View Single Post
Old 12-26-2012, 10:48 AM   #93
chillzATL
Location: ATL
Join Date: Jul 2000
Posts: 847
United_States
Offline
Re: Multiple attackers, using their idea of what is happening against them

I was just about to post my reply when Jun closed the thread. If he chooses to re-open it, hopefully he can merge my reply back into it:

Quote:
Mark Murray wrote: View Post
Ueshiba didn't care? Do you have the relevant research to show that? Ueshiba vehemently denied he was a man of religion and that he was a man of budo. Storms into the dojo and says you're not doing my aikido. But, yet, he doesn't care? And approve?
From what I've read and seen here, I have just as much relevant research as you do. We can go into that elsewhere if you'd like. You reuse the "this is not my aikido" quote like it exists in a vacuum and we don't have anything else to read or look at from the man. We have videos of him laughing and taking falls for kids as he teaches them Kokyunage. Are we to believe that they were doing "his aikido" and he approved of that, yet disapproved of everything else that was going on at hombu? We have examples of him awarding rank to random people because they had good aiki. Are we to honestly believe that they were exhibiting the full set of skills that he had or that he saw just enough of a hint of something in them that he felt like recognizing it? For someone who had such clearly defined views on what aiki was, he sure seemed to find aiki in a lot of places and it can't be because what they were doing lined up perfectly with what he was doing. Heck, just look at Tohei, the man whom he bestowed the proverbial brass ring upon. Anyone who does IS/IP training long enough can pretty clearly see that Tohei's skill set, not his techniques, is missing some of what Ueshiba did. Even if you don't understand what, you can see it in how they move and Tohei seems much more linearly driven than Ueshiba. He also had other students who were going out calling aiki this or that and he knew of it and whether he approved or not, he sure never seems to have pulled any of them to the side and said "psst, hey, I really like you, so I want to tell you that this crap you're spreading, isn't really aiki. Check this out". He saw that many of them were chasing that external, deceptive, "catch them unaware" thing and calling it aiki and he let it slide? That's hard for me to buy personally. Especially considering that he seemed to have some genuine relationships with some students, people he liked and felt some sort of connection too, yet here they are out spreading aiki that is significantly different than his own and he, being unhappy about it, doesn't bother to correct them? again, hard to buy.

The bouncing ball of logic suggests to me that his views of what was or was not aiki were, at least in his later life, not as clearly defined or set in stone as selected quotes might indicate or at the very least he was willing to accept things as aiki that were similar but different to his own.

Quote:
Sort of over the top, but do you get the picture I'm painting? Ueshiba had very defined views on aiki. If you're a professional aikido teacher, you would think that you'd at least try to understand, train, and do what the very founder of your art was doing.
I get the point you're driving at, but I don't think this is quite an apples to apples comparison, for the reasons I've outlined above.