Philosophy

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.

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).

Now it's time to talk about the last self-defence principle. I'd like to start with an example from a movie. You might remember a film called Road house, or - in case you are too young to have seen it - it's recommended. Apart from the action scenes and some questionnable momentums in the film, there are some interesting things in it as well, such as the following: 

As there was no training in the afternoon on Saturday, the last technical training of the camp was in the morning of the 6th day. This training was slightly longer than the previous technical traininings. Elsner sensei left quite a number of things for this training, but as he had explained the basics throughout the week, and we had understood the teachings, everyone could follow what they heard and saw on Saturday, and the tempo was also quite good. The real, long-lasting training will happen during the regular trainings anyway.

So what we had in the last training:

In this post I am going to discuss the relationship between aikido techniques and the concept of self defence, and – finally – I will also touch upon the effectiveness of techniques.

A couple of days ago I was walking towards the train station after work. It was around 9pm but it was still not very dark. As I was walking I heard someone saying in a nervous-sounding voice: "Excuse me!!" It was a woman on a bycicle and she was saying this to an other woman walking just behind me. The pavement was wide, there weren't many people there walking but the bycicle woman wanted to cycle in the middle of it and anyone in her way had to get out.

At the very beginning of my aikido studies I read a book that contained a quote about two techniques. I think it was a quote from O-Sensei and it said something like the following: "[to master] iriminage - [it takes] 15 years; ikkyo - your whole life". I didn't really understand this statement at that time because iriminage seemed to be one of the hardest techniques and ikkyo seemed pretty straightforward, even easy with the beginner partners I trained with. Although I'm still far from mastering any technique, I'm starting to understand the background behind the above quote.

As mentioned in one of the previous posts, I had learned about the concept that through some movements, even some very simple ones, it is believed that enlightment can be achieved. I have been focusing harder on body movement, state of mind, connection and openness for about a month or so, and I think I realised some interesting points.

I have been getting questions recently about the applicability of aikido in self defence situations. How effective are the techniques of aikido as self defence techniques?

Before going into the details of the techniques and their effectiveness, however, let us examine the ways self defence can manifest itself.

Let's consider a simple aikido movement, taisabaki, and someone with little aikido or conscious body movement experience/expertise. Taisabaki is something that looks very easy from the outside. You step forward, turn with hips, and step backward. This is at least the description by which everyone can start doing it. If I give someone this instruction and tell them to do taisabaki for 20 minutes they will get bored in one minute and I will never see them again. However, if I tell them a couple of points to look at, observe, and correct, they might say that 20 days might not be enough to perfect taisabaki, and through that, themselves. The following are a couple of points with respect to taisabaki. These are all going to be questions, so I don't really want to tell anyone what's good and not, just what they think and feel is better and more useful.

Before the questions, a bit of advanced taisabaki demonstration with a partner: