AikiWeb: The Source for Aikido Information AikiWeb's principal purpose is to serve the Internet community as a repository and dissemination point for aikido information.
Hello and thank you for visiting AikiWeb, the
world's most active online Aikido community! This site is home to
over 22,000 aikido practitioners from around the world and covers a
wide range of aikido topics including techniques, philosophy, history,
humor, beginner issues, the marketplace, and more.
If you wish to join in the discussions or use the other advanced
features available, you will need to register first. Registration is
absolutely free and takes only a few minutes to complete so sign up today!
Sometimes a word will start it, like
Hands and feet, sun and gloves. The way
Is fraught with danger, you say, and I
Notice the word "fraught".... John Ashbery, Variant
Lawn as white as driven snow,
Cyprus black as e'er was crow,
Gloves as sweet as damask roses,
Masks for faces and for noses. William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale
I saw her hand, she has a leathern hand,
A freestone-colored hand. I verily did think
That her old gloves were on, but 'twas her hands. William Shakespeare, As You Like It
So, hand in glove I stake my claim
I'll fight to the last breath
If they dare touch a hair on your head
I'll fight to the last breath The Smiths, Hand in Glove
Handle with kid gloves
Handle with kid gloves
Then you learn the lessons
Taught in school won't be enough
Put on your kid gloves
Put on your kid gloves
Then you learn the lesson
That it's cool to be so tough
Handle with kid gloves
Handle with kid gloves
Then you learn the weapons
And the ways of hard-knock school
Put on your kid gloves
Put on your kid gloves
Then you learn the lesson
That it's tough to be so cool Rush, Kid Gloves
Well, they sprung me out of Quentin,
I'm back on the mob's payroll
They can buy my body
Sure they can't buy my soul.
I'm working out of Stockton
I''m weighing in at two -o -one
But there's a man in the front row
Sent down by the mob with a gun.
For 'Kid Gloves', 'Kid Gloves',
I'm back out on the street...More
Scultz: I always thought of you as an Aryan.
The Barber: I'm a vegetarian. Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator
Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,
a jaundice-yellow ("it's really tan")
and fly-weight pacifist,
so vegetarian,
he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit. Robert Lowell, Memories of West Street and Lepke
"Don't you know that meat is murder?",
The dippy hippy cried.
So, I hit him with a leg of lamb -
And sure enough,
he died. Other Theresa, Vegetarian Poem
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, Allen Ginsberg, Howl
Let me confess!
A languid love for Lilies does not blight me!
Lank limbs and haggard cheeks do not delight me!
I do not care for dirty greens
By any means.
I do not long for all one sees
That's Japanese.
…
Then a sentimental passion of a vegetable fashion must excite
your languid spleen,
An attachment à la Plato for a bashful young potato, or a not-
too-French French bean! Gilbert and Sullivan, Patience
A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables. Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen
I, a virgin, can make my frank boast that I communicate to no mortal man my secret counsels except to such as I have chosen on account of their taciturnity; then, if these secrets are later discovered, I know whom to accuse. Elizabeth I
Unknown to trade, to travel, almost to geography, the manner of life they harbour is an unsolved secret. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer
Music and mushrooms:
two words next to one
another in many dictionaries.
Where did he
write The Three-Penny Opera?
Now he's
buried below the grass at the
foot of High Tor.
Once the season changes
from summer to fall,
given sufficient rain,
or just the
mysterious dampness that's in the
earth, mushrooms
grow there,
carrying on, I
am sure, his
business of working with
sounds.
That we
have no ears to hear the
music the spores shot off
from basidia make obliges us
to busy ourselves microphonically. John Cage, Indeterminacy
All aikido arts are secret in nature and are not to be revealed publicly nor taught to rogues who will use them for evil purposes. Morihei Ueshiba, Budo
Matsutake are a type of Japanese mushroom. They are quite rare. They have a special fragrance. They are very, very expensive. Domestic Japanese matsutake are about $100 for 100g now. A dollar a gram. Imported ones are much cheaper. Japan now imports many products traditionally thought of as Japanese from other countries. Especially from other Asian
...More
I live alone, wounded by iron,
Struck by a sword, tired of battle-work,
Weary of blades. Often I see war,
Fight a fearsome foe. I crave no comfort,
That safety might come to me out of the war-strife
Before I among men perish completely.
But the forged brands strike me,
Hard-edged and fiercely sharp, the handwork of smiths,
They bite me in the strongholds. I must wait for
A more murderous meeting. Never a physician
In the battlefield could I find
One of those who with herbs healed wounds
But my sword slashes grow greater
Through death blows day and night.
impressions
An extra post this week about weapons. It is one of the riddles from The Exeter Book put into modern English. There is only one surviving manuscript. It contains 94 riddles. It's a simple, powerful poem. Those adjectives are both from Latin. It's also short, stark and blunt. Those adjectives are all from Old English.
I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,
If the street were time and he at the end of the street T S Eliot, The Boston Evening Transcript
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning. Dylan Thomas, Poem in October
To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U turn, I have only one thing to say. You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning. Margaret Thatcher, speech to the Conservative Party Conference, 10 October 1980
Revenge is a dish best served raw Tagline for the movie Sushi Girl
Well done boys, looks like ice-cold sushi for breakfast Skipper the Penguin, Madagascar
One minute you're on top, the next you're sushi. Morgana, Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea
We use the word kaiten in the martial arts. It means turning or rotation. One of the basic techniques in aikido is kaiten nage - turning throw.
Kaiten zushi is the sushi that goes around on a conveyor belt.
The apprenticeship of a sushi chef takes many years. The fish must be of very good quality so that it can be eaten raw. So sushi in a traditional restaurant can be very, very expensive.
There was a national holiday this weekend and like a lot of families in Japan we went
...More
And so it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows,
heavy shadows against light shadows - it has nothing else Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
We lingered wordless while a tall
Shade enclouded the shadow's cast. Allen Tate, Shadow and Shade
The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. Frank Lloyd Wright (architect), Night is but a Shadow Cast by the Sun
The shadow of the Venetian blind on the painted wall,
Shadows of the snake-plant and cacti, the plaster animals,
Focus the tragic melancholy of the bright stare
Into nowhere, a hole like the black holes in space. John Ashbery, Forties Flick
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow T S Eliot, The Hollow Men
Recently I saw an interesting profile of an American architect. He lives and works in Kyoto. His name is Geoffrey P Moussas. One of his interests is renovating machiya. Machiya are traditional Japanese town houses. The results are very beautiful. Check out the Design 1st site.
He became interested in Japanese architecture after reading In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki. He said that in his architecture studies he had been learning how to use light. But after reading the book he realized that there was another approach. In Japan people used shadow.
I thought it was very interesting. Looking at the same thing f
...More
Where's the mountain I 've just come down?
Where am I? Ko Un, Walking Down a Mountain
Even if you know the way, ask one more time. Korean proverb
There has been a Korean boom in Japan for a few years. It started with a TV drama series called Winter Sonata in 2002. Then one or two Korean pop artists released songs in Japanese. Now there are many, many popular Korean singers and groups.
There are a lot of Korean restaurants and shops selling Korean music and related goods near Shin-Okubo station in Tokyo. It used to be a dying area. Especially during the day. At night it was perhaps a little busier because it is close to some of the Shinjuku entertainment areas. But in the last couple of years it has become a bustling shopping area. Most of the people who go there now are very, very young. They are fans of Korean pop idols and actors. I have to say that Korean movies are usually much more realistic than Japanese movies.
Shin-Okubo is quite near the Aikikai hombu dojo. And it's the closest station to the Iwata budo supply store. I wrote about the store in Iwata. It's where I get all my aikido uniforms: aikidogi and hakama.
It's nice to see an old decaying area become revitalized.
When I went to Korea years ago there was no aikido. Not even one dojo. I think there are a few there now. But I did go to a hapkido dojo. Hapkido is written with the same three Chinese characters as aikido. 合気道. It'
...More
Remember stories you read when a boy
The shipwrecked sailor gaining safety by
His knife, treetrunk, and lianas for now
You must escape, or perish saying no. Philip Larkin, Ultimatum
...paring the apple
With a human stillness.
The cool blade
Severs between coolness, apple-rind
Compelling a recognition. Charles Tomlinson, Paring the Apple
Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind
swipe of the pruner and his knife
busy about the tree of life Robert Lowell, Waking Early Sunday Morning
Having a wheel and four legs of its own
Has never availed the cumbersome grindstone
To get it anywhere that I can see. Robert Frost, The Grindstone
There was no man for peril durst him touch.
A Sheffield whittle bare he in his hose. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Reeve's Tale from The Canterbury Tales
I was in the UK in the summer. I spent some time in Sheffield in the north of England. Sheffield was famous as a city of cutlery and steel factories. It was one of the main producers of knives in the world. Chaucer mentioned a Sheffield knife in the Canterbury Tales, written in the 14th century. Stainless steel was invented there. The 1997 British comedy movie The Full Monty was set in Sheffield against the background of rising unemployment as many of the jobs in the steel industry disappeared.
When I was in Sheffield I visited the workshop of Trevor A
...More
Do not plan for my return.
General Takamichi Kuribayashi, of Nagano, writing to his wife
I just got back from sword training in Nagano. Nagano is in the Japanese Alps. The winter Olympics were held there in 1998. It is an area of volcanic mountains and stark and mysterious rock formations. The countryside is beautiful. And the food is delicious.
Two small details stick in my mind. I could get an English newspaper in Nagano. But it was a day old. Outside Tokyo the newspapers are always a day late. And one organized man bought all his omiyage souvenir presents on the way there.
Sanada Yukimura is a famous samurai from Nagano in the Sengoku Warring States period. He was a master of military strategy. He was called the best warrior in Japan. He fought in many battles.
His father Sanada Masayuki fought with Yukimura in the Western forces against Tokugawa Ieyasu. But in an astonishing tactical move he aligned his first son Sanada Nobuyuki with the Eastern forces. It was reminiscent of the Judgment of Solomon. Whatever the outcome the Sanada line would survive. But the family would be forever divided.
General Takamichi Kuribayashi was an impressive warrior from Nagano in the twentieth century. He was played by Ken Watanabe in the Clint Eastwood movie Letters from Iwo Jima.
at ease talking or remaining silent
moving or staying still
serene even when greeted with sharp weapons Yoka Genkaku, The Song of Enlightenment
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs Rudyard Kipling, If
This is a true story about a famous aikido teacher.. One day he got into a fight. He let himself get provoked. The blood rushed to his head and he lost his cool. But instead of using aikido he punched the other man. He got into a punching match. It should have been easy for him to handle the situation. All he had to do was keep cool. And let his training kick in.
So decades of training. And great technical ability.
Out. The. Window.
I saw a similar thing happen once with someone who had done judo for many years. He made a completely unjustified aggressive comment to somebody. The man warned him. But the judoka didn't cool the situation down. He took the rudeness up a notch. So the man just punched him. The judoka didn't throw him. Or control him. Or wrap him up and take him to the ground. He headbutted him.
The final result was that the other man punched him a few more times. The judoka ended up in hospital. The other man ended up in a police cell.
Years of training. Forgotten. In an instant.
These weren't beginners. One was a professional aikido teacher. The other was a veteran of many judo tournaments.
10-06-2012 01:20 AM 
