Walter Martindale asked:
Quote:
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Was this Ueshiba's source - misogi?
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Yes - HIPS 203-206 (BUT)
That isn't to say (I don't know) if that
specific exercise was not present in Daito-ryu at that time (a high ranking guy in the Kodokai told me that they use it now, but there's no particular account that I know of that describes Takeda Sokaku of doing it - in fact, the DR guy speculated it was incorporated from aikido, an example of what the Japanese call
gyaku-ryunyu - reverse importation).
Remember, Takeda trained briefly as a Shinto priest (his father made him), and the Misogi no Gyo, which was a compilation of various core Shinto (and Chinese derived) training exercises, was popular throughout Japan. Ueshiba first encountered it at a specialized training put on by the Misogikai at a Shinto shrine. It's my opinion that this enabled him to:
a. Have a training system that helped put some distance from Omotokyo orthodoxy (there's an oxymoron).
b. Had a set of training exercises into which he could put DR, while being able to present them as his own. I don't mean that he was being dishonest, any more than BJJ is not judo. He separated himself from the group, and in one sense, it's a mark of respect that when one makes one's own group, one shouldn't just carbon copy the training regimen of the group one left.
In sum, torifune very definitely comes from Misogi-no-Gyo - and possibly, Ueshiba found in torifune an exercise he had already learned.
And lest the usual squawking starts - I didn't say that Ueshiba learned in the Misogi-no-gyo "internal training" apart from that in DR. I doubt that he did, fwiw. I'm talking about the bottle, not the wine.
Ellis Amdur