Quote:
David Orange wrote:
Basically, you have a rich kid whose father had a teaching license in daito ryu and the kid gets direct samurai-lineage instruction from Sokaku Takeda from age 11 until Takeda dies...so I'm not saying it was an easy life, but it did make his life much less complicated than Sokaku's was. One thing he points up by saying that he could teach in one place was that he had leisure to reflect. Meaning that he was rich. Sokaku traveled out of economic necessity. Wasn't Ueshiba's family also wealthy? Didn't they both build dojos for Sokaku?
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The Ueshiba family was quite well off. Several attempts were made to set Morihei Ueshiba up in some sort of business but it is clear that he had absolutely no interest. The family was rich enough to subsidize him in his efforts.
If you look at these guys, and then put that together with who they were teaching, you realize that it must have been near impossible to be poor or even working class and have the time to train the way these folks did nor would it have been easy to find a teacher who would take you on as a student unless you had means. Notice how many folks they taught were in a professional context i.e. police or military where the agency paid the expense.
Anyway, it explains why so many of the folks we know about from recent history seem to have come from well off backgrounds... who else had the time and money to train like a fanatic once the samurai were abolished as a class and all those folks were unemployed. Even in arts like judo and kendo, look at how many top guys came out of police dojos... Even a number of koryu were kept alive within that context.