Your thoughts appreciated
I recently visited my Mum who lives some distance from my local Dojo. Whilst away I had the chance to practice within a Tomiki ha dojo.
As a student of Aikikai Aikido, and never having had much contact with Tomiki ha, I was naturally interested to find out more about the sport variant of the discipline.
I was surprised to see the dojo had no kamiza, little emphasis was placed upon etiquette and following a short time on the mat it was clearly evident that the only thing that mattered was scoring points to win bouts.
As a traditionalist and someone who considers maintaining the heritage of O'Sensei's art very important, I found it difficult to understand the sport form, it appeared to lack even basic 'martial' values and, although I fully comprehend the sport aspect, I watched what I considered to be fundamentally flawed technique being exercised by some Yudansha. At the end of the class I politely enquired about the over emphasis of 'size of technique' (every technique was executed with huge amounts of space between uke and tori or, tori would over emphasis rotational movements for example - Kote gaeshi, tori's arms would make over rotated circles) I was informed this was done to enable the judges every opportunity to see the technique applied cleanly and thus score.
I'd be very interested to hear from Tomiki ha students, I'm not in any way criticising this form of Aikido. I would be very pleased to learn from other's experiences about the deeper aspects of Tomiki ha Aikido and if it still retains any martial value. I read a thread in this forum about Sutemi Waza and how this form of Nage Waza had been banned from competition therefore was no longer required learning. whilst I accept Sutemi Waza is more akin to Judo, is this form of selective devolution true of Aikido technique not deemed suitable for competitive use ?
If this is the case how / whom controls what is deemed suitable and how might this effect the longevity of the discipline ?
Kind regards
Dave Humm
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