Edwin Neal

true Mark, but not robust enough to really capture the essence... Osensei lived a long life and his techniques span the spectrum of that lifetime, okay so sure there is a spectrum of Osenseis aikido through his life his young vs old ikkyo, but its ikkyo... nikkyo... sankyo... He DID DO the same thing every day until he passed... thats the very nature of it takemusu aiki...
how about just a base line standard for shodan?
say we all use one set of minimum requirements that could be added to but not abridged?
so if you wanna throw in a bunch of ki developement exercises, and they wanna do bokken waza no problem... there would be a core that would be universal, and thus unify all schools...
or something like that...just a thought...