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Old 05-03-2007, 08:54 AM   #40
Chris Li
 
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Dojo: Aikido Sangenkai
Location: Honolulu, Hawaii
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Re: loyalty a lost virtue

Quote:
George S. Ledyard wrote: View Post
This is a pretty good example of what we are talking about, actually. O-Sensei clearly felt the need to go in his own direction and did so. But from all accounts of the deshi, he always referred to Takeda respectfully and whenever Takeda visited, O-Sensei treated him as his teacher and acted accordingly. The virtual disowning of Takeda and Daito Ryu was done buy the Aikikai under Kisshomaru, Osawa, and company (at least as I understand it).

Also, in terms of loyalty going both ways, as Chuck Clark Sensei pointed out, Takeda did some questionable things such as walking in and hi-jacking the Asahi Newspaper training program.
It does appear as if Ueshiba was always respectful in face to face meetings. That Takeda hi-jacked the Asahi News dojo is both a symptom of the problems between them and an interesting example of how Japanese deal with difficult problems, IMO.

In any case, my point was that even in "traditional" Japan, it was common for people to go off and open dojo on their own, change teachers, etc.. If it is good for "traditional" Japanese, then arguing against it on the basis of a tradition of loyalty in budo seems, to me, to make no sense.

As for disowning, I'm not sure how far that really goes. If you look back at Kisshomaru's books published in Japanese, even those quite far back, Takeda was always prominently mentioned in the history sections.

Best,

Chris

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