Part 2 - Street aikido, other martial arts

Have you had to use aikido in the street?

Ok, this is the classic kind of beginners’ question, and what people often want with this question is some kind of Steven Seagal kind of movie fantasy beating up 10 guys using aikido. I use aikido principles every day, that’s the first one I'm saying, and that's the really useful part. The next most useful thing, is the physical part of aikido that defends you from the main things that kill young people – depression, nasty falls while drunk, those kinds of things. So that's one the real “self defence” of aikido. Aikido decreases the rate of heart decease and cancer for example. Certainly the first, probably the second. In terms of applications of aikido techniques, yeah, there's been some times. With Aiki Extensions (an aikido based charity), I worked in quite dangerous areas so there were times when there were aikido techniques used. More often it was more the relaxation and awareness part of aikido that was useful. There was a time in Addis Ababa where I was walking down the street, and I'd just bought an English language newspaper and I was walking along with that, and I saw a kind of a fight going on ahead of me, a scuffle, and I was immediately aware that this wasn't a real fight. It didn't look authentic – from the point of view of a martial artist with some awareness of that, so I said to myself, what's going on here? Then I got pushed from behind into the fight, and a fourth person tried to grab my wallet from a pocket. So at this point I was already in a kind of randori situation, it was four people pushing and shouting around me and it was more of a matter of staying centred. What I actually ended up doing was hitting the person over the head with the newspaper I was holding and screaming out to them, using some pretty colourful language in English and Amharic to tell them to...go away. And they did! They were taken by surprise I was kind of able to respond at all in given the speed of the situation. And afterwards I thought, "argh, I should have done some kotegaeshi, or some other wrist lock or cool move", you know, but actually I thought it wouldn't have been appropriate and these guys might have knifed me to death or something like that and actually, the response of just screaming and hitting them with a newspaper I happened to be carrying was a more aiki response. What else a time or three subduing drunk friends, people who were danger to themselves and other people – and the beauty o aikido is that you don’t have to kill your mates just because they’re being idiots... we’ve all been there. There was also a time when I was in a street riot in Ecuador, in Quito with a lot of anti-foreign feeling around. The Americans had just crushed their economy to get cheaper bananas basically, and the response was that people weren't very happy as you can imagine this sort of sentiment turned against all the foreigners who happened to be there, and I was one of them. And so the street riot ensued and, yeah, it was more about awareness, taisabaki, there was a lot of body movement, moving out of the way of various things thrown at me and people trying to hit me with things and getting out of the situation, so I didn't do any shihonages or iriminages but it's definitely an application of aikido technique.

The time I’m most proud of with aikido was when I didn’t do a technique. It was in South America again and an old lady in “the street” had just sold me some batteries that I quickly found out didn’t work. Well I grabbed my money back and went to leave feeling indignant. She took hold of me ai-hanmi – it was a classical aikido “attack” – to stop me going. I could see the nikkyo and knew I could slam it on and just leave, but I also realised it would probably break this poor woman’s wrist, and she obviously needed the money more than I needed the batteries, so I smiled gave her the $2 back, took the useless batteries and went about my day. That’s aikido to be proud of.

Another beginner type question. You have experience in a lot of martial arts, jujitsu, Systema and so on. What is the main difference between all of these and aikido, and why did you choose aikido instead of these in the long term?

First of all I only have limited experience of the other martial arts. I've only trained briefly, no more than a year in any of the others, so things like Systema I enjoyed, tae kwon do, jujitsu, just briefly. I think I was very lucky to find aikido first, and in a way, it was unlucky because aikido was too sophisticated for me to understand at first, and I was really doing jujitsu in an aikido dojo at first, just based on technique and hurting people, moving things and doing 'to' rather than 'with'. It was two of three years I started to do something that's a little bit like aikido. Now I think I maybe have done real aikido two of three times in my life by accident. So do I do aikido? Yeah, no. :-) In terms of the other arts, there's a lot there and they are all good, they are good for different things so it's what you want. So if you want to do sports judo can be great, if you want to do dramatic kicks tae kwon do can be great. So there's all good stuff there and it really depends on the teacher as much as the art, so conversations about which art is better are pointless. What I love about aikido is several things. First of all, it has an ethical dimension. All the true traditional martial arts have a spiritual basis and basis in doing minimal violence. Karate for example - one of the founders of karate said you should only use karate once in your lifetime, if you do it more than that you are sick and a trouble maker. All traditional martial arts are about this. Aikido is really taken it to the next level by saying not only am I going to do minimal violence to my attacker but I'm going to protect my attacker. It's not I'm going to just be defensive and if he attacks me then I can kill him and that’s his bad luck or karma or whatever. It's actually saying even if he attacks me, even if he tries to kill me and my whole family I'm going to try and protect him. And of course that's the ideal which you don't always live up to in some situations – I’ve broken a couple of joints one through ego and carelessness and one to stop worse pain, and as an aikidoka I felt it. Empathy hurts.

So that's one thing about aikido which is really unique - actually unique. Technically it's not so different from some ninjutsu or jujitsu or Systema or other things. Technically. The other aspect of aikido I like is just the emphasis on connection and flow. So by putting you into prolonged contact with other people, it's very special and the things that come out of that psychologically. Also the emphasis on beauty and flow adds another dimension to it. So when I see aikido it like stop, start, one, two, three aikido I don't really think it's aikido to me, maybe how you learn aikido....maybe. It's lacking that kind of beauty and flow. The other aspect of aikido which is unique - perhaps not unique but certainly a meaningful thing - is the uke-nage relationship. The training method of aikido is ukemi. The training method of karate traditionally has been kata, the training method of judo is randori which has rules, and these both have advantages, actually, over aikido. But the training method of aikido is this role taking uke-nage relationship which, again, psychologically sets up certain things to do with power and vulnerability or example, which are pretty unique. I do aikido because of those things. I've tried other things and I have yet to find something that satisfies me at such a deep level. There are other things I could do... I don't want to say aikido is special, actually, that's a mistake. If you say aikido is special put it out as something exotic and fetishise it then it causes problems, whereas actually there's many things in Systema or even tango dancing that are in aikido. So aikido is wonderful, and it's beautiful, unique and it's also totally not special [smiles].