George S. Ledyard

I've always felt that the USAF did an excellent job of putting their senior American instructors forward. The closeness you mention between the seniors may be the positive side of the Federation's almost exclusive focus on people from within its organization. Perhaps it will result in a group that can form a leadership core that survives after the Japanese former uchi deshi have passed.

Anyway, I'd love to see us take responsibility for our own Aikido and run with it. I am not much in agreement with the direction Aikido has taken and think we can do better for ourselves. Aikido was never meant to have a "style" imposed on it but rather should be an art in which each individual finds his own expression.

If the next generation of teachers continues the politics and narrowness of focus of the previous generation of Japanese teachers, it won't make any difference if Japanese Shihan or the American Shihan are running the show.

Budo should be about personal relationships and not about organizations. I have a friend who was a senior member of one of the major Aikido organizations. He traveled all the time teaching and was a very popular and respected teacher within his org. Then he broke with his teacher and went independent... What happened to all those folks who used to invite him and loved his teaching so much? He basically dropped off the face of the earth. I think that is total BS. A true student of Budo doesn't pick his associates based on who is in favor or out of favor with some political group (or frankly, even with ones own teacher).

I think that, all in all, large organizations have been very good at encouraging the growth of the art here and abroad. I also think that they have in many cases restricted the growth of their senior members in favor of creating good organization men and women. The seniors have been actively discouraged from training outside the box both especially within the Aikido community.

Once again, I have another friend who is senior in one of the organizations... he was asked to teach at a camp or some such event. This particular teacher had been doing some training with folks outside of his organization (not with the approval of his peers) and had some things that he was very excited about. He taught some of those things in his class at the camp and was later approached by the other seniors and told that they shouldn't be teaching anything but the strictly delimited "style" from the group of which they were members. They didn't even want to see anything different.

Now I am not saying that independence is some panacea either. In my experience, many independent dojos are isolated and out of touch. Often the reason they went independent was so that no one could tell them what to do. But when left to their own devices they didn't push the envelope, they settled for the comfortable. Easy to do when no one is over you... At least the organizations set some standards. The freedom these independent folks have to train with anyone they want gets exercised by doing what I call the checklist approach... they invite all sorts of people but don't actually make the commitment to master any of the things they have been shown. They just mark the name of the teacher off the list and say, "Yes, we had him teach at our place." One can marvel at all the different teachers that have passed through with no one actually changing much about what they do. No teacher who has anything to offer of any depth can pass much on in just a weekend. It takes repeated exposure. The let's fill our Yudansha books with as many names as possible approach doesn't really cut it either.

It's not that I am anti-organization... it's that I don't think that most of the ones I have seen function very well in encouraging the transmission and further development of the art. An organization with a structure designed to actually accomplish the transmission efficiently and encourage the growth of it of the skills within its membership would be a very positive thing and is actually necessary if the mass of folks out there are to experience Aikido in any depth.

I personally do not believe that the art should be as elitist as it is, where only the folks who had the good fortune to train with high level Shihan have any depth to their practice and everyone else is doing Aikido-lite. A truly functional organization is necessary to have a more equitable distribution of the skills. If we, as many are talking about, start to bring knowledge and skills in from outside of the art, how are these to be distributed to the wider community? Only through an organizational structure that is truly set up to pass on the knowledge gained by those at the top vertically to those at the bottom.

Anyway, Peter Goldsbury Sensei is writing a series on "transmission" and I hope that there will be further discussion of the issue of transmission as we go forward. I talk to a lot of people about these issues and am very surprised at how fundamentally conservative folks tend to be. This is the way its been, so this is the way that they will be in the future... What I am trying to point out is that there will be a time in the not too distant future when circumstances will be right for change if we want it. People will need to have some idea beforehand what they would like to see change or we will simply duplicate what has gone before for another generation or two.