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Christopher Li wrote:
What he did, at least in the case of the dancer. Anyway, never mind the old man, he's dead anyway...  |
It is pretty well documented that O Sensei threw dan ranks around like they were hot potatoes. I think this had a lot more to do with his feelings about rank than with his definition of aikido.
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Of course the technical curriculum can be quite different in many cases - of Tohei, Shioda, Mochizuki, Tomiki, Nishio, Yamaguchi, Saito, Watanabe, Abe, et al - who is and isn't doing Aikido?
Some of would definitely say (or have said) that what you're doing isn't Aikido - of course, you might say the same thing... 
Best,
Chris |
All the technical curricula you mentioned above have irimi, tenkan, ikkyo, nikkyo, sankyo, kotegaeshi, koshinage, etc. I have trained with students of the Saotome, Nishio, Yamada, Chiba, Tohei, Homma, Tomiki, and Hombu curricula, and they all used nearly identical terminology for essentially the same set of techniques. We might not all agree on what is
good aikido, but virtually all of us do seem to agree, according to a technique-based definition, on what is aikido and what is not.
So if that definition is insufficient, (1) what's wrong with it, and (2) what is your alternative definition?