Part 3 - Teaching, culture, ukemi

I'm interested in your teaching activities on five continents. The main question is are the students different? Is there an effect of culture or you can teach them the same way?

First of all let me clarify that I have 11 years of experience of aikido so I'm very junior compared to a lot of people, and I want to acknowledge that I don't primarily consider myself as an aikido teacher. At the moment I take classes from two 4th dans in Brighton, for example. I don't teach, I learn. During my time with Aiki Extensions I was in a privileged position of being a volunteer in different countries and often in those countries perhaps the highest grade was... for example in Ethiopia, the highest grade was a 6th kyu so as a 1st kyu I was teaching there. In Brazil, I was teaching children in the favelas slums and there were much higher grades in Brazil but many wouldn’t teach in favelas or just weren’t available for so much time because of work etc. So the differences and similarities across cultures... I became obsessed with culture for a while travelling around in aikido in different countries and seeing the different bodies and way of doing things. The younger people are the more similar they are, so we all kind of start at the same, so young children 5-6 year olds doing aikido are very similar all over the world. As they get older they get culturalised and they are sort of warped in one particular direction or another. So what you see, how it shows up in the bodies is perhaps easiest to describe. Americans are much more upper body; the culture is orientated around a particular expression of power and dominance, so they are out of balance in the upper bodies, it won't come out on radio but you can show it like this [shows]. In East Europe, there is some of that strength but it's slightly differently orientated, there is some of that upper body kind of strength pushing forward kind of piece. In Brazil, much more in the hips, women and men dance in Brazil, they are kind of koshinage specialists I always think, you know. But many people in Brazil aren't doing Brazilian aikido, they've impersonated the body of something else, so after enough training they stop looking Brazilian because they are trying to be Japanese or Amercian. Japanese and English aren’t so different. Much more held, the body is much more contained, less free in its movement from say, South America, as you would expect. In some ways, actually, aikido is a practice about flow and relaxation and harmonisation and femininity which in many ways is profoundly unjapanese! I think the Japanese invented aikido because they needed it not because they naturally embody it. The British body is quite similar, held in that way. Ethiopians, much more in the back, it’s an old, proud culture where people keep their opinions to themselves. Americans tend to be on the front weight more, Ethiopians on the back weight more. The learning style is different, you know, in a class of Ethiopian children you can just tell them what to do. American teenagers just wouldn't tolerate that, so there is differences in the teachings that's appropriate. Some of the technical mistakes they make are pretty universal: everyone puts shihonage behind the head. So when they go to do a standard katatedori shihonage beginners all around the world put it behind the head. That's the problem with perception. They are perceiving that you go underneath the arm rather than that you actually keep the arm in front of you and turn your hips. So that's just one example, there are lots of others of a universal problem in perception of aikido techniques.

I read somewhere that there are people who are more Japanese than the actual Japanese because they want to learn the Japanese way so much. Have you experienced anything like this?

I have some young Japanese friends from aikido and most of them eat hamburgers, they are six foot tall, they listen to hip-hop and they are nothing like what you'd expect. The Super-Shihan who left Japan during the sixties just as Japan was modernising kept a kind of old-school Japanese nature that even the Shihan coming out of Hombu dojo now don't have, for better and for worse. In foreign countries people confuse form and essence. So there are a lot of people impersonating the form of aikido rather than the essence, and if you've done aikido in only one place and learned from one teacher it's easy to do because you can't triangulate what's the essence. Whereas if you've got different teachers there at different locations you can triangulate and say “OK, this bit is universal as that's something that all my teachers had, that must be aikido that can't just be Fred, it can't just be Japan, they can't just be my association.” And that goes from cultures, associations to teachers right down the way, that confusing the form and essence. So yeah, some people are impersonating being Japanese and want to be samurai, there are even English guys who speak with Japanese accent on the mat, and I'd like to be on the record for saying that's bloody ridiculous. It doesn't serve, it doesn't serve their students so it's not cool.

You said that if you are grown-up basically culture has a large effect but if you had to say one single thing that you think is the most important thing to teach to a beginner - independently from how old they are or where they are - what would that be?

I once asked one of my main teachers Shihan William Smith - he is deceased now, I was uchi deshi for him for a little while, I stayed in his dojo many times between jobs over about a five year period, and am deeply indebted to him. So I once asked him what's the hardest thing about aikido and he said ukemi. And I asked what's the most important thing in aikido and he said ukemi. So I'd stay with ukemi if I had to say one thing to teach to beginners. There are a lot of other answers, it depends on the beginner: manner and attitude; if the manner and attitude are right then everything else follows; Care, care for their partners, that would really be up on my list as the essence of aikido and the essence of learning; and going slow, Saotome Sensei says "go slowly learn quickly".