I just got back last night from a seminar with Morihiro Saito sensei, and I thought I'd share some of my thoughts about it.

It's been a good week as far as aikido goes for me. Last weekend, I had the pleasure of training with Yoshinobu Takeda sensei from Yokohama, Japan in the Bay Area. A friend of mine from the area who was also at Takeda sensei's seminar came back with me to train at our dojo and to be here a few days ahead of time for Saito sensei's seminar. And then, the last three days over the weekend were spent at Saito sensei's seminar. All in all, it's been a good ten days or so as far as aikido goes.

I had never seen Saito sensei before outside of pictures in his books and a video of his demonstration in a friendship demonstration from over 20 years ago. In addition, my own experience in "Iwama style" aikido has been very limited, pretty much only to that which I've seen; I'd never trained in that system before. With all this in mind, I was very much looking forward to this weekend for a while and was excited to attend the seminar.

The seminar was held at the Buddhist Temple in downtown Denver. When my friend and I arrived at around 4:30pm (with the seminar officially starting at 6pm), there was already a line of about fifty to a hundred people waiting in line to get into the seminar area. Luckily, my friend's teachers from Aikido Institute (Oakland, California) were waiting pretty close to the beginning of the line, so we latched onto them and got ourselves a good spot.

Gaku Homma sensei's Nippon Kan organization hosted the seminar, and their organization of the seminar was something to behold. They had a pretty big crew of people, complete with walkie talkies, ushering people left and right, putting stamps on your hands showing you had paid for that session (although these stamps rubbed off after about two minutes of training), serving cookies and fruits, and so on. Although the registration process itself seemed a bit bulky (with only one person entering all of the registration details into a computer), the seminar was pretty incredibly organized. We were each assigned a number that we had to have checked each time we entered the seminar space itself.

The seminar space was basically all covered with wrestling mats held together by that wide medical tape stuff. It's not my favorite surface on which to train (as it tends to catch toes and such) and doesn't really absorb a whole lot of breakfall energy, but it wasn't that bad this weekend since we pretty much never completed a throw during the whole seminar as there were way too many people. Estimating, I would say there were at least two hundred people on the mat.

Saito sensei looks, frankly, a lot smaller in person than he does in his books and such; I expected him to be a larger man. Of course, the most recent picture I've seen of him must have been at least several years old, and I've heard his health hasn't been too well recently. He was walking with a cane whenever he was off the mat, but his aikido, of course, looked very powerful.

With him came a few people from Iwama and other locations from Japan including Kawabe sensei, Namai sensei, and an uchideshi named Mark who did all of the translating throughout the seminar. I thought Mark did a very faithful job at translation over the weekend and seemed to very much be taking care of Saito sensei excellently as far as I could tell.

The basic gist of the weekend went like this:

• Friday evening: ikkyo, nikkyo, sankyo
• Saturday morning: shihonage, kotegaeshi
• Saturday afternoon: koshinage, kokyunage
• Sunday morning: weapons (jo/bokken suburi, kumitachi, kumijo)
• Sunday afternoon: ushirowaza, iriminage

The techniques we did were all very informative and I was doing my darnedest to do what Saito sensei was doing. I'm sure that a lot of the folks with whom I trained were thinking, "Sheesh -- what's up with this person's techniques?" Nonetheless, I kept at it as well as I could through the weekend, despite the fact that I was a fumbling moron most of the time.

Of course, I can't go through each and every single technique that we did over the weekend. I think it's the most number of different techniques I've ever gone over in technical detail. Good stuff. Despite the fact that I've never really studied under his students, I found myself thinking, "Hey, I remember being told to do this during this technique before," quite often throughout the weekend. Saito sensei's influence is very strong, even in non-"Iwama" dojo.

How did I fare during the techniques? As I've said before, I'm really no good at technical details; I must have a short attention span or something. So, I had trouble with things like which hand do I put into a sankyo-like grip during this particular koshinage? Does the hand make an outside-in circle or an inside-out circle? It was an "ugh" situation, but I slodged through it as well as I could.

I found the techniques themselves to be interesting - different for me at times. When folks who were experienced did the techniques onto me, they seemed to work pretty well, even when I was hanging on pretty tightly. Of course, my techniques hardly worked at all throughout the weekend except with "nice" uke. I'm just not used to putting that much of a "grip" into my hands or that much "strength" into my arms during a technique, I guess. Even the "ki no nagare" techniques seemed a bit on the stiff side for my taste, but I come from a "flowy" background.

Throughout the weekend, Saito sensei said that his techniques are what O-sensei taught him. He referred constantly to the book "Budo" (that O-sensei wrote) and said that if you take a look at what he is doing, it is very much the same as what is in the book. He asked people to please take what he does as what he was taught by O-sensei and to try out these teachings as well as what we normally do.

Watching Saito sensei do techniques is an interesting sort of a backwards reverberation, as although I've never seen him in person, I've seen a lot of his students do what he is doing. It's definitely neat to see the "origin" of the manner in which his students practice aikido.

Through the weekend, I got the feeling that Saito sensei was very much trying to preserve that which O-sensei taught him. I can very much feel the respect and loyalty he has to what the founder gave to him, and I very much appreciated the fact that someone out there is allowing us an opportunity to tap into his embodiment of what he learned. He did not say that this was any better nor worse than what anyone else was doing, but in fact, he went out of his way to say that everyone should go and train with as many different instructors as they could, that we should go to different seminars and work with different people. I really liked this feeling of his opening the door for people to go see different people, as I very much subscribe to that philosophy.

He also said that "ki no nagare" was usually not taught at Iwama until students were at least third dan, but he noticed that a lot of the teachers in Tokyo did so. In keeping up with these kinds of "newer" methods of training, Saito sensei said that he was introducing working with more flowing techniques with his beginning students. I thought that was pretty interesting.

Although I didn't get close to touching Saito sensei, Namai sensei who was walking around the mat noticed me fumbling around and paid a lot of attention to me, providing me with his thoughts on ukemi, iriminage, koshinage, and a few other things I was working on. In addition, I also got to work with other teachers in the US including Kim Peuser sensei (who helped me gently and intensely through some of the kumijo) and Hoa Nguyen sensei (a few times, including koshinage) of Aikido Institute, Hans Goto sensei of Bay Marin Aikido (who offered some good insights on kumitachi), and Aviv Goldsmith of Reno Aikido Co-op (who was gracious to extend an invitation to their Lake Tahoe retreat next year). These people helped me personally and patiently to get a glimpse of what Saito sensei was teaching, and I appreciate their efforts greatly.

Nippon Kan threw an amazing party on Saturday night at their beautiful dojo. There was plenty of yummy food there, enough even for me (and I even went back for thirds). They have a tradition of each group coming from different dojo coming up and singing a song for the rest of the group. I was made an "honorary member" of Aikido Institute and went up with them to sing a parody Tom Petty song. The folks from North Texas were amazing, having brought instruments for their parody song! They even had enough of a repertoire to go back up for an encore. Wow. We decided that although we weren't that good, our group was certainly louder.

Over the weekend, I stayed and hung around with these folks from Oakland at a house of the parents of one of the students who had come. It was fun being in a totally different "group" than I was used to, and they were all very friendly and welcoming to me. Thanks goes out to Maggie, Josh, Ted, Yuko, Darrin, Saill, Pod (sp?), Gavin, Kathy, Kim sensei, and Hoa sensei for making me feel a part of their group.

Many other instructors were in attendance including Pat Hendricks sensei (with her healthy, very aware baby), Dennis Tatoian sensei, Bernice Tom sensei, Stephanie Yap sensei, and Russell Alvey sensei.

There were also some List people at the seminar. Those whom I met included Greg Jennings, Chris Pearce (part of the aforementioned Texas group), Sean Hollander, Dave O'Farrell, and Frank Gordon. It was too bad I couldn't spend more time with everyone, as I was already in one "social" group during the seminar... Cindy Paloma was there as well, and I had a fun time training and talking geek stuff with her. She introduced me to Stan Pranin with whom I had exchanged some pieces of e-mail with in the past and whom I found to be very approachable and nice. I also bumped into a couple of Rocky Izumi's students (to whom I sent my regards).

Overall, I had a really fun time at this seminar. It was too bad that there wasn't enough room to take any ukemi at all, but it's difficult to find a space large enough to fit that many people. It was a good crowd of folks from all over the place, all interested in aikido -- always a good place to be. It was great to meet new people and train with them, and I hope to be back again the next time such a seminar occurs.

Jun