Quote:
Rupert Atkinson wrote:
With aiki you can develop the craft to apply nikyo (with or without pain). Without aiki, you can do neither - all you can do is crunch it, like they do in most Jujutsu or Hapkido dojos. Zero finesse, if you like. Aiki is the finesse we seek.
My nikyo has uke on the edge of pain from beginning to end. It is 'on'. When finished there is no lasting damage and in fact, it should feel to be rather a pleasant kind of pain, but it is pain nevertheless. If you are trying to do it without pain you are just barking up the wrong tree.
A lot if the Aikido I see is just plain garbage. Even more of what I hear. I have done Judo, wrestling, Jujustsu - all sorts - and am becoming tired of aiki-fairy imaginations. If you are barking up the wrong tree and you don't know it - well - how bad can that be. I guess you will find out when someone attacks you.
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I agree with some of what you say. The painless nikyo/nikajo variant is a training tool that results from shite and uke performing their roles well together. I couldn't use the painless variant as a self-defence tool, although I can imagine that someone with much more training could.
However, I think you should look at the source of the pain. The pain comes from the wrist joint getting cranked. If you are doing an "on" technique just on the verge of pain (which I have also felt), it is coming from controlling the wrist joint without too much crank. So, as you say, finesse. This means people who are doing the technique without pain are not controlling the wrist, they controlling something else (hint:
not ki). I.e., it is a fundamentally different technique. So you are arguing apples against oranges here, I think. The truth of this can be seen by comparing uke's reactions to the two techniques. A "good" uke responding to a good wrist crank nikyo will, from what I've seen, drop pretty much straight down by falling onto one knee. A good uke responding to a non-pain variant nikajo buckles at the knees first and starts to fall backwards before going down onto the knees.
I think you should also consider the history of aikido. As I understand it, aikido didn't develop from jujutsu per se but from a specific subset of jujutsu techniques that were designed to study
aiki as an application. Ueshiba sort of isolated this direction of study and said, "hey, let's do this exclusively for a purpose other than mastering jujutsu." You are arguing for a return to the pre-aikido roots of aiki study, it seems to me. That's fine, but it doesn't make sense to study aikido, then, rather than a jujutsu.