Although it's been a bit over a week since I actually attended Nishio sensei's seminar in Santa Cruz, I thought it better late than never to write up a seminar review.

The seminar was held in two places; Thursday night class (2 hours) was at Aikido West, while the rest of the seminar (Friday through Sunday) was held down on the lovely UC Santa Cruz campus in the West Field House (gymnasium).

The seminar was dubbed as Nishio sensei's 70th birthday seminar, although, in fact, his 70th birthday was last December. In any case, I do have to remark that the man does not move anything like any other 70 year old that I've seen, but not many 70 year olds I've met are 8th dan aikido, 7th dan iaido, 6th dan judo, and 5th dan karate.

A lot of Nishio sensei's techniques seem to be drawn from his iaido experience. Much of his subtle footwork and handwork came from the way one would handle a sword. In fact, outside of the two hours at Aikido West (where we didn't have much room), Nishio sensei showed a lot of his empty handed techniques performed with a bokken versus bokken and jo versus bokken; the same basic movements were used in all of these to show that they were all interrelated and valuable in one's practice. Nishio sensei said, time and time again, that unless you are able to do the techniques both empty handed and with a weapon in your hand, you are not practicing budo.

Nishio sensei places quite a lot of emphasis on footwork and handwork. All of his movements can be applied toward basically any attack, whether it be a grab or a strike; the same body movements handle all of the attacks. Perhaps due to this, many of his techniques seemed very foreign to me. Shomenuchi ikkyo irimi, for instance, had two shuto atemi to the attacker's face before even attempting to control the shomenuchi arm. This was pretty different from most of the other aikido I've encountered, but was nonetheless interesting to see and feel.

One thing I found interesting was that Nishio sensei would say that a lot of people in Japan, in the States, and in Europe did a technique in a certain manner (showing a "basic" technique like katatedori shihonage), and continued on to say that the way these people practiced was all wrong. He would then go on to show the openings and places where the technique just plainly wouldn't work, and then showed his version of the technique to show that all of these openings were covered.

A lot of the principles that he showed were interesting, too. His interpretation of irimi was not the "take your body and thrust it into the attacker's space" kind of irimi but was a subtle movement, perhaps six inches or so, of one foot or the other; that was all. The movement didn't even have to go _into_ the attacker, but could even be a slight step away, interestingly. This produced enough of a movement to cause uke to not be able to hit nage, but to put nage into a good position to strike or throw uke.

Nishio sensei spoke in Japanese throughout the seminar, and Chikako Bryner handled the translation quite marvelously; I certainly wouldn't have been able to do as well as she did. Of course, I just ended up listening to Nishio sensei directly, but Chikako-san did a great job at providing an accurate, simultaneous translation of Nishio sensei's explanations.

The seminar was also interesting as it drew quite a lot of people from all over the place. I actually knew some of the people from out of town, including people from San Bernardino, Austin (Kregg Phillips and Marc Lipsinic), Boulder, and from all over the Bay Area.

My practice for this seminar was not to pick up new techniques or even new ways of doing techniques. Rather than pick up the minutiae of how to do shomenuchi ikkyo, I found myself working with the _frustration_ at not being able to do some of the things that Nishio sensei presented, especially his weapons work. Honestly, I really dislike working on footwork and handwork, a fact that makes a lot of my aikido seem very sloppy. In other words, this seminar was good for me in the same was as having to eat my vegetables; I was working on something I didn't like, and I think that _that_ was the important thing for me during the weekend. Rather than just giving up on trying to be able to do some of the particular techniques, I started from step one and worked from there. I thought it was good that I was able to work through _some_ of the frustrations I felt during the seminar...

Jun