I guess I will be the odd one and say that History is important.

djm: Kindred soul!

Although unlike Modern day Daito ryu who feel the need to denounce O'sensei for watering down DTR and call it Aikido.

djm: As an aikido practitioner, I am comfortable with the term "watered-down," pejorative overtones notwithstanding (this, a rhetorical technique catalogued by Aristotle as "paramologia", stealing your opponents' thunder.) It dismisses frivolous bickering: Tomayto, tomahto as I seem to find myself posting frequently, no doubt to my fellow online denizens' probable tedium. As Peter Goldsbury posted so trencantly in one of the AJ debates, we probably lack the framework even to understand UM's "depth" not having read either the Kojiki or the Reikai Monogatari.

....more and more of O sensei's direct students are starting to pass on. With this loss of a direct link to Osensei, Myths can be promulagated to fact, and technique and his message can become lost, in favor of a more "american" approach to a culture that few really know about or really understand.

djm: If I understand aright, this is how the Jpn, largely unschooled in Chinese language and culture, catalyzed an irrational Zen from a theretofore far more wordy Ch'an. The half empty glass...

....If one really wants to know an art, how can they truly deny the history of that art?

djm: Incendiary stuff, this. Read the dismissive quotes of the second Doshu on aikido's debt to DR in Pranin's Aikido Masters.

To me the difference between knowing history and not knowing history is like that of the difference between a square and a cube. One has depth.

djm: Love that. Can I use it?