Quote:
Joe Curran wrote:
Dear Karl,
Any great musician or makes errors, nobody is infallible.As far as Chiba Sensei is concerned I consider him to be a great weapons and body art exponent.The video does indeed show Sensei dropping his sword. On the other hand how many times have you and others watched Chiba Sensei doing sword and Jo work, not to mention his body art? As far as James Brown is concerned and others , he had some bad nights where is singing was dreadful,Sinatra at one point could not fill a telephone box with customers. Do you always do everything 100%perfect ?I think not. Surgeons/doctors make errors,patients on occasion get sutures left inside their bodies, plastic surgeons botch jobs.They are not all stricken off medical registers. I dispute your last two sentences.Personally speaking if I had 50% of the skill level of Chiba Sensei in weapons and body art I would consider myself to be a fortunate aikidoka. Rather than be highly critical why not take the time and effort to review Chiba Sensei and his work more thoroughly?Maybe then you would be more qualified /more objective in making such comments?Cheers, Joe.
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I was wondering how long it would take for the apologists to appear. LOL!!!! You only want 50% of that skill level? That's sad. Why not strive for 150%? All students should seek to surpass their teachers, not simply measure up. After all, 50% of ok is just "o".
I'm not perfect, but I'm also not a "world renown teacher" traveling around tooting my own horn and charging people money for my services. Professionals in any industry, are and should always be held to a much higher standard than amateurs and students. The fact that people are obviously videotaping it should have made him even more focused, not less.
When is the last time you saw Itzhak Perlman, Andres Segovia, or Yo-yo Ma drop their instrument/bow during a performance? NEVER, never, never, not ever....NEVER!!! and they aren't even simulating a life and death struggle. When lives are on the line, don't you think the standards should be even higher than the performance of a simple, harmless piece of music? I should hope so. Oh and trust me, if you were to ever see it happen, they would excuse them self from the stage, if not the entire profession, on their own. They certainly wouldn't pretend like nothing happened, scowl at their partners, or try to blame the others on stage like Chiba san.
Aikido will never grow, or be fully respected as an art if all we do is worship rank, praise poor technique, and make excuses for teachers who obviously long past their prime. One can either perform up to the task, or they cannot. Clearly Chiba san cannot, which is fine, but then stop charing money for your "skills". Heck, I can teach you to use a bokken as well as he did in the vid for free.
Step 1: grab bokken (correctly ,or not. He doesn't seem to care, so why should you!)( e.g :18 mark), Step 2: loose focus, Step 3: get bested by your student, Step 4: pretend like it didn't happen, Step 5: scowl at uke and strut around like a petulant child/bully. Repeat until perfection is achieved. LOL!!!!
Are you still happy with 50%?
See it's not that hard at all
