George S. Ledyard

This is a huge problem for Aikido. Guys like these used to be the bulk of your new beginners uin the old days. That would have been true for all the martial arts, not just Aikido. Now young men want to "fight" and they expect quick results.They don;t wantto spend decades gettingto the "goodies". They don;t even know what the goodies are and if you try to tell them they just pooh pooh it.

MMA skills can be acquired in a relatively short time and you can start "fighting" very quickly after you begin. Not only Aikido but almost all of the traditional martial arts, including the koryu, ar suffering in terms of enrollment. This has implications for the future of these arts in terms of where the next generation of teachers will come from.

It's not that these arts will disappear, but the huge growth they went through back in the seventies and eighties has ended. There will be a small number of highly skilled teachers keeping these arts alive but with such a small pool of really serious students, you are highly likely to see a real fall off in the quality of the instruction at many dojos. In other words the "dumbing dwon' of the arts will accelerate, despite the fact that there is now more access to high level instruction than ever before. When I look around I ask myself how many of the people I see running dojos today have one or more students who will be as good as they are (or better). The answer, in my experience, is very few. The teachers hae not been able to pass on their skills. Whether this is because they didn't teach very well or that they didn;t have any students who were willingto train as they did back in the day is open to question.

The only thing that is going to save Aikido as an art that maintains itself as a form of real Budo and has anything at all to do with what the founder created and hoped Aikido would be is for there to be a huge shrinking in the number of dojos and the number of folks training. if we had a quarter the number of dojos, run by really qualified teachers, and the folks that were serious about training could collect at these dojos, you might stop the slip of quality and even reverse it. The koryu don;t have quite the same probelm because they never allowed their arts to spread in the first place. There are only a handful of people teaching koryu and a very small number of students under them. In the cases with which I am familiar these teachers do have a student or students to pass their arts off to.

But I am seriously concerened about the future of our art. In most ofthe dojos at which I teach, the average age is rising steadily. These folks simply can't train the way they might have back in their 20's. This fact forces te dojo to tone down the training and makes it even less likely that we attract those young folks who really want to train like maniacs. I have talked about this to some senior Japanese teachers and they see the same thing. One in particular simply agreed with me that Aikido as a martial art was dying. He seemed unconcerened about it, as if he saw no point in fighting a ternd that was inevitable. He had his own training and had pointed the way to the students out there. Whether they follwed along or not was not his problem. I still care but I do not see a solution in sight.