Blog

It's been a while since I last wrote to this blog, which has several reasons. One is that I have been busy with work and (almost) all my thoughts were centred around teaching and preparation for teaching. I learned a lot of lessons from students, but now I want to explore how this non-writing is related to my aikido practice.

Sometimes an ukemi is not performed the best way... Ukemi without using the arms is not the easiest one, that's why it's usually not recommended to beginners. If you want to try it, fold your hands, go down to shikko dachi and start rolling forward. You will see that it's harder to roll this way, but rolling without the use of the hands can come handy sometimes (think icy roads and some big china vase in your hands).

A couple of days ago, when I was writing the address of my dojo's website onto the pavement with chalk (with the aim of drawing attention to martial arts, especially to aikido), a little kid was coming by with his mother. As he saw what I was doing he asked his mother what I was writing there. After having received the answer from her, he immediately asked her mother "What is aikido?" I was curious about what people not doing martial arts might know about aikido so I waited patiently until the woman said something.

On the second day of the Doshu weekend there was one training in the morning and a number of demonstrations in the afternoon. Here's what happened:

On 14-15 November 2009, Doshu Ueshiba Moriteru held a seminar in the Netherlands. The event was (as far as I know) in correlation with the facts that the Netherlands commemorate the 400th anniversary of starting trade relations with Japan this year, and that Aikido has been practiced in the country for 45 years. This post is my personal report of day one of the seminar, day two will follow soon.

Vincent: But you know what the funniest thing about Europe is?
Jules: What?
Vincent: It's the little differences. I mean, they got the same shit over there that we got here, but it's just – it's just there it's a little different.

I have some sort of confusion about our martial art when it comes to the concepts of harmony, control, centre, and so on. Connor has already made some comparisons between aikido and other martial arts (see his self-defence post series,[1] [2] [3] [4]), and there he discussed which one is 'better' than the other, which one works better against one another. In this post, I compare aikido to other martial arts in the sense how selfish they are/appear. By writing my thoughts down, I hope to organise my thoughts and share them with you in order to give you some interesting ideas, and to receive some feedback (by the way, all these aims are selfish).

Before going on to relating to other people in the dojo, I would like to write about the overall process of dojo-change.
I've recently read about the steps of cultural shock (and I wrote a post about it which was lost just before submitting...), because of moving to a new country. The four steps of cultural shock are always there, and none of the steps can be skipped no matter how much you would want that. The only thing that might change is the duration of the individual stages. Before going onm here's the steps from Wikipedia:

Does aikido work in the street? What would it be like to send an aikido master out to deal with the bad guys? I'm not sure whether we will get any answers to these questions but I definitely want to watch a couple of episodes of how Steven Seagal behaves as a police officer.