and transition between the various holding positions on the ground. Most judo classes use a similar drill to introduce supine holding, but this drill is particularly valuable because it makes tori more comfortable in all the major top positions with uke supine, prone, and turtled-up.

Afterward we reviewed one of the major groundwork escape principles - bridge uke's face forcibly into the mat. It's amazing how much easier many of the escapes become when you smash uke's nose into the earth first. Similar to an idea that Tomiki sensei allegedly expressed, "None of this will work unless you do shomenate (hit them in the face) first."

What's up, doc?

Tegatana concentrating on small steps and medial balls of feet. Hanasu as a warmup into Chain #2, including kote taoshi, mae otoshi, hiki taoshi, and oshi taoshi. Nijusan concentrating on shomenate, aigamaeate, and gyakugamaeate. After class, Patrick M. and Kristof demonstrated Nijusan 1-10 for our new guy. Patrick has made some particular improvements in the atemiwaza (1-5) of Nijusan. #4 and #7 still need some work. Kristof did well with his demonstration, but still needs to clean up #10 (wakigatame) and the pins on #6, 7, and 8.
I’d like to introduce our new guy, Kel. He comes to us from an aikido class in the vicinity of Purdue University where he studied under Dr. Thomas Burdine. I like to ask new guys that have done aiki stuff before if the stuff we do looks the same or different – Kel responded, “Yes.” Dr. Burdine shares some aiki lineage with us, having trained under Tomiki as well as Tohei, and Burdine sensei must still using some of the Tomiki structure because Kel told me that he recognized pretty much all of the nijusan that Patrick and Kristof demonstrated and that he’s seen it in similar format.
As for my current posture quest, after each repetition I made a point to rock my head back and look upward a couple of times to get the feel of what a little more neck extension might feel like. Working this I made an interesting observation. Tori doesn’t have much trouble working with good neck extension but uke pretty much has to break this neck posture in order to do an event as athletic as an attack. I think this practice might have helped me some without really trying to remain rigidly upright. Head/neck posture has some interesting interactions with the concept of eye contact (metsuke) too.

Attack of the living dead

One common complaint about aikido as a system of self-defense is that it looks like the uke attacks like an idiot and then jumps onto the ground to make tori look good. Sure enough, if you check out aikido demos on Google or Youtube, uke is often either running blindly at tori or is lurching slowly forward like a monster in a 1950’s movie, giving an extended arm to tori to do with as he pleases. You even occasionally see videos of Doshu or of the various “old school” “hard style” aikido folks in which ukes attack like brainless zombies. Honestly, Doesn't it look like Frank is about to execute kotegaeshi in the picture?

What’s going on here? Surely this isn’t what the founder or his prewar disciples (i.e. Tomiki, Shioda, etc…) intended aikido to become. Well, there are several things going on here…

• These are just demonstrations and the ukes are understandably reluctant to ruin the demo or make the instructor look like a fool. (Not a very satisfying answer to the question or solution to the problem)


• To artistically represent anything there has to be some degree of abstraction from reality. The same is true in the abstraction of combat into martial art. There will necessarily be distortion. (Still not a really satisfying answer.) The trick is managing that distortion such that the martial art is still artistic but also still functional and practical.


• People who are attacked violently and randomly fail to learn. They refuse to learn. In fact, unless you see the same type of situation several times in a format you can handle, it is nearly impossible to learn from it.


• If you look at the act of striking in general (disregarding the use of weapons for right now) there are at least three requirements for any striking attack. First, the attacker has to approach to within touching distance. Second, the attacker has to extend a natural weapon (arm, leg, etc…) and has to put strength in it. Third, the target for the most part has to be the victim’s center of mass. Otherwise the attack stands a greater chance of glancing off or missing.The basic attacks of aikido (shomenate, shomenuchi, yokomenuchi) are the most abstracted things that still follow these principles.
  

So, the attack of the living dead that you often see is intended to be a somewhat abstract attack that fulfils the above three requirements but is still orderly enough for tori to deal with and learn from. Where aikidoka get in trouble is when uke forgets his role as THE BAD GUY and gives the appearance of fulfiling the above requirements without ever really posing any potential threat to tori. That is what uke's role is - present a potential threat for tori to deal with. So, how can uke improve his potential threat while still using the ordely attacks that tori can deal with?

• Maintain eye contact as much as possible. If uke can look tori in the eye than tori is making it too easy for uke.


• Uke should not wallow around in a state of offbalance. If tori gets an offbalance, uke responds to regain his balance then regain a position from which to attack.


• Uke's attack should take place in one efficient, ballistic motion from outside ma-ai. If uke gets closer than ma-ai without attacking tori should already be smiting him.

It is really sort of a strategy game between uke and tori. Tori is always trying to get into strategically stronger positions and uke is always trying to regain the strategic advantage.