... If it's a matter of 'rank', well sheeet, people, what do you want, a medal? Crikey it's just a pair of pants, not a status symbol...

I don't mean to be rude, but I couldn't disagree more with a bunch of things in there. Aikido is an extremely spiritual thing for me, and to claim the significance of the way that the dojo treats what I consider to be my soul as something that should be warped to suit their whim, that it's "just training", cuts a little deep. It's more than a uniform man... It's a representation of things which I hold very dear...