Quote:
Basia Halliop wrote:
It sounds like you are saying that if people are falling badly or banging their head it's basically an accident. But if even the highest ranking people (ie, supposedly very skilled and also good at judging uke's ukemi), still very routinely have that happen on an ongoing basis (even in edited demo videos, where we may be getting above average examples), maybe it's time for that person to consider if they're really able to do that throw well enough to gamble on it like that on students with such a high rate of failing in a dangerous way? And if even they haven't mastered it, then can they really try to teach it to much less skilled people?
I think what we're really talking about aren't accidents, though, more an intentional way of ending a technique.
BTW I have seen and trained in ways that would (sometimes did) cause injury if there was an accident, and I don't think that's what we're talking about. I'm not sure exactly where my dojo fits into the spectrum but it seems closer to the hard than the soft... but I have also seen perfectly well that someone skilled enough, 'hard' or not, is capable of keeping enough judgement and control of the situation to avoid constant accidents to their ukes.
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No that is not what I said at all.
In fact it has almost nothing to do with it and you will not get it unless you put yourselves in my side of the argument.
First Lets drop the caring for uke take. Basically in any martial arts you have to care for uke., If only for the reason that you will run out of partner. It just take a different form according to your style.
What I am saying is that I think I understand more precisely what Ron & Don where saying. I missed it until now because I coming from a harder aikido style. And before your post I did not realize that there was another rational to what they have been saying.
What I failed to get from Ron, Don and you was that in softer style tori can much more readily facilitate uke ukemi than in harder style.
It is not even a matter of soft or hard or martial or fluffy, it is a matter of what the application of the technique implies for Uke.or if you prefer what it constrains Uke to or what uke is able to do.
For that you have two components the way the technique physically works and the impetus with which it is done.
Regardless hard or soft, the more impetus or intent the more uke need to be on the ball.
It a bit of a generalization but with hard style, the technique puts more physical constrain on uke from the onset of the technique.
To oversimplify we could say that hard style technique have a greater intrinsic control, and frame the uke fall with the movement (soft style compensate/replace that with movement, so that is not really more martial per se ) .
That limits uke options for the ukemi much more drastically than in softer style. Usually the techniques are more direct (and take a shorter time to completion). As well it limits the help that tori can give to uke.
One way to be kind to uke, is to reduce the intent/impetus of the technique from the beginning. So that uke has sufficient time to take care of himself.
In softer aikido, tori reducing the imput at any point during the technique will help uke to recover his ukemi, with harder style not that much is possible after the beginning of the technique.
One way to express that is to say that Uke has more responsibility regarding is own break fall than in softer style.
For harder style it does not matter whose fault it is (ie who coked up) it can be uke or tori. The net result is that once the technique has started the only one that can do something about it is uke.
Statistically speaking it is more likely to happen with harder style, and there is no need for tori to have it in for uke, it just takes tori and uke not to be in sync.
What Ron & Don made me realize is that it is not really the case for softer style. To get the same result in softer style you need to actively want to snot uke.
So from that context their comment that it is way out of order is totally founded. And I agree with them
Hopefully if you have a softer approach, you will understand that if you come from a harder style, it does not denote ill intentions, it is just an occupational hazard that can happen when things go wrong (and not really the end result that tori expect).
So yes it is easy to see softer style as a bunch of big girl blouses and harder style as aikido after Modor fashion but may it is missing the forest for the tree.
Phil
ps thanks ron