George S. Ledyard

I am always amazed that two people looking at precisely the same thing, even feeling the same thing, can have totally opposite perceptions of what is going on.

I was at the Aiki Expo and saw Ushiro Sensei and went, "Oh my God, this guy is off the charts. I need to get more exposure to this while I can." Of course, Ikeda Sensei thought the same thing and repeatedly invited Ushiro Sensei to come and teach over here.

I had other friends, who saw what I saw... yet didn't actually see what I saw. Ask them about Ushiro and they'll say, "Yeah, I saw Ushiro.. he was good." And that's it... Nothing more.

I have trained with Ikeda Sensei for 35 years. He likes nothing better than to have someone decide not to "comply". Go ahead... make your best effort. He'll pick the biggest, strongest guy in the room, give him explicit instruction to try to stop him and he'll do exactly what he intended, no effort.

I have trained with a lot of people and continue to do so. Many of them were some of the Aikido greats, now passed. To say that what Ikeda Sensei is doing is nothing special, well, either you are training with someone truly superior that I don't know about or you haven't really played with Ikeda Sensei enough.

Of course, it all depends on what someone would call "compliant". Trying to hang in there past the point at which someone has kuzushi, attempting to reorganize to stop him, well, that's another thing. That starts to cross the line into fighting an then you get to see how the atemi waza function in the technique. But I can assure you , he can do what he is showing and it doesn't require ukes that cooperate.